While this will be a great boon to people looking to defend copyrights, there is a downside to this legal defensibility: what happens if someone gains access to your PC? I can just imagine trying to defend myself in court by saying that while there is a signed and dated document delineating my plans to murder someone, I did not actually commit the act nor did I even write the document. Fun fun.
The problem I've encountered recently is a mass of email that imitates Microsoft update announcements and silimar emails. For some reason Mozilla refuses to filter this stuff out even though I've been marking them all as junk. I still see ~20 a day in this exact format.
Check the decibel ratings of heatsinks before making a purchase. Carefully shopping around can turn up even normal fan-based heatsinks that average around 22 decibels, much lower than the typical 45 or so many heatsink/fans generate. I've gotten to the point where the loudest thing in my system by a good margin is a 10k RPM HD. When it isn't spinning my case is practically silent.
with hardware resiliency, and work on your machine while it's running. A few years back I dropped a screw into my case, it hit the mainboard with a spark and a puff of smoke and the machine rebooted... when it came back up the BIOS had been reset. A month ago I plugged the power cable into a connected HD that resulted in a similar spark and puff followed by a hard crash. While at work we had T1 call processing hardware that would fail if you sneezed at it wrong or pretty much opened the case without a grounding strap on your wrist. Not very pleasant given the cost of the damn boards.
I've personally never owned an IDE device. One of the nifty things about SCSI is the large number of devices it can support concurrently. When I need more space I just buy a new drive and relegate an older one to storage for backup files--I typically have 2-3 CD type drives and 3-4 hard drives installed. Is IDE really that much cheaper if the drives fail in half the time? In the 14 years I've been using SCSI at home I've yet to have a single device fail on me. The only thing that sucks about SCSI is the constantly changing bus standards. In the time I've had SCSI devices the SCSI connector format has changed probably 3-4 times compared to 0 with IDE.
Last time I checked there were no plans to incorporate support for DRM into Linux. This obviously doesn't make it any better for the rest of the world, but...
An instance of a template is created for every type that template is applied to, but only when explicitly necessary. So say I create a list and a list, you will end up with the class declarations for both compiled into your application. But say that from these two lists you only ever call list::foo(). This function call is the only code that the compiler ever instantiates in your application. So from your two lists you end up with two class declarations and the code for one function call. Some code bloat.
And as others have said there are other substantial advantages to using templates. Complex code generation, type safety, algorithm genericity, etc.
Personally, I would not hire someone as a C++ programmer who did not demonstrate at least a reasonable understanding of templates. If you're ignoring this facet of C++ out of some unfounded fear of code bloat I gurantee you're doing yourself a grave disservice.
I spent 5 minutes browsing ragingcow.com and all I've learned is that someone has spent an inprdinate amount of time writing a blog using a cow persona. I have no interest in returning to the site, reading what's on the site, or indeed, finding out why someone is pretending to be a cow in the first place. What an incredibly lame marketing ploy.
Try none. Intellectual property laws have effectively hamstrung software engineering as an industrial process. While this may be great from a programmer's perspective (income potential and job security), it's detrimental to the industry as a whole. I've even run into situations where I've been unable to bring standard utility code with me from one job to another because the companies I work for are afraid of a lawsuit.
You have to accept the fact that the software industry is still it infancy. We're still working on a development process that allows for true compoment interchangability and programming by design rather than direction. The software industry is the same place now as it was 25 years ago. It's much like metalsmithing shortly before the industrial revolution. Everything is hand-crafted and trade-secrets are jealously guarded by companies, while programmers/journeymen are encouraged to attribute their skills to their company and not to leave to work anywhere else. Finally, basically no effort has been made at anything resembling component interchangibility (see: "intellectual property laws"). While mechanical engineering may have long since settled on the idea of basic compoment standards (you can go to any hardware store and buy a replacement screw for that thingamabob at home), only passing attempts have been made in the software industry and this only by a company who wants to sell their new "component solution."
This is one area where open-source software has the potential to fundamentally change everything, but until there's a way for programmers to make a living developing OSS, the change will be long in coming. Ultimately, companies may start to realize that jealously protecting knowledge/code isn't necessarily in even their best economic interest, but until then we have a future of hand-crafted software to look forward to. After you've re-created the same wheel 10 or 15 times it starts to get old. It's much more satisfying to be able to focus on the high-level problems without mucking in the minutae. IP laws may have been created to protect investment and thereby encourage innovation, but their actual effect is exactly the opposite.
One notable exception being the finance industry. In NYC, most of the larger trading organizations maintain DR sites somewhere else in case of something like, oh, Sept 11. The issue here though is that these companies need a fully capable and connected trading floor rather than just a backup server room, and the short-term loss potential of the industry is such that DR costs are generally quite reasonable in comparison.
