Actually, it's not compiled vs. interperated languages that are the problem: it's staticly typed vs dynamicly typed. The difference?
In C you say
int i;
and you have an int
in python, you say
i = 5
and you have an int
In C you say
char[] c;
and you have a string.
in python, you say
c = "somestring"
and you have a string.
In C, you have to declair what a variable is before you use it. In Perl or Python, you say something is something, and it's that type. They both have types, casts and so on, it's all a matter of when they get those types associated with them. Other than that, you are quite correct about Parrot.
Sorry if the C is wrong, my C is really rusty these days. It's a rare thing where my apps really require the fine tuned memory management that c provides and requires, rather than the speed and flexability of development time that languages like perl, python and (to some extent, imho) java provide.
Actually, my girlfriend and I where looking into setting up some sort of ad-hock version of this, but this looks better. She's got a motor imparement, and so mousing for her is generally a bit of a pain in the ass, doable, but slow. With this, she'd be able to mouse easier, and play City of Heroes with much greater ease =)
Now to convince her to wear a silly hat. That's going to be harder.
Oh, and quick plug on my own opinions about people with disabilities and computer use: There are a lot of smart people out there, with unnessicary complications for getting into computer use because a lot of computer periferals are built for able bodied people. It's unfortunate, but I'm glad things like these are making it to mass market production, because it means people who need them, but can't get their insurance companies to pay for them, will be able to afford them more realisticly.
Slashdot editors, PLEASE stop refering to Santa Cruz, CA, when talking about SCO. It is no longer Santa Cruz Operations. It hasn't been for years! That POS company has been a bad enough black spot on this otherwise very cool town long enough. It is 'The SCO Group', and SCO no longer in any way refers to Santa Cruz. Thank you.
This comes as no huge shock to me. The big label execs have never figured out that this is about how easy to manage and maintain a digital collection of music is, not about it being free, for the vast majority of people. That's why they refuse to make an actually usability equivalent, legal alternative to what's already available. They don't get it, and they won't until it's to late.
Instead, they want to make this market into an exact clone of what they see the cd market being, and continue wading in the money they make, and spread around to all of the middlemen, corp shills and various greedy bastards that line the entire music industry.
However, just because they can, doesn't mean that everyone has to follow suit. They are going to see an increasing number of smaller artists being able to directly market themselves, and completely free of any fair use limiting tech (IE, pure format compressed audio, ala mp3, aac, ogg, whatever). These people will see that, while they get less sales overall (less huge piles of marketing clout, etc etc), if they can market themselves well (or hook up with a good, small, dedicated marketing company), then they get a much larger cut of their smaller sales, and in the end, more profit for their hard work. Less babying, less huge rockstar lifestyle, most likely, though.
Could it just be that way to many games that are coming out are overpriced, overproduced, exactly the same as the gameplay we've gotten before graphical bungles that people really are having trouble caring about? Most of the games that sell well that are coming out are mearly highly polished versions of things we've seen before with one or two novel twists (FPS, RPGs, etc).
A second reason is services like gamefly. I know I won't be bying as many games from now on, as long as I have this service available. Why buy that game that's $55 for 12-18 hours of gameplay when I can rent it for a week? Anyway, just my 2c.
he gets his suply, but I want to know what he's smoking, and where I can get some. Also, I want to know what the interviewer was smoking, so I DON'T smoke any. I want visions of the future, not being able to blindly belive someone else's =)
Here's a thought, boys and girl(s?;). Where in any of this does it say a content distributer HAS to use any of these technologies?
Specificly, the cost of implimenting these counter piracy technologies is skyrocketing. One of these days, it's going to be a simple matter of echnonomics that the empires of media idiocy are going to be overrun by smaller, more agile buisnesses, enabled by the medium that is the internet (can you say faster home connections making choices for multimedia consumption much wider?), offering equal or better product (entertainment, news, etc etc) at a much better price. When you can download a movie from a small production house doing high quality work, for $10, or yet another boxoffice bloatfest for $25 on dvd, which one are you going to choose?
Well, the one you enjoy, of course. That's the key to media, really. But as the big players keep raising the cost of entry into 'their' world, how long do you think it will be before smaller players make their own?
