The original post opines that it would be a "scary scenario" to have, in essence, a massive database of information for $20/month. I spend more than that on *coffee* per month. Even if the database contains public domain sources, the massive level of effort required to digitize some large fraction of them (a far greater level of effort and storage requirements than Project Gutenberg so far) justifies a charge all by itself - not to mention that it would be buying access to a massively parallel server farm containing many terabytes of data and constantly updated.
There are people who are so anti-business and so cheap by nature that they'd rather forgo the greatest research tool in the history of humanity than pay something (and an absolutely piddling, trivial price) for it and have somebody make a profit.
Today I was looking through the Platform SDK documentation (for Visual Studio.NET 2003) at an example purporting to show how to enumerate the files in a directory. The example's help URL is:
ms-help://MS.VSCC.2003/MS.MSDNQTR.2003FEB.1033/f il eio/base/listing_the_files_in_a_directory.htm
found in the hierarchy at: MSDN Library/Windows Development/Windows Base Services/Files and I/O/SDK Documentation/Storage/Storage Overview/Directory Management/Obtaining Directory Information/Listing the Files in a Directory.
The sample is *utterly wrong* from top to bottom. It will not remotely compile. Almost literally everything about it is screwed up, from the incorrect MAXPATH define (it should be MAX_PATH) to the 'wsprintf' function lacking a string target, to the 'LPCTSTR lpDirSpec[MAXPATH];' which is obviously meant to define a string buffer but which actually defines an array of LPCTSTRs (LPCTSTR is a pointer to a string).
In short, whoever wrote this sample was *completely* ignorant of C and could not possibly have compiled it - nor did anyone else at Microsoft catch this before it made it into the MSDN documentation.
Microsoft's core competency ought to be programming - but if the above is a sample, then I have to agree with the overall thesis of its decline.
It's easy to forget that Gates was a real programmer before he started focusing just on the business. Beware of letting envy at his success (and that is the real source of 99.9% of the negative comments about him, admit it) mask those origins.
I started with computers around 1978-9 with the Radio Shack TRS-80. I began with BASIC but progressed to Z-80 assembly language. At one point I disassembled and studied the 12K Level II BASIC ROM, written in Z-80. 12 kilobytes of Z80 assembly is not a lot of space for a reasonably sophisticated (circa 1979) language interpreter so some clever hacks were employed. One that still sticks with me was the error code section. The routine that looked up the 2 letter error code used the contents of the 8 bit E register. But if you looked at the section preceding that routine, there were mostly a series of 3 byte instructions, a 16 bit LD BC,nnnn (BC being the 16 bit concatenation of the 8 bit B and C registers), one after the other. This was very puzzling at first but then I noticed that the jumps to print the error code were *within* those instructions. It turned out that the operand, nnnn, was itself an instruction: LD E,err ! Dropping down after that were LD BC instructions that did not alter the contents of E, which eliminated the need to have many jump instructions and hence conserving the precious 12K resource.
From my understanding it is likely that Gates worked on that code, given that it originated as a Microsoft product and that he was still coding at that time. If so, it is obvious that he was not just a great businessman but a superlative "hacker" as well.
Back WHAT claim up? Are you saying that Stallman did NOT say what he said in that Dr. Dobb's article? You're out of luck. He did. Has he supposedly changed his mind? I'm sure it's been toned down a bit and made less obvious in recent years. But a major, actual change in his views? I don't see any evidence of that.
As far as "encouraging the sale of free software", that is transparently a cynical ploy. The only way somebody could sell "free software" for more than a pittance is by fooling the end user about the ready availability of the software all over the place for no more than the cost of an internet download, which is as close to free as you can get these days. And in any case, the *creator* of the software, by such design, gets *no part* of almost any of those sales, which is perfectly in keeping with Kant's philosophy of anti-self.
There is a deliberate obfuscation that leads to the legitimate confusion regarding Open Source vs. Free Software. That obfuscation was created by Richard Stallman.
Stallman's motives are not a secret. I own an old issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal that published a rant by Stallman which lays out his views in a completely unambiguous way; I really need to find it again so that I can post the exact reference when needed. In that rant, Stallman unambiguously made it clear that he considers making money from software to be *bad*, period. He suggests that it is flat out wrong for software companies to exist and that the world would be better served if, perhaps, a government agency wrote freely distributed software. He invokes Kant's philosophy explicitly to provide the so-called moral justification for this view; a philosophy which is utterly against personal gain of any sort.
