But we're talking about the default system here. inetd isn't required to boot the system, and you can perfectly have a fully functional system without it. That's not to say that it shouldn't be present, just that it shouldn't be installed until you install something that depends on it. Same for portmap.
Prophecies aren't worth the paper they're written on.
First, how do you know they were made before the event? Second, most of them are either so general that they match anything at all, or so obscure they could mean anything at all and are only understood after some event seems to fit.
Say, here's a prophecy: You'll have a little accident next week.
What does that mean? Nothing at all. There's a good chance *something* will happen to you next week, maybe you'll bump into somebody on the street, fall in the shower, cut yourself while chopping vegetables. Any of those would match.
Question: What is the computer, and what exactly is transferring?
Is it transferring if you move the hard drive to another box? What if the board dies and you replace all the hardware around the disk? What if only the motherboard dies and you replace it (same or different model)? What if the disk does and you restore an image to the new one?
What I called "my desktop computer" went gradually from a Duron 850 to a dual Athlon MP 2000+, with gradual replacement of motherboard, video card, sound card, addition of a disk, and SCSI card. Yet through the whole process I kept the same Linux install (Windows didn't survive the motherboard swap), and it was in my eyes the same computer, just a bit better. I never got to the point of having two desktops, just a box that was getting upgraded and a box of spare parts that was growing larger.
My system is better. In most games you can click on the place where you want to move, so sending movements in terms of "Player is moving to (x,y)" will produce better results than "Player started moving in X direction at Y speed; Player stopped moving". While the later is less bandwidth intensive, just try to get that to work well with variable latency.
If your server is right nearby, sure. The best ping times I get for anything on the Internet is 100ms, and 200-300ms is a lot more usual. I can easily type fast enough so that it comes into play.
Just enable (as it's usually disabled for things like SSH) Nagle's algorhitm, and it should destroy most of the timing information.
For those who don't know, it's a TCP optimization that buffers data until there's a packet worth of data, or an ACK is received for the last packet sent, so that writing 1 byte of data into a socket doesn't immediately result in sending a packet with 40 bytes of overhead, and 1 byte of data.
You don't have to retransmit. Many things can coded in such a way that any lost data can be ignored without ill effects.
For example, suppose a game where you control a character. The user is running forward. Packets are sent with the content of "Player Alice moving to (x,y)", at intervals, whether the user is actually moving or not. You have these packets:
#1: Alice moving to (0,10) #2: Alice moving to (0,20) #3: Alice moving to (0,30) #4: Alice moving to (0,30) #5: Alice moving to (0,30)...
The receiving side knows at which speed Alice runs, so it interpolates to find what happens in the middle. If packet #2 is lost, the program assumes Alice is still running in the same direction. #3 arrives, and it's quite possible the user won't notice anything went wrong. If enough packets get lost, Alice will be seen running forward for a while, then run back to the correct position, or suddenly teleport to where she should have stopped.
If the laws are about exposure to asbestos, that should be easily worked around by making the employees who remove it use pressure suits. If it's possible to legally run a nuclear power station, with all the nasty stuff used in them, surely it's possible to protect people enough from asbestos as well.
Now, of course I bet doing that would result in them charging an arm or a leg for the service, but I don't see why it shouldn't be technically doable.
If this becomes popular enough, I think things might reverse. Instead of presenting it as "you can use it with ads if you don't want to pay", at some point it'll switch to "you can pay if you don't want the ads". At that point, the paid software becomes something like cable TV, which in the beginning promised no ads, and that's what you'd be paying for.
But of course they realized they could get even more money by placing ads on their networks, and that the people quitting wouldn't be that many, so now cable has ads too.
Couldn't something like that happen here as well? Paid version would have more features, and perhaps less intrusive ads, but still have them.
Why do you care what OS is underneath? Your nice $2K machine came with Windows, right? And it plays all your games out of the box, right? So what's the problem? Or is this some sort of irrational religious thing?
Mine didn't. All my computers have been assembled from pieces. Some completely new, some from whatever spare stuff was lying around. And it's been that way for a long time. Last version of Windows I paid for was Windows 3.1 that came with my first computer, a 386. Part of the reason is that I like picking my hardware, part that I don't plan to pay MS for something I don't use anyway.
