The false star technique relies on shining a laser upwards against an essentially black background. To do the same thing with a satellite you would have to fire the laser downwards - and make sure it lands on a surface with perfectly predictable spectral response. So short of lugging a massive square of BaSO4 around I don't see how this can be done.
A friend works for Mt. Wilson observatory, and as I understand it they've had great success with adaptive optics wihtout the laser, and they end up getting some images that are better than hubble for such things as asteroids.
The military/cia/whoever must have been using this sort of thing for some time, as the limits of non-adaptive optics are painfully obvious from the get-go, and they've had the money to dump into the research a lot longer than the scientific community has.
I went over to a co-worker's place today to pick up an old Mac that they were giving away, and we chatted briefly about their new son. They suggested that he'd probably grow up to be a programmer, but then we hit on the idea that that will probably be meaningless by the time he grows up. Likely, "programmer" will be about as meaningful as "typist" is today. Everyone types.
This lead us to the thought that computers will likely be unrecognizable by then as well. "Computer? Oh, you mean this?" (points at top button on shirt). Yep, with that sort of a scenario, and the prospect that IPv6 will be given out only slightly less sloppily than v4, I suspect the number crunch will exist again by 2020....
The GPL vs BSD license idea does present an interesting point, it seems that Linux users tend to "shove" the GPL licensing into people's mouths, if it's not GPL then it can't be allowed to live. An example would be the recent QT war.
Not the same at all. BSD has a good, simple license for a research operating system (which is, after all, BSD's background). The GPL is a tool to combat a certain type of commercial software paradigm, and thus does not play nice with the BSD style license (nor visa versa).
The QPL, on the other hand, is a tool designed to appease a community of developers who demand source code, while simultaneously forcing users of the code to restrict their use and distribution to venues that do not limit Trolltech's business model.
I'm not saying that any one or more of these are unreasonable, but clearly the first two licenses have in common a desire to see source code proliferate and grow. The third is hardly that altruistic....
There is a lot of BSD licensed code in your average Linux distribution. There is a lot of GPLed code in your average BSD distribution. This is not really the reason for the debate. The debate centers around two things: ego and "not developed here" syndrome. Before this article, I would have said that a lot of this centered on the Linux and GNU camps (especially GNU, since the Linux camp generally has Linus to calm it down, and the GNU folks have... er...) Now, I would have to say that clearly there are some over-inflated egos and far-too-undermedicated "not developed here" sufferers on both sides of the fence.
I would expect a true hacker to submit an obfuscated Perl script resembling line noise that cleverly outputs his Q&A session as HTML. [...] But not MS Word.
Ah, did anyone bother running this... "Word Document" through a Perl interpreter? Java VM?
RHAT is a public corporation. Its management has legal duty to maximize shareholder value by whatever legal means necessary.
Close, but no cigar.
Fact of the matter is that Red Hat, and every other company to go public that I know of, has filed a document called a prospectus. That document details many things about the company including, and most importantly to this discussion, a business plan. That business plan includes many useless facts that no one will bother to read, but there's one fact that no investor of any serious merit could miss: Red Hat as no Intellectual Property, nor do they intend to develop any. Any shareholder suit that claimed that Red Hat was not producing the mythical Shareholder Value would have to argue that they were doing worse than could be expected by the average investor, given the above phrase.
Now, given that the average investor should (given prevailing history in the industry) interpret that phrase as a sure indication of negative growth potential, and Red Hat shows no signs of negative growth in the near future.... Exactly how would investors manage to force Red Hat into anything that is not in line with their current plan?
Everyone in their right mind blocks ICMP from any but a handful of trusted sources. A net-connected host is required to respond to daytime as well. Quick show of hands, now, how many people run daytime?
All of us mere developers whose code Red Hat ships every day, but who didn't make it onto the short list are still out in the rain. I guess a couple of Perl modules and Gimp plug-ins just didn't cut it;-)
I bet it was all those Linux freaks, with bad haircuts and poor personal hygiene
What haircut?
I'm not sure I like your sarcastic tone. You know, not all of us Linux advocates are the straight-laced $100,000/year IT managers that get all of the press. Some of us are just normal geeks. This is probably just another Microsoft weenie trying to cast us all as stock-greedy suits!
