Why not just send patches to the right people?
on
Linus Does Not Scale
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If you read Linus' reply to this you'll see he argues that the 'patch penguin' merely replaces him with someone else, and does not actually help distribute the work. He also comments that it may be better to submit patches to subsystem maintainers.
This being the case, why not just automate that? Subsystem maintainers are effectively maintainers for a known group of source files. Its not hard to figure out (automatically) from a patch which files are affected - and from that, which maintainer(s) the patch is relevant to. Given how Linus describes his 'trust network' it looks like he wants a hierarchy of subsystem managers who can merge patches for him to accept upstream. I can see that scaling a lot better than the proposal in the article.
For this to work of course, you'd have to hope the patches had reasonably local scope - if most patches affect >1 subsystem this isnt worth doing at all.
It looks like it has escaped your notice that MatLab, and a 'few [you] missed' like Mathematica ad Pari, are quite capable doing symbolic mathematics - such as eg finding the factors of polynomials, integration, differentiation, etc. See here to get started: http://www.symbolicnet.org/
It is also quite possible to work with represetations of numbers as intervals instead of plain ol' floats, so that the results of the calculation give you error bounds, in a more automated way (without as much need for a numerical method course, in other words). Plenty of research cited here: http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/Math/intari th.html
See also the XSC system which builds this error calculation into languages like Pascal:
http://www.xsc.de/
I find it mystifying that you would consider an understanding of 'Gurdels'(sic) incompleteness theorem necessary to write decent computer programs.
-Baz
The description of the inner workings of SABRE impresses the hell out of me. However, I've used sabre a lot for getting iternational flights in the past, and I can only recall _one_ occasion when I've not been able to find better/cheaper fares by messing with the search process - kidding the system on that I was going on a single hop flight on each leg that I knew was sensible, for example.
However it usually does do a reasonable job, the savings I can get by extra typing are minimal. My biggest gripe against such systems is that they havent got a clue about what it is travellers actually want to do. I hardly ever want to travel 'from LHR to CDG' (ie specific airports). I'm usually able to get to any airport with in 50 miles using public transport. So in the UK I would usually like to be able to propose Glasgow and Edinburgh as alternates, or Manchester and Leeds/Bradford, etc. But what I really want is not these simple choices but... I'll tell you where I am, and where I want to get to, now tell me about through fares on buses trains and planes from here to there.
Given the description they give of the problem it sounds way too hard. But....
They describe what they're doing as basically enumeration of the graph of all routes between destinations. Once again, this does not mimic what a traveller will do when figuring out how to get from place to place. We construct routes using waypoints - going from one regional aiport to another usually involves connections via hub airports; travelling by train from eg Auchtermuchty to Reading means going via Edinburgh and London. By thinking this way we reduce the number of routes under consideration to a manageable size. (this is also how game ai works. I would include a link to an article on this at http://www.gamasutra.com/ but all their articles are now members only)
Hell I'm sure they know what they're doing - sound like smart guys...
'published' IIRC just requires that >20 people have seen it, placing it beyond the circulation of a private communication, where those people have not agreed (written, verbal or via their employment contract) to an NDA.
There is an urban legend that big pharma regularly publishes relevant info in low-circulation magazines like Pig Breeders Monthly (Chinese Edition), in order to avoid going public via the patent process, but providing prior art to prevent their competitors filing patents.
In this instance, the mechanism underlying the method is glaringly obvious to anyone who looks at it - every step of the process except unique id generation and fetching of information associated with that id are seen by, and often enacted by, the user (no need to reverse engineer algorithms etc). The very existence of such a system in use by people in more than one organisation, as the guy above described, seems likely to constitute prior art.
They are BEHIND these damn window things - WTF use are they there?????
All my shortcuts go on the menu. Where I can get them, without hiding the current app.
Desktops are useful, in real life, when they are large enough to sit *around* your work. You can reach out and grab pens and such. Desktops, on PCs, have never yet been big enough for me to feel comfortable with more than a couple of (non-overlapping) windows up at a time. (Don't get me started on overlapping windows... grrr...)
And I NEVER store files on the desktop. Why? Because, sonny, this is Win2K with a roaming profile. Everything you write there is synched with the server (which, half the time, is in a different city from me). T r y l o g g i n g o n t o d a.... oh feck it can I log on as you today?
