I'll open up N869 later and see if I'm wrong, but IIRC it's just not recommended because of the
implementation specific behavior- which for most intents and purposes means you shouldn't use it;)
Well, a program that formats the hard disk would be a correct translation of the source
void main() {}. So you are right, I would not recommend it:-). --
You must be fun at parties. It's a JOKE. Correct syntax is an after-thought at best...
Jokes have a tendency to get better if they are plausible. This one has had at least five years to evolve. I tend to bring new and/or good jokes to my parties, thank you.;-)
I did enjoy it the first time but am getting a bit bored by now. It seems like someone must post it every time Microsoft and source code is mentioned in the same sentence. --
Indeed, Windows source code leaked. Here's a fragment.
Come on, that is getting to be a very old joke. It is about time that the syntax got correct.
search_and_destroy_the_rest_of_OS/2();
That would be search_and_destroy_the_rest_of_OS_2(); since a slash is clearly not allowed as part of a function name.
basically_run_windows_3.1();
Same deal, this time with a dot instead of a slash.
system_memory = open("a:\swp0001.swp", O_CREATE);
I do believe that the backslash would have to be escaped, making it "..a:\\swp...".
There might be a few more syntax errors that I did not notice this time around. void main() is illegal C, but I believe Microsoft compilers accept it, so no need to correct that one.
Making fun of Microsoft is great and all, but being binary only, Microsoft will have to make sure that Windows does at least compile.
I think Linux is one of the only kernels that has a record of shipping with syntax errors;-). --
When we start playing the propaganda and PR game with M$, we're letting them distract us from what we should be doing, making better code.
Not everyone can program.
On the other hand, if someone is a gifted writer (and one would have to be, to start a discussion with the PR department of Microsoft), she could spend her time better making some of the documentation that Linux based systems are missing. Though there are some great exceptions, lack of free documentation is still a great problem with Linux. I wonder why Microsoft did not pick that one:-). --
Yeah, sure - that was the other stupid answer I could get. Sorry for not predicting that one in my original post.
Did it occur to you that someone with some insight might be able to give a little more detailed answer than that? Like if we are looking at month's or year's of development? Perhaps some key features that are still missing?
Linux 2.4 will also be out "when it's ready", but I am willing to bet that it will be within a year. --
Okay, so one is not supposed to use the development snapshots. Fair enough - but is there any word on when GCC 3.0 will be out, then? The current C++ support is somewhat lacking and I hope to see it improved in the next release.
(Yeah, yeah - I should go and do it myself instead of bitchin' about it. Sorry, I am busy doing the stuff I was told to do last time I bitched:-). --
Actually, Mozilla started out as just enhancing Netscape - they did not even have to port it. They did choose to rewrite it, though - that is of course correct.
I have a feeling that Opera for Linux is also greatly a rewrite, since I do not believe Opera was written with portability in mind initially. I have no references, though. --
This causes filesystem checking software (like fsck) to work dramatically faster.
fsck does not go faster; it is simply not needed. The file system guarantees that it will always have its integrity intact. Therefore there is no cleaning up to do after an unclean shutdown.
There are still fsck programs for journaled file systems, though - they might be useful for example after being hit by a bug in the file system itself. --
The tip-top way of achieving this effect is some uber-control over the disk caching mechanisms to
allow pre-stuffing of the cache with known files at bootup / login.
I suppose cating the stuff to/dev/null should take care of that matter.
An interesting side effect of filling the cache this way is that it is much faster to copy a file linearly than semi-randomly like the normal "demand loading" does. --
What should we think about the fact that only Qt/Unix (i.e., the one directly threatened by gtk/gnome) goes GPL ?
The Windows version is not even free in the beer sense. As a hobby developer, this puts me off using Qt. I like the fact that if I want to port to Windows, I will have the possibility.
Granted, the current GTK+ stuff for Windows is far from easy to work with, but I have hopes that it will get better. And I have the time to wait; my programs are primarily for Linux and a Windows version would just be an added bonus. In the mean time I enjoy using GTK+ under Linux so no problem there.
