Go ahead, write your app in C-whatever or Java, and I'll do it in VB, and I'll be finished and sipping coffee while you're still coding the mainline. I'll be rolling out code to paying clients while you're still trying to debug yet another pointer problem or buffer overflow bug.
The reason for this programmer pluggability is that the market evolved to the point where creativity simply is not neccessary, since most common problems have been solved and codified -- and there is no demand for uncommon tasks.
This is complete and utter bullshit, unless you're coding industrial machines for a living. And if you think that VB programming is just about dragging widgets around a screen and dropping them on a form, you obviously don't know much about VB. The Japanese and Chinese believe the way you do, which is why they have almost zero innovation. They copy very well, but they can't innovate worth beans, because they treat the programming process, as you do, as an assembly line where you just plug in widgets.
most common problems have been solved and codified
That's what they said about physics back around the turn of the century, before Bohr and Planck and Einstein blew that load of horse hockey out of the water. I guess you sit in an office all day long and read COBOL? There's all kinds of research going on right now - peer-to-peer programming, for one, which I firmly believe is going to revolutionize the way that data is moved around the increasingly wired world. The old way is to buy bigger and bigger pipes. The new way is to be smarter about when, how, why, and where that data is moved. And peer-to-peer programming has only existed for a handful of years.
The notion that "all the important discoveries" in CS have already been done would be funny if it didn't highlight the poster's ignorance so well.
That's because you've never used ssh or PGP to encrypt your browser connection or your email, respectively. Lots of reasons why your private communication isn't anyone else's business - discussing or researching your spouse's medical condition, for example, or your own.
Well, that's certainly true. We've been offering Escapade for almost 5 years, and we have a big following in Europe, but people in the US are still addicted to clunky and cumbersome technologies like ASP, Perl, and PHP.
And that's a good thing because you'd lose. I've been using challenge-response email systems (for anonymous email) since 1992, and so have a number of people on the cypherpunks mailing list. So if you can claim that your system has been around for longer than 11 years, your claim doesn't hold water.
Until OEMs start putting flash RAM that's fast and has rewrite cycles longer than 100,000 cycles, instead of hard drives in laptops and replace those fragile-as-hell LCD screens with something a bit more durable, laptops will still be fragile, no matter how much padding you put around the drive.
The Plugger is about the size of my old Magellan GPS. It takes forever to get a lock, and it eats batteries like there's no tomorrow.
Compare that to my much newer Garmin 12MAP GPS. I can download maps to it, it's a lot easier on batteries, it's rugged, water resistant, and the lockup time is less than a minute, even at cold start. And with SA off, it's just as accurate as the military models.
As for point 3, "The Design of the UNIX Operating System" was quite popular at the time, and was probably used by more than one person while working on the kernel code - I know I used it. No infringment necessary.
The few? I can name at least 50-100 developers who were intimately involved with the Linux kernel source around the time that SCO is claiming misappropriation.
Andy Tanenbaum was *not* "one of the leading authorities". He was a professor of computer science teaching operating system theory, using Minix as a teaching tool.
Haha, you're kidding, right? I don't screw with nothing on my Linux desktop - I just installed it and away we go! Windows crashes on me about every other day. Windows Explorer crashes on me if I try and open folders too fast. Linux does none of these things, it just runs, day in, day out.
The *only* reason I have a Windows box is that I have clients that I support that I've done VB work for, and VB 6.0 won't run under wine, and I haven't bought a VMWare clone to run on the box yet.
Why is everyone acting like this is a new thing? Hams have been doing the same thing for years. There have been construction articles in popular electronics mags for years about going digital with a pair of LEDs.
This isn't new - someone else came up with the same idea a couple of years ago. We've got our outside systems configured to allow connections to port 25, then hold the connections open for 30 econds to a minute per response... then drop the email on the floor.
There are no parents - everyone is a peer. Updates are sent when needed, when requested, or once every few minutes, whichever is less. If a timeout occurs in the middle of sending a packet, the packet is returned to the sender to retransmit along another path or to flag as undeliverable (or to be placed in a queue to wait until a path is available. Finally, TCP doesn't "drop all sorts of packets" - packets may time out, but that's accounted for in the protocol.
The way I got around this problem is easier and less bandwidth-intensive. When a node comes on to the network, it broadcasts its presence. The nodes that hear it add it to their routing table. If communication with a node times out, that node is deleted from the routing table. Periodically, the routing table is exchanged with their neighbors, so the changes spread throughout the network.
No, that's the strength of mesh networking. As long as the network can figure out how to get from point A to point B, you only need to have one connection per node (more is better, obviously). The other tricky part is how to optimize the network, so that your packet gets from point A to point B in the shortest time possible (not necessarily the least number of hops!).
