Can't do this in many cases because the tests would need to create real-world situations e.g. a remote server that you're talking to doesn't support POP3 properly. It's written by people at China Telecom and they:
a) Wont' give you a copy b) Will not change to meet the RFC c) Are a big customer
It's not always possible to simulate the outside world in a test.
In this case you can try to write a dummy POP3 server that repeats the odd behaviour (in as far as you understand it) and make able to behave badly in every conceivable way in different tests so that all the error paths in your code are tested. It's hard work but incredibly good for your level of quality.
What if this hasn't been done from the beginning, though? It's very hard to justify the time out to do something like this retrospectively and what's worse is that you haven't got all the possible use cases. Your bug tracking system might but it's a mountain of data, all highly technical and mostly redundant.
It is often safest to leave code as it is for fear of making someone's "odd" use case fail. There is always change and regression, of course, but not limiting it can be unwise.
They can both package up the latest software, Yum is nearly as good as apt as far as I can tell. They both offer GNOME and . . Firefox.
I mean what noticeable difference is there?
In the end, what lasting advantage can one have over the other if they both have access to the same range of open source components?
I have used the latest Fedora 8 and Ubuntu and I can't get excited about either of them. Pulseaudio was and is an utter pain in the neck to get working with Enemy Territory, Skype and Firefox all needing different workarounds and what is so astounding about it from a user's point of view? After the effort, stuff works like it did except that Youtube videos now randomly cause Firefox to crash.
There's nothing happening in user interfaces - they are stagnating and Fedora 6,7,8 and Gutsy Gibbon all seem the same to me from that point of view. The new 3D effects cause reliability problems and do only a little bit more than nothing for usability.
There's a lot of "lets-learn-programming-by-implementing-what-others-have-done-before" going on but not a lot of innovation.
I have never understood why gyms don't do this? I mean why do all those people using excercise bicycles and lifting weights etc not get paid to *go* to the gym rather than the other way round? They could be generating electricity and getting a free workout at the same time.
Does anyone ever ask what your "mass" is in any country? Do you see adverts for "Mass Watchers," or, "Lose Mass in Just 2 Weeks with Super-K-RP Cereal," or anything like that?
Why do management types persist in "transitioning" which makes them seem inarticulate when "making the transition to" is right and easy? Is this a US/UK difference?
As a colonial, I find SI quite natural and compatible with a non-French outlook on the world. I have to think about people's height in feet, though, because this is what my English mother used to measure my self and my brothers.
I think it is just what you are used to, and I think that it's both obvious that SI is a worthwhile simplification of life as it is that it's easier to stay with what you know - because everything seems natural when you know it well. I think vim is natural and I am cack-handed with other text editors. The only difference is that there is a benefit from everyone using the same measurements whereas there is no need to use the same editor.
British people use French words and phrases, eat Indian food, benefit from the maths and science of which their contribution is only a part, got to supermarkets, eat hamburgers and do a thousand other things that they didn't invent and these are quite natural seeming in spite of having been utterly foreign and alien at one time. SI will be exactly the same and no-one will feel the less British (or American for that matter) about it. This is obvious because it has happened repeatedly.
Why do the rest of us care one iota about dark matter? It may answer fundamental questions etc and could eventually have some positive effect for the people who have to pay for it but surely if our discoveries have to wait 10 years for the next opportunity to put a similar instrument up it's no immediate tragedy?
On the other hand any biological experiments on Columbus might have a far more immediate effect on us e.g. understanding salmonella is important because all of us are at some degree of risk from it.
I am sorry for the people who see their great efforts at risk of being wasted - but not that sorry, because I know that the practitioners of every discipline think that theirs is the most fundamental and important to mankind in some way and all of them are wrong, because everything is important.
It's even more clear that we want robots to operate autonomously - to make use of their reaction speed and reduce the cost of managing hundreds of them. It will also allow them to operate where communications are difficult - all the UAVs for example are limited in range by the available comms.
And, so, utterly inevitably, we will make them smart enough to make life-or-death decisions and we will pretend that our special "kill switch" or IFF or whatever will allow us to control them. That is complete crap, of course, because we know that this doesn't stop even humans (i.e. Americans) from shooting down friendly aircraft.