For someone using Windows as her primary platform, GTK+ is not that ideal, though. Freeing Qt/Win32 would be an excellent way to get more developers to the Linux platform; they might be interested in a Linux version if it was a free bonus when using a different widget set. I even have the impression that Qt might be better (cleaner) than what Windows programmers are used to. But while Qt/Win32 will cost a developer money, hobby developers are not even going to try it.
The trolls could keep their "commercial usage costs" policy and they would not risk a whole lot of sales. --
Has anyone ever heard what C++ inventor Stroustrup thinks about the latest addition to the C family?!
Actually, this is in his FAQ. Since it is a short answer, I will carbon copy it here:
What do you think of C#?
I have no comments on C# as a language. It will take a lot to pursuade me that the world needs yet another proprietary
language (YAPL). It will be especially hard to persuade me that it needs a language that is geared for a specific
proprietary operating system.
Clearly, I'm no great fan of proprietary languages, and quite a fan of open, formal standards. --
Amacdys is a bootable mp3 player that fits into a single diskette.
The idea is to make your MP3 CD's bootable with Linux and a built-in player. Then you only depend on a computer when you bring your MP3 CD's, it does not matter what is installed on that computer. --
You might have redundant kernels of the same version, as long as you do not plan to use this for upgrading to newer kernels.
Data structures regularly change even in the stable kernels and providing an upgrade path for this would clutter the kernel to an extent that I do not believe Linus would accept.
Zombies are children that have finished executing, but their parent does not care. The parent needs to call the wait function to shut down the child properly (and transfer the exit status to the parent process).
You cannot kill such a zombie, since the parent might care at a later time. The kernel cannot know in advance when the parent is going to call wait and thus the only way to kill the zombie is to kill its parent. A zombie is merely the exit status of a program, waiting to be picked up. If you kill the parent, the kernel can finally be sure that the exit status is not being picked up, and both parent and child/zombie goes away.
You can, when you program, instruct the kernel to take care of any finished children by saying that you are never going to call wait. But you have to do that on a per-program basis, and in advance.
On the topic of Google... I guess it is well-known by now that if you search for "more evil than satan", Microsoft will turn up as the number one match.
Is this feature pre-programmed into Google, or is it merely a matter of its wonderful new indexing technology? --
Sure, it is great they fix bugs instead of just moving forward with new features. I do not think that it is "impressive", though.
My point (which, judging by the moderation, I did not get accros too well:-) was that releasing software as version 1.0 when it is full of bugs is not too good, promotion wise. They called 1.0 stable, and now it turns out it was so buggy that the bugfixing alone is "impressive". It surely makes me wonder whether I can trust that this release is stable.
It reminds me of Windows, where Win95 was said to be so much more fun. And then Win98 commercials come along, stating that Win98 will take away the headache. (They had such commercials in Denmark, I do not know if it was world-wide. They had a box of painkillers of the brand "Windows 98" if I recall correctly).
I am a programmer. When I fix a bug, I apologize that I put it in in the first place. I do not celebrate myself as being the great bugfixer. It is merely the word "impressive" that I am against - not the bugfixing in itself. As I said, fixing bugs is great! --
Come on, stability improvements cannot really be that impressive? I for one am not impressed that they manage to fix their own bugs. It should nearly always be the number one priority for any programmer.
I am impressed that they rushed 1.0 out the door so soon that it took them this long to get it stable (if it is stable now). I gave up on Gnome due to all the bugs, and KDE being stable is no excuse for rushing a buggy 1.0 out the door. --
We will never get a distributon that our moms can install. I am fairly certain that my mom could not get her own TV to work properly. That is not her fault; getting "stuff" to work just does not interest her enough to make her spend time learning to do it. Which I think is perfectly fine.
I am all for easy installation. Just never start to pretend that my mother could pull the trick off:-). She just does not care. --
While I am not certain that the list is complete, this list of release dates for many MS operating systems can be handy to have around.
