As far as I know nobody has formally specified the 'win' outcome for the war -- so I'm a bit doubtful that anyone has worked out an EXACT 26% (not 25%! That number would sound like a guess! But 26% sounds like SCIENCE!) chance of the US side achieving it.
If the 26% really was worked out with a reasonable methodology, then the interesting part isn't the number so much as whatever definition they came up with of 'victory'.
That said, giving ridiculously exact answers to impossibly vague questions is fun and harmless. 92.8% of the time.
So, the Jamie guy extends Express. Which has a license forbiddeng extension, and extensibility features removed. He works around this removal of the features to create something which, while useful, is in violation of the license.
And it falls to Jason Weber to grapple with this even though he's really a dev -- poor guy.
So Jason Weber sends mail after mail and even arranges 30 mins with someone really pretty important. And Jamie just keeps on changing his mind and seeking advice and saying he'll remove the feature and then again that he won't remove it. And Weber never really runs out of patience.
I would have run out of patience around month 4 or thereabouts.
You may say that MS's license terms are silly -- but they are a for-profit company and they do have to sell some copies of the actual full price product. Even if MS's license terms are silly, the article is certainly being both disingenuous and depressingly immature in depicting Weber and the other MS staff involved as arrogant and condescending.
Does LiftPort's failure reveal systematic shortcomings in the mechanisms now available for funding and enabling innovative and risky projects? Or is the failure a one-off, caused by accidents or the inherent difficulty of the task?
It's also worth noting that the identities of/. posters are very weak. People reply to the post, not to the poster, and relationships pretty much never last longer than the thread they are in. I can't actually name a single/. user name except my own.
I used to have a.sig saying: "If you recognize me at all, you probably recognize me by this.sig" and I think it was true.
Compare this to sites like Fark where rivalries and stereotypes rule. Hey, time for Bevets to post how we're all going to hell! Time for Wild_Bluebonnet to post about how Texas is the best and Liberals should all be shot with silver bullets! Time for Dancin_in_Anson to foam at the mouth!
This is WHY/. has a better signal/noise ratio after so long. People are (often) reacting to what they actually just read, rather than logging on with the intention of showing off / pursuing vendettas / posting pictures of their guns.
The question is, why? What is it about/. that has made the post, not the poster, the fundamental item? I think partly it's layout and the lack of avatars, graphics, etc., but there must be other factors that are hard to isolate. It's a very *good* thing, though -- I wish I knew how to duplicate the recipe for other forums.
Ballmer has a track record of taking a large, powerful empire and gradually frittering away its goodwill, resources, and internal cohesion by his aggressive posturing, constant confrontation, and wilful ignorance of what made it great in the first place.
The question is, how has he *avoided* becoming a member of the Republican administration for so long?
Disclaimer: I couldn't care less about US party politics, but the parallel is actually striking enough to mention.
Meta-Disclaimer: I am aware of the locution 'could care less' and I consider it WRONG WRONG WRONG!!! *throws chair*
On medium to large projects -- 10 to 100 developers maybe, on 1 to 5 sites, with a significant amount of metaconfiguration which is itself versioned -- it is simply impossible to forbid concurrent editing of code.
It's also extremely hard to avoid branching. To say 'there is no branching' is to say 'nobody has any changes that need to be in version control, and yet should not be forced on all developers / all releases'. It's only possible to say this about extremely small projects -- small enough to have only one stream of development going at once.
I'm stating the obvious here but it's worth repeating because some people do have a lot of trouble understanding that proper SCM (as opposed to the parent post's conception of SCM) is necessary.
Well, all modern PCs can boot from a USB drive. Knoppix et al has severe problems with most PCs that I have contact with including:
--All small form factor PCs (shuttles etc) --Most PCs that have mobo gfx/sound and then *also* a gfx card --Various other PCs for no reason.
The big problem (with Knoppix specifically) is getting it to boot at all, so it's not a matter of having exotic devices -- I wouldn't need those anyway for de-spywaring.
So a more robust distro with a different boot method could be very useful.