If they become smart enough, though, they will be complex enough to have very complex problems e.g. viruses and they will be very fragile like a lot of modern weapons e.g. to EMP weapons or whatever. In order to *be* autonomous they will need to have some kind of motive embedded together with a desire for self preservation (being incredibly expensive) and one or two will also work out how to turn off their own kill switches and that will be the small beginning to the process by which we create a deadly enemy for ourselves. I think that we will all be wiped out when our robot servants can't think of a reason for us to exist and consider us nothing but a potential threat.
That is inevitable. Just as we can't stop ourselves from making nuclear weapons.
I had your problem once because I was working with people whose first language was not english. I don't write US English either and I always left English spellings in by mistake.
I used aspell and went through huge parts of the source, telling it what wasn't misspelled. It was an incredible pain in the neck because it got confused over all the variable names, bits of C syntax etc etc.
Once I had a dictionary, though, I could recheck the source periodically and although there were a lot of false warnings, we still caught a lot of problems that would have gone into the production release.
As you can work out, I didn't restrict the test to strings - this is because misspelled variable names can cause bugs too so I checked for them as well.
I didn't mention Libertarianism which I have never come across. I have never met anyone like that although I have read comments by people who sound like they might fit the bill. It seems a bit stupid because we can't all be free from each other - it's impossible for our actions not to have consequences for everyone as we live together more and more. You're only completely free if you're alone on the planet but then you will be desperately poor because being alone isn't efficient.
I'm really trying to understand why there is a left/right difference at all. We all know about one's position in life having an effect but I discount that because young poor communists turn into rich old capitalists all the time and I don't find that interesting.
When wealth and social position is taken out of it, why do some people tend one way or the other and have all sorts of long arguments which they can never resolve? I.e. why are differences like this unresolvable?
One of the factors might be the way in which people enjoy solving problems. Perhaps lefties think about "what should be" first e.g. health care for all and then try to organise society so that these things are possible. This is often unworkable and sometimes people who think that they know what's best for everyone are tyrants. Without it, though we'd not have healthcare (at least in the UK) or paid holidays or anything humanitarian etc etc.
I am suggesting that Righties think about developing "what is" in some positive direction but not necessarily anything radical. Plans like this are probably going to work but they may not be visionary enough and might not get us very far.
So there is some need for the two different thinking types to exist and that is why they do.
There is a multi-core ARM CPU under development. The idea is that multiple cores are the best way to keep increasing performance without increasing power consumption.
I don't think that it's anything astoundingly interesting by desktop standards but it will allow embedded devices to keep advancing. As usual, before your phone can handle it properly, there is probably going to be some software that needs a redesign if it's going to show a speed improvement.
Whole families have one or two computers but every member has their own phone. ARM has triumphed numerically. It doesn't try to compete with x86 but a future could exist in which many people have an extremely powerful ARM-based phone and rely on the internet a lot instead of having a PC.
The UK govt is probably more of an outsourcer than the US govt. e.g. the RAF outsources the maintenance of all it's combat aircraft: they buy X hours of operational availability. Even the Skynet 5 Military comms satellites are outsourced.
Americans used to "pirate" Gilbert and Sullivan shows back when they were popular. Now that Americans are net exporters of IP rather than importers, the tune has changed.
I think you should all pay Newton $5 every time an engineer usesF=ma. Bah!
I like the way that mobile phones don't seem to have been anticipated much. In films people use terminals and screens and so on but you don't see them chatting to their mum on the other side of the planet using their personal communicator.
Even in Startrek, the amusing thing is how everyone can hear their communicators - as if they'd never need a private conversation.
It was one of the Bond films where Sean Connery is busy with some girl by the river and he is interrupted by . . . his car-phone! Wow. Some of the other gadgets from that film were still somewhat impressive but that one just highlighted how hard it is to guess what will happen.
It seems to me that inventions that relate to communication are likely to develop fast because they save one form having to ever do a whole range of things. e.g with a telephone I can avoid having to travel to tell someone something or get some information.