My laptop is an HP nx5000, specifically bought for the Linux support and the option to get it preloaded with Linux.
I paid so far for 4 copies of Neverwinter Nights (me, and friends to play together) Why? Because there was Linux support.
I won't be paying for NWN2. Why? Because there's no Linux support.
Have in mind this specifically with networked games: Just because people run them on Windows doesn't mean Linux didn't come somewhere into the picture tangentially. I will very preferentially pay for things that come with Linux support. Perhaps even extra copies as gifts for friends, if it happens to be good enough.
Server must be configured to deliver a different image if you try to load it with a referer that's not from the sites. People sometimes do that when you annoy them by linking to their images from your site or a forum signature.
Just open a new window, so that there's no referer, and paste the URL into the address bar.
Look, I travelled every day to go to class on one of the lines where a train blew up in Madrid, only fortunately in the afternoon instead of the morning. I had a friend personally present there, and a classmate of mine died there.
But you know what I did next day? I went to class just like everybody else. I certainly wasn't demanding useless measures to be taken to protect me against something against which no protection is possible, and neither was most of the country.
As a matter of fact, to go to work I have to cross a dangerous road where sometimes the traffic lights *aren't working*. I'm much more likely to be killed by a truck on that road than by a bomb. There you have one place where spending some money would be actually useful.
For instance, in Russia my grandma had a really ancient iron (tool for ironing clothes I mean) that was essentially a chunk of metal that was hollow on the inside, and you were supposed to put coal in there to keep it hot. While not nearly as nice as the current stuff, I bet that thing could survive for a couple centuries without problems. Current ones are much nicer, but made with plastic and electronics that are much more likely to fail.
Or take the IBM Model M keyboard, of which the originals from the 1980s still survive. It's got steel in it, unlike any modern keyboard, and you could easily kill somebody with it if used as a weapon. It's a pretty loud one too. But these days, try to find a keyboard like that.
While in part I agree with that you're saying, you also have to take into account that we've moved from tools that were so simple and solid in construction that there was nothing that could break to the modern versions that are much fancier, but full of brittle plastic and components that wear out easily.
For instance, there's no reason why a solid CD drive that would last for 20 years couldn't be made. But it's a lot easier to make it using unreliable components, so that it breaks and you need a new one. My previous CD drive failed when the piece that held the CD on the top got unglued (there's no technical reason why it had to be glued!), and the CD hit against the internals of the drive and got smashed into dust.
Actually, I've been discussing this with a friend recently.
Take NWN for instance. How about making a game where things are REALLY happening? So far most worlds are extremely static. MMORPGs are static in that nothing ever changes, you kill the Lord of Evil and he's back on his dark throne 5 minutes later. And in most RPGs things just stay there and wait for you to appear (say, you never miss a battle in progress, as they just stay there until you appear nearby so that you can conveniently join the battle).
For example, in NWN it's very clear that there are multiple factions living in the area. How about having kobolds, knolls, wolves, etc move around on their own, gather food, kill each other, reproduce, try to invade, etc? Wouldn't it be neat if you could defeat the gnolls, then wander off for whatever reason, and when you return find the kobolds now took over the gnoll cave, increased their population, and Tymofarrar got out of the cave and set fire to the town?
Of course, make it too realistic and it gets a bit weird... imagine having to kill kobold children and walking on gnolls having sex.
I assert that a parsed XML tree really doesn't buy you that much. You must still walk your structure manually. Who does the semantic validation?
You of course, who else? I don't really get what you're getting at. What do you propose as the alternative? ANY method of data input is going to require validation of some sort, unless you can be sure your data has already been validated, for instance by a database set up with check constraints and triggers that make sure nothing that doesn't make sense can get in, and that just moves the validation somewhere else.
Making your data executable isn't going to fix it, either. For instance in Perl I can make a config file that's a Perl script that returns a hash, but then I still have to walk and validate it in the program that uses it. Or I could make it consist wholly of function calls to the main program, but then those functions need to validate their arguments. You can't really escape from that.
The data representation format has value, but claiming the parser in such situations adds significant value is a silly argument.