Actually, I was aware of the differences, and why =) Good reference material though, and well thought out. My point was more, it's a non-useful feature in the first place, because it wastes more time than it saves.
Played the Genesis version, I can deffinately say it was good. Pirates: Gold! is great, in that it's a Sid Meyer game that translates well to console controls. One of my favorite games before I got a computer, and, well, tried Civ =)
What you are talking about here is yet more leftover UI cruft. I think the overall point that people are trying to make, but not actually described very well (thanks slashdot geeks!), is this:
File -> Open should pop a perfectly useable file selector window, but instead of a gui specific one, fire up the file browser to the directory that app suggested (for example, last dir visited by the app, home dir, etc). They aren't asking you to change your usage pattern, just that, why do we have two tools to accomplish the same task (especialy when it took so long to redevelop the one that's been needing it so bad, and yet the other's development has been zooming along)? Why not *very slightly* multipurpous one of them.
At least that's my take.
Otoh, the comment on drag and drop is interesting. I can honsestly say I never use drag and drop myself, execpt in the context of one file browser window to another, and I don't use that any more, because of the inconsistent 'smart' behavior I get from the file browsers I use. Will it copy? Will it move? Will it create a 'god damn(tm)' windows shortcut? So I make sure I do what I intend with it before hand now.
Sun has publicly said they will talk to IBM about this. This doesn't amount to agreeing to do that which is proposed, ala an open source java.
What they HAVE basicly said is "We have officially turned to look at the road that may lead to an open source java". This isn't the first step on the road to Sun being involved in an open source java. But it's the precursor to that step, so I think anyone interested in java will take note.
Or, simply, they can raise an alarm to the system when they disappear, and the security cameras can automaticly record that location asap, and try to track moving people in the area. There are all sorts of other solutions than having a person, moving no faster than the thief, try to catch them.
If this is for truely CS students, I'd have to agree. I wish the corses at my local collage would have done this, and been structured to really teach me programming as a whole, with a set thread of corses, rather than piecemeal. I personally had to teach myself project management, code orginization, and design techniques. The results have been varied, but a deffinate improvement from the folks that I know that kept going to that same school for CS. A sad thing indeed.
On the other hand, there is the serious consideration that there are perfectly valid computer career choices that don't need low level languages at all. Can you say Sci majors that need computer programming to be able to do calculations more than anything? I can think of a few more, but I don't think all of them are that valid of career choices;)
This guy obviously can't get around the fact that bad designs are bad designs. He gives some good examples (embperl, for example), but then goes right downhill with his harrasment of Mozilla, and hits rock bottom when addressing HTML.
Mozilla is two thing, a rendering engine (gecko), and then the application suite. That he can't see his head around that is a bit irritating, but hey, it's his opinion. Still, firebird's faster rendering of XUL, and ridding itself of extranios code would most likely suit him better, but he simply doesn't address it.
As I said, his HTML vs XML and associated standards analasys is fatally flawed, as I'm sure many of you know. If you don't, check out a list apart (http://www.alistapart.com/), the folks there cover the ins and outs of the need to redesign html much better than I could.
The fact that he starts with "The Web was based on the idea that a simple markup language could allow us to divorce document presentation from document structure, and concentrate on how information was related rather than how it should be displayed." and then goes on to describe how <FONT> tags aren't that bad, obviously means he's missed the whole point.
And <FONT> tags are depricated in HTML 4.01 strict as well.
Please, before posting a huge flame doc as an article, please do your research. We are geeks after all.
Oh, and yes, I did just pick and choose which I read, thank you very much. I don't have enough info on the background of the rest to have an informed opinion. I personally find there to be a great deal of merit in that.
I'll second this, with one note on it's quality. It really goes off on tangents with some very complex lexx and yacc code, which, not being that level of a system programmer, felt very hard to wade through. Not only that, but it felt as though it was there just to pad the book's length, as an included cd with the program's source would have been much more useful, rather than having the code, in full, in the book. It's not as if I can run gcc (or configure.sh) on the book.
That out of the way, the coverage of the actual material, where it is covered, is excelent, absolutely as detailed as it needs to get, which is very. It's a complex topic, but one that will serve you well if you plan on building projects, rather than just contributing code, and even then, if there are new requirements you add to a project, knowing these tools is very handy.