So in this one South London neighborhood that I occasionally frequent, there was an armed robbery at 4 in the afternoon on the main street last Saturday. It's a quiet neighborhood, very well-balanced, well-off, so it makes sense to come there and rob people.
There was a similar robbery the previous week.
The week before that, it was on a weekday evening, I guess they had a busy schedule that week. It's the same guys each time. They live in this totally different neighborhood a way to the south, though.
And there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Nothing at all. What are you going to do? Call Batman? The UK police are very nice guys (compared to any other police force I've met) but they really can't do much in this situation.
The trouble is, this particular chunk of street doesn't have any cameras. The south half of the street near the station does, and the north half near what's called a 'roundabout' does, but there's this bit in the middle that doesn't. So all you have to do is rob people there, since nobody around here is fool enough to intervene and get jailed or killed, and there's no chance of a conviction (or even police attention) without video evidence. If you have video evidence, and there is a history of crime, and someone gets hurt, then in the end, you can get a custodial sentence passed. It's an uphill struggle, though, because there's a hell of a lot of civil liberties in the way.
If nobody gets hurt, there's nothing you can do even with cameras. Every weekend, kids come up the road from the other, nastier neighborhood to the south, and as they go they kick over stuff and pull flowers out because, well, that's the local culture. It's not a life-threatening problem -- it just means you kind of have to remember to get stuff indoors by a certain time on Fridays. And don't grow rosebushes in the front yard.
But all is not lost. Armed robbery generally *does* mean someone eventually getting hurt, and next year there will be cameras for that bit of street, yay! And none of this is really *Real Violent Crime* such as you might find in south chicago; it's just that there's no reason *not* to mug people or kick stuff over so it just becomes the normal expectation that those things will happen.
The thing about 'omg they are taking our libertiez!' is, Civil Liberties in this sense aren't as important as for example the liberty to *not* be mugged or the liberty to *not* have your stuff smashed or the most important liberty of all, the liberty to *not* have the nature of your life dictated by the whims of thugs. The liberty of not being recorded on camera is actually pretty trivial by comparison.
So install some more freakin cameras. Create new powers to stop 'public nuisance', use electronic tags, maybe suspend habeas corpus or something. Take away more civil liberties. Here, have some of mine. I'll expect them back when I leave the UK.
Is it possible for a device like this to circumvent XP to the point where it can be used to delete files/kill processes that are being protected by freindly spyware processes?
I've been confronted by several XP machines that have spyware which can pretty much never be removed within XP, but which also don't run Knoppix or other 'lite' linux distros. Unless they happen to have a floppy drive for a DOS boot disk, it's a major pain removing spyware.
A Linux USB stick might help, depending on how it's implemented...
...we designed the tests to be as fair and equitable as possible.... And no, we didn't include processing-heavy modern software like Photoshop or Crysis! We selected very basic everyday functions that were performed equally by the 1980's and the 2007 Microsoft applications.
Well, if you designed these tests of performance to IGNORE performance and focus on UI operations which tend to always take the same amount of time because that's exactly the amount of time people will tolerate before they perceive it as slow, then YES, there is no improvement.
Clicking a button to bring up a window has ALWAYS taken about the same amount of time -- the amount of time that people will stand for. Lately, OSes have been able to put some drop-shadowing and stuff in, but the *time taken* stays the same.
Let me restate your 'conclusion':
"When we test only operations that are pretty much independant of the system's performanoe, systems with high performance do no better than those with lower performance."
Or, even more simply:
"HA11O! We Are f0olz!@"
Now, test those two systems on finding the risk of a bond portfolio, or applying a Photoshop filter, or compiling 100,000 lines of code and hey! look! when we choose a test that's performance-related, suddenly high performance is good!
What is/. *thinking* of to give this rubbish free publicity?
Honestly, if some Marxist state from the 60s produced propaganda like that, everyone would laugh:
"The People's Revolution is about more than nationalism! New communal agricultural techniques will enable a standard of living of a completely different nature than today! Manufacturing and distributing goods for the Workers could be taken to a whole new level!"
