Acutally the nifty little animation appears to be horribly out of date. The counter on their website actually indicates that there is 11792.07 TB available (when I checked it).
Object casting is not a "feature." It's probably the biggest design flaw I can think of in Java.
The object casting in Java completely destroys any benefits of static typing. Casting does not cause it to fail early. It only fails compilation when you fail to specify the casting. By explicitly performing an object cast in my code I'm basically telling the compiler to ignore the static typing and delay the cast until runtime. When you run the application it's still quite possible to have a ClassCastException.
Yes, operator overloading can lead to confusing code when used improperly, but it can lead to clearer code when used well.
For a simple example, take the BigInteger class from Java. I think it's quite easy to see that it would make sense to write "bigInt1 - bigInt2" rather than "bigInt1.subtract(bigInt2)."
Now look at "y = m * x + b" compared to "y = m.multiply(x).add(b)". This makes it even more clear how what should be a simple, easy to read statement becomes quite muddled by unnecessary verbiage.
Of course I could define operators for situations in which their intention is quite unclear, but that's not the fault of the language.
Operator overloading lets bad programmers write bad code, however without operator overloading all programmers are forced to write bad code.
Of course I suppose that kind of supports Paul Graham's point. Java is a crippled language that eliminates some programmer pitfalls, thus catering to the lowest common denominator. However, languages like Python give good programmers the freedom to write a solution well suited to their problem.
Well, you're just looking at what's public. Most distros the debate is going to be kept within the company. So, you could look at the debates over Debian as a bad thing, or you could realize that this is just indicative of the fact that the community gets more say in the direction of their distribution.
1. Install Fedora Core 2 2. Install apt 3. Realize I have to add a bunch of extra repositories to get a half-way decent selection of packages 4. Still can't find packages for lots of stuff I had in Debian 5. Overlaps and conflicts between packages in different repositories causes havoc everytime I try to upgrade 6. Not so happy
I suggest you watch this presentation on the Psyco just-in-time compiler for Python and do some research on the Transmeta Crusoe processor to learn about run-time optimization.
Now, I can't comment on the performance, etc. at this point, but I can tell you the installation was miserable.
First of all, Oracle won't install without X, which this server wasn't going to have. There is an option for a completely non-interactive install which just reads the options from a file, but the installer still won't load without X installed on the system.
So, Oracle indicated that we could install the database and then remove X afterwards and it would still work. So, we started to install it and the component which provides the database creation utility wouldn't install. The error indicated that it didn't have sufficient permissions, though we had given write permissions everywhere it should have needed. We tried to track down exactly what it was trying to write, but the error message didn't give this information and the logs were empty.
We finally gave up on that utility so we had to do the whole database creation by hand, which Oracle doesn't make very easy. I was previously pretty much ambivalent towards Oracle before, but now this has me rather put off. I would switch to MySQL, but the customer is strictly for Oracle.
I have no objections to Oracle providing nice graphical utilities, but it shouldn't be this monolithic entity.
..."Bowen disagrees with the PHP documentation however, noting that actual users report that they are using PHP with Apache 2.0.x without problems."
A while back on Windows I had some issues getting the PHP module to load in Apache 2.0 when I was trying to use the latest releases available for each. However, I believe it was in the beta days of PHP4 and I'm not a fan of PHP anyways, so that doesn't concern me.
Now I use Apache 2.0 because that's what Subversion works with.
Yeah, I know this was meant to be funny, but actually it'd probably be a bad idea for him to have children who is also quite technically-oriented. My mom is a special education teacher and she's constantly telling me that I can't marry anyone technical since it strongly increases the chances of autism in children. This was partly discovered by Microsoft who started looking into why they were having so many insurance claims for autistic children amongst their employees. It seems that with more women in technical positions now that more co-workers are getting married. Then, when you combine the genes of two very analytical people the child's genes may be too strongly concentrated with this analytic thinking which results in Autism or Asberger's syndrom. They may be very intelligent, but have many difficulties dealing with everyday social situations.
So, go ahead and marry someone intelligent, just not too technical.
Someone else already mentioned the ability for live backups with Subversion. Another benefit of the database is built-in journaling support. BerkelyDB logs any changes before making them, so if your system crashes or something, the DB will be restored to a stable point. This is MORE reliable than what CVS offers, even with a journaling filesystem. Also I'm pretty sure that if you REALLY need to hack the DB, there are utilities that will let you do this. However, most of the scenarios that CVS admins needed to hack the,v files for are no longer a problem in Subversion.
Ok, I saw some questions about why people should switch from CVS to Subversion. The article does a nice job of covering what features Subversion adds, but people still seem to wonder why these are important.