The bottom line of intellectual property is this: The creator of that IP has an absolute moral right to determine how his property may be used. Some choose to (try to) sell that IP; if there is a market, so be it. Some have chosen to simply give it away; that is also their right. However, the secondary issue then remains: Are they doing so because they feel guilt about making a profit? Because "knowledge should be free"? If so, they are operating on a bad moral premise, the idea that profit is evil. Even if it's $1 for an entire operating system. (Note that Red Hat charges a lot more than that for support, but Linus Torvalds and others who created their product gets no compensation linked to those charges.)
The SCO legal action is bound to be used as a straw man to attack profit making with software IP. Their basis for claiming ownership of Linux is specious. The real issue, again, is whether the *creator* (or creators) of a piece of IP have the moral right to designate its usage. In other words, whether the products of the mind can be *property*. Grant that and the side by side existence of Microsoft with Open Source is no mystery and no problem. Attack that and you do attack the foundations of a civilized society, because you support the notion that "society" can freely steal from those who create.
In my searches so far, Dice.com is the best site that I know about. I found out about my current job from a posting there. Monster.com has a number of problems. First, it is not IT oriented; Dice.com is entirely technical. Fewer jobs but higher quality and laser focused. Secondly, Monster.com accepts a LOT of "spam" ads - the posting equivalent of "Make $500/hr in your spare time" kind of email spam. After awhile you can tell what they are, but the fact that they are tolerated at all says something about the integrity and seriousness of Monster.com.
The idea that obscure languages "becoming extinct" will adversely affect computer science is wrong on multiple levels.
First, any language properly so-called has referents in reality. Those referents are language independent; that is a fundamental aspect of epistemology. If that were not so, it would be impossible to translate between human languages. Obviously, it is very possible.
Second, the characteristics of human language which affect computer languages are - what? A computer "language" is a formal syntax to tell an electronic machine exactly what to do, in a particular order. That's it. A lot of Slashdot readers know multiple computer languages (and no doubt, human languages). Aside from speed considerations, any complete computer language can do anything any other language can do, as long as the ability to access given hardware is the same.
Third, what difference does it make if a language is "extinct" or not? Latin is a "dead" language but it forms the root of many European languages. If anything, computer "languages" can, and do, evolve far more rapidly than any human language, to fit evolving needs and better comprehension of good programming practices. Whether an addition operation is called "Addition", "Summa", "Plus", or "+" is irrelevant really, other than conciseness of syntax (leading to "+" as ideal here.)
What other major website purporting to want to be taken seriously and to provide useful news, has a front page article riddled with spelling mistakes including "Fransworth" (should be "Farnsworth")? That's the least of the problems. What is the point of repeating this tired old collectivist Marxist bullshit that the "lone [whatever]'s day is over". Screw the New Yorker. In an industry (computers) that has always absolutely been dominated by individuals, even to the present day, it is really ironic that an organization such as Slashdot that relies on an enormous amount of recent individual technical innovation is so fantastically ignorant of history and philosophy that it feels a need to promote such crap. While Slashdot sometimes has interesting links, I am done helping out its advertising revenue stream - time to set my browser's home page to something else.
From what I recall reading not that long ago, it's really unlikely you're going to find a rental car company that would rent you a car for travel in Eastern Europe. One reason is that the car will probably be stolen by the many grassroots socialists (i.e., thieves) in those countries. And insurance? The rule of law? In case of an accident? Yeah right. If I were you I'd do a LOT of web and Usenet searching before considering such a dangerous trip done in any way.
The idea that a Martian microbe could be pathogenic to earthly life is basically dumb. NASA doesn't believe this for a second.
So what's the bottom line of this red herring? Easy. NASA is now way too much of a fat, incompetent organization to dream of sending a man to Mars. They can barely get a simple Low Earth Orbit space station going for billions over an already bloated budget. Fearmongering is one (very low) way that they can produce classic FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about the very idea to let them off of the hook for not being able to produce such a mission.