It's the same fallacy: "If only everyone spontaneously got together and did what I think they should, all problems would go away!"
Yet just because the fictional utopia in question is the 'Semantic Web' rather than the 'Workers Paradise', everybody takes it really seriously. And nobody mocks it at all. Nope, nobody ever laughs at the Semantic Web.
Ok, ok, I'm just being mean, I should go and do something useful.
What you're describing as 'models based on data flow' is the way parallel programming SHOULD be being done already.
The reason a parallel system like/. works, as you say, is that there are well-defined compartments for the 'cooks', buffered work queues between them, and well defined interfaces between their compartments. That structure is forced by the fact that the parallelization is happening across the Internet.
Good software design uses compartmentalization, buffering, and well defined interfaces even when NOT forced to by the physical environment. And lo and behold, multithreading becomes easy (for certain values of 'easy').
All you have to do is forget about the UNIX process model really:/
The mountain of evidence on the Holocaust can't not be washed away just because people think that people ought to decide for themselves if something occured or didn't.
Oh, rubbish. It's like the invasion of Tibet -- well, I say 'invasion' but in fact lots of people would say the lives of working-class Tibetans got a great deal better, and anyway Tibet was part of the Manchurian empire and so was China so they're almost kind of nearly the same country, and anyway you're really just imposing your pre-existing values on something that isn't your business at all, and anyway if you insist on your intolerant interpretation it'll be very hard to get on with any nearby Chinese people whereas if you just drop the whole silly 'invasion' thing which is probably 80% Indian propaganda anyway, it all gets a lot more convenient... gosh, it's like the problem just *faded away*!
Well, yes, 'semantics-carrying containers' did confuse me a bit. The problem in the above scenario is not Unicode -- it's having one bit of code check the input string, and *then* having another bit of code (with different assumptions, e.g. that a Chinese quote mark can end a SQL string) change it before it is used!
In such a case, unless the two bits of code share common assumptions, there's bound to be a hole.
I don't think the issue of Unicode versus some other encoding matters, once you already have a filter transforming the string AFTER it is checked. Are there any systems that really have to work like this?
Would some of the things that led to computers - morse code, telegraphy etc have been feasible using, say, Chinese in its normal written form?
Well, they weren't feasible using English in its normal written form... so I'd guess they wouldn't be feasible using Chinese in it's normal written form either.
Offhand I can't think of any human script or language that's fundamentally suitable to telegraphy. Which isn't really all that surprising.
Down below this post, there's a troll writing something like 'lol if u cant just use ASCII u shud let ur language die u foreign creeps lol k thx'.
And a whole bunch of people then jump on the troll and criticize him for his US-centrism, and so on, and the troll is at -1.
Yet the post I'm replying to, which is at +4, really comes to the same thing as this troll; it's simply UNIX 8-bit centric rather than USA ASCII centric.
The fact is, computers are used for text, and much if not most text is non-ASCII. How would you rather represent that text:
--With Unicode --With KOI-8, KOI-8R, KOI-8RU, EBCDIC, EUC-KR, EUC-JP, shift-JIS, Shift-JIS-the-Jphone-version, ISCII, VISCII, ISO-2022-*, and the many many other encodings that have evolved in different times and environments.
Seriously, which is going to be easier to secure (and otherwise manage) -- one encoding (which is HEAVILY documented and discussed) or a large number of encodings (the actual number being ever-changing and impossible to really know) many of which are not well documented and have forgotten ramifications and assumptions?
Right -- so now you know why people use Unicode so much.
But the interesting question is, why is one error ("All teh world is teh USA lol! Shouldn't you learn to speak English?") rightly jumped on and pounded flat, whereas another form that's actually more problematic ("All teh world is C on UNIX lolz!! Shouldn't you stop wanting dangerous extra features?") isn't?
Actually, I see in another window that some people have indeed been pounding the parent poster flat, so perhaps my question isn't valid after all.