Atomic Commits: As stated in the article, if something goes wrong in the middle of a CVS commit (e.g. network goes down) it can leave the commit only partially complete. This can be a problem if changes in multiple files are dependent upon each other. Say I add a function to an API, then call it in other file. If the call gets committed and the API change doesn't, now the code in CVS won't compile. With atomic commits if the connection was dropped the commit would simply roll back. Then when my network came back up I could try to commit again, but the repository would never be left in a state where it didn't compile.
Constant Time Tagging/Branching: In Subversion tagging and branching are fundamentally the same, they're both executed as a "copy" command. I'm not sure what the execution time is for these operations in CVS, though I believe it's linear to the size of the repository. In Subversion this is an O(1) operation. While one of the posts commented on tagging being an infrequent operation, this may be true, but why not let it be fast anyways? However, no matter how often you do tags, constant time branching is nice. I can at any time quickly create my own branch of a project to work from. Working in my own branch means that I can keep very granular track of my changes by committing frequently, without worrying about breaking something else. Once I'm satisfied with my changes I can merge my branch with the main code.
Storing Binaries: "Binaries" does not necessarilly mean compiled code. There are plenty of things that can benefit from this. Anywhere you use graphics: web programming, GUI programming, or say game or other 3D programming andy you want to store your models. Or, you can store documentation in the repository: PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, etc.
Finally, the barrier to switching isn't all that high. The command line program has quite similar syntax, so switching is pretty easy, and the other interfaces such as the web viewer, TortoiseCVS, and IDE integrations generally have counterparts for Subversion.
Well, that's all I can think of for now. I'm actually going to try to get my company to switch over to Subversion from a commercial software they were using when we start on our new product. We're using a Java applet to interface with the repository now, and it's not very nice. CVS would work, since the main thing I want is integration with Eclipse and IntelliJ Idea, but there are plugins to support this with Subversion as well. However, Subversion has nice feature CVS doesn't, so I don't see any reason to use CVS over Subversion.
Hey, thanks it works great now. Ah, the wonderful quirks of OSS. Fortunately there's usually someone who's had the same problem and knows how to fix it.
Authority? Well, I guess you could say they get it from the people, and the copyright system. Similar the the GPL and LGPL, these are just licensed drawn up by people with knowledge of the law and an interest in promoting freedom. If you're interested in distributing a copyrighted creation and allowing other people certain freedoms in using your work, these are well-crafted licenses that aim to meet your intentions, so you don't have to learn the legalese to make your own license.
I see no sidescrollers. Yes, I've played the original, but haven't you learned from every other game series out there? Follow-ups to old 2D games rarely stay 2D, even when it suits the genre better. The new NARC is a 3rd person 3D game.
Yes, though like I mentioned, there are libraries available to interface with their server, so rather than writing software to interface with FreeDB, you could make a better program that interfaced with MusicBrainz.
Isn't this the kind of thing MusicBrainz was invented for. For those who don't know about it MusicBrainz is like CDDB, but you can look up files based on an audio fingerprint as well as the tag information. This means that files could be tagged completely wrong and you can still match them in the database. They provide open-source software for generating the fingerprints, interfacing with the server, and the server software (should you, for some strange reason want to run your own site). There's a pretty easy-to-use client for Windows, and I've been considering writing my own client for Linux.
Well, I haven't used the Junction utility mentioned above, but it seems to support soft links. There's also some shell extensions out there for creating hardlinks in Windows. I found it irritating that MS didn't include one of their own, but with this shell extension installed just right click a file and select "Create Hardlink" or whatever it's called. I found it fairly useful when I used Windows.
In Nautilus, right click a file or folder and click "Make Link". "ls -l" confirms it: regular symbolic link.
Now, maybe you're confusing what Gnome refers to ask "Launchers" (not sure what KDE calls it) with trying to be links. Launchers are not links, and will not be replaced by links. Launchers are meant for, yes, "launching" a command. They need to be a file since the file needs to store infomation on the icon to use, some comment information, etc. A link has none of this information, so it's not a suitable replacement.
Hmmm, tough choice: get into a legal battle to keep the name "wxWindows" and spend a lot of money, or change to "wxWidgets" and get "modest financial compensation" from Microsoft?
The information on the exploits is rather vauge, but the c|net article says "when people play or stream the corrupted file" so I'm not sure that the exploit is necessarily in the streaming code, it seems like it applies to any playing of Real files.
Slashdot Mirror
Well technically 2, 3, and 5 were all prime and people used to say 1 was prime, but it's not considered to be prime anymore.
There is something quite wrong about their figures.
The ratio of video to audio size seems about right: 1 movie = 175 songs. So that would be about right for 700 MB Divx movies and 4 MB mp3s.
However, based on those rates the number of movies or songs they list would only add up to 40 TB.
