And primary schools produce people who barely know basic maths, but there are still awesome mathematicians.
Maybe what they teach won't be great, but I'm pretty sure that even though it will increase the amount of programmers who barely know how to make a game it will also increase the amount of people who're great at writing them, because I'm pretty sure some of them will learn to do it better after finishing the course.
I used SourceSafe for a while, at let me tell you, it's pure crap.
First of all it's only usable on a local network, because it has no networking at all. So we had to set up a VPN. It doesn't let several people work comfortably on the same file. It won't let you change something checked out by somebody else. Checkins/checkouts can't be automated. And it also is horribly slow.
I guess it's better than nothing, but since I switched to TortoiseCVS I'm really happy.
Two of those books, the one about Linux development and the one about Snort sound interesting and I'd like to get them. A translation to Russian or Spanish would be nice, but not necessary.
CPU speed seems not to be growing so fast lately... I can't really imagine when a dual Athlon MP 1400 will stop being useful. I use a P133 for a firewall, and as a machine for checking mail it'd work just fine.
I just wonder what bloated OS you'd have to have to have problems running something other than games on a dual Athlon.
Well, perhaps because switching to a different language in the middle of development wouldn't be a very good idea?
Besides, learning a language well takes time. Yes, knowing a few languages you can take a Perl book and write something in a week. But how good will that be? Since you know Perl think of how would a program run if you wrote it entirely in C style. For example, ignoring regular expressions and working with strings as if they were arrays, like happens in C. And Perl allows a lot of freedom. It took me weeks to learn Perl, but months to define my coding style.
Then there are the specifics of course. Why write code for a website in PHP if the rest is done in Perl already? It'd increase memory use and add another point of failure. Would you write a game in Perl? Or parse text in C?
Well, as somebody who writes it for money I thought I'd answer...
Yes, VB is very basic, although some quite impressive stuff can be done with it. It's perfectly possible to write enterprise management stuff with it for example. If your app only needs to be a pretty interface for a database then VB is a quite good tool for that job. However, it's got a lot of problems.
There's always important functionality missing. MS has some really incredible knack for releasing a new version of VB that adds 2 or 3 features that you'd find really useful... but still hasn't found time to add unsigned types in VB6.
Lots of working around is needed. The experts in VB learn to do tricks with undocumented functions like CopyMemory, and calling the WinAPI. There's no way in VB to make a window appear on top of all the others, for example.
It's hard to use with source control tools. CVS is quite usable though, but not perfect. Just opening a project and closing it changes files, for no good reason.
And then there's the bug from Hell that sometimes makes it forget about an OCX you included and forces you to muck with project files by hand to fix it.
But, even regardless of all that people use it. I guess it's because it's really easy to do small things with it. If you need to do a quick tool that queries a database and prints a few reports then it's almost perfect. But if you're planning anything large I'd use anything else instead. Maybe Delphi, or.NET, or C. I'd say that at about 50000 lines it starts getting very annyoing.
It's about the same thing as a normal filesystem! Just with keywords.
First it talks about assigning keywords to files. Okay, that's an useful feature. Now, I look at the "improved" file save dialog. First it looks more confusing. Second, I wouldn't say the document is a letter. I might rather call it 'Essay' (not sure if it's the right word), and here I just lost my ability to find it by keywords. Following that same line of thought, I never remember using the term "computing" either. I might search for "Computers", "File systems" or "Data storage". It seems to me that every file would need 20 keywords to be easily found.
Later, it just seems to show that this idea won't fly by introducing collections. Hello, that's a directory! Or at least I see no difference between that collection and ~/photos/2002_07/beach, for example. The difference between that and ~/photos/beach/2002_07/ doesn't worry me at all, by the way, because there's a handy tool called find(1).
And I can think of more problems with that. How do I backup my music? I can imagine different categories it could be under, maybe 'music', or 'sound', or 'audio', or 'songs'. Can I be sure that all my music is tagged as 'music' and not one of the other ones?
Oh, and I just thought of another thing. How do we delimit physical disks in this way? On my computer I know/cdrom is my CD-ROM. On my server/usr is a different partition. How would that be represented?
Here's a detailed step-by-step example that shows how this problem could play out:
Programmer P downloads the Konqueror web browser, receiving it under terms of GPL.