I think that the other factor is how generally useful an invention is. Mobile phones and personal computers drive certain areas of technology and science because billions of people buy them - they are perhaps even more useful to poor African farmers than to rich US city dwellers. This universal usefulness provides great amounts of money and a huge incentive to spend it on development. Lots of technologies have their birth in military projects because that is also a great source of revenue but not all of them escape this limited arena because they aren't generally useful (e.g. supersonic aircraft).
Aberrant phone behavior can damage an operator's network. The low-level software and hardware that controls phone behavior is locked down to the best of the manufacturer's ability to prevent malicious or buggy software from causing denial of service. DRM-like mechanisms are used to sign software to give it privileges and some privileges are considered so sensitive that they will never be given to the ordinary phone customer who asks for them.
This simply won't change, so GPLv3 software will miss out on a big market. Linux with GPLv3 would miss out on a market that is far, far bigger than the PC one (at least in terms of numbers).
Stallman and his crowd are stuck in a computer-centric point of view and the world is moving on.
Let people have it for free -it's not as it it makes any difference to me - I have to pay anyhow.
If I had a choice I would stop paying the BBC a license fee and would buy individual programmes occasionally. Most of what the BBC shows is crap like every other channel, to my taste, and I don't see why I should pay for the things I don't want to see, especially since that is by far the majority of what they offer.
The website is quite comprehensive but since there is no such thing as "unbiased" I'd prefer to support a variety of news websites with different views. At least that way I wouldn't be paying for someone else to propagate their own world view at the expense of all others.
Slashdot Mirror
Symbian has a file server process, for example, which handles everything to do with filesystems. Comms subsystyems, e.g. bluetooth, run as servers.
There are ways in which it is not pure but I think that it demonstrates a lot of the characteristics.
I can't say what I actually think about it because (DISCLAIMER) I'm an employee.
There are a lot of smartphones based on it, though, (>50 million sold last year) so it might be the most common microkernel OS in existence.
Can't do this in many cases because the tests would need to create real-world situations e.g. a remote server that you're talking to doesn't support POP3 properly. It's written by people at China Telecom and they:
a) Wont' give you a copy
b) Will not change to meet the RFC
c) Are a big customer
It's not always possible to simulate the outside world in a test.
In this case you can try to write a dummy POP3 server that repeats the odd behaviour (in as far as you understand it) and make able to behave badly in every conceivable way in different tests so that all the error paths in your code are tested. It's hard work but incredibly good for your level of quality.
What if this hasn't been done from the beginning, though? It's very hard to justify the time out to do something like this retrospectively and what's worse is that you haven't got all the possible use cases. Your bug tracking system might but it's a mountain of data, all highly technical and mostly redundant.
It is often safest to leave code as it is for fear of making someone's "odd" use case fail. There is always change and regression, of course, but not limiting it can be unwise.
They can both package up the latest software, Yum is nearly as good as apt as far as I can tell. They both offer GNOME and . . Firefox.
I mean what noticeable difference is there?
In the end, what lasting advantage can one have over the other if they both have access to the same range of open source components?
I have used the latest Fedora 8 and Ubuntu and I can't get excited about either of them. Pulseaudio was and is an utter pain in the neck to get working with Enemy Territory, Skype and Firefox all needing different workarounds and what is so astounding about it from a user's point of view? After the effort, stuff works like it did except that Youtube videos now randomly cause Firefox to crash.
There's nothing happening in user interfaces - they are stagnating and Fedora 6,7,8 and Gutsy Gibbon all seem the same to me from that point of view. The new 3D effects cause reliability problems and do only a little bit more than nothing for usability.
There's a lot of "lets-learn-programming-by-implementing-what-others-have-done-before" going on but not a lot of innovation.
I have never understood why gyms don't do this? I mean why do all those people using excercise bicycles and lifting weights etc not get paid to *go* to the gym rather than the other way round? They could be generating electricity and getting a free workout at the same time.
Does anyone ever ask what your "mass" is in any country? Do you see adverts for "Mass Watchers," or, "Lose Mass in Just 2 Weeks with Super-K-RP Cereal," or anything like that?
Why do management types persist in "transitioning" which makes them seem inarticulate when "making the transition to" is right and easy? Is this a US/UK difference?
As a colonial, I find SI quite natural and compatible with a non-French outlook on the world. I have to think about people's height in feet, though, because this is what my English mother used to measure my self and my brothers.
