VPNs are going to be incredibly important. The flexibility it gives is astonishing. Unfortunately, they haven't been very well implemented yet. Even Cisco have had 'issues' with them. One of the major complexities is designing and implementing good overlays
I don't know how good X-bone is, but if it helps with overlay management it deserves to be successful.
Can't you see what this is? A cynical attempt to kill a large proportion of the open source community. How many of us are literally going to die laughing when we see the quality of this code?
This article seems to suggest that there is a real market for Linux certification. This could be a great business plan. Focus the marketing on the open-source aspects - why should Red Hat be the only ones to certify engineers? "We also support Debian, SUSE, etc..."
Publish the syllabus, sample papers and the pass mark to establish some credibility. Offer telephone support, charge substantially less than Red Hat and do your marketing on the net. Hell, do your tuition over the net. Now that could be fun.
Providing you maintain the integrity of the exam, you could do very well.
If someone wants to lend we some start-up cash, they can join in the IPO in two year's time. All I need is another few geeks with good interpersonal skills - whoops - that's the fatal flaw.
In most nations, intelligence organisations see it as their duty to act in the best interests of their nation.
So if the NSA/CIA/whoever use intelligence information to help US corporations, why does everybody get self-righteous? If the successor to the KGB was doing this nobody would be surprised. I am sure that MOSSAD pass commercial information on to Israeli companies. The French make no secret of their intelligence forces doing it. I would be surprised if information from GCHQ never makes it's way into British company's hands.
If this weren't happening, the taxpayers should complain. How would it look if the director of the CIA had to tell a congressional commitee "Yes, we had the information that would have saved Boeing/General Motors/Lockheed but we couldn't pass it on because it was commercial"?
Stop believing that the world is a nice place, and grow up.
How do you cope with a situation where your 'tool' can reason with you? If you still treat it as a 'tool' are you morally any different from a slave master?
Should we treat dogs/dolphins/chimpanzees/octopi as 'tools'?
"How does one use the WWW to learn about the current and future state of the human genome project" http://www.google.com/search?q=Hu man+Genome+Project would seem like a good place to start. Where have you tried?
Without wishing to sound like an old fart from comp.lang.c++, it is hard to answer such a vague question. What do you want to know? Where have you looked? What have you found so far?
This is an important area, clouded with difficult legal issues and sparkling with neat science (keep mixing those metaphors), but there are a lot of resources out there for study. Go and do some research. Then tell us what you think. Then we'll discuss it.
Assuming that advances in technology continue, I think it is reasonable to postulate that at some stage we will create sentient beings. Whether this is done in software, or uses nanotechnology, or biotechnology or whatever, it raises some interesting ethical questions. Is such an entity permitted to value it's own self-preservation? What if this leads to conflict with humans?
Do we have a right to construct entities that place human well-being above their own well-being? (Asimov's 'Laws of Robotics' or similar)
If we do this, aren't we dangerously close to building slaves?
These comments do not neccesarily reflect the views of the author.
This from the Gnu web site should be a candidate. You'd need to take a few links out to get it under the limit, but it shows what can be done in limited space.
Many countries (most 'Western' ones anyway) have reciprocal copyright agreements. This stuff is clearly the copyright of the broadcaster, or they have licensed it from someone who holds the copyright. Si it's a bit of a non-starter really.
On a slightly different point, if someone negotiates a licence to do the web broadcast of something, and someone else then mirrors that broadcast, possibly stripping out advertisong and stuff, does the licensee have the right to be pissed off and do something about it? Some laws have a purpose.
Your comment is a long way over the reality horizon and still accelerating.
Intel hardware has a long way to go before it can touch big iron for sheer I/O throughput, which is what a mainframe customer wants. 16-way is barely the right order of magnitude.
Win2K is so hideously unstable that it has no place in the *real* machine room. MS claim 99.95% reliability. Well, that sucks. Given three minutes for a reboot, that's one crash every two days. If I have 5,000 users logged on, I can't afford that sort of downtime. I need genuine 24*7 availability. That means a system that can cope with 5,000 users, a number of whom are developers, hacking away processing tens of millions of records a day and never crash. Not once. Given an operational life of maybe ten years I won't tolerate a single unplanned outage. Sorry, guys, but the only boxes that do that are mainframes.