Not tried it myself but there was an article on this on O'Rielly network:
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2001/01/ 05/record_cd.html
Which reccomended Gramofile:
http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/~costar/gramofile/
Don't be put off by the Linux-centric title - gramofile works on DOS/Windows too. Looks to be more fully featured than LPRipper and costs a whole heap less (ie nothing) than SoundForge _plus the noise reduction plugin_ ($290 on top of the cost of soundforge).
In the UK a court case two weeks ago ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/england/newsid _1659000/1659807.stm ) decided that it was illegal for councils to sell on personal information, specifically the electoral roll, for commercial purposes. The defendants were backed by credit check companies as well as marketeers.
The gist of the claim was that since it is illegal NOT to register to vote in the UK there was no way for someone to legally opt out of this particular scam (btw uk readers: you can opt out of most direct mail (they claim 93%) in this country via the list maintained by http://www.mpsonline.co.uk/ )
The scene is now set for challenges to this ruling because of the words 'commercial purposes'. Everyone now claims they don't use the electoral roll as a source of names but purely to check the accuracy of the information they do have, which arguably they have to do by law (under the UK's Data Protection Act).
This is something of a red herring - all they can possibly need it to check is the spelling of your name and that's never stopped me being billed or the post getting through! There's a separate data source (the 'PAF' - post office address file, see below) which allows them to fix the address, and the phone no can be checked using BT's phonedisc.
The other equivalent sources of information in the uk break down as follows -
- Telephone books/CDs: managed by BT on behalf of OFTEL for historical reasons, the directory enquiries database contains all yer info and BT are required to pass it on (for RAND-style fee) to all telephone co's (seriously - BT has *2* directory services groups, the one that maintains the national number info is not allowed to make a profit!) Or you can just buy it on CD; I don't know what protection they use to stop reverse lookups or just ripping out all the addresses.
- The Post Office Address File is under Crown Copyright (AFAIK) and is managed by Royal Mail and not their semi-private arm, Consignia. In practice this means that they sell their lists for a RAND fee but it doesnt include people's names. Not much of a privacy issue there.
- The Land Register is maintained by a Govt dept and you can get access to all of it, but at a fee based on the area searched. In practice this would be an *incredibly* expensive way of getting info for marketing. However, like the electoral roll there is no way to opt out.
- The electoral roll (above) is maintained by local government organisations and so they don't have a national policy. Councils may give free access to the roll to companies doing work for them in some cases.
Nice n simple. If all registration/payment forms used the same field names, browsers could spot this and fill in details for you. So what names to settle on? This is where ecml came in.
Part of the problem with this was that browsers seem perfectly happy to roll over and give out everything they know about you to any crackers passing through. So would you really trust having your credit card details held there? Hence the need for ewallets which could store this info.
There's two different concerns here though - single sign on identities (for login etc) and identity for payment. Frankly I DO NOT WANT single sign on which covers my wallet as well as my ability to post to/.
Unfortunately for you, not VSS. However, look at the cruisecontrol project (on Sourceforge) and ant - they have (java) code for integration with VSS that may help you build what you need. Since what's in there is essentially just calls to the command line of VSS, and Bugzilla CVS integration is at much the same level, you might want to just read the VSS manual instead of looking at ant. (there's VSS integration for NTemacs that works the same way if you'd rather)
The Perforce integration has more info on what they did than the CVS one has (http://www.perforce.com/perforce/products/p4dti.h tml) , unless you just look at the code.
I would get one of these things but they are such a waste of power. It looks like they need to be on to display a picture. (please correct me if I'm wrong). Does noone sell frames using technology like cholesteric liquid crystals? They only need power to change the picture. (and thus would answer the question of the poster who wanted to know 'why not use a laptop'
(ok I just answered my own question. I went to http://www.kentdisplays.com (I assume this is an offshoot of KSU? most stuff I read says they did the research) . It turns out you can't get full colour chLCDs yet, just X-and-Y combinations, for colours X and Y)
I tried using a Palm as a terminal for a Sun once (for a laught); this was exactly what you described - a vt100 terminal emulator via a serial line. It worked, but not very well. In fact, it pretty much sucked. You really need to write yourself a custom menu-driven interface so you can make use of the touchscreen. Simplest way to do this might be if you can get a web browser/server pair running over that line.