I implemented such a system back in 1996 in VB for 1200 baud half-duplex tactical networks.
Been there, done that. I designed a wireless tactical network based on this idea back in 1995 or 1996. What I discovered is that it's tricky to get routing right if you use a broadcast type of protocol where each node automatically retransmits anything it hears, because the network quickly gets swamped with retransmissions unless you're careful about the timing of retransmissions. The other way to do it (which I implemented) is to exchange routing information throughout the network - sharing information on which nodes any particular node can hear - then it becomes easy to route packets efficiently through the network.
APRS does a similar sort of thing as the former - it uses a decaying algorithm to determine when to retransmit messages, and so (mostly) avoids the congestion problems inherent in such a design.
Only for the moment, until people realize that they have to recharge their PPC every day, the PPC is signifigantly heaver and larger then the Palm platform, and Windows CE crashes significantly more often than PalmOS. I've got both - an iPAQ 3760 and a Palm III. I used the iPAQ for a while, then went back to the Palm. I can't surf the web or read my email in realtime on the Palm, but my Palm lasts for weeks on a set of batteries and I don't have to reboot the thing on the average of twice a day like the PPC.
I'm looking forward to moving to a Handspring this year, just to get 802.11b connectivity. Anyone want a used iPAQ with the expansion sleeve.. cheap?
Oh, that's almost too easy. Having a "private developer list" is certainly "behind closed doors". No such list exists in Linux.
As for the leap between internal developer politics and code openness, it certainly sounds like the core has let it's own ego get to them. "Internal developer politics" has NO PLACE in a technical environment, as you should well know if you've been developing code for any length of time. Politics is completely independent of code quality, so why throw someone out if they are prodoucing good code? There are a LOT of developers in Linux that are complete jerks, but Linus takes patches from them all, and treats them all the same, because he judges them on the quality of their contributions, not on how well they stroke his ego. Too bad the same can't apparently be said of the FreeBSD core.
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Go ahead, write your app in C-whatever or Java, and I'll do it in VB, and I'll be finished and sipping coffee while you're still coding the mainline. I'll be rolling out code to paying clients while you're still trying to debug yet another pointer problem or buffer overflow bug.
There are data recovery companies that can read upwards of a dozen past writes of data, sometimes even if the platters have been somewhat mangled.
Oh, really? Who? Name names, please. I have a very valid law enforcement need, so put up or shut up. Alphabet-soup government agencies don't count.
The reason for this programmer pluggability is that the market evolved to the point where creativity simply is not neccessary, since most common problems have been solved and codified -- and there is no demand for uncommon tasks.
This is complete and utter bullshit, unless you're coding industrial machines for a living. And if you think that VB programming is just about dragging widgets around a screen and dropping them on a form, you obviously don't know much about VB. The Japanese and Chinese believe the way you do, which is why they have almost zero innovation. They copy very well, but they can't innovate worth beans, because they treat the programming process, as you do, as an assembly line where you just plug in widgets.
most common problems have been solved and codified
That's what they said about physics back around the turn of the century, before Bohr and Planck and Einstein blew that load of horse hockey out of the water. I guess you sit in an office all day long and read COBOL? There's all kinds of research going on right now - peer-to-peer programming, for one, which I firmly believe is going to revolutionize the way that data is moved around the increasingly wired world. The old way is to buy bigger and bigger pipes. The new way is to be smarter about when, how, why, and where that data is moved. And peer-to-peer programming has only existed for a handful of years.
The notion that "all the important discoveries" in CS have already been done would be funny if it didn't highlight the poster's ignorance so well.
That's because you've never used ssh or PGP to encrypt your browser connection or your email, respectively. Lots of reasons why your private communication isn't anyone else's business - discussing or researching your spouse's medical condition, for example, or your own.
Well, that's certainly true. We've been offering Escapade for almost 5 years, and we have a big following in Europe, but people in the US are still addicted to clunky and cumbersome technologies like ASP, Perl, and PHP.
And that's a good thing because you'd lose. I've been using challenge-response email systems (for anonymous email) since 1992, and so have a number of people on the cypherpunks mailing list. So if you can claim that your system has been around for longer than 11 years, your claim doesn't hold water.
Until OEMs start putting flash RAM that's fast and has rewrite cycles longer than 100,000 cycles, instead of hard drives in laptops and replace those fragile-as-hell LCD screens with something a bit more durable, laptops will still be fragile, no matter how much padding you put around the drive.
I think I'd rather have a ToughBook running Linux or FreeBSD :)
The Plugger is about the size of my old Magellan GPS. It takes forever to get a lock, and it eats batteries like there's no tomorrow.