For one thing, the NOCs and the switching centers of the major switched carriers aren't always even in the same building. The only people in the switching centers are people that need to be there and switching centers of major carriers all even occasionally share a building (maybe bad from a single-point-of-failure standpoint, but it means that they all get to exploit a single well-designed and well-placed building for a slightly more reasonable cost). The hardware rooms are all temperature controlled, are on replenishable power backup systems (to account for theoretically unlimited time off-grid), and protected from fire by gas systems (like Halon). They also generally don't have anything flammable anywhere (how did this fire get started anyway?). You've got to remember, in the US anyway, phone companies are considered utilities and governed by special rules as a result. If a city were being firebombed and police had ordered that civilians not be allowed on the streets, switch operators would be an exception to that rule. It's highly unlikely any of our switching centers would fail from much besides a natural disaster (floods have interrupted service before) or a deliberate attack.
There are more desktop linux distributions than there are desktop linux users. It's no wonder linux still can't compete with windows on the desktop. If a few distros die off it would be a good thing. Linux proves that open source will never be able to compete with proprietary software in novie markets because there's no one forcing everyone to agree on anything. This might be okay if the product is for a geek who's just going to want to rip it apart and customize it anyway, but it's tantamount to suicide if you want to market the product to someone who just learned what a mouse is.
in a computer game. How this is handled may well affect the computer game market as a whole. You may not care about sims eating branded cheeseburgers, but what if Id's next big game is called "Doom 3: Bob's Big Boy vs. the Big Mac Attack?" Commercials are bad enough in TV and radio, and product placement in movies gets pretty bad at times. I fear the day when computer games fall victim as well.
Really, now. It may be an innivative design, but there are practical reasons why existing designs have their weels inline rather than parallel. Why would I pay thousands of dollars for an electric scooter that's got inherent design flaws the $400 ones don't? Sure hitting a big bump may be considered user error, but MS could claim its GPFs were the result of user error as well. How about someone release a $4000 scooter whose innovations relate to the power supply? That's where the real problem lies.
Perhaps this will help inspire people to actually use public-key encryption and message-signing. An email client could be set up to reject email that wasn't signed, or email that was signed by a questionable key. Sure, the spammers could just create public keys and upload them to keyservers, but these keys would be quickly identified as the source of spam, forcing spammers to upload new keys to the keyservers, etc. Keyservers, being a necessary part of the process, could be set up to throttle key submissions from subnets, or even enforce some kind of verification process (via email recipts).
And this isn't even to mention the vast improvements in automatic email analysis (which were mentioned just this week). This topic borders on FUD.
that will be the challenge. Remember, these are completely legitimate uses of the IP protocol. It's not like we could (probably) detect any of these techniques.
The traceroute bit offers some interesting MITM possibilities. Yes, it requires a connection to be established, which assumes that the client is legitimate, but what about someone upstream that's messing with the IP packet before passing it on?
All in all these are incredibly clever hacks. My compliments to the chef.
There is already a NWN standalone server for linux, and the client is on the way, but there will be NO port of the toolset. From what I've heard, this was because Kylix/C++ was released later than planned, and the team apparently didn't want to deal with a late-term port from C++Builder.
Does this mean I'd have a shot at picking a government-based service, creating a business that provided the same service, and then lobbying to have the government-based service shut down by arguing unfair competition?
to run on massively parallel machines? It does have threads, but that's only part of the solution. This would also mean throwing out all their existing code unless they wanted to use that terrifying Java-Native C integration. I don't think the problem was ever an issue of language so much as addressing their compilation problems.
Microsoft hired Herb Sutter a while back and has become quite committed to producing a fully compliant C++ compiler. VC7 is a huge step in the right direction and VC7.1 (due out probably within the next 6 months, and approximately $30 to upgrade from VC7) will iron out almost every remaining issue, including partial template specialization. I haven't been watching gcc as closely but when VC7.1 comes out it will probably surpass gcc in terms of standards conformance.
It's not VC++'s code that isn't portable, it's some of the language extensions MS added for Windows-specific stuff like COM. Since any cross-platform project has to encapsulate platform-specific code anyway, this isn't much of an issue in the grand scheme of things.
Last time I heard, supercomputer timesharing was one of the original purposes for the internet. The idea was to allow scientists to purchase computer time on some Really Big Machine somewhere to get their number crunching done. The point was to provide supercomputer access without the need to purchase or maintain said supercomputer.
Perhaps what makes this so special is that IBM is putting a pretty interface on top of it and trying to sell the feature to busineses rather than laboratories?