Being a previous 2nd-place winner of said contest as well as a Perl programming courseware designer and instructor, I have to disagree. It is no easier to write bad code in Perl than it is in say, C++, TCL, sh, VisualBasic or LISP. Anyone who doubts this should create an Obfuscated LISP Programming Contest, and attempt to read one of the entrants....
The impression that Perl produces worse code than other languages usually comes from the hurdle of being able to visually guage regular expressions and grasp context-sensitivity. I try to code with these two hurdles in mind (both for abuse in contests and for maintainability at work), and things work out quite well. But, I've learned to think in Perl, so even "bad" Perl is more readable to me than "good" C++ (which I program in, but do not yet think in).
My favorite obfuscated contest entry is still my C/LISP combo which printed "Hello, world" with only one copy of the string in the code. It would run under EMACS LISP or compile as C code. Fun stuff, that!
I'll just wait until I can "buy Linux" as a mutual fund
Actually, you could already create this. Who would be in it? Geeze, who wouldn't (except MS). Here's a quick list:
RedHat
IBM
Intel
Netscape
Applix (public?)
Corel
Sun
Dell
SGI
Oracle
Sybase (kinda)
Slashdot;-)
Not to mention anyone else who announces a software product for Linux only or which has the same or better support under Linux as everywhere else.
Just a few in the fund, but always growing. Anyone else?
Yep, someone with connections should mention this to a mutual fund company. It'd be fun. I think they would need at least 100 companies, but if you include the companies that use Linux heavily or are likely to benifit from Linux the most (e.g. Bowing, Cisco, etc) you might get enough. Hmmm....
"They are pretty much daring us to blackhole them. The board of MAPS, LLC will make its final determination in the next few days, and if we do decide to blackhole NSI it's going to get ugly. As an interested party, we want you all to know what's happening."
Is Paul an attorney? I don't think so. Interpreting Emery's email as a "dare" strikes me as a somewhat juvenile attitude.
The use of the word "dare" was perhaps unfortunate, but isn't NSI simply calling MAPS' bluff? If MAPS doesn't follow through with their stated MO, isn't this going to weaken MAPS' ability to impliment such Spam-reduction in the future? Perception is key, here.
The additional danger of the juvenile attitudes of both Emery and Vixie here is the dick-measuring element. Without a doubt a lot of unsuspecting people will be confused, inconvenienced, and possibly hurt by an NSI blockade -- this would amount essentially to conviction without trial IMHO.
Ok, repeat after me... RBL is not a government, nor is it a law, nor is it implimented by either of the above. The Black-holing of NSI will be a public action taken by the public. The equvalent would be a newsletter that displayed picutres of salesmen that stick their feet in doors in order to give a sales pitch. The newsletter does not lock people's doors. It simply gives them a good idea of when that might be appropriate. In the case of the RBL, there are automatic ways to have your door lock, but that doesn't change the fact that the public recipient of the hostile sales pitch (yes, Spamming is textbook hostile sales) is the one shutting it off, and they can choose not to.
The case that keeps getting pointed out is where an ISP uses RBL and will be blocking NSI mail to all of their users. This is much like the case where an office building management company does not let hostile salesment into the building to see the tenents. The tenents are going to get grumpy at some point, and say "hey, I wanted to see that guy, he's selling widgets that I need". This is what has already been mentioned where some ISPs will stop using RBL based on the NSI blackhole. This is a Good Thing(tm). It demonstrates that these ISPs are willing participants, and they can and will leave if and when they feel that it is no longer appropriate.
What kind of a geek are you if you can't figure out how to operate your own bloody mail filters?
What kind of geek are you if you don't create a way for non-geeks to do the same thing.... Gee, that would be RBL!
Most of the people upset about censorware is that they miss many naughty words, and censor other sites that have none.
So, if I were to create the technically perfect Web censorship software, Jon Katz would not be annoyed at its use? "Most of the people" who usually complain would not? No.
I and others who are bothered by censorship are usually bothered because censorship implies a power of control. Control of ideas, in fact, which is one of the most powerful forms of control.