Having said that, I'd quite like to run Linux in a VM.
Sorry to post as an AC (away from usual box, password stored as cookie etc etc), but who the hell thought this was worth a +5 (Funny)? It's not very funny, it's not clever and it should be a -1 (Troll).
If I were a conspiracy theorist I'd say that the/. management are trying to reduce the value of the site by encouraging troll weevils, posting deadly dull old stories and hiring new story posters without any mention of their provenance.
Rob, You're best readers/contributors are going to get really pissed off and leave. If you're feeling too rich/bored to run the site properly, hand it over to someone who *will* run it properly.
Back on topic, I spent half of today writing a neat little Java utility. Console only (with JDBC to three Oracle boxes), and I can't see how I could have built it that fast with any other system. I considered perl, python, C, C++, but for me, today, Java worked.
[Yay! I've managed to get X to my usual box - the cookie's still there, so I'm not an AC after all. The magic of modern telecoms...]
distance (in miles)=136000000 distance(in metres)=136000000 * 1609 c=300000000 m/s => time (in s) ~= 720
So, this interaction will take place 12 light minutes away. Allowing for errors, let's say 1/2 an hour round-trip time for signals. OK, the orbital time will be pretty low, but it's still a serious challenge.
If they land this thing on, with a signal latency like that, can NASA have their budget back please?
To increase speed, IBM researchers decentralized the clock, using locally generated clocks to run smaller sections of circuits. The design thus allows faster sections of circuits the freedom to run at higher cycles. It also significantly reduces power requirements.
This was probably quite difficult to implement, but isn't exactly conceptually brilliant. Modern computers already run at different clock rates internally. Your disk I/O bus runs at one speed, your video processor runs at another speed and the CPU still spends a lot of time waiting for stuff to come down the system bus from memory.
As far as I can see, IBM have scaled this down to a single chip, which will increase overall throughput considerably. Difficult to do, very worthwhile, but conceptually all they have done is to get the latency issues into a smaller space.
OTOH, this could lead to an architecture with considerably lower power consumtion, which is definitely worth doing.
The bit about 'quantum mirages' has already been discussed on/. a few days ago.
I work at a software company where a significant proportion of the techies are female. The difference between the 'hardcore geeks' (myself included) and the women is that the women seem to have social lives.
Rather than spending their spare time hacking, they do sensible, worthwhile things, like learning foreign languages, helping organisations that work with disadvantaged and disabled young people and so on.
Most of the male geeks spend their spare time either hacking or drinking large amounts of beer and wondering why we don't have girlfriends.
I think the article makes it clear why there aren't more female hackers. Being a hacker requires a lot if time and commitment. Many women would rather spend their free time doing things that require human interaction, instead of behaving that like a bunch of sad losers who spend far to much time playing with computers(myself included).
Incidentally, my experience of working with female techies is that they are generally considerably more productive than males.
These comments do not necessarily represent the views of the author
OK, so you're running a Linux kernel. Which is released under the GNU General Public License. If all you are running is a kernel, then I'm impressed. Did you post your comment by whistling down your phone line?. No. I bet you had to run a shell. Which is also almost certainly released under GPL. Maybe you used cat to compose your post, but I doubt it. You probably used a text editor like emacs (originated by RMS himself) to write it. Then you probably connected to your ISP with pppd. Guess which license?
And every single bit of your Gnu/Linux setup (if you use a decent distribution) could have been (and certainly was) built with gcc and the rest of the bin-utils package. Guess who owns the copyleft on that?
I'm getting bored now, but please learn your history. RMS wanted to create a free OS. He chose to implement it as a UNIX rather than anything else because of the cultural heritage of the UNIX community. He would have chosen a better architecture if he could, but he made a pragmatic decision.
Then, rather than start with a kernel, he started with the tools that make an OS usable, like a text editor (alright emacs is just a little bit more than an editor), a compiler (try writing one yourself if you're bored for a few decades), text processing utilities etc.