One time it helped me was when someone claimed that NT 3.5 had been reported to have an uptime of 7 years. I could then point to this document that revealed that the version had only been out four or five years. --
Slashdot Mirror
Well, a program that formats the hard disk would be a correct translation of the source void main() {}. So you are right, I would not recommend it :-).
--
You must be fun at parties. It's a JOKE. Correct syntax is an after-thought at best...
Jokes have a tendency to get better if they are plausible. This one has had at least five years to evolve. I tend to bring new and/or good jokes to my parties, thank you. ;-)
I did enjoy it the first time but am getting a bit bored by now. It seems like someone must post it every time Microsoft and source code is mentioned in the same sentence.
--
Indeed, Windows source code leaked. Here's a fragment.
Come on, that is getting to be a very old joke. It is about time that the syntax got correct.
search_and_destroy_the_rest_of_OS/2();
That would be search_and_destroy_the_rest_of_OS_2(); since a slash is clearly not allowed as part of a function name.
basically_run_windows_3.1();
Same deal, this time with a dot instead of a slash.
system_memory = open("a:\swp0001.swp", O_CREATE);
I do believe that the backslash would have to be escaped, making it "..a:\\swp...".
There might be a few more syntax errors that I did not notice this time around. void main() is illegal C, but I believe Microsoft compilers accept it, so no need to correct that one.
Making fun of Microsoft is great and all, but being binary only, Microsoft will have to make sure that Windows does at least compile. I think Linux is one of the only kernels that has a record of shipping with syntax errors ;-).
--
...what a Beowulf cluster of those could do.
--
That'll teach me to log out before having a party in my dorm room ;-).
--
When we start playing the propaganda and PR game with M$, we're letting them distract us from what we should be doing, making better code.
Not everyone can program.
On the other hand, if someone is a gifted writer (and one would have to be, to start a discussion with the PR department of Microsoft), she could spend her time better making some of the documentation that Linux based systems are missing. Though there are some great exceptions, lack of free documentation is still a great problem with Linux. I wonder why Microsoft did not pick that one :-).
--
Yeah, sure - that was the other stupid answer I could get. Sorry for not predicting that one in my original post.
Did it occur to you that someone with some insight might be able to give a little more detailed answer than that? Like if we are looking at month's or year's of development? Perhaps some key features that are still missing?
Linux 2.4 will also be out "when it's ready", but I am willing to bet that it will be within a year.
--
Okay, so one is not supposed to use the development snapshots. Fair enough - but is there any word on when GCC 3.0 will be out, then? The current C++ support is somewhat lacking and I hope to see it improved in the next release.
(Yeah, yeah - I should go and do it myself instead of bitchin' about it. Sorry, I am busy doing the stuff I was told to do last time I bitched :-).
--
Actually, Mozilla started out as just enhancing Netscape - they did not even have to port it. They did choose to rewrite it, though - that is of course correct.
I have a feeling that Opera for Linux is also greatly a rewrite, since I do not believe Opera was written with portability in mind initially. I have no references, though.
--
Hardly as long as Mozilla has been.
--
This causes filesystem checking software (like fsck) to work dramatically faster.
fsck does not go faster; it is simply not needed. The file system guarantees that it will always have its integrity intact. Therefore there is no cleaning up to do after an unclean shutdown.
There are still fsck programs for journaled file systems, though - they might be useful for example after being hit by a bug in the file system itself.
--
I suppose cating the stuff to /dev/null should take care of that matter.
An interesting side effect of filling the cache this way is that it is much faster to copy a file linearly than semi-randomly like the normal "demand loading" does.
--
The Windows version is not even free in the beer sense. As a hobby developer, this puts me off using Qt. I like the fact that if I want to port to Windows, I will have the possibility.
Granted, the current GTK+ stuff for Windows is far from easy to work with, but I have hopes that it will get better. And I have the time to wait; my programs are primarily for Linux and a Windows version would just be an added bonus. In the mean time I enjoy using GTK+ under Linux so no problem there.