Alternatively: get your app to work by writing files on both client and server and use standard hotsynch. This means you could (eg) manage an mp3 playlist offline, then slot your palm in the car, click the synch button, and hey presto, you're there.
However you have a bigger problem - no power to your controller. Your batteries will run down pretty quick. (another advantage of hotsynch versus an active serial connection). If you can go to a Palm V then you could rig it to recharge from the car.
The problem you describe with 'patents not going through because of some minor detail' being a reason for not making the applications public is no longer valid.
It used to be that you could file 'submarine' patents that kept getting corrected for years, and then the patent period expired 17 (?) years after granting. To stop this, now the patent protection is 20 yrs from the time the patent was originally filed, if it ever gets granted. So it would be dumb for someone to file an application fixing typos in someone elses, since the first _application_ wins (not the first one granted)
Maybe I'm not browsing at a low enough level here but most posters seem to be ignoring the fact that PDF does scalable pictures as well as typeset text. LaTeX's embedded picture mode is not all that good... however SVG is an open standard which does at least that part of it. Though of course, its not the whole solution.
In the main I agree with one of the other posters who suggested XSL-FO. If we had a 'native' XSL-FO viewer, and a document 'format' consisting of a (tar.gz) archive of xml body text, xsl styling, plus embedded objects, then we'd have something very close to a winner. However if you wanted to abandon PS and TrueType you'd have to embed all your fonts as SVG too... urk...
There was a paper with benchmark comparisons of Citrix (ICA), WTS (RDP), VNC, and SunRay thin clients at usenix.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/publications/us en ix2001_slowmotion.pdf
Summary:
'Overall, VNC and Sun Ray were faster at higher
network bandwidths while Citrix and RDP performed
better at lower network bandwidths.' (this on a web browsing test)
They also did a streaming video test which basically seemed to show everything except SunRay got processor bound at high bandwidths and that 'visually,
only Sun Ray achieved good performance even at 100
Mbps.'
From your point of view another interesting observation was that VNC sends less data than the others at low bandwidths. ie, the other protocols were still trying to to real time updates, VNC just began to appear sluggish as it waits for client responses. However in the words of the report 'none of the platforms
provide good response time at 128 Kbps'
whoops I should have followed all the threads. The rdp2vnc work is now available, having been completed by James Weatherall:
http://www.uk.research.att.com/~jnw/downloadable s/
Very nice. Notice though that Tim Edmonds has been
posting that he's working on bringing together
the rdp code with the vnc code to allow you to
get round the slowness of vnc on windows servers -
simply take advantage of the rdp server.
Why? Well, why would you want an rdp client when
you can manage all of your boxen (not just windows
or X) - from all of your boxen, with vnc?
It was the STE not CWU (STE represented most of the managers/programmers, CWU the engineers). 10,000 was just the manager/professional grades, the company employed 120,000 - that ought to give it away. Its true though, neither union could really help temps and agency employees. There are a number of reasons for this -
- most employee rights kick in after 2 years, agents dont usually stay that long
- agents may not technically be employees of the telco. This is often intended to de-unionize the workforce and introduce personal contracts so there can be no collective wage bargaining (and before we get the arguments on collective bargaining meaning the good get paid the same as the bad, it doesnt - its supposed to help the employees get a clear understanding of how their pay will progress if they perform, while hopefully getting everyone more cash)
In the end companies close units as and when they want to; and with agents, usually with little or no redundancy payments. Its only if they are actually trying to realign the workforce that the unions can help mitigate the problem.
On a personal note, I came from a design area - may or may not be the bit you're referring to - and I left like everyone else I knew because the company was imploding on itself, descending into empire building and reorganisations instead of anyone caring about the work. The contractors, outsourcing etc happened there because we left en-masse.
You seem to have had a particularly bad experience. Up until recently I was the union rep for a bunch of programmers in a telco, and I can tell you straight people did need the union.