Then the GNU project was almost complete, and it was good... but before they got a chance to start serious work on the gorgeous, architechturally clean and fiendish to debug Hurd kernel that was their dream, a bright lad from Finland turned up with an incomplete, but functional kernel. And they saw that it was good, if a bit hairy and flaky. But they persuaded the great Finn to release it under their licence. And GNU/Linux was born. That was in 1991. Please remember, that was a *very* long time ago. FreeBSD didn't exist. X was still closed. And the WWW probably had less pages than the Great Library of Alexandria. Ancient times indeed.
Linux would have been a rather neat toy that had once run on a single 8086 if it weren't for the GNU project.
Linus gave us a kernel, because he had the courage to share it.
RMS gave us Gnu/Linux, because he is a (very hairy) visionary. What he really gave us were two critical things. Forget emacs. Forget gcc. He gave us a vision, and he gave us the GPL.
Both the vision and the GPL have flaws, but until you can come up with any single thing as good as one of these, please remember that it IS GNU/Linux.
"A highly sophisticated, rather delicate, very ingenious robot that is a credit to its developers and a triumph of Human ingenuity is being tested in the antarctic"
"It was transported there with great care by a number of highly skilled scientists and engineers, who will monitor its every step with loving care."
"Then we'll stuff it on the top of a rocket, do our level best to shake it to bits on launch, expose it to unimaginably rapid changes in temperature and leave it alone for 9-12 months"
"Once we're bored with that, we'll plunge it into the atmosphere of a small planet, allow it to hit the ground in way that will make it lucky not to leave a significant crater. Then, whatever happens, we'll spend the next several months bombarding it with incredibly faint radio signals, just to see what happens. Either way, we're going to need more funding."
Apologies. This is capable of being one of the peaks of human endeavour. But I'm glad I'm not the robot.
I propose we should patent something along the following lines:
"A system consisting of small entities with precisely defined properties, including properties such as charge, top, bottom, spin, 'colour', and mass, that, within a framework of rules can interact to construct arbitrarily complex other entities."
I'm sure you could get it past the US (or UK) patent office. Now that would be funny.
The plaintiff requires that the universe ceases to exist forthwith unless royalties are paid.
Anyone got a spare $50,000 to have a go? No-one can claim it's 'obvious', but it could get really nasty if a certain supernatural entity appeared in court to claim 'prior art'. Armageddon, anyone?
No, I don't expect a computer to turn me into Picasso. I expect it to let me express my ideas as clearly as I can on paper. And I haven't got a computer that will do that yet. Do you want to help build one?
Programming models change every ten years Indisputable They seem to change for the better Yup. So far. C++ is not a bad language, but it's too big Damn right. But I think he dismisses the STL architecture too readily. It is an amazingly good abstraction, easy to extend (not that you need to often) and avoids being too object-oriented (which would have made it ridiculous) Java is a good language, but it's slow Yup. Again UnrealScript rocks (but not enough) Never used it. However good it is, can I model a telecomms network with it?
I also I think he skipped a bit to briefly over the 'Groups of Objects' technologies (patterns etc).
The fundamental problem is that we don't think in terms of 'language' (human or computer). We think with ideas. Computers 'think' with binary operations. I suspect that the reason so many people find computers difficult and scary is that they don't know how to translate their ideas into terms the computer will 'understand'
As an example, I get paid to develop software. Mostly I do architecture rather than programming. When I am designing a system I use paper, pens and whiteboards. When I try and transfer the design to an 'electronic' format, I struggle. The tools don't exist. Why not? The tools I use are very good, but I find it difficult to express my ideas with a screen, mouse and keyboard. I spend too much time second-guessing the tool programmer, thinking 'How would the programmer have expected me to this?' - I shouldn't have to concern myself with this (mostly I don't - I shout for the tools programmer to show me how to do it)
To end this tedious rant:
Yes, we need to rethink programming models constantly
No, there is 'No Silver Bullet'
Human/computer interaction systems are a disgrace to us all. Please will somebody make a computer as easy to use as a pencil and paper. I'll help.
Alright, to be honest almost all my production experience is with 6.5. It is measurably slower than Oracle 7.3.4 and 8.0.5 on the same hardware. I haven't done enough with SQL Server 7 to comment about performance. I have done some work with Oracle 8i, and all I have to say is "Buy another bucket of memory". It is a complete hog, particularly doing imports. Way cool, though.