The RBL presents the same danger, but the original poster was incorrect in assuming that that danger can be acted upon. Because the RBL is voluntary (and in fact is only the most popular of several such efforts, some of which are more technically sound, but have a higher barrier to entry) it can never have the same impact as, say, the V-chip which is required in every television set in the US.
I have a problem with some of the applications of the RBL, however. For example, WebTV applies the RBL to your mail whether you like it or not, and that's exactly the problem with things like the V-chip (granted, this is WebTV's problem, not MAPS').
NSI is not being censored, they are being refused access to the pockets of millions of consumers because of bad business practices. The consumers do not have to deny access (except as noted above), but they WILL because they don't WANT unsolicited EMail. If NSI wants to put those messages on their Web site, and slam out ad banners to every major Web portal on the planet, there's nothing wrong with that. BUT, it would cost them money, and NSI doesn't want to have to spend any actuall money! Therein lies the rub. Spam costs money, but not to the sender. Thus it is refered to as theft. NSI is commiting theft, and what's worse, they are doing so because of their relationship with the US government that gives them a monopoly over one of the most important communications technologies in history.
Let me repeat, this is not a censorship issue, this is a simple case of abuse. NSI is abusing their customers, and their customers are not pleased (that includes me).
Re:Huray! Now, more people use C++!!
on
GCC 2.95 Released
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· Score: 1
C++ is useless trash. People who know better avoid it like they do the plague.
Not fair or true. There are plenty of people who "know better" and don't avoid the language. C++ is actually a very nice language if you avoid the standard pit-traps (which are many).
For example, I recommend avoiding multiple inheiritance (the only thing that I think Java got right), references, templates, run-time type checking, public data members, unplanned parenthood (e.g. what most people call reuse, and are shocked to find slows projects down), and most of all operator overloading (I'm still stunned by the sheer stupidity of overloading If you avoid these constructs you will soon find that any C effort could be sped up several-fold by the addtion of polymorphic function signatures, single inheiritance, namespace separation, data hiding and the (slightly) improved memory management.
Now, all I need is something that gives me the speed and low-level handling of C++ plus the high-level abstractions of Perl. For now, I will have to resign myself to calling C++ from Perl using XS.
It's great to see the full span of history, here. The previous article was Ritchie releaseing code for the first C compilers and this one is GCC 2.95 which is the culmination of at least 15 years of work on the part of Stallman, FSF, Cygnus and probably tens of thousands of volunteers. For those who are looking to advocate Open Source within their companies, or just see for yourself what this "new" paradigm can produce, please read the GCC source! It's some of the best code I've ever seen (though I admit it has it's... blemishes). The way it achives platform neutrality while producing highly platform-optimizied code is genius, and you can really feel its roots (the intermediate language is a compromise between Stallman's love for LISP and a desire to keep compilation fast and efficient). This is all without going into the fact that there are now front-ends for every major programming language with the exception of the purely interpreted ones (Perl, Python, TCL, etc).
Currently, as far as I am aware, this is the finest compiler on the face of the Earth, and I dare someone to prove it wrong. There are compilers that produce faster code for a specific platform, and there are compilers for languages that GCC has never heard of, but GCC wins the all-around best technology (IMHO) for producing native instructions from your pet language. It's the one tool which I feel justifies all of Stallman's quirkiness, and gives me faith in the future of Open Source.
Personally, I really hope this is as excellent as Ender's Game (the novel, I have not yet read the original novella), but I'm not holding my breath. The problem is that Card has been wandering into a sort of "abuse the main character when plot fails" sort of mode that has made series like the Call of Earth books and *cough* the Alvin Maker books quite unreadable. Alvin Maker especially bothered me because it was such a briliantly simple idea that showed such promise. For those who haven't read the series, it's late 1800s US where many (if not everyone) have magical tallents that range from being able to make a better shoe than the technology should allow to healing the sick. Card begins the first book with a full head of steam and really brings the reader into the world. But, as the books drag on, all we get is more and more abuse of the main chraracter; this sort of "growth only comes through pain" melodrama that does not allow us to explore this facsinating world at all (in fact in one book he outright admits that he really only wants to explore one town, expounding on the contributiuons to the local citizenry that he got from the Internet).