What is amusing is seeing the response of thieves to being called thieves (and thieves are parasites). Guess what - outside of a self-congratulatory cadre of thieves, the actual creators of some works do not appreciate having their work stolen. The mere ability to copy does not confer ownership, any more than the ability to turn the keys in a car permits you to drive away with it when you don't own it. Ellison's point is simple and direct - the creator of a work OWNS that work and those who would copy it "freely" are thieves. That this sounds shocking is a sad testament to the communist mindset engendered by Stallman and co.
NASA is an immensely wasteful, bloated bureaucracy that's still riding on the glory days of Apollo. More than any other factor it is responsible for the LACK of private space development. Rather than stealing away more money from the people who earned it, how about just auctioning off NASA's facilities to private companies who actually want to make space accessible on a real commercial basis. Then perhaps those of us who don't have $20 million to spend on a ride will have a finite chance of getting into space before we die of old age.
You hit the nail on the head. What people have today on their cable modems or DSL lines is really PEAK bandwidth capability. Does it really take a genius to see that if every cable or DSL line tried to run at maximum speed that no provider in the world could handle it? It's a matter of statistics. As you noted, all that would happen would be lousy service for everyone (this in fact already happens in areas where cable modem nodes are overly subscribed.)
A useful analogy would be to imagine a bunch of firehoses hooked up to a water pump that can move 100 amount of gallons per minute. Let's say each hose can move 10 gallons of water per minute. People have valves that let them turn it on and off at will. Let's say there are 500 hoses hooked up. This may still provide acceptable water flow on as "as needed basis" if usage is bursty, but turn them all on and you aren't going to get 5000 gallons per minute aggregate water flow: You're going to get what the pump can move, 100 gallons/minute, aggregately. Or in other words, given equal resistance among the hoses, 1/5 gallon of water per minute flowing from each.
Re:Acquisition isn't "toast" dummy!
on
Is MOXI Toast?
·
· Score: 1
True, the companies and the owners aren't the same - my point was that one company acquiring or merging with another is a vote of confidence and probably a step in the right direction. "Toast" implies something like bankruptcy.
Acquisition isn't "toast" dummy!
on
Is MOXI Toast?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Being acquired by and funded by a billionaire is hardly a bad event for the company in question. Who approves such stupidly misleading headlines?
Unless Microsoft runs CeBit, it would be accurate (as opposed to CmdrTaco's verbiage) to say that *CeBit management* "kicked out" Sony.
Why would Microsoft care? Hmm, maybe because they were following the rules and didn't plan to have people playing on the Xbox, which would only have been fair if Sony was doing it?
You can imagine the strident bitching that would appear if *Microsoft* had broken the rules and had scores of Xbox stations set up for people to play.
Microsoft was founded in/around *1975* at a time when nobody thought there was a market for PC software. Some of the Marxists-in-training who regularly snipe at Microsoft were probably not even born then. A standard, cheap Intel platform that can run e.g. Linux exists because of Microsoft software driven custumer mass demand for PCs. It's very "in" to be a Microsoft basher, but try looking at reality sometime.
Actually no, I haven't heard of Kylix, but I'll take your word that it's a good Pascal compiler. I haven't done Pascal since the good old days of Turbo Pascal - once I found C, then C++, I gave up Pascal. Other than a dedicated cadre of Delphi programmers (if you want to count Delphi as a sort of Objective Pascal), I've seen very few developers use Pascal recently - if you look for example at the various open source projects, the large majority of them are C/C++.
A first look at the source code of SapDB appears to show that it's all C/C++. In fact, at:
http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/sapdb/deve lop/framesets/sap_db_development.htm
they indicate Perl 5.005, Python 1.5.2, and Visual C++ 6.0 are all that are required to build the database. When you think about it, this makes sense, who makes a good Pascal compiler these days?
Slashdot Mirror
The original post opines that it would be a "scary scenario" to have, in essence, a massive database of information for $20/month. I spend more than that on *coffee* per month. Even if the database contains public domain sources, the massive level of effort required to digitize some large fraction of them (a far greater level of effort and storage requirements than Project Gutenberg so far) justifies a charge all by itself - not to mention that it would be buying access to a massively parallel server farm containing many terabytes of data and constantly updated.
There are people who are so anti-business and so cheap by nature that they'd rather forgo the greatest research tool in the history of humanity than pay something (and an absolutely piddling, trivial price) for it and have somebody make a profit.