Looks like somebody got mixed up between petabyte and terabyte.
News sources should really have some people to double check their math before publishing an article.
Acutally the nifty little animation appears to be horribly out of date. The counter on their website actually indicates that there is 11792.07 TB available (when I checked it).
Object casting is not a "feature." It's probably the biggest design flaw I can think of in Java.
The object casting in Java completely destroys any benefits of static typing. Casting does not cause it to fail early. It only fails compilation when you fail to specify the casting. By explicitly performing an object cast in my code I'm basically telling the compiler to ignore the static typing and delay the cast until runtime. When you run the application it's still quite possible to have a ClassCastException.
Yes, operator overloading can lead to confusing code when used improperly, but it can lead to clearer code when used well.
For a simple example, take the BigInteger class from Java. I think it's quite easy to see that it would make sense to write "bigInt1 - bigInt2" rather than "bigInt1.subtract(bigInt2)."
Now look at "y = m * x + b" compared to "y = m.multiply(x).add(b)". This makes it even more clear how what should be a simple, easy to read statement becomes quite muddled by unnecessary verbiage.
Of course I could define operators for situations in which their intention is quite unclear, but that's not the fault of the language.
Operator overloading lets bad programmers write bad code, however without operator overloading all programmers are forced to write bad code.
Of course I suppose that kind of supports Paul Graham's point. Java is a crippled language that eliminates some programmer pitfalls, thus catering to the lowest common denominator. However, languages like Python give good programmers the freedom to write a solution well suited to their problem.
Well, you're just looking at what's public. Most distros the debate is going to be kept within the company. So, you could look at the debates over Debian as a bad thing, or you could realize that this is just indicative of the fact that the community gets more say in the direction of their distribution.
1. Install Fedora Core 2
2. Install apt
3. Realize I have to add a bunch of extra repositories to get a half-way decent selection of packages
4. Still can't find packages for lots of stuff I had in Debian
5. Overlaps and conflicts between packages in different repositories causes havoc everytime I try to upgrade
6. Not so happy
I suggest you watch this presentation on the Psyco just-in-time compiler for Python and do some research on the Transmeta Crusoe processor to learn about run-time optimization.
Now, I can't comment on the performance, etc. at this point, but I can tell you the installation was miserable.
First of all, Oracle won't install without X, which this server wasn't going to have. There is an option for a completely non-interactive install which just reads the options from a file, but the installer still won't load without X installed on the system.
So, Oracle indicated that we could install the database and then remove X afterwards and it would still work. So, we started to install it and the component which provides the database creation utility wouldn't install. The error indicated that it didn't have sufficient permissions, though we had given write permissions everywhere it should have needed. We tried to track down exactly what it was trying to write, but the error message didn't give this information and the logs were empty.
We finally gave up on that utility so we had to do the whole database creation by hand, which Oracle doesn't make very easy. I was previously pretty much ambivalent towards Oracle before, but now this has me rather put off. I would switch to MySQL, but the customer is strictly for Oracle.
I have no objections to Oracle providing nice graphical utilities, but it shouldn't be this monolithic entity.
"developing software with a good UI requires ... aptitude"
I find Synaptic's UI nicer myself, but what do I know?
Here's an enhancement request I filed for Firefox. This is something I think would be a nice use of Baysian filtering.
..."Bowen disagrees with the PHP documentation however, noting that actual users report that they are using PHP with Apache 2.0.x without problems."
A while back on Windows I had some issues getting the PHP module to load in Apache 2.0 when I was trying to use the latest releases available for each. However, I believe it was in the beta days of PHP4 and I'm not a fan of PHP anyways, so that doesn't concern me.
Now I use Apache 2.0 because that's what Subversion works with.
Yeah, I know this was meant to be funny, but actually it'd probably be a bad idea for him to have children who is also quite technically-oriented. My mom is a special education teacher and she's constantly telling me that I can't marry anyone technical since it strongly increases the chances of autism in children. This was partly discovered by Microsoft who started looking into why they were having so many insurance claims for autistic children amongst their employees. It seems that with more women in technical positions now that more co-workers are getting married. Then, when you combine the genes of two very analytical people the child's genes may be too strongly concentrated with this analytic thinking which results in Autism or Asberger's syndrom. They may be very intelligent, but have many difficulties dealing with everyday social situations.
So, go ahead and marry someone intelligent, just not too technical.
Someone else already mentioned the ability for live backups with Subversion. Another benefit of the database is built-in journaling support. BerkelyDB logs any changes before making them, so if your system crashes or something, the DB will be restored to a stable point. This is MORE reliable than what CVS offers, even with a journaling filesystem. Also I'm pretty sure that if you REALLY need to hack the DB, there are utilities that will let you do this. However, most of the scenarios that CVS admins needed to hack the ,v files for are no longer a problem in Subversion.