P learns of a new web standard that requires exercising a technique for parsing URLs that is patented by Corporation C. C has licensed the patent under an RF, non-exclusive license, but with a "field of use" restriction that says the license can be used to "implement the standard". The standard, as it turns out, covers only what browsers must do with URLs, and says nothing about the server side or clients that aren't user browsers.
P implements this technique in Konqueror, and seeks to redistribute the modified version on his website so that other users can benefit from Konqueror now complying with the standard. If he does, he is bound by the GPL under copyright law, because he is redistributing a modified version.
However, he knows full well of a condition on that code that contradicts the GPL (violating Section 7) -- namely, he knows that C's patent license prohibits folks from taking his URL parsing code and putting it into, say, a search engine. Therefore, under GPL Section 7, he is prohibited from redistribution.
You might think that he can simply assign his copyright to the existing copyright holder of Konqueror let distribution happen from that source. They could distribute under GPL, but they would be granting a self-contradicting license. Nothing (to my knowledge, but IANAL) prohibits someone from distributing copyrighted works under licenses that make no sense and are self-contradictory. However, it is certainly true that those who receive distribution of the works are stuck and can't undertake further distribution or modification themselves.
The way I understand it is that it can create a weird situation. Suppose I write code to parse Yahoo pages to extract information from them. Suppose that Yahoo uses some technology licensed in this way on their site. Now they can stop me because it's not a web browser.
It surely uses little power. If you have 3 computers on an UPS like me, 2 of them with no keyboard or monitor this kind of thing is interesting. Those 2 computers, a server and a firewall are in a place where there's no room for monitors, even 9" ones, and even if there was they'd put more load on the UPS.
Of course I could not plug them into the UPS but then I'd lose functionality. Seeing "shutdown in 10 minutes" on that screen could be an useful feature.
If I remember correctly, the text modes have the font stored in a 2048 bytes array, with every character having a byte per line, and 8 lines per character. I don't think there's any way of squeezing more chracters into a text mode, unless video card designers come up with some extension.
So probably if Linux is made to support Unicode correctly this will only work in framebuffer modes, where it's possible to have as many characters as you want. That would mean a lot of improvement is needed in this area. For example the rivafb driver/nVidia X driver would need to be fixed to coexist. Sure vesafb can be used, but it's painfully slow, and some really old cards don't support it.
I'm pretty sure this is not new. I've heard of such a thing before, and even heard a bit of it. I think the point was to establish that source code is speech.
That doesn't make sense. Using an ability will only increase it. If you run often you'll be good at running. Or if you write code often you'll get better in programming. Now, you're claiming that somebody who listens a lot to music that requires the brain to interpolate lost that ability because of using it! Think of it, it doesn't make any sense.
Something like this might be just what's needed to make non-geeks use things like Freenet and encryption. Or at least it'd be a good reason for it. Of course then Freenet might become illegal, with the resulting developments in steganography...
I don't think that anything good will come out of this. Hopefully people will wake up before we all end living in a totalitarian state.
Yup, the "that's how things work in the real world" way of thinking. If everybody was like you we'd be still in the prehistory.
Listen. If something works in some way, and I don't like it, I'm not going to just accept it and tell everybody to "learn to play by real rules". I'm going to do my best to make sure the situation I don't like goes away. The kernel developers are doing the right thing.
First, you can search google a bit and probably find a cheap internal modem that works with Linux. But there are far better options. Just find somebody at your college who switched from a modem to DSL and buy his/her old one. Or look on ebay.
I bought a decent external modem for Linux a few years ago and it was about $42. If I got a second hand one I'm pretty sure I could have got it for half the price.
Palladium, if I understood correctly is just code signing. In a Linux environment it'd mean the kernel has my public key somewhere in it, and refuses to run anything that wasn't signed by that key.
Even given knowledge of my public key, the encryption algorhitm and a binary of a program to run, nobody but me can generate a proper signature. This is essentially a system that prevents something unsigned from running, even if how the system works is completely understood.
This makes me think that a company of the size of Microsoft would have no problems with releasing a patch for previous versions of Windows. They'd just add whatever signatures are needed to get the CPU to run them, maybe add a patch, or offer a small alternate installer. I'm pretty sure that since they invented it they can find a way of making older versions of Windows work while preventing everything else from running. Then they would convince you to switch to a system that supports Palladium fully with additional features and their power over OEMs.
