Nevermind the WTC Deaths
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 3, Redundant
There are plenty of human casualties in the Afghan conflict -- though few among Americans
Yeah, nevermind the thousands that died at the world trade centers, the pentagon and on the three flights -- the civilians who didn't even know we were fighting a war until Al Queda made their first cowardly strike. Some drone war. So unfair. You are tiresome, Katz.
What concientous buyer would purchase a Microsoft product while boycotting the CSS Authority? Isn't that like subscribing to Rush Online (tm) in order to sleight Dr. Laura?
I hope what we will see is these nations teaming up with Russia and China to build an alternate station to the brain-damaged political football of the ISS and become a new independent force in space exploration.
What a joke. Nothing, and I mean absolutely NOTHING, is preventing Russia, China, Canada, Japan, et all from doing this RIGHT NOW. It's easy to kick the US when we're in a recession, involved in a war and just suffered billions in unilateral damages; and yet we are still the major funding for the ISS. I would be overjoyed if other nations would actually DO something other than bitch, like you seem content to do. Russia, for their part, have done extraordianary things with ISS (not to mention Mir), and I applaud them.
Legislation in the USA changes from year to year just like in other nations, Everyone Knows Best(tm) how to spend the GNP, and NASA is just one such agency. Personally, I would love to fund NASA much more than it currently is funded, but I live in a democracy and I realize that my priorities don't coincide with many other Americans (much less with Canadians or Japanese). In short: there is no conspiracy, we don't rise every day thinking "How can I screw the rest of the world" -- the reality is quite the contrary.
The sad thing is, in other forums we hear the exact opposite, but coincidental rant: "Why does the US spend so much god-damned money on NASA, they should be spending all that money on AIDS research" or the ever-classic "The space program just pollutes, we could spend that money on more green technologies that will benefit everyone." It is tiresome, to say the least.
Apparantly Lindows has taken Wine, under the ever-so-exploitable modified BSD licence (there has been talked of changing to the LGPL soon, to ensure people like this DO feed changes back into the main tree...) and (rumor) stuck some chinese developers behind it to hack on the functionality Wine has been missing..
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps Transgaming or Lindows wouldn't exist if Wine used an LGPL license? I know the president of Transgaming has said as much.
Oh yeah... and how much of your personal code has been "exploited" by Lindows?
The F-117's existence wasn't known outside of the AF and skunkworks for almost a decade, and even after that, details weren't out until after the Gulf War. The SR-71 had an even more ellusive history, with people reporting UFO sigtings about it because nobody outside of Nevada knew about it. I'm not saying that the steal ship exists, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did exist and we didn't know about it.
Nevermind that there are 20 million Playstation 2 machines out there already... Microsoft has quite a bit of "catching up" to do itself before they can start dictating terms to developers like you seem to think. I wouldn't count on the XBox being a wild success; frankly there are no good games out for it yet (at least ones that I would pay for), and if the XBox is unable to differentiate itself from the PC then it will go down in flames very quickly.
That said, good luck to Microsoft and Nintendo -- we need more competition in the console wars.
Pthreads are POSIX threads, and have very
different semantics from clone(), mostly to support implementing multithreading in userspace (ick). So,
the standard is a hack to say the least.
You don't know what the hell you're talking about. Linux pthreads use clone() syscalls! In addition, userland threads have an order of magnitude faster spawning time than kernel threads at the expense of clueless scheduling with regards to I/O operations, so your assertion (ick) that they are undesirable is very strange. You should check out IBM's ngpt project for Linux, which will give the programmer a choice between the two.
A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.
Already done: Highlight the URL you want in some other application and then middle-click in a blank spot on any Mozilla page. You can even set this up to open a new tab with the tabbed browser by going to the new tab preferences under 'Navigator'.
Adding features is good, but keep them out of the thing that claims to be the standard version of the language./bin/sh should be a POSIX shell, period.
So which is it that you people want? A POSIX shell or a Bourne shell? They are mutually exclusive. Bash and ksh are both POSIX shells, but the Bourne shell is most definately not. As far as I'm concerned, POSIX can go jump in a lake anyway -- but that's another rant for another day.
Review: Some of the media gives Microsoft a bad rap, that might be because most of the media is AOL/Time/Warner. I've been pretty lucky to meet lots of folks from Microsoft in the last year and they're a great passionate crew and the result is a profitable company with cool products, so I'm pretty excited about this particular annual meeting to say the least!