Compare that to my much newer Garmin 12MAP GPS. I can download maps to it, it's a lot easier on batteries, it's rugged, water resistant, and the lockup time is less than a minute, even at cold start. And with SA off, it's just as accurate as the military models.
As for point 3, "The Design of the UNIX Operating System" was quite popular at the time, and was probably used by more than one person while working on the kernel code - I know I used it. No infringment necessary.
The few? I can name at least 50-100 developers who were intimately involved with the Linux kernel source around the time that SCO is claiming misappropriation.
Andy Tanenbaum was *not* "one of the leading authorities". He was a professor of computer science teaching operating system theory, using Minix as a teaching tool.
Haha, you're kidding, right? I don't screw with nothing on my Linux desktop - I just installed it and away we go! Windows crashes on me about every other day. Windows Explorer crashes on me if I try and open folders too fast. Linux does none of these things, it just runs, day in, day out.
The *only* reason I have a Windows box is that I have clients that I support that I've done VB work for, and VB 6.0 won't run under wine, and I haven't bought a VMWare clone to run on the box yet.
Not really. Even ultraviolet doesn't penetrate very far in seawater unless the water is *very* clear.
Why is everyone acting like this is a new thing? Hams have been doing the same thing for years. There have been construction articles in popular electronics mags for years about going digital with a pair of LEDs.
Even simpler - keep all your objects sorted and do a binary search. Faster than hashes.
This isn't new - someone else came up with the same idea a couple of years ago. We've got our outside systems configured to allow connections to port 25, then hold the connections open for 30 econds to a minute per response ... then drop the email on the floor.
PUSH/POP is significantly slower than two MOV instructions on an x86, though...
There are no parents - everyone is a peer. Updates are sent when needed, when requested, or once every few minutes, whichever is less. If a timeout occurs in the middle of sending a packet, the packet is returned to the sender to retransmit along another path or to flag as undeliverable (or to be placed in a queue to wait until a path is available. Finally, TCP doesn't "drop all sorts of packets" - packets may time out, but that's accounted for in the protocol.
The way I got around this problem is easier and less bandwidth-intensive. When a node comes on to the network, it broadcasts its presence. The nodes that hear it add it to their routing table. If communication with a node times out, that node is deleted from the routing table. Periodically, the routing table is exchanged with their neighbors, so the changes spread throughout the network.
Very simple, very robust.
No, that's the strength of mesh networking. As long as the network can figure out how to get from point A to point B, you only need to have one connection per node (more is better, obviously). The other tricky part is how to optimize the network, so that your packet gets from point A to point B in the shortest time possible (not necessarily the least number of hops!).
I implemented such a system back in 1996 in VB for 1200 baud half-duplex tactical networks.
Been there, done that. I designed a wireless tactical network based on this idea back in 1995 or 1996. What I discovered is that it's tricky to get routing right if you use a broadcast type of protocol where each node automatically retransmits anything it hears, because the network quickly gets swamped with retransmissions unless you're careful about the timing of retransmissions. The other way to do it (which I implemented) is to exchange routing information throughout the network - sharing information on which nodes any particular node can hear - then it becomes easy to route packets efficiently through the network.
APRS does a similar sort of thing as the former - it uses a decaying algorithm to determine when to retransmit messages, and so (mostly) avoids the congestion problems inherent in such a design.
I guess I've been around longer than you - I cut my teeth on nroff/troff :P
Only for the moment, until people realize that they have to recharge their PPC every day, the PPC is signifigantly heaver and larger then the Palm platform, and Windows CE crashes significantly more often than PalmOS. I've got both - an iPAQ 3760 and a Palm III. I used the iPAQ for a while, then went back to the Palm. I can't surf the web or read my email in realtime on the Palm, but my Palm lasts for weeks on a set of batteries and I don't have to reboot the thing on the average of twice a day like the PPC.
.. cheap?
I'm looking forward to moving to a Handspring this year, just to get 802.11b connectivity. Anyone want a used iPAQ with the expansion sleeve
Oh, that's almost too easy. Having a "private developer list" is certainly "behind closed doors". No such list exists in Linux.
As for the leap between internal developer politics and code openness, it certainly sounds like the core has let it's own ego get to them. "Internal developer politics" has NO PLACE in a technical environment, as you should well know if you've been developing code for any length of time. Politics is completely independent of code quality, so why throw someone out if they are prodoucing good code? There are a LOT of developers in Linux that are complete jerks, but Linus takes patches from them all, and treats them all the same, because he judges them on the quality of their contributions, not on how well they stroke his ego. Too bad the same can't apparently be said of the FreeBSD core.