Ah, but your opinion isn't actually incompatible with mine. You're clearly showing that your definition of "fun" is just very different from mine.
Perhaps you as many people prefer convenience. A console of course matches this perfectly, insert disk and play. On the other hand, I just *need* to be able to mess with stuff. That's why I use Linux instead of Windows, I like learning how stuff works, and even find it interesting to troubleshoot stuff when it doesn't work right. I also get incredibly frustrated when something I absolutely can't control breaks.
Your choice of games also shows this clearly. I have absolutely no interest in the games you like, but got addicted to Creatures, which isn't even a game. It's a life simulator. There's nothing to beat, no way to lose or win, no objective and even no rules in it. It is however, a wonderful toy if you like messing with it and create new species, see how evolution works, make new words, etc.
So, I think it'd be pretty pointless to argue about this. You'll probably never convince me that those games are fun for more than 5 minutes, and you'll probably hate Creatures.
A few years ago I got a game called Creatures. Then Creatures 2 and Creatures 3. Played the game itself like a maniac for a few months. Then while playing C2 one creature I wanted was going to die because of genetic defects. Not sure why but I spent a month writing a plugin for the game that could monitor the game and optionally inject creatures to prevent them from dying. I also wrote a program to read the game's image files and draw the creatures from the game. Currently it's being used to put images of them in web sites. And all this information I needed was on the official site.
None of this would have been possible on a console of course. I've heard it's been ported to gameboy advance, but I never heard anybody talk about it much. It can't be the same thing. What I want in a game is first that it's good of course, and second that I can poke around when I get tired of the normal game.
If anybody is feeling curious, the latest version is available for free here, and there's a Linux version.
2. So, in which way is/etc different? You can make hierarchies in it, just like in the registry, and additionally, it's much easier to modify, backup and compare. I'd like to see how you keep the Windows registry in CVS.
Clean installation/deinstallation and upgrades have been here for ages, see apt-get(1)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd give you +1 insigthful, if only I had mod points.
And primary schools produce people who barely know basic maths, but there are still awesome mathematicians.
Maybe what they teach won't be great, but I'm pretty sure that even though it will increase the amount of programmers who barely know how to make a game it will also increase the amount of people who're great at writing them, because I'm pretty sure some of them will learn to do it better after finishing the course.
There was a story about that already here
I used SourceSafe for a while, at let me tell you, it's pure crap.
First of all it's only usable on a local network, because it has no networking at all. So we had to set up a VPN. It doesn't let several people work comfortably on the same file. It won't let you change something checked out by somebody else. Checkins/checkouts can't be automated. And it also is horribly slow.
I guess it's better than nothing, but since I switched to TortoiseCVS I'm really happy.
Unfortunately that's way beyond my abilities, although I'm thinking about trying to translate a HOWTO or some small KDE app some day.
My English grammar isn't great, but I can read it pretty well, so if it's going to be available in English that's good enough for me.
Two of those books, the one about Linux development and the one about Snort sound interesting and I'd like to get them. A translation to Russian or Spanish would be nice, but not necessary.
CPU speed seems not to be growing so fast lately... I can't really imagine when a dual Athlon MP 1400 will stop being useful. I use a P133 for a firewall, and as a machine for checking mail it'd work just fine.
I just wonder what bloated OS you'd have to have to have problems running something other than games on a dual Athlon.
The Neo Project is being slashdotted today for the second time!
;-)
I wonder if Microsoft is paying for this
Well, perhaps because switching to a different language in the middle of development wouldn't be a very good idea?
Besides, learning a language well takes time. Yes, knowing a few languages you can take a Perl book and write something in a week. But how good will that be? Since you know Perl think of how would a program run if you wrote it entirely in C style. For example, ignoring regular expressions and working with strings as if they were arrays, like happens in C. And Perl allows a lot of freedom. It took me weeks to learn Perl, but months to define my coding style.
Then there are the specifics of course. Why write code for a website in PHP if the rest is done in Perl already? It'd increase memory use and add another point of failure. Would you write a game in Perl? Or parse text in C?
Well, as somebody who writes it for money I thought I'd answer...
.NET, or C. I'd say that at about 50000 lines it starts getting very annyoing.
Yes, VB is very basic, although some quite impressive stuff can be done with it. It's perfectly possible to write enterprise management stuff with it for example. If your app only needs to be a pretty interface for a database then VB is a quite good tool for that job. However, it's got a lot of problems.