No wonder he enjoyed Comdex so much. All the geeks left Comdex years ago; now it's just basically a Sharper Image exposition with a massive Microsoft presence. I went a couple years ago when it seemed like Linux was going to make a good showing (got to see de Icaza speak), but even then most of the Linux booths were doing like everyone else: free T-shirts, lame "sales" people pimping their warez and a bunch of lemmings yelling like idiots.
I saw this story and started wondering what I'd missed (I just live 7 hours away by car), but upon further inspection it seems to have been written by someone who is impressed by all this, so I haven't missed a thing. Developers certainly don't learn anything at the event other than the product schedule (usually hardware) of a certain company, which you can find on the web if you really care anyway. The best thing about Comdex is Las Vegas, and I can go when it isn't so crowded at pretty much any other time I care to.
Here's a letter I sent to my congressman and senators. Feel free to copy it; I hope to see people from every state followup with letters that they have sent. Everyone needs to take action now; if only the representatives from California and New York are notified, nothing will be done.
Representative Simpson,
As I feared, and wrote to you about, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
(DMCA) has now crippled US software developers. Here is a thread which
basically explains the situation:
In short: the DMCA has forced the Linux kernel developers to distinguish
between "US" and "Non-US" developers. The "Non-US" group of developers
are privy to all the security fixes for the kernel while the "US" group
are now unable to view these changes because of recent action by DMCA
proponents (the FBI's Skylarov case, MPAA vs. 2600).
Worse than that, we (US developers) are no longer able to participate in
security development and as such are in a weaker position to ensure the
security of a product -- something very important in light of September
11th. This law needs to be fixed or repealed as soon as possible; it has
prevented university research from being published (see Felton vs. RIAA,
SDMI) and companies are using the most ridiculous "copy protection"
schemes in order to halt speaking about security.
What probably happened, is that CmdrTaco saw the original story, noted that it was put out by the Bush whitehouse and so he rejected it in order to maintain his anti-Bush-at-all-costs stance. Then Hemos came along and posted it, not understanding that/. is a liberal-biased publication that isn't supposed to say bad things about Sun and Oracle.
And just this makes it very hard to implement it. It would require slashcode to remember the scores it presents to a moderator until moderation is done (you offcourse cannot let the webbrowser of the moderator remember them, to avoid abuse). Implementing this would be very, very not trivial I think.
It wouldn't be difficult at all. Instead of giving the moderator a +1 / -1, you'd ask the moderator what score the post deserves to have (eg, +3, interesting); if that article has already reached the desired threshold, no points are spent and nothing is moderated. If there is a difference, the points are deducted and the post is moved up or down by one point.
Developers can easily "assume" admin rights when developing their software - and then blithely write software that requires write permission to an admin only area for example.
Or, they could not do that. Developers could do many things that they do not do.
Developers having admin rights to machines means that they can build and install their development tools anyway they want, and they can patch/not patch as they see fit.
It also means they can fix problems without waiting weeks for them to otherwise be fixed (yes, I have been the recipient of that while working for one of the top defense contractors).
Have you ever witnessed the example of developers using beta or pre-release versions of libraries, compilors, or OSes? And then wondering why problems crept up when they moved their applications to production. Witness the recent problems at MS where code had been built against beta libraries - which left debuging turned on for applications that were then moved into production... not a good thing at all.
Yes, that is a problem, but your solution is just as large a problem. You can solve such issues with guidelines and good management skills; the draconian route can work, but it's not the best route in my experience. I've fought with it. I've seen teams fall down for it. I've seen projects die in a flaming mess because if it. The 'it' I'm refering to is beaurocracy, and what you are advocating is a particularly severe form of it. There are other, better solutions.
Besides, most of the people I've know that advocate your position usually had some sort of power struggle involved (my last one was Thou Shalt Not Use PowrerBuilder because Visual Basic is Blessed).
What's the point in having fine-grained security if it isn't used? I'll assume you're talking about ACLs here (and I'll hope you're not talking about silly things like 'backup privilege' or 'spool manager') and point out that ACLs do indeed exist for UNIX. In fact, UNIX had ACLs before NT did... it's just not that useful in the real world. Having UGO control covers 95% of the cases, and the other 5% are covered by playing group membership games (in traditional UNIX, like Linux and FreeBSD).
That said, I don't think UNIX users will reject ACLs (there are ACL implementations for Linux, but they are not mainstream yet) -- but it won't be a major improvement over how things are right now when they arrive.