Today I was looking through the Platform SDK documentation (for Visual Studio .NET 2003) at an example purporting to show how to enumerate the files in a directory. The example's help URL is:
f il eio/base/listing_the_files_in_a_directory.htm
// directory specification
ms-help://MS.VSCC.2003/MS.MSDNQTR.2003FEB.1033/
found in the hierarchy at: MSDN Library/Windows Development/Windows Base Services/Files and I/O/SDK Documentation/Storage/Storage Overview/Directory Management/Obtaining Directory Information/Listing the Files in a Directory.
The code sample is:
#define _WIN32_WINNT 0x0501
#include "windows.h"
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
WIN32_FIND_DATA FindFileData;
HANDLE hFind = NULL;
LPCTSTR lpDirSpec[MAXPATH];
wsprintf ("Target directory is %s.\n", argv[1]);
strncpy (lpDirSpec, argv[1], sizeof(argv[1]));
strncpy (lpDirSpec, "\*", 3);
hFind = FindFirstFile(lpDirSpec, &FindFileData);
if (hFind == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE) {
wsprintf ("Invalid file handle. Error is %u\n", GetLastError());
return (-1);
} else {
wsprintf ("First file name is %s\n", FindFileData.cFileName);
while (FindNextFile(hFind, &FindFileData) != 0) {
wsprintf ("Next file name is %s\n", FindFileData.cFileName);
}
DWORD dwError = GetLastError();
if (dwError == ERROR_NO_MORE_FILES) {
FindClose(hFind);
} else {
wsprintf ("FindNextFile error. Error is %u\n", dwError);
return (-1);
}
}
return (0);
}
The sample is *utterly wrong* from top to bottom. It will not remotely compile. Almost literally everything about it is screwed up, from the incorrect MAXPATH define (it should be MAX_PATH) to the 'wsprintf' function lacking a string target, to the 'LPCTSTR lpDirSpec[MAXPATH];' which is obviously meant to define a string buffer but which actually defines an array of LPCTSTRs (LPCTSTR is a pointer to a string).
In short, whoever wrote this sample was *completely* ignorant of C and could not possibly have compiled it - nor did anyone else at Microsoft catch this before it made it into the MSDN documentation.
Microsoft's core competency ought to be programming - but if the above is a sample, then I have to agree with the overall thesis of its decline.
It's easy to forget that Gates was a real programmer before he started focusing just on the business. Beware of letting envy at his success (and that is the real source of 99.9% of the negative comments about him, admit it) mask those origins.
I started with computers around 1978-9 with the Radio Shack TRS-80. I began with BASIC but progressed to Z-80 assembly language. At one point I disassembled and studied the 12K Level II BASIC ROM, written in Z-80. 12 kilobytes of Z80 assembly is not a lot of space for a reasonably sophisticated (circa 1979) language interpreter so some clever hacks were employed. One that still sticks with me was the error code section. The routine that looked up the 2 letter error code used the contents of the 8 bit E register. But if you looked at the section preceding that routine, there were mostly a series of 3 byte instructions, a 16 bit LD BC,nnnn (BC being the 16 bit concatenation of the 8 bit B and C registers), one after the other. This was very puzzling at first but then I noticed that the jumps to print the error code were *within* those instructions. It turned out that the operand, nnnn, was itself an instruction: LD E,err ! Dropping down after that were LD BC instructions that did not alter the contents of E, which eliminated the need to have many jump instructions and hence conserving the precious 12K resource.
From my understanding it is likely that Gates worked on that code, given that it originated as a Microsoft product and that he was still coding at that time. If so, it is obvious that he was not just a great businessman but a superlative "hacker" as well.
Back WHAT claim up? Are you saying that Stallman did NOT say what he said in that Dr. Dobb's article? You're out of luck. He did. Has he supposedly changed his mind? I'm sure it's been toned down a bit and made less obvious in recent years. But a major, actual change in his views? I don't see any evidence of that.
As far as "encouraging the sale of free software", that is transparently a cynical ploy. The only way somebody could sell "free software" for more than a pittance is by fooling the end user about the ready availability of the software all over the place for no more than the cost of an internet download, which is as close to free as you can get these days. And in any case, the *creator* of the software, by such design, gets *no part* of almost any of those sales, which is perfectly in keeping with Kant's philosophy of anti-self.