There's always important functionality missing. MS has some really incredible knack for releasing a new version of VB that adds 2 or 3 features that you'd find really useful... but still hasn't found time to add unsigned types in VB6.
Lots of working around is needed. The experts in VB learn to do tricks with undocumented functions like CopyMemory, and calling the WinAPI. There's no way in VB to make a window appear on top of all the others, for example.
It's hard to use with source control tools. CVS is quite usable though, but not perfect. Just opening a project and closing it changes files, for no good reason.
And then there's the bug from Hell that sometimes makes it forget about an OCX you included and forces you to muck with project files by hand to fix it.
But, even regardless of all that people use it. I guess it's because it's really easy to do small things with it. If you need to do a quick tool that queries a database and prints a few reports then it's almost perfect. But if you're planning anything large I'd use anything else instead. Maybe Delphi, or
It's about the same thing as a normal filesystem! Just with keywords.
/cdrom is my CD-ROM. On my server /usr is a different partition. How would that be represented?
First it talks about assigning keywords to files. Okay, that's an useful feature. Now, I look at the "improved" file save dialog. First it looks more confusing. Second, I wouldn't say the document is a letter. I might rather call it 'Essay' (not sure if it's the right word), and here I just lost my ability to find it by keywords. Following that same line of thought, I never remember using the term "computing" either. I might search for "Computers", "File systems" or "Data storage". It seems to me that every file would need 20 keywords to be easily found.
Later, it just seems to show that this idea won't fly by introducing collections. Hello, that's a directory! Or at least I see no difference between that collection and ~/photos/2002_07/beach, for example. The difference between that and ~/photos/beach/2002_07/ doesn't worry me at all, by the way, because there's a handy tool called find(1).
And I can think of more problems with that. How do I backup my music? I can imagine different categories it could be under, maybe 'music', or 'sound', or 'audio', or 'songs'. Can I be sure that all my music is tagged as 'music' and not one of the other ones?
Oh, and I just thought of another thing. How do we delimit physical disks in this way? On my computer I know
Spamassassin
So I'll paste a bit from the fsf site:
Here's a detailed step-by-step example that shows how this problem could play out:
Programmer P downloads the Konqueror web browser, receiving it under terms of GPL.
P learns of a new web standard that requires exercising a technique for parsing URLs that is patented by Corporation C. C has licensed the patent under an RF, non-exclusive license, but with a "field of use" restriction that says the license can be used to "implement the standard". The standard, as it turns out, covers only what browsers must do with URLs, and says nothing about the server side or clients that aren't user browsers.
P implements this technique in Konqueror, and seeks to redistribute the modified version on his website so that other users can benefit from Konqueror now complying with the standard. If he does, he is bound by the GPL under copyright law, because he is redistributing a modified version.
However, he knows full well of a condition on that code that contradicts the GPL (violating Section 7) -- namely, he knows that C's patent license prohibits folks from taking his URL parsing code and putting it into, say, a search engine. Therefore, under GPL Section 7, he is prohibited from redistribution.
You might think that he can simply assign his copyright to the existing copyright holder of Konqueror let distribution happen from that source. They could distribute under GPL, but they would be granting a self-contradicting license. Nothing (to my knowledge, but IANAL) prohibits someone from distributing copyrighted works under licenses that make no sense and are self-contradictory. However, it is certainly true that those who receive distribution of the works are stuck and can't undertake further distribution or modification themselves.
The way I understand it is that it can create a weird situation. Suppose I write code to parse Yahoo pages to extract information from them. Suppose that Yahoo uses some technology licensed in this way on their site. Now they can stop me because it's not a web browser.
It surely uses little power. If you have 3 computers on an UPS like me, 2 of them with no keyboard or monitor this kind of thing is interesting. Those 2 computers, a server and a firewall are in a place where there's no room for monitors, even 9" ones, and even if there was they'd put more load on the UPS.
Of course I could not plug them into the UPS but then I'd lose functionality. Seeing "shutdown in 10 minutes" on that screen could be an useful feature.
Ever heard of povray?
If I remember correctly, the text modes have the font stored in a 2048 bytes array, with every character having a byte per line, and 8 lines per character. I don't think there's any way of squeezing more chracters into a text mode, unless video card designers come up with some extension.