Oh, and, duh, forgot to add, am making enough money that just post holiday season when I have some cash to spend on myself again, I plan to get one of these ogg playing portables myself, so I put my money where my mouth is on liking it.
Not to conclusively prove or disprove your theory here, but I am one user of Ogg that deffinately breaks that mold. My main workstations are Windows (I do tech support, so I have to use windows a lot and be familiure with it, but god, anything on servers, give me Linux or BSD or death (or maybe cake)), and I run on moderately high end stuff. Not cutting edge, but nothing outdated.
And, I tend to run generally moderately high quality sound systems. Nothing surround sound, but deffinately seperate subwoofer, and I have to say, the general quality of ogg vorbis at 128 (ish, vorbis is VBR) is higher than the mp3 equivilent. Not all mp3 encoders are created equal though, and not all ppl use their encoders well, but my own rips strait from Lame vs Ogg have generally had Ogg coming out on top, especially for trance tracks and classical. Harder to tell the diff on rock stuff, but hey. And as others have noted, about 10% smaller file sizes! Except the trance and techno tracks, then it's more like 5%, but hey, is sounds so much better than the other, and is still smaller! Who am I to complain?
Just because the w3c spec is there, and is the canon source, doesn't make it easy to understand. Books like this help to break down for a wider audiance the lessons learned by someone who has spent a long time doing exactly what you suggest, understanding the web standards specs.
I'm not saying refering to the w3c for any questions is a bad plan, nor is making sure pages validate. But that doesn't invalidate the need for books like this. Just because a person CAN understand the w3c spec right out of the box (and not everyone can), doesn't mean it's a good learning too. I bet that you could have learned everything you did that summer doing internship a whole lot sooner into it if you'd had this book at the starting point for learning how to get truely standards complient.
I'm inclined to agree about the how often can one check thing. Otherwise it can easily be construed as either misuse of service, or malicious loitering. I think drawing apon real world parallels to a problem is the best way to get those outside of the internet community (ie, the legal community) to take the problems we as system admins face seriously.
Sendmail has remote exploits every couple of months at best. Why is anyone suprised any more? It's not as if it's easy to set up, administrate or is horribly high performance. It's about as middle of the road as you get. As many have pointed out before I'm sure, this is exactly why we complain about software from microsoft (and I mean just the software, not it's licences nor the biz tactics associated with it).
So why not look for alternatives, all you sysadmins out here? I for one prefer qmail. There are plenty of others.
I know it's hard to switch to a new system when you've gotten profficent in configuring something well, especially when you are so busy using it that you don't have time to play with something new to see if can work for your setup. But I can't see that running a frequently exploited mail server will cause anything but more work.
The spirit of the law vs. the letter of the law is something that will be put into effect when the judge hands down the punishment. That's always been the best way to deal with mostly harmless, or even possitive breaking of the law. It'd be smart for the defence attorney to have him plead guilty to the charges, and then push the motive and results. Hopefully they'll get a sympathetic judge.
Even more hopefully, the judge will let him off with a big pile of community service... and then the FBI will get him to fulfill it, busting into their systems and pointing out the bugs. The private sector needs a watchdog for cracking, but the govt. needs it doubly so.
I know this is directly counter to what has been previous posted, but I'm sticking by it. I work for a small isp. All our dialups are already filtered. It's outlined in our TOS.
None of our dialup cusomers where hit with blaster. We filter these ports on our dialup for the same reason we filter all incoming email for virii. It's a sensable service, and a good default. Some of our customers request that certain ports be unfiltered, and with few exceptions, we are more than happy to (one exception being outgoing 25, it's our smtp or nothing. We don't abide spammers).
Remember, tech savvy customers will know to request changes, and the unsavvy ones will be best served by being protected. People are sick and tired of people in the know doing nothing to protect them, sick of the virii and the worms, and the spam, the popups and the hassle and the crap. The more of the that you can keep from effecting them, the happier customers you have.
See, now, that's a reputation I can live with for a Santa Cruz company. They may have been sleezy, layed back potheads, but they they didn't go around trying to sue people, with questionable ethical motivations.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's not compiled vs. interperated languages that are the problem: it's staticly typed vs dynamicly typed. The difference?