Of course it adds significant value. Just try to extract something of interest from a complex format, like that Mork monstruosity Mozilla used. To reliably get a bit of data from something like that can easily require you to spend hours writing a parser for it. If it's stored in XML, you just link to an XML library, discard everything that doesn't interest you, and get the bit of data you want in just a couple of minutes.
For instance, I'd really love a C to XML filter. Sure the output would be horribly ugly, but unlike with C source, it'd be trivial to write a program that for instance outputs all the functions in a file and their arguments.
In Windows, if you want to get say, the list of the last URLs typed into IE, you just take the registry API, query the right keys, and get the results. I hope you're not going to tell me the API is not a significant value in comparison to trying to write code to interpret the contents of user.dat.
Huh? I claimed what? I described XML as essentially an evolution of constructs like CSV and the/etc/passwd format. I think I already said it about 20 times: XML is there to free me from the need to write a parser and dealing with all the annoying issues like encoding and delimiting data, because those issues take work to satisfactorily solve, and I have better things to do with my time than writing parsers for programs whose primary purpose has nothing to do with parsing.
Hell, it doesn't even have to be XML, Data::Dumper, Storable and YAML solve the same problem, only are rather less standard and have significant disadvantages.
XML is simply a way of formatting data, it's NOT supposed to be executable! When I'm loading records into my database, all I'm interested in an easy way of figuring out which is the URL and which is the timestamp. The parser gives me that, after that I can easily generate a SQL query.
I'm not saying that what you describe isn't useful, I'm saying that it's not WANTED for some purposes. In Perl I often make config files that are Perl scripts that when executed return a hash with the config data, and that can be really neat and useful, but sending Perl code through a socket to be eval'ed on the other end would be insane, and a security nightmare, and also would require a Perl interpreter on the other end.
I started this whole discussion to explain what XML is good for. It doesn't solve world hunger, or make coffee. It's not supposed to do calculations or do anything fancy. It's a way of providing structure to a document, which when fed to a parser results in a parse tree, freeing me from the issues of having to deal with charsets, delimiters and all that crap, and that's really all I want from it.
What if you came up with an XML DTD that could represent a Java program structurally? What if you then wrote a Java program to manipulate those XML data files? Then what if you wrote that program in your new XML-Java language?
Why would I even want that in a format that's made for the markup of data? XML is perfectly well suited for one thing, creating structure in a document in a way that takes into account the problems inherent in the task. It's just like CSV, or the/etc/passwd format, only much fancier and usable for more purposes. This is history entry, and inside it, this is the URL, this is the timestamp, and this is the visit count. That's what it's for.
Not to mention, I don't think I even want any sort of executable code inside my data when I'm trying to load records into a database. Sure you could be really clever there, but that's one place where I really don't want infinite loops screwing up a batch process.
The technical information is elsewhere. The movie trailer shouldn't tell you how a movie ends....it should encourage you to go see the movie.
Then what's the point, I wonder? I'm not interested in reading rants that include more on politics and the state of the world than a technical issue it's supposed to be about. I notice you still haven't provided examples, btw.
Okay, why reinvent the wheel? S-Expressions have been around since the 60's. They are far simpler to understand and use than XML. They show the equivalence of data and code (von Neumann, anyone?) when considered in the context of Lisp. They are more economical than XML. In fact, it's hard to find a way in which they are not superior.
Can you have namespaces? You don't have to use them in XML, but it's something that certainly comes handy sometimes.
But this doesn't get us any closer to the issue you don't seem to grasp: XML is a data representation. The underlying problems still exist. What does the data mean? You've added a turtle between you and the problem. That's the XML parser. The XML parser really does very little for you. Now you walk a parse tree. It's a lot of effort for ver little payoff. To rephrase: It's not a silver bullet. Consider the S-Expression alternative in Lisp. Make methods out of portions of the code. But S-Expressions aren't a silver bullet either.
I don't get it. Did I say something different? XML is simply a way of encoding data in such a way that if you want to say, parse your browser's history or bookmarks you can do that using a standard library, instead of getting a headache trying to understand some horrible format in the style of "Mork" (see my other posts in the thread for links on it).