Enough about Alvin, here's hoping that Card will return to his master-writer form, and give us a book that will wash away everything between Ender's Game and now!
anyone who honestly believes that crypto can be stopped, or even regulated, is braindead
Oh no, you missed the point. Stopping encryption would be the worst outcome for the governments. The best outcome would be if only the bad-guys use it. You see breaking crypto is hard work, and you want to start off with a pretty good chance that what you're craking is worth it. Let's say that you can crack 1Kb/s of encrypted data. If you're listening to a pipe that has 10Mb/s you very quickly try to make sure that almost no-one mainstream uses crypto, just the "fringe".
The thing that scares me so much about this one is not that its stupid, but that it's clever as all hell, and a refutation of every time I've asserted that our (US) government isn't capable enough to mount an effective offensive against its own people. Before, I was amused, now I'm scared.
Hmm... Just in case anyone's listening... This is an obvious, and therefore bad idea. You want to try to be a little more subtle.
"I think we made significant progress toward a regime that can support the interests of national security and public safety in the face of the challenges posed by the increasing use of encryption internationally." -Janet Weiss, er Reno
Clearly this is a fake... right? Please!? Hmmm, perhaps it's time to move.
Katz somewhere has picked up the notion that people have an absolute right to not only expose themselves to whatever they wish but that no one else may interfere in the slightest. Frankly, I find that approach far more tyrannical than anything movie theaters might do because I don't see a limit to its scope.
This is a mis-use of the word "tyrannical". One cannot behave like a tyrant without attempting to control or manipulate others and advocating freedom of "experience" could only fall under this heading if he were taking that possition in order to manipulate others to some other goal (which you have not stated or implied that you feel is the case).
Why not slow down, think about what you were like at 15-16. It's a time when civil disobedience is a) least likely to produce negative, life-affecting results and b) most likely to lead you down a path of questioning authority and opening yourself to thinking through the really important choices that you will have to make later on. I know that my few late-teen experiences that really shook my world and made me question everyone and everything around me are very directly responsible for most of my successes later on. That's likely not going to be the case as a result of a dispute with a movie theater, but it's a start. Good things and bad... they all start small, and the only real guide we have is our own moral compass. I know mine has been strengthened by such conflict and subsequent resolution, how about yours?
On the other hand, remember that Jon's first article (the sense of which seems to have been assumed in this second installment) was discussing the plight of parents who were not able to get their kids into a movie because they were unable to attend with them. I don't really think movies are a great choice as baby-sitter, but on the other hand, there's no good reason that a parent shouldn't be allowed to drop their kids off to see a film. Parental Guidance has been given. Done. They're not the theater's kids, and if the theater wants to start dictating how a parent raises their kid, they should sue for co-custody (hyperbole asside, this is what the studios are trying to excersise).
Jon, I wish you the best. "Our Kids" have become the political football of a very scary powerplay. The "War on Drugs" which has killed hundreds of thousands while pushing drug sales to new highs; censorship that is totally out of whack with practiced community standards; constant dumbing down of our educational institutions and a lack of focus on real political issues all seem to be the reward that this battle-cry reap. I hope I'm wrong, and that the next 20 years get a little brighter, but I have a feeling that they're going to... well, in the words of South Park's daring tots... suck *ss!
I checked this software out, and while it's a cool idea, and one that I might take the time to fully develop, I came up with some pretty SERIOUS security holes in this. It's not as bad as BO, but close, and it's multi-platform.
At the very least, PLEASE don't run this without changing the falsepath function in response.pl so that it never returns anything but a non-existant filename. This program will happily transfer all of your files to remote systems (yes, I know that falsepath tries to prevent this, but think about it for a bit, and you can get around this).
As I pointed out for the Mindcraft stuff, these are some common problems in modern Web benchmarks:
in the "real world" a mix of pages are being requested at once, so flat files and cgi and mod_perl should be tested all at once.
the clients (not via localhost, of course) should simulate a variety of connect speeds so that the server has to deal with pumping lots of data fast as well as keeping lots of connections up while slow clients download.
clients should also simulate partial downloads, this can change the dynamic for cgi a great deal.