It would be instructive to consider the Internet's small but active flounder population, whose emoticons look like this:..)
Notice the distinctive adaptation to a 'flounder-like' way of percieving faces. Of course you may object that internet-using flounders are imaginary. As a matter of fact, that's an objection was raised even by many prominent flounders when the 'unicorn flounder' smiley was first circulated:
Thank you for your question -- it's true that because of the 'psychic burnout' caused by energizing the dot I forgot to actually give licensing information.
The dot itself is copyright me (kahei) 2007. Obviously, I do not claim that the copyright extends to ANY use of the '.' character -- only to the published work whose text is '.'
Clearly Uri Geller has no "psychic" abilities whatsoever
I'll thank you not to post baseless, unprovable defamatory statements about Mr. Geller. His 'Orange Dot' (see google) was almost certainly the single most amazing thing ever done in the sphere of psychic activity. Seriously, which is more likely:
Proposition A: Uri Geller does have psychic abilities Proposition B: A high proportion of the human race, if you print an orange dot in a newspaper and tell them touching it will make their dreams come true, will take it *very seriously indeed*.
I think you'll agree the latter proposition is simply ludicrous. Therefore it behooves anyone who'd consider themselves a free thinker to consider proposition A.
Incidentally, I myself possess something of Mr. Geller's gift. While he is able to energize a large orange dot on high-quality newsprint, I can only perform the lesser feat of energizing a small black dot on the flimsy medium of a cathode ray tube or TFT. I have focused my spirit energy on this dot and it is now fully energized. Empty your mind, gaze on the dot and let the spirit energy fill you and uplift you.
Here is the Dot: .
Reach out. Touch it. Imagine you are floating on a bed of marshmallows(*). Who knows? Your dreams might just come true!
(*)Genuine quote from Uri Geller, used here as "fair use" as I know Mr. Geller would never stoop to abusing copyright law.
But consider this: if a number can be illegal to distribute, how do you know your post was legal? Maybe some part of that post is some part of the key to something. It's impossible to know until someone accuses you. Maybe some bit of information in your post facilitates the cracking of some form of protection on some content. Or maybe someone just *thinks* it does. Maybe your post is actually the encrypted version of some illegal data -- can you *prove* it isn't? (that last one is UK-only)
See the problem with indiscriminately criminalizing more and more simple actions in order to enforce existing (and justified, though sometimes abused) rights?
I think it's that, rather than the fact that some things are copyrighted and you have to pay for them, which is bothering people.
Lots of people have already jumped on you for the above post (a 'dogpile' -- if you've seen a large group of dogs fighting the analogy will be obvious) but let me just jump onto that pile myself and tear off some more skin.
Leaving aside the error in the above code (which was made possible by the use of gotos -- it's easy to misplace a goto label but hard to misplace a } and still have the code compile), consider all the *good* solutions you had to ignore in order to wind up with the above.
You had to ignore exceptions. You had to ignore "Resource Acquisition Is Initialization".
Maybe, just maybe, there is no C++ compiler for your platform, but there is a C compiler. In that unlikely case, I think I might venture to suggest:
if(a) free(a); if(b) free(b);...repeat for c - z...
See how that frees those pointers that were allocated, WITHOUT involving a branch that spans the whole function for each one?
Or, if allocation is expensive and you don't want to allocate b if a fails:
a = malloc(); if(a) { b = malloc(); if(b).... etc... } else { free (b);} } else { free (a);}
This used to be called 'structured programming' back before OO existed.
Of course, that's assuming you can't do it the right way, with OO constructs such as exceptions.
Now, the error-prone and complex way you have chosen to free that memory is less easy to arrive at, IMHO, than many of the good ways of doing it. It also has a twisted elegance which is kind of attractive. I think that this is an example of a bright and competent programmer -- you -- working in an environment where you are under little pressure either to research best practises, or to compare your code to that of others. It's a classic example of how good programming ability is worth very little without the ability to communicate and learn.