The problem with NT is that it has all the neat-o features, but they aren't bloody used. So I must ask again, what's the point? Why have a fine grained registry (without comments, which is another gripe for another time) and ship the OS with everything wide-open? Do you know how severely berated any UNIX vendor would be if all OS files defaulted to 777? This is mentioned and Windows advocates immediately tout the (supposed) technological benefits and sluough the argument off to clueless administrators and bad 3rd-party software.
That argument may have been valid with NT 3.x. It was wearing thin with NT4. It was absurd with NT5. Now, its just laughable.
Hmm, they changed pictures, or was this the one with the shiney marble bathroom-looking background previously? Mac users have way too much free time on their hands, and they have excellent graphic rendering software to boot. A bad combination for gullible news sites.:)
However, I have to be a stinker and say this... How many diferent revisions are you going to need to keep on your hard drive to be able to run that really old 1.x GNOME app when there is no GNOME 8.x version available? Does this mean that we will have all the versions of the GNOME stuff on our hard drives at the same time?
The same thing happens with Windows all the time. Each application's installation directory is searched for dynamic libraries first, and then the system library directories are searched second. Take a look at most Win32 applciations, they include DLL files in their own directories for just this problem.
The reason why this is so painfully visibile under UNIX systems is that by convention we usually don't keep old libraries around; package managers in particular don't like this (which is why we have lame hacks like libfoo-compat or libbar3-version). We're going to have to change how we do things a little bit, but nothing drastic needs to be done. Newer libraries will always break older ones, its unavoidable; we just need to make sure that multiple libraries can co-exist without being a headache to maintain.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, nevermind the thousands that died at the world trade centers, the pentagon and on the three flights -- the civilians who didn't even know we were fighting a war until Al Queda made their first cowardly strike. Some drone war. So unfair. You are tiresome, Katz.
Yeah, I hate having to restart Apache all the time. Damn those open source programmers! :)
Touche! I suppose the Gamecube is the correct choice then?
What concientous buyer would purchase a Microsoft product while boycotting the CSS Authority? Isn't that like subscribing to Rush Online (tm) in order to sleight Dr. Laura?
What a joke. Nothing, and I mean absolutely NOTHING, is preventing Russia, China, Canada, Japan, et all from doing this RIGHT NOW. It's easy to kick the US when we're in a recession, involved in a war and just suffered billions in unilateral damages; and yet we are still the major funding for the ISS. I would be overjoyed if other nations would actually DO something other than bitch, like you seem content to do. Russia, for their part, have done extraordianary things with ISS (not to mention Mir), and I applaud them.
Legislation in the USA changes from year to year just like in other nations, Everyone Knows Best(tm) how to spend the GNP, and NASA is just one such agency. Personally, I would love to fund NASA much more than it currently is funded, but I live in a democracy and I realize that my priorities don't coincide with many other Americans (much less with Canadians or Japanese). In short: there is no conspiracy, we don't rise every day thinking "How can I screw the rest of the world" -- the reality is quite the contrary.
The sad thing is, in other forums we hear the exact opposite, but coincidental rant: "Why does the US spend so much god-damned money on NASA, they should be spending all that money on AIDS research" or the ever-classic "The space program just pollutes, we could spend that money on more green technologies that will benefit everyone." It is tiresome, to say the least.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps Transgaming or Lindows wouldn't exist if Wine used an LGPL license? I know the president of Transgaming has said as much.
Oh yeah... and how much of your personal code has been "exploited" by Lindows?
The F-117's existence wasn't known outside of the AF and skunkworks for almost a decade, and even after that, details weren't out until after the Gulf War. The SR-71 had an even more ellusive history, with people reporting UFO sigtings about it because nobody outside of Nevada knew about it. I'm not saying that the steal ship exists, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did exist and we didn't know about it.
That said, good luck to Microsoft and Nintendo -- we need more competition in the console wars.
http://www.bigempire.com/filthy/
You don't know what the hell you're talking about. Linux pthreads use clone() syscalls! In addition, userland threads have an order of magnitude faster spawning time than kernel threads at the expense of clueless scheduling with regards to I/O operations, so your assertion (ick) that they are undesirable is very strange. You should check out IBM's ngpt project for Linux, which will give the programmer a choice between the two.
How did you get modded up to +5 informative?
Already done: Highlight the URL you want in some other application and then middle-click in a blank spot on any Mozilla page. You can even set this up to open a new tab with the tabbed browser by going to the new tab preferences under 'Navigator'.
So which is it that you people want? A POSIX shell or a Bourne shell? They are mutually exclusive. Bash and ksh are both POSIX shells, but the Bourne shell is most definately not. As far as I'm concerned, POSIX can go jump in a lake anyway -- but that's another rant for another day.