Yes, everyone has rights, but the management are often clueless or deliberately lax in applying the rules. Far from promoting by merit when left to themselves, management promoted cronies, and almost exclusively male cronies at that. Managers in some projects had told their team that if they applied for their time off in lieu (the alternative to overtime) it would count against them at appraisals; and so on. I was personally involved in discovering some duplicity in company pay negotiations - as a result of which 10,000 people did not get their pay cut by £150 pa.
Asking the union for help in the UK at least is not like the Teamster example earlier in this thread where we smash up cars. In disputes workers here have a right to be accompanied by someone else in any meeting with management, and 9 times out of 10 they chose a union rep rather than a friend because we'd been through these meetings before, had been through courses on employment law, and could make sure the employee got a fair deal.
If the company wanted to sack a lazy, theiving or stupid employee as characterized by you they had procedures they had agreed to follow to make sure it was fair and not the product of a local grudge. If the company gave the worker a fair hearing and they should be sacked, they were sacked. We didnt stand in their way.
On the politics angle, our union (given its white collar background) was fairly apolitical, and under UK law the union members voted to stop political contributions. I personally knew members who stood for elected office for each of the 3 main parties in this country - hardly evidence of losing your political views.
The setup of the machine (as in the combination of software) is effectively irrelevant. Reported exploits most commonly happen in individual pieces of software. It _is_ possible to rate software based on the frequency of exploits reported in one piece of software. Even the most complex exploits hit enumerable combinations of software, not thousands of variations[1].
Widespread exploits depend on out-of-the-box insecurity.Similarly, security ratings of locks depend on their out-of-the-box characteristics, not when you've 'customized' them with a hacksaw.
However, the uncertainty of security ratings is almost certainly dependant on the install base of the software. So that, eg the certainty (not the value) of the security level of Windows variants is much higher than anyone else, while that of eg MVS should be fairly low as there are far fewer folk with access to mainframes.
-Baz
[1] This situation is different where there is a widely deployed insecure protocol, such that almost every implementation can be compromised by exploiting the same flaw in the protocol. However even this boils down for the most part to knowing the OS patch level.
emacs calendar/diary modes, and Jamie Zawinski's Big Brother Database for your rolodex. AFAIK there is sync software for this but as I havent used it now for 3 years I havent been keeping up[1]
-Baz
[1] Not because I didnt like it. I miss it today (sob!). However, because of a corporate misdecision our shop was having to switch to outlook mail (non-SMTP) and all that goes with it, so as the head of systems I felt I should switch - users kept reporting problems , but 'cos it didnt affect me I wasnt trying to find fixes hard enough...
Just curious (cos I don't do that stuff any more) --- does C++ these days allow you to optimize everything _but_ arithmetic expressions? Or give you fine-grained control on what parts of code can be optimized?
There is a nasty difference between C and Fortran in that Fortrans don't mess with the order of expressions and make them over/under-flow.
FWIW the languages I like best (but get to use least these days - how fashons change) are the Lisp-like languages and Smalltalk. Strange how every other language needs to introduce syntax warts for things which can look 'just like normal code' in lisp.
I can't see a single post commenting that - as usual - companies sometimes threaten suit for trademark infringement because they are legally obliged to.[1] Don't forget that if you don't defend your trademark, then it becomes something anyone can use. This would be worse for apple than letting the themes site continue.
I don't think anyone gains out of this but the lawyers. If Mr MacThemes managed to engineer his software such that it couldn't copy images tagged as apple's trademark[2], then I think the suite would disappear like snow off a dyke, since as everyone is pointing out, this hurts Apple too.
-Baz
[1] IANAL
[2] And why not? It would be trivial for apple to put 'Registered Trademark of Apple Corp' in a tEXt chunk of a PNG or whatever.
Someone should mod that one up, its a very worthy goal.
At the other end of the spectrum, you might find that changing the UI of Mozilla is the/easiest/ piece of work you can do (given that you have a project with limited timescales) since its look is not compiled in.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read Linus' reply to this you'll see he argues that the 'patch penguin' merely replaces him with someone else, and does not actually help distribute the work. He also comments that it may be better to submit patches to subsystem maintainers.