Slashdot Mirror
While this will be a great boon to people looking to defend copyrights, there is a downside to this legal defensibility: what happens if someone gains access to your PC? I can just imagine trying to defend myself in court by saying that while there is a signed and dated document delineating my plans to murder someone, I did not actually commit the act nor did I even write the document. Fun fun.
The problem I've encountered recently is a mass of email that imitates Microsoft update announcements and silimar emails. For some reason Mozilla refuses to filter this stuff out even though I've been marking them all as junk. I still see ~20 a day in this exact format.
Check the decibel ratings of heatsinks before making a purchase. Carefully shopping around can turn up even normal fan-based heatsinks that average around 22 decibels, much lower than the typical 45 or so many heatsink/fans generate. I've gotten to the point where the loudest thing in my system by a good margin is a 10k RPM HD. When it isn't spinning my case is practically silent.
with hardware resiliency, and work on your machine while it's running. A few years back I dropped a screw into my case, it hit the mainboard with a spark and a puff of smoke and the machine rebooted... when it came back up the BIOS had been reset. A month ago I plugged the power cable into a connected HD that resulted in a similar spark and puff followed by a hard crash. While at work we had T1 call processing hardware that would fail if you sneezed at it wrong or pretty much opened the case without a grounding strap on your wrist. Not very pleasant given the cost of the damn boards.
I've personally never owned an IDE device. One of the nifty things about SCSI is the large number of devices it can support concurrently. When I need more space I just buy a new drive and relegate an older one to storage for backup files--I typically have 2-3 CD type drives and 3-4 hard drives installed. Is IDE really that much cheaper if the drives fail in half the time? In the 14 years I've been using SCSI at home I've yet to have a single device fail on me. The only thing that sucks about SCSI is the constantly changing bus standards. In the time I've had SCSI devices the SCSI connector format has changed probably 3-4 times compared to 0 with IDE.
for linking to the same websites?
Last time I checked there were no plans to incorporate support for DRM into Linux. This obviously doesn't make it any better for the rest of the world, but...
An instance of a template is created for every type that template is applied to, but only when explicitly necessary. So say I create a list and a list, you will end up with the class declarations for both compiled into your application. But say that from these two lists you only ever call list::foo(). This function call is the only code that the compiler ever instantiates in your application. So from your two lists you end up with two class declarations and the code for one function call. Some code bloat.
And as others have said there are other substantial advantages to using templates. Complex code generation, type safety, algorithm genericity, etc.
Personally, I would not hire someone as a C++ programmer who did not demonstrate at least a reasonable understanding of templates. If you're ignoring this facet of C++ out of some unfounded fear of code bloat I gurantee you're doing yourself a grave disservice.
I spent 5 minutes browsing ragingcow.com and all I've learned is that someone has spent an inprdinate amount of time writing a blog using a cow persona. I have no interest in returning to the site, reading what's on the site, or indeed, finding out why someone is pretending to be a cow in the first place. What an incredibly lame marketing ploy.
Try none. Intellectual property laws have effectively hamstrung software engineering as an industrial process. While this may be great from a programmer's perspective (income potential and job security), it's detrimental to the industry as a whole. I've even run into situations where I've been unable to bring standard utility code with me from one job to another because the companies I work for are afraid of a lawsuit.
You have to accept the fact that the software industry is still it infancy. We're still working on a development process that allows for true compoment interchangability and programming by design rather than direction. The software industry is the same place now as it was 25 years ago. It's much like metalsmithing shortly before the industrial revolution. Everything is hand-crafted and trade-secrets are jealously guarded by companies, while programmers/journeymen are encouraged to attribute their skills to their company and not to leave to work anywhere else. Finally, basically no effort has been made at anything resembling component interchangibility (see: "intellectual property laws"). While mechanical engineering may have long since settled on the idea of basic compoment standards (you can go to any hardware store and buy a replacement screw for that thingamabob at home), only passing attempts have been made in the software industry and this only by a company who wants to sell their new "component solution."
This is one area where open-source software has the potential to fundamentally change everything, but until there's a way for programmers to make a living developing OSS, the change will be long in coming. Ultimately, companies may start to realize that jealously protecting knowledge/code isn't necessarily in even their best economic interest, but until then we have a future of hand-crafted software to look forward to. After you've re-created the same wheel 10 or 15 times it starts to get old. It's much more satisfying to be able to focus on the high-level problems without mucking in the minutae. IP laws may have been created to protect investment and thereby encourage innovation, but their actual effect is exactly the opposite.
One notable exception being the finance industry. In NYC, most of the larger trading organizations maintain DR sites somewhere else in case of something like, oh, Sept 11. The issue here though is that these companies need a fully capable and connected trading floor rather than just a backup server room, and the short-term loss potential of the industry is such that DR costs are generally quite reasonable in comparison.