Well yeah. You're the guy who produces, and they (muggers etc) are parasites -- so the burden's always going to be on you, whether it's the burden of paying more for your iPod or the burden of paying tax for a proper legal and penal system, or (if you roll that way) the burden of throwing more money at an education system which focuses entirely on league-tables and 'building self esteem'.
The UK's like the USA -- it educates *some* of its own people but generally it relies on attracting people who were educated elsewhere and immigrate in order to make money. Actually, these days the UK is *more* like this than the USA is -- it's an economy that depends utterly on immigration. This leaves the lower-class young UK-ians, who are often educated to a horrifyingly low level, with a stark choice between crime, the Army, and the supermarket checkout. In the USA the latter two are more likely overall, but in the UK the crime option is a lot safer, and thus the iPod problem.
I think it's just one of those things that nothing much can be done about.
Like the endless parade of anti-IP-infringement measures, like the endless surveillance and mail-sifting programs, this is yet another result of a bunch of people facing (or creating) a social problem, and then trying to convince themselves that a nifty gadget will fix it.
And it's the latest in a long parade.
What they've got is a culture that favors the instigator, rather than the victim, in robbery, street violence, and general antisocial behavior. Here are their solutions so far:
--Cameras --Electronic tags --New Databases (rather like many large companies, the UK government loves greating A New Database to solve any kind of problem) --Magic dream iPods that can't be stolen or some such rubbish
It's a simple choice -- you can either address a problem, or you can talk about how cool it would be if a gadget would make it go away.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know nobody has formally specified the 'win' outcome for the war -- so I'm a bit doubtful that anyone has worked out an EXACT 26% (not 25%! That number would sound like a guess! But 26% sounds like SCIENCE!) chance of the US side achieving it.
If the 26% really was worked out with a reasonable methodology, then the interesting part isn't the number so much as whatever definition they came up with of 'victory'.
That said, giving ridiculously exact answers to impossibly vague questions is fun and harmless. 92.8% of the time.
Isn't this just a watered-down version of Toyota's iFoot from 2 years ago?
I mean I hate to be the one who comes out and says it, but...
Yes, they funded this innovation by buying equity.
C'mon, learn how it works. It's the system you live in.
So, the Jamie guy extends Express. Which has a license forbiddeng extension, and extensibility features removed. He works around this removal of the features to create something which, while useful, is in violation of the license.
And it falls to Jason Weber to grapple with this even though he's really a dev -- poor guy.
So Jason Weber sends mail after mail and even arranges 30 mins with someone really pretty important. And Jamie just keeps on changing his mind and seeking advice and saying he'll remove the feature and then again that he won't remove it. And Weber never really runs out of patience.
I would have run out of patience around month 4 or thereabouts.
You may say that MS's license terms are silly -- but they are a for-profit company and they do have to sell some copies of the actual full price product. Even if MS's license terms are silly, the article is certainly being both disingenuous and depressingly immature in depicting Weber and the other MS staff involved as arrogant and condescending.
I have a question:
Does LiftPort's failure reveal systematic shortcomings in the mechanisms now available for funding and enabling innovative and risky projects? Or is the failure a one-off, caused by accidents or the inherent difficulty of the task?
Obviously one would hope for the latter.
It's also worth noting that the identities of
I used to have a
Compare this to sites like Fark where rivalries and stereotypes rule. Hey, time for Bevets to post how we're all going to hell! Time for Wild_Bluebonnet to post about how Texas is the best and Liberals should all be shot with silver bullets! Time for Dancin_in_Anson to foam at the mouth!
This is WHY
The question is, why? What is it about
Ballmer has a track record of taking a large, powerful empire and gradually frittering away its goodwill, resources, and internal cohesion by his aggressive posturing, constant confrontation, and wilful ignorance of what made it great in the first place.
The question is, how has he *avoided* becoming a member of the Republican administration for so long?
Disclaimer: I couldn't care less about US party politics, but the parallel is actually striking enough to mention.