Of course it doesn't specify what the data means. Nor it should, because that's not the point of it. How the hell can any markup format do that, anyway? It's simply an unsolvable problem in this respect. Databases don't solve the problem either, but that doesn't make them useless, right?
But, since I don't know Lisp, please provide an example in XML and S-Expressions, with an explanation of how S-Expressions are better. I've seen your link, but it's completely useless. It's completely devoid of any technical information. It's a fairly amusing rant, but completely useless for the purpose of backing your point.
Slashdot Mirror
But we're talking about the default system here. inetd isn't required to boot the system, and you can perfectly have a fully functional system without it. That's not to say that it shouldn't be present, just that it shouldn't be installed until you install something that depends on it. Same for portmap.
Prophecies aren't worth the paper they're written on.
First, how do you know they were made before the event? Second, most of them are either so general that they match anything at all, or so obscure they could mean anything at all and are only understood after some event seems to fit.
Say, here's a prophecy: You'll have a little accident next week.
What does that mean? Nothing at all. There's a good chance *something* will happen to you next week, maybe you'll bump into somebody on the street, fall in the shower, cut yourself while chopping vegetables. Any of those would match.
Question: What is the computer, and what exactly is transferring?
Is it transferring if you move the hard drive to another box? What if the board dies and you replace all the hardware around the disk? What if only the motherboard dies and you replace it (same or different model)? What if the disk does and you restore an image to the new one?
What I called "my desktop computer" went gradually from a Duron 850 to a dual Athlon MP 2000+, with gradual replacement of motherboard, video card, sound card, addition of a disk, and SCSI card. Yet through the whole process I kept the same Linux install (Windows didn't survive the motherboard swap), and it was in my eyes the same computer, just a bit better. I never got to the point of having two desktops, just a box that was getting upgraded and a box of spare parts that was growing larger.
My system is better. In most games you can click on the place where you want to move, so sending movements in terms of "Player is moving to (x,y)" will produce better results than "Player started moving in X direction at Y speed; Player stopped moving". While the later is less bandwidth intensive, just try to get that to work well with variable latency.
If your server is right nearby, sure. The best ping times I get for anything on the Internet is 100ms, and 200-300ms is a lot more usual. I can easily type fast enough so that it comes into play.
Just enable (as it's usually disabled for things like SSH) Nagle's algorhitm, and it should destroy most of the timing information.
For those who don't know, it's a TCP optimization that buffers data until there's a packet worth of data, or an ACK is received for the last packet sent, so that writing 1 byte of data into a socket doesn't immediately result in sending a packet with 40 bytes of overhead, and 1 byte of data.
You don't have to retransmit. Many things can coded in such a way that any lost data can be ignored without ill effects.
...
For example, suppose a game where you control a character. The user is running forward. Packets are sent with the content of "Player Alice moving to (x,y)", at intervals, whether the user is actually moving or not. You have these packets:
#1: Alice moving to (0,10)
#2: Alice moving to (0,20)
#3: Alice moving to (0,30)
#4: Alice moving to (0,30)
#5: Alice moving to (0,30)
The receiving side knows at which speed Alice runs, so it interpolates to find what happens in the middle. If packet #2 is lost, the program assumes Alice is still running in the same direction. #3 arrives, and it's quite possible the user won't notice anything went wrong. If enough packets get lost, Alice will be seen running forward for a while, then run back to the correct position, or suddenly teleport to where she should have stopped.
Don't pray. Do something useful.
That doesn't make much sense though.
If the laws are about exposure to asbestos, that should be easily worked around by making the employees who remove it use pressure suits. If it's possible to legally run a nuclear power station, with all the nasty stuff used in them, surely it's possible to protect people enough from asbestos as well.
Now, of course I bet doing that would result in them charging an arm or a leg for the service, but I don't see why it shouldn't be technically doable.
If this becomes popular enough, I think things might reverse. Instead of presenting it as "you can use it with ads if you don't want to pay", at some point it'll switch to "you can pay if you don't want the ads". At that point, the paid software becomes something like cable TV, which in the beginning promised no ads, and that's what you'd be paying for.
But of course they realized they could get even more money by placing ads on their networks, and that the people quitting wouldn't be that many, so now cable has ads too.