This being the case, why not just automate that? Subsystem maintainers are effectively maintainers for a known group of source files. Its not hard to figure out (automatically) from a patch which files are affected - and from that, which maintainer(s) the patch is relevant to. Given how Linus describes his 'trust network' it looks like he wants a hierarchy of subsystem managers who can merge patches for him to accept upstream. I can see that scaling a lot better than the proposal in the article.
For this to work of course, you'd have to hope the patches had reasonably local scope - if most patches affect >1 subsystem this isnt worth doing at all.
- Baz
Bull. Maths is not all numerical approximation.
i th.html
It looks like it has escaped your notice that MatLab, and a 'few [you] missed' like Mathematica ad Pari, are quite capable doing symbolic mathematics - such as eg finding the factors of polynomials, integration, differentiation, etc. See here to get started: http://www.symbolicnet.org/
It is also quite possible to work with represetations of numbers as intervals instead of plain ol' floats, so that the results of the calculation give you error bounds, in a more automated way (without as much need for a numerical method course, in other words). Plenty of research cited here: http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/Math/intar
See also the XSC system which builds this error calculation into languages like Pascal:
http://www.xsc.de/
I find it mystifying that you would consider an understanding of 'Gurdels'(sic) incompleteness theorem necessary to write decent computer programs.
-Baz
The description of the inner workings of SABRE impresses the hell out of me. However, I've used sabre a lot for getting iternational flights in the past, and I can only recall _one_ occasion when I've not been able to find better/cheaper fares by messing with the search process - kidding the system on that I was going on a single hop flight on each leg that I knew was sensible, for example.
However it usually does do a reasonable job, the savings I can get by extra typing are minimal. My biggest gripe against such systems is that they havent got a clue about what it is travellers actually want to do. I hardly ever want to travel 'from LHR to CDG' (ie specific airports). I'm usually able to get to any airport with in 50 miles using public transport. So in the UK I would usually like to be able to propose Glasgow and Edinburgh as alternates, or Manchester and Leeds/Bradford, etc. But what I really want is not these simple choices but... I'll tell you where I am, and where I want to get to, now tell me about through fares on buses trains and planes from here to there.
Given the description they give of the problem it sounds way too hard. But....
They describe what they're doing as basically enumeration of the graph of all routes between destinations. Once again, this does not mimic what a traveller will do when figuring out how to get from place to place. We construct routes using waypoints - going from one regional aiport to another usually involves connections via hub airports; travelling by train from eg Auchtermuchty to Reading means going via Edinburgh and London. By thinking this way we reduce the number of routes under consideration to a manageable size. (this is also how game ai works. I would include a link to an article on this at http://www.gamasutra.com/ but all their articles are now members only)
Hell I'm sure they know what they're doing - sound like smart guys...
'published' IIRC just requires that >20 people have seen it, placing it beyond the circulation of a private communication, where those people have not agreed (written, verbal or via their employment contract) to an NDA.
There is an urban legend that big pharma regularly publishes relevant info in low-circulation magazines like Pig Breeders Monthly (Chinese Edition), in order to avoid going public via the patent process, but providing prior art to prevent their competitors filing patents.
In this instance, the mechanism underlying the method is glaringly obvious to anyone who looks at it - every step of the process except unique id generation and fetching of information associated with that id are seen by, and often enacted by, the user (no need to reverse engineer algorithms etc). The very existence of such a system in use by people in more than one organisation, as the guy above described, seems likely to constitute prior art.
'course, IANAL.
Personally I use 0 (zero) icons on my desktop.
They are BEHIND these damn window things - WTF use are they there?????
All my shortcuts go on the menu. Where I can get them, without hiding the current app.
Desktops are useful, in real life, when they are large enough to sit *around* your work. You can reach out and grab pens and such. Desktops, on PCs, have never yet been big enough for me to feel comfortable with more than a couple of (non-overlapping) windows up at a time. (Don't get me started on overlapping windows... grrr...)
And I NEVER store files on the desktop. Why? Because, sonny, this is Win2K with a roaming profile. Everything you write there is synched with the server (which, half the time, is in a different city from me). T r y l o g g i n g o n t o d a.... oh feck it can I log on as you today?