Meta-Disclaimer: I am aware of the locution 'could care less' and I consider it WRONG WRONG WRONG!!! *throws chair*
On medium to large projects -- 10 to 100 developers maybe, on 1 to 5 sites, with a significant amount of metaconfiguration which is itself versioned -- it is simply impossible to forbid concurrent editing of code.
It's also extremely hard to avoid branching. To say 'there is no branching' is to say 'nobody has any changes that need to be in version control, and yet should not be forced on all developers / all releases'. It's only possible to say this about extremely small projects -- small enough to have only one stream of development going at once.
I'm stating the obvious here but it's worth repeating because some people do have a lot of trouble understanding that proper SCM (as opposed to the parent post's conception of SCM) is necessary.
Well, all modern PCs can boot from a USB drive. Knoppix et al has severe problems with most PCs that I have contact with including:
--All small form factor PCs (shuttles etc)
--Most PCs that have mobo gfx/sound and then *also* a gfx card
--Various other PCs for no reason.
The big problem (with Knoppix specifically) is getting it to boot at all, so it's not a matter of having exotic devices -- I wouldn't need those anyway for de-spywaring.
So a more robust distro with a different boot method could be very useful.
So in this one South London neighborhood that I occasionally frequent, there was an armed robbery at 4 in the afternoon on the main street last Saturday. It's a quiet neighborhood, very well-balanced, well-off, so it makes sense to come there and rob people.
There was a similar robbery the previous week.
The week before that, it was on a weekday evening, I guess they had a busy schedule that week. It's the same guys each time. They live in this totally different neighborhood a way to the south, though.
And there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Nothing at all. What are you going to do? Call Batman? The UK police are very nice guys (compared to any other police force I've met) but they really can't do much in this situation.
The trouble is, this particular chunk of street doesn't have any cameras. The south half of the street near the station does, and the north half near what's called a 'roundabout' does, but there's this bit in the middle that doesn't. So all you have to do is rob people there, since nobody around here is fool enough to intervene and get jailed or killed, and there's no chance of a conviction (or even police attention) without video evidence. If you have video evidence, and there is a history of crime, and someone gets hurt, then in the end, you can get a custodial sentence passed. It's an uphill struggle, though, because there's a hell of a lot of civil liberties in the way.
If nobody gets hurt, there's nothing you can do even with cameras. Every weekend, kids come up the road from the other, nastier neighborhood to the south, and as they go they kick over stuff and pull flowers out because, well, that's the local culture. It's not a life-threatening problem -- it just means you kind of have to remember to get stuff indoors by a certain time on Fridays. And don't grow rosebushes in the front yard.
But all is not lost. Armed robbery generally *does* mean someone eventually getting hurt, and next year there will be cameras for that bit of street, yay! And none of this is really *Real Violent Crime* such as you might find in south chicago; it's just that there's no reason *not* to mug people or kick stuff over so it just becomes the normal expectation that those things will happen.
The thing about 'omg they are taking our libertiez!' is, Civil Liberties in this sense aren't as important as for example the liberty to *not* be mugged or the liberty to *not* have your stuff smashed or the most important liberty of all, the liberty to *not* have the nature of your life dictated by the whims of thugs. The liberty of not being recorded on camera is actually pretty trivial by comparison.
So install some more freakin cameras. Create new powers to stop 'public nuisance', use electronic tags, maybe suspend habeas corpus or something. Take away more civil liberties. Here, have some of mine. I'll expect them back when I leave the UK.
Is it possible for a device like this to circumvent XP to the point where it can be used to delete files/kill processes that are being protected by freindly spyware processes?
I've been confronted by several XP machines that have spyware which can pretty much never be removed within XP, but which also don't run Knoppix or other 'lite' linux distros. Unless they happen to have a floppy drive for a DOS boot disk, it's a major pain removing spyware.
A Linux USB stick might help, depending on how it's implemented...
...we designed the tests to be as fair and equitable as possible. ... And no, we didn't include processing-heavy modern software like Photoshop or Crysis! We selected very basic everyday functions that were performed equally by the 1980's and the 2007 Microsoft applications.