Couldn't something like that happen here as well? Paid version would have more features, and perhaps less intrusive ads, but still have them.
Well, I'd love to see at least one application written in Java that is fast, but so far I haven't seen any.
I've got a dual Athlon MP2000+, and Azureus still is horribly slow compared to everything else I run on it.
It was reverted in less than a minute.
Mine didn't. All my computers have been assembled from pieces. Some completely new, some from whatever spare stuff was lying around. And it's been that way for a long time. Last version of Windows I paid for was Windows 3.1 that came with my first computer, a 386. Part of the reason is that I like picking my hardware, part that I don't plan to pay MS for something I don't use anyway.
My laptop is an HP nx5000, specifically bought for the Linux support and the option to get it preloaded with Linux.
Well, let me put it this way:
I paid so far for 4 copies of Neverwinter Nights (me, and friends to play together) Why? Because there was Linux support.
I won't be paying for NWN2. Why? Because there's no Linux support.
Have in mind this specifically with networked games: Just because people run them on Windows doesn't mean Linux didn't come somewhere into the picture tangentially. I will very preferentially pay for things that come with Linux support. Perhaps even extra copies as gifts for friends, if it happens to be good enough.
Server must be configured to deliver a different image if you try to load it with a referer that's not from the sites. People sometimes do that when you annoy them by linking to their images from your site or a forum signature.
Just open a new window, so that there's no referer, and paste the URL into the address bar.
And whose fault was the paranoia?
Look, I travelled every day to go to class on one of the lines where a train blew up in Madrid, only fortunately in the afternoon instead of the morning. I had a friend personally present there, and a classmate of mine died there.
But you know what I did next day? I went to class just like everybody else. I certainly wasn't demanding useless measures to be taken to protect me against something against which no protection is possible, and neither was most of the country.
As a matter of fact, to go to work I have to cross a dangerous road where sometimes the traffic lights *aren't working*. I'm much more likely to be killed by a truck on that road than by a bomb. There you have one place where spending some money would be actually useful.
Well, it depends on the construction as well.
For instance, in Russia my grandma had a really ancient iron (tool for ironing clothes I mean) that was essentially a chunk of metal that was hollow on the inside, and you were supposed to put coal in there to keep it hot. While not nearly as nice as the current stuff, I bet that thing could survive for a couple centuries without problems. Current ones are much nicer, but made with plastic and electronics that are much more likely to fail.
Or take the IBM Model M keyboard, of which the originals from the 1980s still survive. It's got steel in it, unlike any modern keyboard, and you could easily kill somebody with it if used as a weapon. It's a pretty loud one too. But these days, try to find a keyboard like that.
While in part I agree with that you're saying, you also have to take into account that we've moved from tools that were so simple and solid in construction that there was nothing that could break to the modern versions that are much fancier, but full of brittle plastic and components that wear out easily.
For instance, there's no reason why a solid CD drive that would last for 20 years couldn't be made. But it's a lot easier to make it using unreliable components, so that it breaks and you need a new one. My previous CD drive failed when the piece that held the CD on the top got unglued (there's no technical reason why it had to be glued!), and the CD hit against the internals of the drive and got smashed into dust.
Actually, I've been discussing this with a friend recently.
Take NWN for instance. How about making a game where things are REALLY happening? So far most worlds are extremely static. MMORPGs are static in that nothing ever changes, you kill the Lord of Evil and he's back on his dark throne 5 minutes later. And in most RPGs things just stay there and wait for you to appear (say, you never miss a battle in progress, as they just stay there until you appear nearby so that you can conveniently join the battle).
For example, in NWN it's very clear that there are multiple factions living in the area. How about having kobolds, knolls, wolves, etc move around on their own, gather food, kill each other, reproduce, try to invade, etc? Wouldn't it be neat if you could defeat the gnolls, then wander off for whatever reason, and when you return find the kobolds now took over the gnoll cave, increased their population, and Tymofarrar got out of the cave and set fire to the town?
Of course, make it too realistic and it gets a bit weird... imagine having to kill kobold children and walking on gnolls having sex.