So probably if Linux is made to support Unicode correctly this will only work in framebuffer modes, where it's possible to have as many characters as you want. That would mean a lot of improvement is needed in this area. For example the rivafb driver/nVidia X driver would need to be fixed to coexist. Sure vesafb can be used, but it's painfully slow, and some really old cards don't support it.
I'm pretty sure this is not new. I've heard of such a thing before, and even heard a bit of it. I think the point was to establish that source code is speech.
That doesn't make sense. Using an ability will only increase it. If you run often you'll be good at running. Or if you write code often you'll get better in programming. Now, you're claiming that somebody who listens a lot to music that requires the brain to interpolate lost that ability because of using it! Think of it, it doesn't make any sense.
Something like this might be just what's needed to make non-geeks use things like Freenet and encryption. Or at least it'd be a good reason for it. Of course then Freenet might become illegal, with the resulting developments in steganography...
I don't think that anything good will come out of this. Hopefully people will wake up before we all end living in a totalitarian state.
Yup, the "that's how things work in the real world" way of thinking. If everybody was like you we'd be still in the prehistory.
Listen. If something works in some way, and I don't like it, I'm not going to just accept it and tell everybody to "learn to play by real rules". I'm going to do my best to make sure the situation I don't like goes away. The kernel developers are doing the right thing.
Over $100?
First, you can search google a bit and probably find a cheap internal modem that works with Linux. But there are far better options. Just find somebody at your college who switched from a modem to DSL and buy his/her old one. Or look on ebay.
I bought a decent external modem for Linux a few years ago and it was about $42. If I got a second hand one I'm pretty sure I could have got it for half the price.
Palladium, if I understood correctly is just code signing. In a Linux environment it'd mean the kernel has my public key somewhere in it, and refuses to run anything that wasn't signed by that key.
Even given knowledge of my public key, the encryption algorhitm and a binary of a program to run, nobody but me can generate a proper signature. This is essentially a system that prevents something unsigned from running, even if how the system works is completely understood.
This makes me think that a company of the size of Microsoft would have no problems with releasing a patch for previous versions of Windows. They'd just add whatever signatures are needed to get the CPU to run them, maybe add a patch, or offer a small alternate installer. I'm pretty sure that since they invented it they can find a way of making older versions of Windows work while preventing everything else from running. Then they would convince you to switch to a system that supports Palladium fully with additional features and their power over OEMs.
Ah, but your opinion isn't actually incompatible with mine. You're clearly showing that your definition of "fun" is just very different from mine.
Perhaps you as many people prefer convenience. A console of course matches this perfectly, insert disk and play. On the other hand, I just *need* to be able to mess with stuff. That's why I use Linux instead of Windows, I like learning how stuff works, and even find it interesting to troubleshoot stuff when it doesn't work right. I also get incredibly frustrated when something I absolutely can't control breaks.
Your choice of games also shows this clearly. I have absolutely no interest in the games you like, but got addicted to Creatures, which isn't even a game. It's a life simulator. There's nothing to beat, no way to lose or win, no objective and even no rules in it. It is however, a wonderful toy if you like messing with it and create new species, see how evolution works, make new words, etc.
So, I think it'd be pretty pointless to argue about this. You'll probably never convince me that those games are fun for more than 5 minutes, and you'll probably hate Creatures.
A few years ago I got a game called Creatures. Then Creatures 2 and Creatures 3. Played the game itself like a maniac for a few months. Then while playing C2 one creature I wanted was going to die because of genetic defects. Not sure why but I spent a month writing a plugin for the game that could monitor the game and optionally inject creatures to prevent them from dying. I also wrote a program to read the game's image files and draw the creatures from the game. Currently it's being used to put images of them in web sites. And all this information I needed was on the official site.
None of this would have been possible on a console of course. I've heard it's been ported to gameboy advance, but I never heard anybody talk about it much. It can't be the same thing. What I want in a game is first that it's good of course, and second that I can poke around when I get tired of the normal game.
If anybody is feeling curious, the latest version is available for free here, and there's a Linux version.
1. Explain? Linux has one shared library format.
/etc different? You can make hierarchies in it, just like in the registry, and additionally, it's much easier to modify, backup and compare. I'd like to see how you keep the Windows registry in CVS.
2. So, in which way is
Clean installation/deinstallation and upgrades have been here for ages, see apt-get(1)