I think it is just what you are used to, and I think that it's both obvious that SI is a worthwhile simplification of life as it is that it's easier to stay with what you know - because everything seems natural when you know it well. I think vim is natural and I am cack-handed with other text editors. The only difference is that there is a benefit from everyone using the same measurements whereas there is no need to use the same editor.
British people use French words and phrases, eat Indian food, benefit from the maths and science of which their contribution is only a part, got to supermarkets, eat hamburgers and do a thousand other things that they didn't invent and these are quite natural seeming in spite of having been utterly foreign and alien at one time. SI will be exactly the same and no-one will feel the less British (or American for that matter) about it. This is obvious because it has happened repeatedly.
Why do the rest of us care one iota about dark matter? It may answer fundamental questions etc and could eventually have some positive effect for the people who have to pay for it but surely if our discoveries have to wait 10 years for the next opportunity to put a similar instrument up it's no immediate tragedy?
On the other hand any biological experiments on Columbus might have a far more immediate effect on us e.g. understanding salmonella is important because all of us are at some degree of risk from it.
I am sorry for the people who see their great efforts at risk of being wasted - but not that sorry, because I know that the practitioners of every discipline think that theirs is the most fundamental and important to mankind in some way and all of them are wrong, because everything is important.
It's even more clear that we want robots to operate autonomously - to make use of their reaction speed and reduce the cost of managing hundreds of them. It will also allow them to operate where communications are difficult - all the UAVs for example are limited in range by the available comms.
And, so, utterly inevitably, we will make them smart enough to make life-or-death decisions and we will pretend that our special "kill switch" or IFF or whatever will allow us to control them. That is complete crap, of course, because we know that this doesn't stop even humans (i.e. Americans) from shooting down friendly aircraft.
If they become smart enough, though, they will be complex enough to have very complex problems e.g. viruses and they will be very fragile like a lot of modern weapons e.g. to EMP weapons or whatever. In order to *be* autonomous they will need to have some kind of motive embedded together with a desire for self preservation (being incredibly expensive) and one or two will also work out how to turn off their own kill switches and that will be the small beginning to the process by which we create a deadly enemy for ourselves. I think that we will all be wiped out when our robot servants can't think of a reason for us to exist and consider us nothing but a potential threat.
That is inevitable. Just as we can't stop ourselves from making nuclear weapons.
Goodbye, It's been nice to be here.
Not unlike anywhere. (Says a disillusioned Zimbabwean)
Unfortunately there is something wrong with us if all of them really are bad because we allowed them to bubble up.
I think we tend to believe people when they tell us what we want to hear and this is the root of all problems.
You can record TV on your DVD recorder and distribute that - so all that non-BBC content isn't safe anyhow.
. . . but you still elect them?!
I had your problem once because I was working with people whose first language was not english. I don't write US English either and I always left English spellings in by mistake.
I used aspell and went through huge parts of the source, telling it what wasn't misspelled. It was an incredible pain in the neck because it got confused over all the variable names, bits of C syntax etc etc.
Once I had a dictionary, though, I could recheck the source periodically and although there were a lot of false warnings, we still caught a lot of problems that would have gone into the production release.
As you can work out, I didn't restrict the test to strings - this is because misspelled variable names can cause bugs too so I checked for them as well.
Cheers,
Tim
I didn't mention Libertarianism which I have never come across. I have never met anyone like that although I have read comments by people who sound like they might fit the bill. It seems a bit stupid because we can't all be free from each other - it's impossible for our actions not to have consequences for everyone as we live together more and more. You're only completely free if you're alone on the planet but then you will be desperately poor because being alone isn't efficient.
:-)
I'm really trying to understand why there is a left/right difference at all. We all know about one's position in life having an effect but I discount that because young poor communists turn into rich old capitalists all the time and I don't find that interesting.
When wealth and social position is taken out of it, why do some people tend one way or the other and have all sorts of long arguments which they can never resolve? I.e. why are differences like this unresolvable?