For someone using Windows as her primary platform, GTK+ is not that ideal, though. Freeing Qt/Win32 would be an excellent way to get more developers to the Linux platform; they might be interested in a Linux version if it was a free bonus when using a different widget set. I even have the impression that Qt might be better (cleaner) than what Windows programmers are used to. But while Qt/Win32 will cost a developer money, hobby developers are not even going to try it.
The trolls could keep their "commercial usage costs" policy and they would not risk a whole lot of sales.
--
Disregard the above, it is a troll. There is no such address and the actual link points... elsewhere.
--
He was considering a hypothetical situation.
--
Has anyone ever heard what C++ inventor Stroustrup thinks about the latest addition to the C family?!
Actually, this is in his FAQ. Since it is a short answer, I will carbon copy it here:
What do you think of C#?
I have no comments on C# as a language. It will take a lot to pursuade me that the world needs yet another proprietary language (YAPL). It will be especially hard to persuade me that it needs a language that is geared for a specific proprietary operating system.
Clearly, I'm no great fan of proprietary languages, and quite a fan of open, formal standards.
--
The idea is to make your MP3 CD's bootable with Linux and a built-in player. Then you only depend on a computer when you bring your MP3 CD's, it does not matter what is installed on that computer.
--
You might have redundant kernels of the same version, as long as you do not plan to use this for upgrading to newer kernels.
Data structures regularly change even in the stable kernels and providing an upgrade path for this would clutter the kernel to an extent that I do not believe Linus would accept.
--
Yes, that is correct - init inherits them. I was being a bit unprecise, sorry.
--
Zombies are children that have finished executing, but their parent does not care. The parent needs to call the wait function to shut down the child properly (and transfer the exit status to the parent process).
You cannot kill such a zombie, since the parent might care at a later time. The kernel cannot know in advance when the parent is going to call wait and thus the only way to kill the zombie is to kill its parent. A zombie is merely the exit status of a program, waiting to be picked up. If you kill the parent, the kernel can finally be sure that the exit status is not being picked up, and both parent and child/zombie goes away.
You can, when you program, instruct the kernel to take care of any finished children by saying that you are never going to call wait. But you have to do that on a per-program basis, and in advance.
--
On the topic of Google... I guess it is well-known by now that if you search for "more evil than satan", Microsoft will turn up as the number one match.
Is this feature pre-programmed into Google, or is it merely a matter of its wonderful new indexing technology?
--
Sure, it is great they fix bugs instead of just moving forward with new features. I do not think that it is "impressive", though.
My point (which, judging by the moderation, I did not get accros too well :-) was that releasing software as version 1.0 when it is full of bugs is not too good, promotion wise. They called 1.0 stable, and now it turns out it was so buggy that the bugfixing alone is "impressive". It surely makes me wonder whether I can trust that this release is stable.
It reminds me of Windows, where Win95 was said to be so much more fun. And then Win98 commercials come along, stating that Win98 will take away the headache. (They had such commercials in Denmark, I do not know if it was world-wide. They had a box of painkillers of the brand "Windows 98" if I recall correctly).
I am a programmer. When I fix a bug, I apologize that I put it in in the first place. I do not celebrate myself as being the great bugfixer. It is merely the word "impressive" that I am against - not the bugfixing in itself. As I said, fixing bugs is great!
--
Come on, stability improvements cannot really be that impressive? I for one am not impressed that they manage to fix their own bugs. It should nearly always be the number one priority for any programmer.
I am impressed that they rushed 1.0 out the door so soon that it took them this long to get it stable (if it is stable now). I gave up on Gnome due to all the bugs, and KDE being stable is no excuse for rushing a buggy 1.0 out the door.
--
We will never get a distributon that our moms can install. I am fairly certain that my mom could not get her own TV to work properly. That is not her fault; getting "stuff" to work just does not interest her enough to make her spend time learning to do it. Which I think is perfectly fine.
:-). She just does not care.
I am all for easy installation. Just never start to pretend that my mother could pull the trick off
--
One time it helped me was when someone claimed that NT 3.5 had been reported to have an uptime of 7 years. I could then point to this document that revealed that the version had only been out four or five years.
--