I may take some time to write a generic web load simulation suite so that these things can be done in a standardized way.
However, I am pleased to see that people are looking into BSD vs Linux performance. Linux needs to not get complacent, and BSD is an ideal prod in that direction. NT just can't provide the level of competition necessary to keep us lean and mean.
I'd love to see some PHP (or eperl) tests done against the same functionality under ASP/vbscript.
I suspect that PHP/Apache/Linux would blow the doors off of VB/ASP/IIS/NT, however there's an even more telling test that I think would show NT to be the leader in slow technology:
Take your benchmark box. Connect it to 1024 clients, and have them all download active content (CGI, ASP, whatever) at a byte rate of 100 bytes per second. Watch NT fall over at about 500 concurent processes....
First, I don't see how anyone (and it doesn't look like many have, but still) could view this as RMS "selling out"
Uh, no one but you has said that....
To those who are tired of his "ranting" about GNU/Linux...
I'm certainly tired of those who insist on introducing this tired old argument into random threads about RMS.
And at least a few people out there do respect him
There are those of us who've known Richard and his body of work far too long to a) not respect him or b) fail to recognize that the man has some serious problems. These two are not mutually exclusive. However, there seem to be a very vocal contingent of his cheering squad who feel the need to turn every "I don't agree with RMS" comment into a holy-war. I have to admit that turning an award anouncement into a holy-war is a new twist that I would not have thought of....
Slashdot Mirror
A friend works for Mt. Wilson observatory, and as I understand it they've had great success with adaptive optics wihtout the laser, and they end up getting some images that are better than hubble for such things as asteroids.
The military/cia/whoever must have been using this sort of thing for some time, as the limits of non-adaptive optics are painfully obvious from the get-go, and they've had the money to dump into the research a lot longer than the scientific community has.
I went over to a co-worker's place today to pick up an old Mac that they were giving away, and we chatted briefly about their new son. They suggested that he'd probably grow up to be a programmer, but then we hit on the idea that that will probably be meaningless by the time he grows up. Likely, "programmer" will be about as meaningful as "typist" is today. Everyone types.
This lead us to the thought that computers will likely be unrecognizable by then as well. "Computer? Oh, you mean this?" (points at top button on shirt). Yep, with that sort of a scenario, and the prospect that IPv6 will be given out only slightly less sloppily than v4, I suspect the number crunch will exist again by 2020....
The GPL vs BSD license idea does present an interesting point, it seems that Linux users tend to "shove" the GPL licensing into people's mouths, if it's not GPL then it can't be allowed to live. An example would be the recent QT war.
Not the same at all. BSD has a good, simple license for a research operating system (which is, after all, BSD's background). The GPL is a tool to combat a certain type of commercial software paradigm, and thus does not play nice with the BSD style license (nor visa versa).
The QPL, on the other hand, is a tool designed to appease a community of developers who demand source code, while simultaneously forcing users of the code to restrict their use and distribution to venues that do not limit Trolltech's business model.
I'm not saying that any one or more of these are unreasonable, but clearly the first two licenses have in common a desire to see source code proliferate and grow. The third is hardly that altruistic....
There is a lot of BSD licensed code in your average Linux distribution. There is a lot of GPLed code in your average BSD distribution. This is not really the reason for the debate. The debate centers around two things: ego and "not developed here" syndrome. Before this article, I would have said that a lot of this centered on the Linux and GNU camps (especially GNU, since the Linux camp generally has Linus to calm it down, and the GNU folks have... er...) Now, I would have to say that clearly there are some over-inflated egos and far-too-undermedicated "not developed here" sufferers on both sides of the fence.
[...] But not MS Word.
Ah, did anyone bother running this... "Word Document" through a Perl interpreter? Java VM?
Just wondering.... ;-)
Close, but no cigar.
Fact of the matter is that Red Hat, and every other company to go public that I know of, has filed a document called a prospectus. That document details many things about the company including, and most importantly to this discussion, a business plan. That business plan includes many useless facts that no one will bother to read, but there's one fact that no investor of any serious merit could miss: Red Hat as no Intellectual Property, nor do they intend to develop any. Any shareholder suit that claimed that Red Hat was not producing the mythical Shareholder Value would have to argue that they were doing worse than could be expected by the average investor, given the above phrase.