For one thing, the NOCs and the switching centers of the major switched carriers aren't always even in the same building. The only people in the switching centers are people that need to be there and switching centers of major carriers all even occasionally share a building (maybe bad from a single-point-of-failure standpoint, but it means that they all get to exploit a single well-designed and well-placed building for a slightly more reasonable cost). The hardware rooms are all temperature controlled, are on replenishable power backup systems (to account for theoretically unlimited time off-grid), and protected from fire by gas systems (like Halon). They also generally don't have anything flammable anywhere (how did this fire get started anyway?). You've got to remember, in the US anyway, phone companies are considered utilities and governed by special rules as a result. If a city were being firebombed and police had ordered that civilians not be allowed on the streets, switch operators would be an exception to that rule. It's highly unlikely any of our switching centers would fail from much besides a natural disaster (floods have interrupted service before) or a deliberate attack.
There are more desktop linux distributions than there are desktop linux users. It's no wonder linux still can't compete with windows on the desktop. If a few distros die off it would be a good thing. Linux proves that open source will never be able to compete with proprietary software in novie markets because there's no one forcing everyone to agree on anything. This might be okay if the product is for a geek who's just going to want to rip it apart and customize it anyway, but it's tantamount to suicide if you want to market the product to someone who just learned what a mouse is.
in a computer game. How this is handled may well affect the computer game market as a whole. You may not care about sims eating branded cheeseburgers, but what if Id's next big game is called "Doom 3: Bob's Big Boy vs. the Big Mac Attack?" Commercials are bad enough in TV and radio, and product placement in movies gets pretty bad at times. I fear the day when computer games fall victim as well.
in the road.
Really, now. It may be an innivative design, but there are practical reasons why existing designs have their weels inline rather than parallel. Why would I pay thousands of dollars for an electric scooter that's got inherent design flaws the $400 ones don't? Sure hitting a big bump may be considered user error, but MS could claim its GPFs were the result of user error as well. How about someone release a $4000 scooter whose innovations relate to the power supply? That's where the real problem lies.
Perhaps this will help inspire people to actually use public-key encryption and message-signing. An email client could be set up to reject email that wasn't signed, or email that was signed by a questionable key. Sure, the spammers could just create public keys and upload them to keyservers, but these keys would be quickly identified as the source of spam, forcing spammers to upload new keys to the keyservers, etc. Keyservers, being a necessary part of the process, could be set up to throttle key submissions from subnets, or even enforce some kind of verification process (via email recipts).
And this isn't even to mention the vast improvements in automatic email analysis (which were mentioned just this week). This topic borders on FUD.
that will be the challenge. Remember, these are completely legitimate uses of the IP protocol. It's not like we could (probably) detect any of these techniques.
The traceroute bit offers some interesting MITM possibilities. Yes, it requires a connection to be established, which assumes that the client is legitimate, but what about someone upstream that's messing with the IP packet before passing it on?
All in all these are incredibly clever hacks. My compliments to the chef.
There is already a NWN standalone server for linux, and the client is on the way, but there will be NO port of the toolset. From what I've heard, this was because Kylix/C++ was released later than planned, and the team apparently didn't want to deal with a late-term port from C++Builder.
Does this mean I'd have a shot at picking a government-based service, creating a business that provided the same service, and then lobbying to have the government-based service shut down by arguing unfair competition?
to run on massively parallel machines? It does have threads, but that's only part of the solution. This would also mean throwing out all their existing code unless they wanted to use that terrifying Java-Native C integration. I don't think the problem was ever an issue of language so much as addressing their compilation problems.
Microsoft hired Herb Sutter a while back and has become quite committed to producing a fully compliant C++ compiler. VC7 is a huge step in the right direction and VC7.1 (due out probably within the next 6 months, and approximately $30 to upgrade from VC7) will iron out almost every remaining issue, including partial template specialization. I haven't been watching gcc as closely but when VC7.1 comes out it will probably surpass gcc in terms of standards conformance.
It's not VC++'s code that isn't portable, it's some of the language extensions MS added for Windows-specific stuff like COM. Since any cross-platform project has to encapsulate platform-specific code anyway, this isn't much of an issue in the grand scheme of things.
My God. All this just to chat at work?
I hear it includes a person willing to pay retail price for all your used PC hardware.
Last time I heard, supercomputer timesharing was one of the original purposes for the internet. The idea was to allow scientists to purchase computer time on some Really Big Machine somewhere to get their number crunching done. The point was to provide supercomputer access without the need to purchase or maintain said supercomputer.
Perhaps what makes this so special is that IBM is putting a pretty interface on top of it and trying to sell the feature to busineses rather than laboratories?
"Curious Yellow" is also a term from his novel, "Vurt."