No wonder he enjoyed Comdex so much. All the geeks left Comdex years ago; now it's just basically a Sharper Image exposition with a massive Microsoft presence. I went a couple years ago when it seemed like Linux was going to make a good showing (got to see de Icaza speak), but even then most of the Linux booths were doing like everyone else: free T-shirts, lame "sales" people pimping their warez and a bunch of lemmings yelling like idiots.
I saw this story and started wondering what I'd missed (I just live 7 hours away by car), but upon further inspection it seems to have been written by someone who is impressed by all this, so I haven't missed a thing. Developers certainly don't learn anything at the event other than the product schedule (usually hardware) of a certain company, which you can find on the web if you really care anyway. The best thing about Comdex is Las Vegas, and I can go when it isn't so crowded at pretty much any other time I care to.
Feel free to cut and paste and modify.
Does /. have a split personality today?
What probably happened, is that CmdrTaco saw the original story, noted that it was put out by the Bush whitehouse and so he rejected it in order to maintain his anti-Bush-at-all-costs stance. Then Hemos came along and posted it, not understanding that /. is a liberal-biased publication that isn't supposed to say bad things about Sun and Oracle.
It wouldn't be difficult at all. Instead of giving the moderator a +1 / -1, you'd ask the moderator what score the post deserves to have (eg, +3, interesting); if that article has already reached the desired threshold, no points are spent and nothing is moderated. If there is a difference, the points are deducted and the post is moved up or down by one point.
TWM did that years before.
Or, they could not do that. Developers could do many things that they do not do.
Developers having admin rights to machines means that they can build and install their development tools anyway they want, and they can patch/not patch as they see fit.
It also means they can fix problems without waiting weeks for them to otherwise be fixed (yes, I have been the recipient of that while working for one of the top defense contractors).
Have you ever witnessed the example of developers using beta or pre-release versions of libraries, compilors, or OSes? And then wondering why problems crept up when they moved their applications to production. Witness the recent problems at MS where code had been built against beta libraries - which left debuging turned on for applications that were then moved into production ... not a good thing at all.
Yes, that is a problem, but your solution is just as large a problem. You can solve such issues with guidelines and good management skills; the draconian route can work, but it's not the best route in my experience. I've fought with it. I've seen teams fall down for it. I've seen projects die in a flaming mess because if it. The 'it' I'm refering to is beaurocracy, and what you are advocating is a particularly severe form of it. There are other, better solutions.
Besides, most of the people I've know that advocate your position usually had some sort of power struggle involved (my last one was Thou Shalt Not Use PowrerBuilder because Visual Basic is Blessed).
That said, I don't think UNIX users will reject ACLs (there are ACL implementations for Linux, but they are not mainstream yet) -- but it won't be a major improvement over how things are right now when they arrive.
The problem with NT is that it has all the neat-o features, but they aren't bloody used. So I must ask again, what's the point? Why have a fine grained registry (without comments, which is another gripe for another time) and ship the OS with everything wide-open? Do you know how severely berated any UNIX vendor would be if all OS files defaulted to 777? This is mentioned and Windows advocates immediately tout the (supposed) technological benefits and sluough the argument off to clueless administrators and bad 3rd-party software.
That argument may have been valid with NT 3.x. It was wearing thin with NT4. It was absurd with NT5. Now, its just laughable.
Hmm, they changed pictures, or was this the one with the shiney marble bathroom-looking background previously? Mac users have way too much free time on their hands, and they have excellent graphic rendering software to boot. A bad combination for gullible news sites. :)
The MacNN forums (www.macnn.com ahem the most reliable) have debunked this as a doctored up Harmon Kardon amplifier and a Microsoft remote control.
Ahem:
http://www.xemacs.org/Download/win32/
XEmacs already has native win32 widgets, if you prefer.
The same thing happens with Windows all the time. Each application's installation directory is searched for dynamic libraries first, and then the system library directories are searched second. Take a look at most Win32 applciations, they include DLL files in their own directories for just this problem.
The reason why this is so painfully visibile under UNIX systems is that by convention we usually don't keep old libraries around; package managers in particular don't like this (which is why we have lame hacks like libfoo-compat or libbar3-version). We're going to have to change how we do things a little bit, but nothing drastic needs to be done. Newer libraries will always break older ones, its unavoidable; we just need to make sure that multiple libraries can co-exist without being a headache to maintain.
Well its in 2.4.10-ac9, so I assumed Linus would have merged it into 2.4.11. It seems I was wrong.
Sorry, I meant that EXT3 is in the kernel.