Now, given that the average investor should (given prevailing history in the industry) interpret that phrase as a sure indication of negative growth potential, and Red Hat shows no signs of negative growth in the near future.... Exactly how would investors manage to force Red Hat into anything that is not in line with their current plan?
Doom and gloom: 0
Wall Street / Linux: 1
Everyone in their right mind blocks ICMP from any but a handful of trusted sources. A net-connected host is required to respond to daytime as well. Quick show of hands, now, how many people run daytime?
All of us mere developers whose code Red Hat ships every day, but who didn't make it onto the short list are still out in the rain. I guess a couple of Perl modules and Gimp plug-ins just didn't cut it ;-)
I bet it was all those Linux freaks, with bad haircuts and poor personal hygiene
;-)
What haircut?
I'm not sure I like your sarcastic tone. You know, not all of us Linux advocates are the straight-laced $100,000/year IT managers that get all of the press. Some of us are just normal geeks. This is probably just another Microsoft weenie trying to cast us all as stock-greedy suits!
The impression that Perl produces worse code than other languages usually comes from the hurdle of being able to visually guage regular expressions and grasp context-sensitivity. I try to code with these two hurdles in mind (both for abuse in contests and for maintainability at work), and things work out quite well. But, I've learned to think in Perl, so even "bad" Perl is more readable to me than "good" C++ (which I program in, but do not yet think in).
My favorite obfuscated contest entry is still my C/LISP combo which printed "Hello, world" with only one copy of the string in the code. It would run under EMACS LISP or compile as C code. Fun stuff, that!
Actually, you could already create this. Who would be in it? Geeze, who wouldn't (except MS). Here's a quick list:
Just a few in the fund, but always growing. Anyone else?
Yep, someone with connections should mention this to a mutual fund company. It'd be fun. I think they would need at least 100 companies, but if you include the companies that use Linux heavily or are likely to benifit from Linux the most (e.g. Bowing, Cisco, etc) you might get enough. Hmmm....
Is Paul an attorney? I don't think so. Interpreting Emery's email as a "dare" strikes me as a somewhat juvenile attitude.
The use of the word "dare" was perhaps unfortunate, but isn't NSI simply calling MAPS' bluff? If MAPS doesn't follow through with their stated MO, isn't this going to weaken MAPS' ability to impliment such Spam-reduction in the future? Perception is key, here.
The additional danger of the juvenile attitudes of both Emery and Vixie here is the dick-measuring element. Without a doubt a lot of unsuspecting people will be confused, inconvenienced, and possibly hurt by an NSI blockade -- this would amount essentially to conviction without trial IMHO.
Ok, repeat after me... RBL is not a government, nor is it a law, nor is it implimented by either of the above. The Black-holing of NSI will be a public action taken by the public. The equvalent would be a newsletter that displayed picutres of salesmen that stick their feet in doors in order to give a sales pitch. The newsletter does not lock people's doors. It simply gives them a good idea of when that might be appropriate. In the case of the RBL, there are automatic ways to have your door lock, but that doesn't change the fact that the public recipient of the hostile sales pitch (yes, Spamming is textbook hostile sales) is the one shutting it off, and they can choose not to.
The case that keeps getting pointed out is where an ISP uses RBL and will be blocking NSI mail to all of their users. This is much like the case where an office building management company does not let hostile salesment into the building to see the tenents. The tenents are going to get grumpy at some point, and say "hey, I wanted to see that guy, he's selling widgets that I need". This is what has already been mentioned where some ISPs will stop using RBL based on the NSI blackhole. This is a Good Thing(tm). It demonstrates that these ISPs are willing participants, and they can and will leave if and when they feel that it is no longer appropriate.
What kind of a geek are you if you can't figure out how to operate your own bloody mail filters?
What kind of geek are you if you don't create a way for non-geeks to do the same thing.... Gee, that would be RBL!
-AJS
So, if I were to create the technically perfect Web censorship software, Jon Katz would not be annoyed at its use? "Most of the people" who usually complain would not? No.