- Cantankerous Old Git
Not tried it myself but there was an article on this on O'Rielly network:/ 05 /record_cd.html
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2001/01
Which reccomended Gramofile:
http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/~costar/gramofile/
Don't be put off by the Linux-centric title - gramofile works on DOS/Windows too. Looks to be more fully featured than LPRipper and costs a whole heap less (ie nothing) than SoundForge _plus the noise reduction plugin_ ($290 on top of the cost of soundforge).
At that price it's got to be worth a go!
Someone want to mod the parent to this up?? its sitting at 1 but its the only post that actually tries to answer the question posed!!!
In the UK a court case two weeks ago ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/england/newsid _1659000/1659807.stm ) decided that it was illegal for councils to sell on personal information, specifically the electoral roll, for commercial purposes. The defendants were backed by credit check companies as well as marketeers.
The gist of the claim was that since it is illegal NOT to register to vote in the UK there was no way for someone to legally opt out of this particular scam (btw uk readers: you can opt out of most direct mail (they claim 93%) in this country via the list maintained by http://www.mpsonline.co.uk/ )
The scene is now set for challenges to this ruling because of the words 'commercial purposes'. Everyone now claims they don't use the electoral roll as a source of names but purely to check the accuracy of the information they do have, which arguably they have to do by law (under the UK's Data Protection Act).
This is something of a red herring - all they can possibly need it to check is the spelling of your name and that's never stopped me being billed or the post getting through! There's a separate data source (the 'PAF' - post office address file, see below) which allows them to fix the address, and the phone no can be checked using BT's phonedisc.
The other equivalent sources of information in the uk break down as follows -
- Telephone books/CDs: managed by BT on behalf of OFTEL for historical reasons, the directory enquiries database contains all yer info and BT are required to pass it on (for RAND-style fee) to all telephone co's (seriously - BT has *2* directory services groups, the one that maintains the national number info is not allowed to make a profit!) Or you can just buy it on CD; I don't know what protection they use to stop reverse lookups or just ripping out all the addresses.
- The Post Office Address File is under Crown Copyright (AFAIK) and is managed by Royal Mail and not their semi-private arm, Consignia. In practice this means that they sell their lists for a RAND fee but it doesnt include people's names. Not much of a privacy issue there.
- The Land Register is maintained by a Govt dept and you can get access to all of it, but at a fee based on the area searched. In practice this would be an *incredibly* expensive way of getting info for marketing. However, like the electoral roll there is no way to opt out.
- The electoral roll (above) is maintained by local government organisations and so they don't have a national policy. Councils may give free access to the roll to companies doing work for them in some cases.
http://www.ecml.org/
/.
Nice n simple. If all registration/payment forms used the same field names, browsers could spot this and fill in details for you. So what names to settle on? This is where ecml came in.
Part of the problem with this was that browsers seem perfectly happy to roll over and give out everything they know about you to any crackers passing through. So would you really trust having your credit card details held there? Hence the need for ewallets which could store this info.
There's two different concerns here though - single sign on identities (for login etc) and identity for payment. Frankly I DO NOT WANT single sign on which covers my wallet as well as my ability to post to
-Baz
Several other config tools have been integrated to some extent to Bugzilla. See:
- Gu ide.html#INTEGRATION
h tml) , unless you just look at the code.
http://www.trilobyte.net/barnsons/html/Bugzilla
Unfortunately for you, not VSS. However, look at the cruisecontrol project (on Sourceforge) and ant - they have (java) code for integration with VSS that may help you build what you need. Since what's in there is essentially just calls to the command line of VSS, and Bugzilla CVS integration is at much the same level, you might want to just read the VSS manual instead of looking at ant. (there's VSS integration for NTemacs that works the same way if you'd rather)
The Perforce integration has more info on what they did than the CVS one has (http://www.perforce.com/perforce/products/p4dti.
Hope this helps
Baz
Is moving routing info out of band not just guaranteeing QoS for that info? So why not guarantee QoS in band?
Excellent informative post BTW.