Ok, I saw some questions about why people should switch from CVS to Subversion. The article does a nice job of covering what features Subversion adds, but people still seem to wonder why these are important.
Atomic Commits:
As stated in the article, if something goes wrong in the middle of a CVS commit (e.g. network goes down) it can leave the commit only partially complete. This can be a problem if changes in multiple files are dependent upon each other. Say I add a function to an API, then call it in other file. If the call gets committed and the API change doesn't, now the code in CVS won't compile. With atomic commits if the connection was dropped the commit would simply roll back. Then when my network came back up I could try to commit again, but the repository would never be left in a state where it didn't compile.
Constant Time Tagging/Branching:
In Subversion tagging and branching are fundamentally the same, they're both executed as a "copy" command. I'm not sure what the execution time is for these operations in CVS, though I believe it's linear to the size of the repository. In Subversion this is an O(1) operation. While one of the posts commented on tagging being an infrequent operation, this may be true, but why not let it be fast anyways? However, no matter how often you do tags, constant time branching is nice. I can at any time quickly create my own branch of a project to work from. Working in my own branch means that I can keep very granular track of my changes by committing frequently, without worrying about breaking something else. Once I'm satisfied with my changes I can merge my branch with the main code.
Storing Binaries:
"Binaries" does not necessarilly mean compiled code. There are plenty of things that can benefit from this. Anywhere you use graphics: web programming, GUI programming, or say game or other 3D programming andy you want to store your models. Or, you can store documentation in the repository: PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, etc.
Finally, the barrier to switching isn't all that high. The command line program has quite similar syntax, so switching is pretty easy, and the other interfaces such as the web viewer, TortoiseCVS, and IDE integrations generally have counterparts for Subversion.
Well, that's all I can think of for now. I'm actually going to try to get my company to switch over to Subversion from a commercial software they were using when we start on our new product. We're using a Java applet to interface with the repository now, and it's not very nice. CVS would work, since the main thing I want is integration with Eclipse and IntelliJ Idea, but there are plugins to support this with Subversion as well. However, Subversion has nice feature CVS doesn't, so I don't see any reason to use CVS over Subversion.
Hey, thanks it works great now. Ah, the wonderful quirks of OSS. Fortunately there's usually someone who's had the same problem and knows how to fix it.
Authority? Well, I guess you could say they get it from the people, and the copyright system. Similar the the GPL and LGPL, these are just licensed drawn up by people with knowledge of the law and an interest in promoting freedom. If you're interested in distributing a copyrighted creation and allowing other people certain freedoms in using your work, these are well-crafted licenses that aim to meet your intentions, so you don't have to learn the legalese to make your own license.
worked for me. Unfortunately the 1st place entry crashed both Mplayer and Totem.
I see no sidescrollers. Yes, I've played the original, but haven't you learned from every other game series out there? Follow-ups to old 2D games rarely stay 2D, even when it suits the genre better. The new NARC is a 3rd person 3D game.
Yes, though like I mentioned, there are libraries available to interface with their server, so rather than writing software to interface with FreeDB, you could make a better program that interfaced with MusicBrainz.
Isn't this the kind of thing MusicBrainz was invented for. For those who don't know about it MusicBrainz is like CDDB, but you can look up files based on an audio fingerprint as well as the tag information. This means that files could be tagged completely wrong and you can still match them in the database. They provide open-source software for generating the fingerprints, interfacing with the server, and the server software (should you, for some strange reason want to run your own site). There's a pretty easy-to-use client for Windows, and I've been considering writing my own client for Linux.
Well, I haven't used the Junction utility mentioned above, but it seems to support soft links. There's also some shell extensions out there for creating hardlinks in Windows. I found it irritating that MS didn't include one of their own, but with this shell extension installed just right click a file and select "Create Hardlink" or whatever it's called. I found it fairly useful when I used Windows.
Hmmm...
In Nautilus, right click a file or folder and click "Make Link". "ls -l" confirms it: regular symbolic link.
Now, maybe you're confusing what Gnome refers to ask "Launchers" (not sure what KDE calls it) with trying to be links. Launchers are not links, and will not be replaced by links. Launchers are meant for, yes, "launching" a command. They need to be a file since the file needs to store infomation on the icon to use, some comment information, etc. A link has none of this information, so it's not a suitable replacement.
Hmmm, tough choice: get into a legal battle to keep the name "wxWindows" and spend a lot of money, or change to "wxWidgets" and get "modest financial compensation" from Microsoft?
The information on the exploits is rather vauge, but the c|net article says "when people play or stream the corrupted file" so I'm not sure that the exploit is necessarily in the streaming code, it seems like it applies to any playing of Real files.