The issue is, once more, the people who stupidly set the sites up and left the default "sa" account active.
I usually work with Oracle databases. I am still astonished every time I find a can log in to an Oracle database as either SYS or SYSTEM. Given that the default SYS password is ChangeOnInstall, you have to wonder about the people running the systems. I guess that more than 10% of Oracle databases are misconfigured like this.
Don't even get me started about the DB2 database I found on a net-facing S/390 that still had the default admin password.
Is this Oracle's (or Microsoft's, or IBM's) fault? NO - it is the fault of the halfwit DBAs who bullshit their way into jobs that are way beyond their ability. The 'differently intelligent' managers who hire these people should also be held to account, except their mental age relieves them of criminal culpability.
PS - I actually quite like SQL Server. Every time a client specifies a really slow, memory intensive RDBMS, I specify SQL Server. It hasn't happened yet.
After the astonishing advances in physics over the last century or so, we now probably have more 'hard' questions than we started with. Only the irretrievably brave would say that another great breakthrough is 'just around the corner'.
If you could choose which of the 'hard' questions you could know the answer to, which question would you ask, and why?
Slashdot Mirror
VPNs are going to be incredibly important. The flexibility it gives is astonishing. Unfortunately, they haven't been very well implemented yet. Even Cisco have had 'issues' with them. One of the major complexities is designing and implementing good overlays
I don't know how good X-bone is, but if it helps with overlay management it deserves to be successful.
I'm off to check it out now.
// usage: goldbach
// 2 is prime
// Lists all pairs of primes that sum to
// Copyright Chaz Randles 2000
// Licence: GPL
#include
#include
using std::cout;
using std::endl;
using std::vector;
vector * get_primes(int maxPrime) {
vector* result = new vector();
vector::iterator it;
bool isPrime;
result->push_back(2);
for (int candidate = 3; candidate begin(); it!=result->end(); ++it) {
if (!(candidate % *it)) {
isPrime=false;
}
}
if (isPrime) result->push_back(candidate);
}
return result;
}
bool find(vector* vec, int data) {
vector::iterator it;
bool found=false;
for (it=vec->begin(); it!=vec->end(); ++it) {
if (*it==data) {
found=true;
break;
}
}
return found;
}
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
if (argc!=2) {
cout " * primes=get_primes(num);
vector::iterator it;
for (it=primes->begin(); it!=primes->end(); ++it) {
if(find(primes, num - (*it))) {
cout num '\t'*it'\t'num - (*it)endl;
}
}
delete primes;
return 0;
}
// Apologies for poor quality code - done in 10 mins
Can't you see what this is? A cynical attempt to kill a large proportion of the open source community. How many of us are literally going to die laughing when we see the quality of this code?
This article seems to suggest that there is a real market for Linux certification. This could be a great business plan. Focus the marketing on the open-source aspects - why should Red Hat be the only ones to certify engineers? "We also support Debian, SUSE, etc..."
Publish the syllabus, sample papers and the pass mark to establish some credibility. Offer telephone support, charge substantially less than Red Hat and do your marketing on the net. Hell, do your tuition over the net. Now that could be fun.
Providing you maintain the integrity of the exam, you could do very well.
If someone wants to lend we some start-up cash, they can join in the IPO in two year's time. All I need is another few geeks with good interpersonal skills - whoops - that's the fatal flaw.
In most nations, intelligence organisations see it as their duty to act in the best interests of their nation.
So if the NSA/CIA/whoever use intelligence information to help US corporations, why does everybody get self-righteous? If the successor to the KGB was doing this nobody would be surprised. I am sure that MOSSAD pass commercial information on to Israeli companies. The French make no secret of their intelligence forces doing it. I would be surprised if information from GCHQ never makes it's way into British company's hands.
If this weren't happening, the taxpayers should complain. How would it look if the director of the CIA had to tell a congressional commitee "Yes, we had the information that would have saved Boeing/General Motors/Lockheed but we couldn't pass it on because it was commercial"?
Stop believing that the world is a nice place, and grow up.
bzzzzt - Wrong Answer.
How do you cope with a situation where your 'tool' can reason with you? If you still treat it as a 'tool' are you morally any different from a slave master?