In C you say
and you have an intin python, you say
and you have an intIn C you say
and you have a string.in python, you say
and you have a string.In C, you have to declair what a variable is before you use it. In Perl or Python, you say something is something, and it's that type. They both have types, casts and so on, it's all a matter of when they get those types associated with them. Other than that, you are quite correct about Parrot.
Sorry if the C is wrong, my C is really rusty these days. It's a rare thing where my apps really require the fine tuned memory management that c provides and requires, rather than the speed and flexability of development time that languages like perl, python and (to some extent, imho) java provide.
Actually, my girlfriend and I where looking into setting up some sort of ad-hock version of this, but this looks better. She's got a motor imparement, and so mousing for her is generally a bit of a pain in the ass, doable, but slow. With this, she'd be able to mouse easier, and play City of Heroes with much greater ease =)
Now to convince her to wear a silly hat. That's going to be harder.
Oh, and quick plug on my own opinions about people with disabilities and computer use: There are a lot of smart people out there, with unnessicary complications for getting into computer use because a lot of computer periferals are built for able bodied people. It's unfortunate, but I'm glad things like these are making it to mass market production, because it means people who need them, but can't get their insurance companies to pay for them, will be able to afford them more realisticly.
Slashdot editors, PLEASE stop refering to Santa Cruz, CA, when talking about SCO. It is no longer Santa Cruz Operations. It hasn't been for years! That POS company has been a bad enough black spot on this otherwise very cool town long enough. It is 'The SCO Group', and SCO no longer in any way refers to Santa Cruz. Thank you.
And those are:
Lobbying
Litigation
That's how they will respond. I would bet a years supply of the best coffee beans money could buy on it.
This comes as no huge shock to me. The big label execs have never figured out that this is about how easy to manage and maintain a digital collection of music is, not about it being free, for the vast majority of people. That's why they refuse to make an actually usability equivalent, legal alternative to what's already available. They don't get it, and they won't until it's to late.
Instead, they want to make this market into an exact clone of what they see the cd market being, and continue wading in the money they make, and spread around to all of the middlemen, corp shills and various greedy bastards that line the entire music industry.
However, just because they can, doesn't mean that everyone has to follow suit. They are going to see an increasing number of smaller artists being able to directly market themselves, and completely free of any fair use limiting tech (IE, pure format compressed audio, ala mp3, aac, ogg, whatever). These people will see that, while they get less sales overall (less huge piles of marketing clout, etc etc), if they can market themselves well (or hook up with a good, small, dedicated marketing company), then they get a much larger cut of their smaller sales, and in the end, more profit for their hard work. Less babying, less huge rockstar lifestyle, most likely, though.
Anyway, just this strange monkey's 2c.
Could it just be that way to many games that are coming out are overpriced, overproduced, exactly the same as the gameplay we've gotten before graphical bungles that people really are having trouble caring about? Most of the games that sell well that are coming out are mearly highly polished versions of things we've seen before with one or two novel twists (FPS, RPGs, etc).
A second reason is services like gamefly. I know I won't be bying as many games from now on, as long as I have this service available. Why buy that game that's $55 for 12-18 hours of gameplay when I can rent it for a week? Anyway, just my 2c.
the OP should be modded -5 flamebait?
he gets his suply, but I want to know what he's smoking, and where I can get some. Also, I want to know what the interviewer was smoking, so I DON'T smoke any. I want visions of the future, not being able to blindly belive someone else's =)
Here's a thought, boys and girl(s? ;). Where in any of this does it say a content distributer HAS to use any of these technologies?
Specificly, the cost of implimenting these counter piracy technologies is skyrocketing. One of these days, it's going to be a simple matter of echnonomics that the empires of media idiocy are going to be overrun by smaller, more agile buisnesses, enabled by the medium that is the internet (can you say faster home connections making choices for multimedia consumption much wider?), offering equal or better product (entertainment, news, etc etc) at a much better price. When you can download a movie from a small production house doing high quality work, for $10, or yet another boxoffice bloatfest for $25 on dvd, which one are you going to choose?
Well, the one you enjoy, of course. That's the key to media, really. But as the big players keep raising the cost of entry into 'their' world, how long do you think it will be before smaller players make their own?