There is a deliberate obfuscation that leads to the legitimate confusion regarding Open Source vs. Free Software. That obfuscation was created by Richard Stallman.
Stallman's motives are not a secret. I own an old issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal that published a rant by Stallman which lays out his views in a completely unambiguous way; I really need to find it again so that I can post the exact reference when needed. In that rant, Stallman unambiguously made it clear that he considers making money from software to be *bad*, period. He suggests that it is flat out wrong for software companies to exist and that the world would be better served if, perhaps, a government agency wrote freely distributed software. He invokes Kant's philosophy explicitly to provide the so-called moral justification for this view; a philosophy which is utterly against personal gain of any sort.
The bottom line of intellectual property is this: The creator of that IP has an absolute moral right to determine how his property may be used. Some choose to (try to) sell that IP; if there is a market, so be it. Some have chosen to simply give it away; that is also their right. However, the secondary issue then remains: Are they doing so because they feel guilt about making a profit? Because "knowledge should be free"? If so, they are operating on a bad moral premise, the idea that profit is evil. Even if it's $1 for an entire operating system. (Note that Red Hat charges a lot more than that for support, but Linus Torvalds and others who created their product gets no compensation linked to those charges.)
The SCO legal action is bound to be used as a straw man to attack profit making with software IP. Their basis for claiming ownership of Linux is specious. The real issue, again, is whether the *creator* (or creators) of a piece of IP have the moral right to designate its usage. In other words, whether the products of the mind can be *property*. Grant that and the side by side existence of Microsoft with Open Source is no mystery and no problem. Attack that and you do attack the foundations of a civilized society, because you support the notion that "society" can freely steal from those who create.
In my searches so far, Dice.com is the best site that I know about. I found out about my current job from a posting there. Monster.com has a number of problems. First, it is not IT oriented; Dice.com is entirely technical. Fewer jobs but higher quality and laser focused. Secondly, Monster.com accepts a LOT of "spam" ads - the posting equivalent of "Make $500/hr in your spare time" kind of email spam. After awhile you can tell what they are, but the fact that they are tolerated at all says something about the integrity and seriousness of Monster.com.
The idea that obscure languages "becoming extinct" will adversely affect computer science is wrong on multiple levels.
First, any language properly so-called has referents in reality. Those referents are language independent; that is a fundamental aspect of epistemology. If that were not so, it would be impossible to translate between human languages. Obviously, it is very possible.
Second, the characteristics of human language which affect computer languages are - what? A computer "language" is a formal syntax to tell an electronic machine exactly what to do, in a particular order. That's it. A lot of Slashdot readers know multiple computer languages (and no doubt, human languages). Aside from speed considerations, any complete computer language can do anything any other language can do, as long as the ability to access given hardware is the same.
Third, what difference does it make if a language is "extinct" or not? Latin is a "dead" language but it forms the root of many European languages. If anything, computer "languages" can, and do, evolve far more rapidly than any human language, to fit evolving needs and better comprehension of good programming practices. Whether an addition operation is called "Addition", "Summa", "Plus", or "+" is irrelevant really, other than conciseness of syntax (leading to "+" as ideal here.)
What other major website purporting to want to be taken seriously and to provide useful news, has a front page article riddled with spelling mistakes including "Fransworth" (should be "Farnsworth")? That's the least of the problems. What is the point of repeating this tired old collectivist Marxist bullshit that the "lone [whatever]'s day is over". Screw the New Yorker. In an industry (computers) that has always absolutely been dominated by individuals, even to the present day, it is really ironic that an organization such as Slashdot that relies on an enormous amount of recent individual technical innovation is so fantastically ignorant of history and philosophy that it feels a need to promote such crap. While Slashdot sometimes has interesting links, I am done helping out its advertising revenue stream - time to set my browser's home page to something else.
From what I recall reading not that long ago, it's really unlikely you're going to find a rental car company that would rent you a car for travel in Eastern Europe. One reason is that the car will probably be stolen by the many grassroots socialists (i.e., thieves) in those countries. And insurance? The rule of law? In case of an accident? Yeah right. If I were you I'd do a LOT of web and Usenet searching before considering such a dangerous trip done in any way.