I and others who are bothered by censorship are usually bothered because censorship implies a power of control. Control of ideas, in fact, which is one of the most powerful forms of control.
The RBL presents the same danger, but the original poster was incorrect in assuming that that danger can be acted upon. Because the RBL is voluntary (and in fact is only the most popular of several such efforts, some of which are more technically sound, but have a higher barrier to entry) it can never have the same impact as, say, the V-chip which is required in every television set in the US.
I have a problem with some of the applications of the RBL, however. For example, WebTV applies the RBL to your mail whether you like it or not, and that's exactly the problem with things like the V-chip (granted, this is WebTV's problem, not MAPS').
NSI is not being censored, they are being refused access to the pockets of millions of consumers because of bad business practices. The consumers do not have to deny access (except as noted above), but they WILL because they don't WANT unsolicited EMail. If NSI wants to put those messages on their Web site, and slam out ad banners to every major Web portal on the planet, there's nothing wrong with that. BUT, it would cost them money, and NSI doesn't want to have to spend any actuall money! Therein lies the rub. Spam costs money, but not to the sender. Thus it is refered to as theft. NSI is commiting theft, and what's worse, they are doing so because of their relationship with the US government that gives them a monopoly over one of the most important communications technologies in history.
Let me repeat, this is not a censorship issue, this is a simple case of abuse. NSI is abusing their customers, and their customers are not pleased (that includes me).
Not fair or true. There are plenty of people who "know better" and don't avoid the language. C++ is actually a very nice language if you avoid the standard pit-traps (which are many).
For example, I recommend avoiding multiple inheiritance (the only thing that I think Java got right), references, templates, run-time type checking, public data members, unplanned parenthood (e.g. what most people call reuse, and are shocked to find slows projects down), and most of all operator overloading (I'm still stunned by the sheer stupidity of overloading If you avoid these constructs you will soon find that any C effort could be sped up several-fold by the addtion of polymorphic function signatures, single inheiritance, namespace separation, data hiding and the (slightly) improved memory management.
Now, all I need is something that gives me the speed and low-level handling of C++ plus the high-level abstractions of Perl. For now, I will have to resign myself to calling C++ from Perl using XS.
Shouldn't it be trivial (with ispell's "-a" mode) to write a web-based interface to integrate with things like Slash?
It's great to see the full span of history, here. The previous article was Ritchie releaseing code for the first C compilers and this one is GCC 2.95 which is the culmination of at least 15 years of work on the part of Stallman, FSF, Cygnus and probably tens of thousands of volunteers. For those who are looking to advocate Open Source within their companies, or just see for yourself what this "new" paradigm can produce, please read the GCC source! It's some of the best code I've ever seen (though I admit it has it's... blemishes). The way it achives platform neutrality while producing highly platform-optimizied code is genius, and you can really feel its roots (the intermediate language is a compromise between Stallman's love for LISP and a desire to keep compilation fast and efficient). This is all without going into the fact that there are now front-ends for every major programming language with the exception of the purely interpreted ones (Perl, Python, TCL, etc).
Currently, as far as I am aware, this is the finest compiler on the face of the Earth, and I dare someone to prove it wrong. There are compilers that produce faster code for a specific platform, and there are compilers for languages that GCC has never heard of, but GCC wins the all-around best technology (IMHO) for producing native instructions from your pet language. It's the one tool which I feel justifies all of Stallman's quirkiness, and gives me faith in the future of Open Source.
Personally, I really hope this is as excellent as Ender's Game (the novel, I have not yet read the original novella), but I'm not holding my breath. The problem is that Card has been wandering into a sort of "abuse the main character when plot fails" sort of mode that has made series like the Call of Earth books and *cough* the Alvin Maker books quite unreadable. Alvin Maker especially bothered me because it was such a briliantly simple idea that showed such promise. For those who haven't read the series, it's late 1800s US where many (if not everyone) have magical tallents that range from being able to make a better shoe than the technology should allow to healing the sick. Card begins the first book with a full head of steam and really brings the reader into the world. But, as the books drag on, all we get is more and more abuse of the main chraracter; this sort of "growth only comes through pain" melodrama that does not allow us to explore this facsinating world at all (in fact in one book he outright admits that he really only wants to explore one town, expounding on the contributiuons to the local citizenry that he got from the Internet).