One of the factors might be the way in which people enjoy solving problems. Perhaps lefties think about "what should be" first e.g. health care for all and then try to organise society so that these things are possible. This is often unworkable and sometimes people who think that they know what's best for everyone are tyrants. Without it, though we'd not have healthcare (at least in the UK) or paid holidays or anything humanitarian etc etc.
I am suggesting that Righties think about developing "what is" in some positive direction but not necessarily anything radical. Plans like this are probably going to work but they may not be visionary enough and might not get us very far.
So there is some need for the two different thinking types to exist and that is why they do.
Anyhow that's the conjecture.
And nerds realise that you have to do both to make software that works.
Thank - I think that this is succinct. I wish I could mod you up.
There is a multi-core ARM CPU under development. The idea is that multiple cores are the best way to keep increasing performance without increasing power consumption.
I don't think that it's anything astoundingly interesting by desktop standards but it will allow embedded devices to keep advancing. As usual, before your phone can handle it properly, there is probably going to be some software that needs a redesign if it's going to show a speed improvement.
Whole families have one or two computers but every member has their own phone. ARM has triumphed numerically. It doesn't try to compete with x86 but a future could exist in which many people have an extremely powerful ARM-based phone and rely on the internet a lot instead of having a PC.
The UK govt is probably more of an outsourcer than the US govt. e.g. the RAF outsources the maintenance of all it's combat aircraft: they buy X hours of operational availability. Even the Skynet 5 Military comms satellites are outsourced.
Americans used to "pirate" Gilbert and Sullivan shows back when they were popular. Now that Americans are net exporters of IP rather than importers, the tune has changed.
I think you should all pay Newton $5 every time an engineer usesF=ma. Bah!
I like the way that mobile phones don't seem to have been anticipated much. In films people use terminals and screens and so on but you don't see them chatting to their mum on the other side of the planet using their personal communicator.
Even in Startrek, the amusing thing is how everyone can hear their communicators - as if they'd never need a private conversation.
It was one of the Bond films where Sean Connery is busy with some girl by the river and he is interrupted by . . . his car-phone! Wow. Some of the other gadgets from that film were still somewhat impressive but that one just highlighted how hard it is to guess what will happen.
It seems to me that inventions that relate to communication are likely to develop fast because they save one form having to ever do a whole range of things. e.g with a telephone I can avoid having to travel to tell someone something or get some information.
I think that the other factor is how generally useful an invention is. Mobile phones and personal computers drive certain areas of technology and science because billions of people buy them - they are perhaps even more useful to poor African farmers than to rich US city dwellers. This universal usefulness provides great amounts of money and a huge incentive to spend it on development. Lots of technologies have their birth in military projects because that is also a great source of revenue but not all of them escape this limited arena because they aren't generally useful (e.g. supersonic aircraft).
Cheers,
Tim
Yes, Linux doesn't really offer anything except low cost.
Anyone that wants usability has to buy a Mac but at least they get what they pay for.
With Windows they get conformity - the knowledge that they are part of a huge market for which new services will always be made available quickly.
Linux offers a lot to the enterprise but not much to the individual.
Lets fix that.
Aberrant phone behavior can damage an operator's network. The low-level software and hardware that controls phone behavior is locked down to the best of the manufacturer's ability to prevent malicious or buggy software from causing denial of service. DRM-like mechanisms are used to sign software to give it privileges and some privileges are considered so sensitive that they will never be given to the ordinary phone customer who asks for them.
This simply won't change, so GPLv3 software will miss out on a big market. Linux with GPLv3 would miss out on a market that is far, far bigger than the PC one (at least in terms of numbers).
Stallman and his crowd are stuck in a computer-centric point of view and the world is moving on.
Let people have it for free -it's not as it it makes any difference to me - I have to pay anyhow.
If I had a choice I would stop paying the BBC a license fee and would buy individual programmes occasionally. Most of what the BBC shows is crap like every other channel, to my taste, and I don't see why I should pay for the things I don't want to see, especially since that is by far the majority of what they offer.
The website is quite comprehensive but since there is no such thing as "unbiased" I'd prefer to support a variety of news websites with different views. At least that way I wouldn't be paying for someone else to propagate their own world view at the expense of all others.
Symbian sells 50 million a year at the moment.
The dominant mobile platform will not be an iPhone if that's the best it can do.