Should we treat dogs/dolphins/chimpanzees/octopi as 'tools'?
"How does one use the WWW to learn about the current and future state of the human genome project"
http://www.google.com/search?q=Hu man+Genome+Project would seem like a good place to start. Where have you tried?
Without wishing to sound like an old fart from comp.lang.c++, it is hard to answer such a vague question. What do you want to know? Where have you looked? What have you found so far?
This is an important area, clouded with difficult legal issues and sparkling with neat science (keep mixing those metaphors), but there are a lot of resources out there for study. Go and do some research. Then tell us what you think. Then we'll discuss it.
Assuming that advances in technology continue, I think it is reasonable to postulate that at some stage we will create sentient beings. Whether this is done in software, or uses nanotechnology, or biotechnology or whatever, it raises some interesting ethical questions. Is such an entity permitted to value it's own self-preservation? What if this leads to conflict with humans?
Do we have a right to construct entities that place human well-being above their own well-being? (Asimov's 'Laws of Robotics' or similar)
If we do this, aren't we dangerously close to building slaves?
These comments do not neccesarily reflect the views of the author.
VCL ships with the source code. So does Qt. Neither is "free as in speech."
This from the Gnu web site should be a candidate. You'd need to take a few links out to get it under the limit, but it shows what can be done in limited space.
Share and Enjoy.
Many countries (most 'Western' ones anyway) have reciprocal copyright agreements. This stuff is clearly the copyright of the broadcaster, or they have licensed it from someone who holds the copyright. Si it's a bit of a non-starter really.
On a slightly different point, if someone negotiates a licence to do the web broadcast of something, and someone else then mirrors that broadcast, possibly stripping out advertisong and stuff, does the licensee have the right to be pissed off and do something about it? Some laws have a purpose.
Your comment is a long way over the reality horizon and still accelerating.
Intel hardware has a long way to go before it can touch big iron for sheer I/O throughput, which is what a mainframe customer wants. 16-way is barely the right order of magnitude.
Win2K is so hideously unstable that it has no place in the *real* machine room. MS claim 99.95% reliability. Well, that sucks. Given three minutes for a reboot, that's one crash every two days. If I have 5,000 users logged on, I can't afford that sort of downtime. I need genuine 24*7 availability. That means a system that can cope with 5,000 users, a number of whom are developers, hacking away processing tens of millions of records a day and never crash. Not once. Given an operational life of maybe ten years I won't tolerate a single unplanned outage. Sorry, guys, but the only boxes that do that are mainframes.
Having said that, I'd quite like to run Linux in a VM.
I remember my old BBC Micro. A single tape drive that was pretty unreliable at 300baud.
Mind you, it had a BASIC interpreter and a neat 6502 assembler in 16K of ROM, and would boot in less than two seconds.
They don't make them like they used to. Fortunately.
(Incidentally, I've still got it. Must see if I can get it to run NetBSD some time.)
Sorry to post as an AC (away from usual box, password stored as cookie etc etc), but who the hell thought this was worth a +5 (Funny)? It's not very funny, it's not clever and it should be a -1 (Troll).
/. management are trying to reduce the value of the site by encouraging troll weevils, posting deadly dull old stories and hiring new story posters without any mention of their provenance.
If I were a conspiracy theorist I'd say that the
Rob, You're best readers/contributors are going to get really pissed off and leave. If you're feeling too rich/bored to run the site properly, hand it over to someone who *will* run it properly.
Back on topic, I spent half of today writing a neat little Java utility. Console only (with JDBC to three Oracle boxes), and I can't see how I could have built it that fast with any other system. I considered perl, python, C, C++, but for me, today, Java worked.
[Yay! I've managed to get X to my usual box - the cookie's still there, so I'm not an AC after all. The magic of modern telecoms...]
distance (in miles)=136000000
distance(in metres)=136000000 * 1609
c=300000000 m/s
=> time (in s) ~= 720
So, this interaction will take place 12 light minutes away. Allowing for errors, let's say 1/2 an hour round-trip time for signals. OK, the orbital time will be pretty low, but it's still a serious challenge.
If they land this thing on, with a signal latency like that, can NASA have their budget back please?