I would get one of these things but they are such a waste of power. It looks like they need to be on to display a picture. (please correct me if I'm wrong). Does noone sell frames using technology like cholesteric liquid crystals? They only need power to change the picture. (and thus would answer the question of the poster who wanted to know 'why not use a laptop'
(ok I just answered my own question. I went to http://www.kentdisplays.com (I assume this is an offshoot of KSU? most stuff I read says they did the research) . It turns out you can't get full colour chLCDs yet, just X-and-Y combinations, for colours X and Y)
I tried using a Palm as a terminal for a Sun once (for a laught); this was exactly what you described - a vt100 terminal emulator via a serial line. It worked, but not very well. In fact, it pretty much sucked. You really need to write yourself a custom menu-driven interface so you can make use of the touchscreen. Simplest way to do this might be if you can get a web browser/server pair running over that line.
Alternatively: get your app to work by writing files on both client and server and use standard hotsynch. This means you could (eg) manage an mp3 playlist offline, then slot your palm in the car, click the synch button, and hey presto, you're there.
However you have a bigger problem - no power to your controller. Your batteries will run down pretty quick. (another advantage of hotsynch versus an active serial connection). If you can go to a Palm V then you could rig it to recharge from the car.
The problem you describe with 'patents not going through because of some minor detail' being a reason for not making the applications public is no longer valid.
It used to be that you could file 'submarine' patents that kept getting corrected for years, and then the patent period expired 17 (?) years after granting. To stop this, now the patent protection is 20 yrs from the time the patent was originally filed, if it ever gets granted. So it would be dumb for someone to file an application fixing typos in someone elses, since the first _application_ wins (not the first one granted)
Maybe I'm not browsing at a low enough level here but most posters seem to be ignoring the fact that PDF does scalable pictures as well as typeset text. LaTeX's embedded picture mode is not all that good... however SVG is an open standard which does at least that part of it. Though of course, its not the whole solution.
In the main I agree with one of the other posters who suggested XSL-FO. If we had a 'native' XSL-FO viewer, and a document 'format' consisting of a (tar.gz) archive of xml body text, xsl styling, plus embedded objects, then we'd have something very close to a winner. However if you wanted to abandon PS and TrueType you'd have to embed all your fonts as SVG too... urk...
-Baz
There was a paper with benchmark comparisons of Citrix (ICA), WTS (RDP), VNC, and SunRay thin clients at usenix.
s en ix2001_slowmotion.pdf
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/publications/u
Summary:
'Overall, VNC and Sun Ray were faster at higher
network bandwidths while Citrix and RDP performed
better at lower network bandwidths.' (this on a web browsing test)
They also did a streaming video test which basically seemed to show everything except SunRay got processor bound at high bandwidths and that 'visually,
only Sun Ray achieved good performance even at 100
Mbps.'
From your point of view another interesting observation was that VNC sends less data than the others at low bandwidths. ie, the other protocols were still trying to to real time updates, VNC just began to appear sluggish as it waits for client responses. However in the words of the report 'none of the platforms
provide good response time at 128 Kbps'
-Baz
whoops I should have followed all the threads. The rdp2vnc work is now available, having been completed by James Weatherall:e s/
http://www.uk.research.att.com/~jnw/downloadabl
Very nice. Notice though that Tim Edmonds has been
posting that he's working on bringing together
the rdp code with the vnc code to allow you to
get round the slowness of vnc on windows servers -
simply take advantage of the rdp server.
Why? Well, why would you want an rdp client when
you can manage all of your boxen (not just windows
or X) - from all of your boxen, with vnc?
-Baz
It was the STE not CWU (STE represented most of the managers/programmers, CWU the engineers). 10,000 was just the manager/professional grades, the company employed 120,000 - that ought to give it away. Its true though, neither union could really help temps and agency employees. There are a number of reasons for this -
- most employee rights kick in after 2 years, agents dont usually stay that long
- agents may not technically be employees of the telco. This is often intended to de-unionize the workforce and introduce personal contracts so there can be no collective wage bargaining (and before we get the arguments on collective bargaining meaning the good get paid the same as the bad, it doesnt - its supposed to help the employees get a clear understanding of how their pay will progress if they perform, while hopefully getting everyone more cash)
In the end companies close units as and when they want to; and with agents, usually with little or no redundancy payments. Its only if they are actually trying to realign the workforce that the unions can help mitigate the problem.
On a personal note, I came from a design area - may or may not be the bit you're referring to - and I left like everyone else I knew because the company was imploding on itself, descending into empire building and reorganisations instead of anyone caring about the work. The contractors, outsourcing etc happened there because we left en-masse.