Actually, I was aware of the differences, and why =) Good reference material though, and well thought out. My point was more, it's a non-useful feature in the first place, because it wastes more time than it saves.
Played the Genesis version, I can deffinately say it was good. Pirates: Gold! is great, in that it's a Sid Meyer game that translates well to console controls. One of my favorite games before I got a computer, and, well, tried Civ =)
What you are talking about here is yet more leftover UI cruft. I think the overall point that people are trying to make, but not actually described very well (thanks slashdot geeks!), is this:
File -> Open should pop a perfectly useable file selector window, but instead of a gui specific one, fire up the file browser to the directory that app suggested (for example, last dir visited by the app, home dir, etc). They aren't asking you to change your usage pattern, just that, why do we have two tools to accomplish the same task (especialy when it took so long to redevelop the one that's been needing it so bad, and yet the other's development has been zooming along)? Why not *very slightly* multipurpous one of them.
At least that's my take.
Otoh, the comment on drag and drop is interesting. I can honsestly say I never use drag and drop myself, execpt in the context of one file browser window to another, and I don't use that any more, because of the inconsistent 'smart' behavior I get from the file browsers I use. Will it copy? Will it move? Will it create a 'god damn(tm)' windows shortcut? So I make sure I do what I intend with it before hand now.
Sun has publicly said they will talk to IBM about this. This doesn't amount to agreeing to do that which is proposed, ala an open source java.
What they HAVE basicly said is "We have officially turned to look at the road that may lead to an open source java". This isn't the first step on the road to Sun being involved in an open source java. But it's the precursor to that step, so I think anyone interested in java will take note.
Just my 2c
Or, simply, they can raise an alarm to the system when they disappear, and the security cameras can automaticly record that location asap, and try to track moving people in the area. There are all sorts of other solutions than having a person, moving no faster than the thief, try to catch them.
If this is for truely CS students, I'd have to agree. I wish the corses at my local collage would have done this, and been structured to really teach me programming as a whole, with a set thread of corses, rather than piecemeal. I personally had to teach myself project management, code orginization, and design techniques. The results have been varied, but a deffinate improvement from the folks that I know that kept going to that same school for CS. A sad thing indeed.
;)
On the other hand, there is the serious consideration that there are perfectly valid computer career choices that don't need low level languages at all. Can you say Sci majors that need computer programming to be able to do calculations more than anything? I can think of a few more, but I don't think all of them are that valid of career choices
This guy obviously can't get around the fact that bad designs are bad designs. He gives some good examples (embperl, for example), but then goes right downhill with his harrasment of Mozilla, and hits rock bottom when addressing HTML.
Mozilla is two thing, a rendering engine (gecko), and then the application suite. That he can't see his head around that is a bit irritating, but hey, it's his opinion. Still, firebird's faster rendering of XUL, and ridding itself of extranios code would most likely suit him better, but he simply doesn't address it.
As I said, his HTML vs XML and associated standards analasys is fatally flawed, as I'm sure many of you know. If you don't, check out a list apart (http://www.alistapart.com/), the folks there cover the ins and outs of the need to redesign html much better than I could.
The fact that he starts with "The Web was based on the idea that a simple markup language could allow us to divorce document presentation from document structure, and concentrate on how information was related rather than how it should be displayed." and then goes on to describe how <FONT> tags aren't that bad, obviously means he's missed the whole point.
And <FONT> tags are depricated in HTML 4.01 strict as well.
Please, before posting a huge flame doc as an article, please do your research. We are geeks after all.
Oh, and yes, I did just pick and choose which I read, thank you very much. I don't have enough info on the background of the rest to have an informed opinion. I personally find there to be a great deal of merit in that.
I'll second this, with one note on it's quality. It really goes off on tangents with some very complex lexx and yacc code, which, not being that level of a system programmer, felt very hard to wade through. Not only that, but it felt as though it was there just to pad the book's length, as an included cd with the program's source would have been much more useful, rather than having the code, in full, in the book. It's not as if I can run gcc (or configure.sh) on the book.
That out of the way, the coverage of the actual material, where it is covered, is excelent, absolutely as detailed as it needs to get, which is very. It's a complex topic, but one that will serve you well if you plan on building projects, rather than just contributing code, and even then, if there are new requirements you add to a project, knowing these tools is very handy.