Faster. Cheaper. Better. Pick any two.
To increase speed, IBM researchers decentralized the clock, using locally generated clocks to run smaller sections of circuits. The design thus allows faster sections of circuits the freedom to run at higher cycles. It also significantly reduces power requirements.
/. a few days ago.
This was probably quite difficult to implement, but isn't exactly conceptually brilliant. Modern computers already run at different clock rates internally. Your disk I/O bus runs at one speed, your video processor runs at another speed and the CPU still spends a lot of time waiting for stuff to come down the system bus from memory.
As far as I can see, IBM have scaled this down to a single chip, which will increase overall throughput considerably. Difficult to do, very worthwhile, but conceptually all they have done is to get the latency issues into a smaller space.
OTOH, this could lead to an architecture with considerably lower power consumtion, which is definitely worth doing.
The bit about 'quantum mirages' has already been discussed on
I work at a software company where a significant proportion of the techies are female. The difference between the 'hardcore geeks' (myself included) and the women is that the women seem to have social lives.
Rather than spending their spare time hacking, they do sensible, worthwhile things, like learning foreign languages, helping organisations that work with disadvantaged and disabled young people and so on.
Most of the male geeks spend their spare time either hacking or drinking large amounts of beer and wondering why we don't have girlfriends.
I think the article makes it clear why there aren't more female hackers. Being a hacker requires a lot if time and commitment. Many women would rather spend their free time doing things that require human interaction, instead of behaving that like a bunch of sad losers who spend far to much time playing with computers(myself included).
Incidentally, my experience of working with female techies is that they are generally considerably more productive than males.
These comments do not necessarily represent the views of the author
OK, so you're running a Linux kernel. Which is released under the GNU General Public License. If all you are running is a kernel, then I'm impressed. Did you post your comment by whistling down your phone line?. No. I bet you had to run a shell. Which is also almost certainly released under GPL. Maybe you used cat to compose your post, but I doubt it. You probably used a text editor like emacs (originated by RMS himself) to write it. Then you probably connected to your ISP with pppd. Guess which license?
And every single bit of your Gnu/Linux setup (if you use a decent distribution) could have been (and certainly was) built with gcc and the rest of the bin-utils package. Guess who owns the copyleft on that?
I'm getting bored now, but please learn your history. RMS wanted to create a free OS. He chose to implement it as a UNIX rather than anything else because of the cultural heritage of the UNIX community. He would have chosen a better architecture if he could, but he made a pragmatic decision.
Then, rather than start with a kernel, he started with the tools that make an OS usable, like a text editor (alright emacs is just a little bit more than an editor), a compiler (try writing one yourself if you're bored for a few decades), text processing utilities etc.
Then the GNU project was almost complete, and it was good... but before they got a chance to start serious work on the gorgeous, architechturally clean and fiendish to debug Hurd kernel that was their dream, a bright lad from Finland turned up with an incomplete, but functional kernel. And they saw that it was good, if a bit hairy and flaky. But they persuaded the great Finn to release it under their licence. And GNU/Linux was born. That was in 1991. Please remember, that was a *very* long time ago. FreeBSD didn't exist. X was still closed. And the WWW probably had less pages than the Great Library of Alexandria. Ancient times indeed.
Linux would have been a rather neat toy that had once run on a single 8086 if it weren't for the GNU project.
Linus gave us a kernel, because he had the courage to share it.
RMS gave us Gnu/Linux, because he is a (very hairy) visionary. What he really gave us were two critical things. Forget emacs. Forget gcc. He gave us a vision, and he gave us the GPL.
Both the vision and the GPL have flaws, but until you can come up with any single thing as good as one of these, please remember that it IS GNU/Linux.
I apologise for the rant.
Ceci n'est pas un sig
"A highly sophisticated, rather delicate, very ingenious robot that is a credit to its developers and a triumph of Human ingenuity is being tested in the antarctic"
"It was transported there with great care by a number of highly skilled scientists and engineers, who will monitor its every step with loving care."