Enough about Alvin, here's hoping that Card will return to his master-writer form, and give us a book that will wash away everything between Ender's Game and now!
Oh no, you missed the point. Stopping encryption would be the worst outcome for the governments. The best outcome would be if only the bad-guys use it. You see breaking crypto is hard work, and you want to start off with a pretty good chance that what you're craking is worth it. Let's say that you can crack 1Kb/s of encrypted data. If you're listening to a pipe that has 10Mb/s you very quickly try to make sure that almost no-one mainstream uses crypto, just the "fringe".
The thing that scares me so much about this one is not that its stupid, but that it's clever as all hell, and a refutation of every time I've asserted that our (US) government isn't capable enough to mount an effective offensive against its own people. Before, I was amused, now I'm scared.
Hmm... Just in case anyone's listening... This is an obvious, and therefore bad idea. You want to try to be a little more subtle.
Clearly this is a fake... right? Please!? Hmmm, perhaps it's time to move.
This is a mis-use of the word "tyrannical". One cannot behave like a tyrant without attempting to control or manipulate others and advocating freedom of "experience" could only fall under this heading if he were taking that possition in order to manipulate others to some other goal (which you have not stated or implied that you feel is the case).
Why not slow down, think about what you were like at 15-16. It's a time when civil disobedience is a) least likely to produce negative, life-affecting results and b) most likely to lead you down a path of questioning authority and opening yourself to thinking through the really important choices that you will have to make later on. I know that my few late-teen experiences that really shook my world and made me question everyone and everything around me are very directly responsible for most of my successes later on. That's likely not going to be the case as a result of a dispute with a movie theater, but it's a start. Good things and bad... they all start small, and the only real guide we have is our own moral compass. I know mine has been strengthened by such conflict and subsequent resolution, how about yours?
On the other hand, remember that Jon's first article (the sense of which seems to have been assumed in this second installment) was discussing the plight of parents who were not able to get their kids into a movie because they were unable to attend with them. I don't really think movies are a great choice as baby-sitter, but on the other hand, there's no good reason that a parent shouldn't be allowed to drop their kids off to see a film. Parental Guidance has been given. Done. They're not the theater's kids, and if the theater wants to start dictating how a parent raises their kid, they should sue for co-custody (hyperbole asside, this is what the studios are trying to excersise).
Jon, I wish you the best. "Our Kids" have become the political football of a very scary powerplay. The "War on Drugs" which has killed hundreds of thousands while pushing drug sales to new highs; censorship that is totally out of whack with practiced community standards; constant dumbing down of our educational institutions and a lack of focus on real political issues all seem to be the reward that this battle-cry reap. I hope I'm wrong, and that the next 20 years get a little brighter, but I have a feeling that they're going to... well, in the words of South Park's daring tots... suck *ss!
I checked this software out, and while it's a cool idea, and one that I might take the time to fully develop, I came up with some pretty SERIOUS security holes in this. It's not as bad as BO, but close, and it's multi-platform.
At the very least, PLEASE don't run this without changing the falsepath function in response.pl so that it never returns anything but a non-existant filename. This program will happily transfer all of your files to remote systems (yes, I know that falsepath tries to prevent this, but think about it for a bit, and you can get around this).
I may take some time to write a generic web load simulation suite so that these things can be done in a standardized way.
However, I am pleased to see that people are looking into BSD vs Linux performance. Linux needs to not get complacent, and BSD is an ideal prod in that direction. NT just can't provide the level of competition necessary to keep us lean and mean.
I'd love to see some PHP (or eperl) tests done against the same functionality under ASP/vbscript.
I suspect that PHP/Apache/Linux would blow the doors off of VB/ASP/IIS/NT, however there's an even more telling test that I think would show NT to be the leader in slow technology:
Take your benchmark box. Connect it to 1024 clients, and have them all download active content (CGI, ASP, whatever) at a byte rate of 100 bytes per second. Watch NT fall over at about 500 concurent processes....