The idea that a Martian microbe could be pathogenic to earthly life is basically dumb. NASA doesn't believe this for a second.
So what's the bottom line of this red herring? Easy. NASA is now way too much of a fat, incompetent organization to dream of sending a man to Mars. They can barely get a simple Low Earth Orbit space station going for billions over an already bloated budget. Fearmongering is one (very low) way that they can produce classic FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about the very idea to let them off of the hook for not being able to produce such a mission.
Dinkumware also sells an inexpensive drop-in updated replacement STL. I bought it, it's worth it if you do serious programming.
What is amusing is seeing the response of thieves to being called thieves (and thieves are parasites). Guess what - outside of a self-congratulatory cadre of thieves, the actual creators of some works do not appreciate having their work stolen. The mere ability to copy does not confer ownership, any more than the ability to turn the keys in a car permits you to drive away with it when you don't own it. Ellison's point is simple and direct - the creator of a work OWNS that work and those who would copy it "freely" are thieves. That this sounds shocking is a sad testament to the communist mindset engendered by Stallman and co.
NASA is an immensely wasteful, bloated bureaucracy that's still riding on the glory days of Apollo. More than any other factor it is responsible for the LACK of private space development. Rather than stealing away more money from the people who earned it, how about just auctioning off NASA's facilities to private companies who actually want to make space accessible on a real commercial basis. Then perhaps those of us who don't have $20 million to spend on a ride will have a finite chance of getting into space before we die of old age.
You hit the nail on the head. What people have today on their cable modems or DSL lines is really PEAK bandwidth capability. Does it really take a genius to see that if every cable or DSL line tried to run at maximum speed that no provider in the world could handle it? It's a matter of statistics. As you noted, all that would happen would be lousy service for everyone (this in fact already happens in areas where cable modem nodes are overly subscribed.)
A useful analogy would be to imagine a bunch of firehoses hooked up to a water pump that can move 100 amount of gallons per minute. Let's say each hose can move 10 gallons of water per minute. People have valves that let them turn it on and off at will. Let's say there are 500 hoses hooked up. This may still provide acceptable water flow on as "as needed basis" if usage is bursty, but turn them all on and you aren't going to get 5000 gallons per minute aggregate water flow: You're going to get what the pump can move, 100 gallons/minute, aggregately. Or in other words, given equal resistance among the hoses, 1/5 gallon of water per minute flowing from each.
True, the companies and the owners aren't the same - my point was that one company acquiring or merging with another is a vote of confidence and probably a step in the right direction. "Toast" implies something like bankruptcy.
Being acquired by and funded by a billionaire is hardly a bad event for the company in question. Who approves such stupidly misleading headlines?
Unless Microsoft runs CeBit, it would be accurate (as opposed to CmdrTaco's verbiage) to say that *CeBit management* "kicked out" Sony.
Why would Microsoft care? Hmm, maybe because they were following the rules and didn't plan to have people playing on the Xbox, which would only have been fair if Sony was doing it?
You can imagine the strident bitching that would appear if *Microsoft* had broken the rules and had scores of Xbox stations set up for people to play.
Microsoft was founded in/around *1975* at a time when nobody thought there was a market for PC software. Some of the Marxists-in-training who regularly snipe at Microsoft were probably not even born then. A standard, cheap Intel platform that can run e.g. Linux exists because of Microsoft software driven custumer mass demand for PCs. It's very "in" to be a Microsoft basher, but try looking at reality sometime.
Actually no, I haven't heard of Kylix, but I'll take your word that it's a good Pascal compiler. I haven't done Pascal since the good old days of Turbo Pascal - once I found C, then C++, I gave up Pascal. Other than a dedicated cadre of Delphi programmers (if you want to count Delphi as a sort of Objective Pascal), I've seen very few developers use Pascal recently - if you look for example at the various open source projects, the large majority of them are C/C++.
A first look at the source code of SapDB appears to show that it's all C/C++. In fact, at: http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/sapdb/deve lop/framesets/sap_db_development.htm
they indicate Perl 5.005, Python 1.5.2, and Visual C++ 6.0 are all that are required to build the database. When you think about it, this makes sense, who makes a good Pascal compiler these days?