"Then we'll stuff it on the top of a rocket, do our level best to shake it to bits on launch, expose it to unimaginably rapid changes in temperature and leave it alone for 9-12 months"
"Once we're bored with that, we'll plunge it into the atmosphere of a small planet, allow it to hit the ground in way that will make it lucky not to leave a significant crater. Then, whatever happens, we'll spend the next several months bombarding it with incredibly faint radio signals, just to see what happens. Either way, we're going to need more funding."
Apologies. This is capable of being one of the peaks of human endeavour. But I'm glad I'm not the robot.
... I want to get really rich, so:
I propose we should patent something along the following lines:
"A system consisting of small entities with precisely defined properties, including properties such as charge, top, bottom, spin, 'colour', and mass, that, within a framework of rules can interact to construct arbitrarily complex other entities."
I'm sure you could get it past the US (or UK) patent office. Now that would be funny.
The plaintiff requires that the universe ceases to exist forthwith unless royalties are paid.
Anyone got a spare $50,000 to have a go? No-one can claim it's 'obvious', but it could get really nasty if a certain supernatural entity appeared in court to claim 'prior art'. Armageddon, anyone?
No, I don't expect a computer to turn me into Picasso.
I expect it to let me express my ideas as clearly as I can on paper. And I haven't got a computer that will do that yet. Do you want to help build one?
As I read it he says:
Programming models change every ten years
Indisputable
They seem to change for the better
Yup. So far.
C++ is not a bad language, but it's too big
Damn right.
But I think he dismisses the STL architecture too readily. It is an amazingly good abstraction, easy to extend (not that you need to often) and avoids being too object-oriented (which would have made it ridiculous)
Java is a good language, but it's slow
Yup. Again
UnrealScript rocks (but not enough)
Never used it. However good it is, can I model a telecomms network with it?
I also I think he skipped a bit to briefly over the 'Groups of Objects' technologies (patterns etc).
The fundamental problem is that we don't think in terms of 'language' (human or computer). We think with ideas. Computers 'think' with binary operations. I suspect that the reason so many people find computers difficult and scary is that they don't know how to translate their ideas into terms the computer will 'understand'
As an example, I get paid to develop software. Mostly I do architecture rather than programming. When I am designing a system I use paper, pens and whiteboards. When I try and transfer the design to an 'electronic' format, I struggle. The tools don't exist. Why not? The tools I use are very good, but I find it difficult to express my ideas with a screen, mouse and keyboard. I spend too much time second-guessing the tool programmer, thinking 'How would the programmer have expected me to this?' - I shouldn't have to concern myself with this (mostly I don't - I shout for the tools programmer to show me how to do it)
To end this tedious rant:
Yes, we need to rethink programming models constantly
No, there is 'No Silver Bullet'
Human/computer interaction systems are a disgrace to us all. Please will somebody make a computer as easy to use as a pencil and paper. I'll help.
Alright, to be honest almost all my production experience is with 6.5. It is measurably slower than Oracle 7.3.4 and 8.0.5 on the same hardware. I haven't done enough with SQL Server 7 to comment about performance. I have done some work with Oracle 8i, and all I have to say is "Buy another bucket of memory". It is a complete hog, particularly doing imports. Way cool, though.
I agree entirely. Particularly...
The issue is, once more, the people who stupidly set the sites up and left the default "sa" account active.
I usually work with Oracle databases. I am still astonished every time I find a can log in to an Oracle database as either SYS or SYSTEM. Given that the default SYS password is ChangeOnInstall, you have to wonder about the people running the systems. I guess that more than 10% of Oracle databases are misconfigured like this.
Don't even get me started about the DB2 database I found on a net-facing S/390 that still had the default admin password.
Is this Oracle's (or Microsoft's, or IBM's) fault? NO - it is the fault of the halfwit DBAs who bullshit their way into jobs that are way beyond their ability. The 'differently intelligent' managers who hire these people should also be held to account, except their mental age relieves them of criminal culpability.
PS - I actually quite like SQL Server. Every time a client specifies a really slow, memory intensive RDBMS, I specify SQL Server. It hasn't happened yet.
After the astonishing advances in physics over the last century or so, we now probably have more 'hard' questions than we started with. Only the irretrievably brave would say that another great breakthrough is 'just around the corner'.
If you could choose which of the 'hard' questions you could know the answer to, which question would you ask, and why?