Oh, and, duh, forgot to add, am making enough money that just post holiday season when I have some cash to spend on myself again, I plan to get one of these ogg playing portables myself, so I put my money where my mouth is on liking it.
Not to conclusively prove or disprove your theory here, but I am one user of Ogg that deffinately breaks that mold. My main workstations are Windows (I do tech support, so I have to use windows a lot and be familiure with it, but god, anything on servers, give me Linux or BSD or death (or maybe cake)), and I run on moderately high end stuff. Not cutting edge, but nothing outdated.
And, I tend to run generally moderately high quality sound systems. Nothing surround sound, but deffinately seperate subwoofer, and I have to say, the general quality of ogg vorbis at 128 (ish, vorbis is VBR) is higher than the mp3 equivilent. Not all mp3 encoders are created equal though, and not all ppl use their encoders well, but my own rips strait from Lame vs Ogg have generally had Ogg coming out on top, especially for trance tracks and classical. Harder to tell the diff on rock stuff, but hey. And as others have noted, about 10% smaller file sizes! Except the trance and techno tracks, then it's more like 5%, but hey, is sounds so much better than the other, and is still smaller! Who am I to complain?
Just because the w3c spec is there, and is the canon source, doesn't make it easy to understand. Books like this help to break down for a wider audiance the lessons learned by someone who has spent a long time doing exactly what you suggest, understanding the web standards specs.
I'm not saying refering to the w3c for any questions is a bad plan, nor is making sure pages validate. But that doesn't invalidate the need for books like this. Just because a person CAN understand the w3c spec right out of the box (and not everyone can), doesn't mean it's a good learning too. I bet that you could have learned everything you did that summer doing internship a whole lot sooner into it if you'd had this book at the starting point for learning how to get truely standards complient.
And then refered to the w3c spec, naturally.
I'm inclined to agree about the how often can one check thing. Otherwise it can easily be construed as either misuse of service, or malicious loitering. I think drawing apon real world parallels to a problem is the best way to get those outside of the internet community (ie, the legal community) to take the problems we as system admins face seriously.
Just my 2c.
Sendmail has remote exploits every couple of months at best. Why is anyone suprised any more? It's not as if it's easy to set up, administrate or is horribly high performance. It's about as middle of the road as you get. As many have pointed out before I'm sure, this is exactly why we complain about software from microsoft (and I mean just the software, not it's licences nor the biz tactics associated with it).
So why not look for alternatives, all you sysadmins out here? I for one prefer qmail. There are plenty of others.
I know it's hard to switch to a new system when you've gotten profficent in configuring something well, especially when you are so busy using it that you don't have time to play with something new to see if can work for your setup. But I can't see that running a frequently exploited mail server will cause anything but more work.
The spirit of the law vs. the letter of the law is something that will be put into effect when the judge hands down the punishment. That's always been the best way to deal with mostly harmless, or even possitive breaking of the law. It'd be smart for the defence attorney to have him plead guilty to the charges, and then push the motive and results. Hopefully they'll get a sympathetic judge.
Even more hopefully, the judge will let him off with a big pile of community service... and then the FBI will get him to fulfill it, busting into their systems and pointing out the bugs. The private sector needs a watchdog for cracking, but the govt. needs it doubly so.
I know this is directly counter to what has been previous posted, but I'm sticking by it. I work for a small isp. All our dialups are already filtered. It's outlined in our TOS.
None of our dialup cusomers where hit with blaster. We filter these ports on our dialup for the same reason we filter all incoming email for virii. It's a sensable service, and a good default. Some of our customers request that certain ports be unfiltered, and with few exceptions, we are more than happy to (one exception being outgoing 25, it's our smtp or nothing. We don't abide spammers).
Remember, tech savvy customers will know to request changes, and the unsavvy ones will be best served by being protected. People are sick and tired of people in the know doing nothing to protect them, sick of the virii and the worms, and the spam, the popups and the hassle and the crap. The more of the that you can keep from effecting them, the happier customers you have.
See, now, that's a reputation I can live with for a Santa Cruz company. They may have been sleezy, layed back potheads, but they they didn't go around trying to sue people, with questionable ethical motivations.