That would be because it is my original assertion
You of course, who else? I don't really get what you're getting at. What do you propose as the alternative? ANY method of data input is going to require validation of some sort, unless you can be sure your data has already been validated, for instance by a database set up with check constraints and triggers that make sure nothing that doesn't make sense can get in, and that just moves the validation somewhere else.
Making your data executable isn't going to fix it, either. For instance in Perl I can make a config file that's a Perl script that returns a hash, but then I still have to walk and validate it in the program that uses it. Or I could make it consist wholly of function calls to the main program, but then those functions need to validate their arguments. You can't really escape from that.
Of course it adds significant value. Just try to extract something of interest from a complex format, like that Mork monstruosity Mozilla used. To reliably get a bit of data from something like that can easily require you to spend hours writing a parser for it. If it's stored in XML, you just link to an XML library, discard everything that doesn't interest you, and get the bit of data you want in just a couple of minutes.
For instance, I'd really love a C to XML filter. Sure the output would be horribly ugly, but unlike with C source, it'd be trivial to write a program that for instance outputs all the functions in a file and their arguments.
In Windows, if you want to get say, the list of the last URLs typed into IE, you just take the registry API, query the right keys, and get the results. I hope you're not going to tell me the API is not a significant value in comparison to trying to write code to interpret the contents of user.dat.
Huh? I claimed what? I described XML as essentially an evolution of constructs like CSV and the /etc/passwd format. I think I already said it about 20 times: XML is there to free me from the need to write a parser and dealing with all the annoying issues like encoding and delimiting data, because those issues take work to satisfactorily solve, and I have better things to do with my time than writing parsers for programs whose primary purpose has nothing to do with parsing.
Hell, it doesn't even have to be XML, Data::Dumper, Storable and YAML solve the same problem, only are rather less standard and have significant disadvantages.
But we're talking about different things here.
XML is simply a way of formatting data, it's NOT supposed to be executable! When I'm loading records into my database, all I'm interested in an easy way of figuring out which is the URL and which is the timestamp. The parser gives me that, after that I can easily generate a SQL query.
I'm not saying that what you describe isn't useful, I'm saying that it's not WANTED for some purposes. In Perl I often make config files that are Perl scripts that when executed return a hash with the config data, and that can be really neat and useful, but sending Perl code through a socket to be eval'ed on the other end would be insane, and a security nightmare, and also would require a Perl interpreter on the other end.
I started this whole discussion to explain what XML is good for. It doesn't solve world hunger, or make coffee. It's not supposed to do calculations or do anything fancy. It's a way of providing structure to a document, which when fed to a parser results in a parse tree, freeing me from the issues of having to deal with charsets, delimiters and all that crap, and that's really all I want from it.
Blood keeps flowing though your hand, though.
Why would I even want that in a format that's made for the markup of data? XML is perfectly well suited for one thing, creating structure in a document in a way that takes into account the problems inherent in the task. It's just like CSV, or the
Not to mention, I don't think I even want any sort of executable code inside my data when I'm trying to load records into a database. Sure you could be really clever there, but that's one place where I really don't want infinite loops screwing up a batch process.
Then what's the point, I wonder? I'm not interested in reading rants that include more on politics and the state of the world than a technical issue it's supposed to be about. I notice you still haven't provided examples, btw.
Sometimes bad publicity is bad indeed.
For instance, I'm quite sure Bernard Shifman didn't get that much benefit out of all that publicity.
Can you have namespaces? You don't have to use them in XML, but it's something that certainly comes handy sometimes.
I don't get it. Did I say something different? XML is simply a way of encoding data in such a way that if you want to say, parse your browser's history or bookmarks you can do that using a standard library, instead of getting a headache trying to understand some horrible format in the style of "Mork" (see my other posts in the thread for links on it).
Of course it doesn't specify what the data means. Nor it should, because that's not the point of it. How the hell can any markup format do that, anyway? It's simply an unsolvable problem in this respect. Databases don't solve the problem either, but that doesn't make them useless, right?
But, since I don't know Lisp, please provide an example in XML and S-Expressions, with an explanation of how S-Expressions are better. I've seen your link, but it's completely useless. It's completely devoid of any technical information. It's a fairly amusing rant, but completely useless for the purpose of backing your point.