-Baz
You seem to have had a particularly bad experience. Up until recently I was the union rep for a bunch of programmers in a telco, and I can tell you straight people did need the union.
Yes, everyone has rights, but the management are often clueless or deliberately lax in applying the rules. Far from promoting by merit when left to themselves, management promoted cronies, and almost exclusively male cronies at that. Managers in some projects had told their team that if they applied for their time off in lieu (the alternative to overtime) it would count against them at appraisals; and so on. I was personally involved in discovering some duplicity in company pay negotiations - as a result of which 10,000 people did not get their pay cut by £150 pa.
Asking the union for help in the UK at least is not like the Teamster example earlier in this thread where we smash up cars. In disputes workers here have a right to be accompanied by someone else in any meeting with management, and 9 times out of 10 they chose a union rep rather than a friend because we'd been through these meetings before, had been through courses on employment law, and could make sure the employee got a fair deal.
If the company wanted to sack a lazy, theiving or stupid employee as characterized by you they had procedures they had agreed to follow to make sure it was fair and not the product of a local grudge. If the company gave the worker a fair hearing and they should be sacked, they were sacked. We didnt stand in their way.
On the politics angle, our union (given its white collar background) was fairly apolitical, and under UK law the union members voted to stop political contributions. I personally knew members who stood for elected office for each of the 3 main parties in this country - hardly evidence of losing your political views.
The setup of the machine (as in the combination of software) is effectively irrelevant. Reported exploits most commonly happen in individual pieces of software. It _is_ possible to rate software based on the frequency of exploits reported in one piece of software. Even the most complex exploits hit enumerable combinations of software, not thousands of variations[1].
Widespread exploits depend on out-of-the-box insecurity.Similarly, security ratings of locks depend on their out-of-the-box characteristics, not when you've 'customized' them with a hacksaw.
However, the uncertainty of security ratings is almost certainly dependant on the install base of the software. So that, eg the certainty (not the value) of the security level of Windows variants is much higher than anyone else, while that of eg MVS should be fairly low as there are far fewer folk with access to mainframes.
-Baz
[1] This situation is different where there is a widely deployed insecure protocol, such that almost every implementation can be compromised by exploiting the same flaw in the protocol. However even this boils down for the most part to knowing the OS patch level.
emacs calendar/diary modes, and Jamie Zawinski's Big Brother Database for your rolodex. AFAIK there is sync software for this but as I havent used it now for 3 years I havent been keeping up[1]
-Baz
[1] Not because I didnt like it. I miss it today (sob!). However, because of a corporate misdecision our shop was having to switch to outlook mail (non-SMTP) and all that goes with it, so as the head of systems I felt I should switch - users kept reporting problems , but 'cos it didnt affect me I wasnt trying to find fixes hard enough...
Just curious (cos I don't do that stuff any more) --- does C++ these days allow you to optimize everything _but_ arithmetic expressions? Or give you fine-grained control on what parts of code can be optimized?
There is a nasty difference between C and Fortran in that Fortrans don't mess with the order of expressions and make them over/under-flow.
FWIW the languages I like best (but get to use least these days - how fashons change) are the Lisp-like languages and Smalltalk. Strange how every other language needs to introduce syntax warts for things which can look 'just like normal code' in lisp.
I can't see a single post commenting that - as usual - companies sometimes threaten suit for trademark infringement because they are legally obliged to.[1] Don't forget that if you don't defend your trademark, then it becomes something anyone can use. This would be worse for apple than letting the themes site continue.
I don't think anyone gains out of this but the lawyers. If Mr MacThemes managed to engineer his software such that it couldn't copy images tagged as apple's trademark[2], then I think the suite would disappear like snow off a dyke, since as everyone is pointing out, this hurts Apple too.
-Baz
[1] IANAL
[2] And why not? It would be trivial for apple to put 'Registered Trademark of Apple Corp' in a tEXt chunk of a PNG or whatever.
Someone should mod that one up, its a very worthy goal.
/easiest/ piece of work you can do (given that you have a project with limited timescales) since its look is not compiled in.
At the other end of the spectrum, you might find that changing the UI of Mozilla is the