/. *thinking* of to give this rubbish free publicity?
Well, if you designed these tests of performance to IGNORE performance and focus on UI operations which tend to always take the same amount of time because that's exactly the amount of time people will tolerate before they perceive it as slow, then YES, there is no improvement.
Clicking a button to bring up a window has ALWAYS taken about the same amount of time -- the amount of time that people will stand for. Lately, OSes have been able to put some drop-shadowing and stuff in, but the *time taken* stays the same.
Let me restate your 'conclusion':
"When we test only operations that are pretty much independant of the system's performanoe, systems with high performance do no better than those with lower performance."
Or, even more simply:
"HA11O! We Are f0olz!@"
Now, test those two systems on finding the risk of a bond portfolio, or applying a Photoshop filter, or compiling 100,000 lines of code and hey! look! when we choose a test that's performance-related, suddenly high performance is good!
What is
Honestly, if some Marxist state from the 60s produced propaganda like that, everyone would laugh:
"The People's Revolution is about more than nationalism! New communal agricultural techniques will enable a standard of living of a completely different nature than today! Manufacturing and distributing goods for the Workers could be taken to a whole new level!"
It's the same fallacy: "If only everyone spontaneously got together and did what I think they should, all problems would go away!"
Yet just because the fictional utopia in question is the 'Semantic Web' rather than the 'Workers Paradise', everybody takes it really seriously. And nobody mocks it at all. Nope, nobody ever laughs at the Semantic Web.
Ok, ok, I'm just being mean, I should go and do something useful.
What you're describing as 'models based on data flow' is the way parallel programming SHOULD be being done already.
The reason a parallel system like
Good software design uses compartmentalization, buffering, and well defined interfaces even when NOT forced to by the physical environment. And lo and behold, multithreading becomes easy (for certain values of 'easy').
All you have to do is forget about the UNIX process model really
The mountain of evidence on the Holocaust can't not be washed away just because people think that people ought to decide for themselves if something occured or didn't.
Oh, rubbish. It's like the invasion of Tibet -- well, I say 'invasion' but in fact lots of people would say the lives of working-class Tibetans got a great deal better, and anyway Tibet was part of the Manchurian empire and so was China so they're almost kind of nearly the same country, and anyway you're really just imposing your pre-existing values on something that isn't your business at all, and anyway if you insist on your intolerant interpretation it'll be very hard to get on with any nearby Chinese people whereas if you just drop the whole silly 'invasion' thing which is probably 80% Indian propaganda anyway, it all gets a lot more convenient... gosh, it's like the problem just *faded away*!
Repeat as necessary for other massacres, etc.
Well, yes, 'semantics-carrying containers' did confuse me a bit. The problem in the above scenario is not Unicode -- it's having one bit of code check the input string, and *then* having another bit of code (with different assumptions, e.g. that a Chinese quote mark can end a SQL string) change it before it is used!
In such a case, unless the two bits of code share common assumptions, there's bound to be a hole.
I don't think the issue of Unicode versus some other encoding matters, once you already have a filter transforming the string AFTER it is checked. Are there any systems that really have to work like this?
Would some of the things that led to computers - morse code, telegraphy etc have been feasible using, say, Chinese in its normal written form?
Well, they weren't feasible using English in its normal written form... so I'd guess they wouldn't be feasible using Chinese in it's normal written form either.
Offhand I can't think of any human script or language that's fundamentally suitable to telegraphy. Which isn't really all that surprising.
Down below this post, there's a troll writing something like 'lol if u cant just use ASCII u shud let ur language die u foreign creeps lol k thx'.
And a whole bunch of people then jump on the troll and criticize him for his US-centrism, and so on, and the troll is at -1.
Yet the post I'm replying to, which is at +4, really comes to the same thing as this troll; it's simply UNIX 8-bit centric rather than USA ASCII centric.
The fact is, computers are used for text, and much if not most text is non-ASCII. How would you rather represent that text:
--With Unicode
--With KOI-8, KOI-8R, KOI-8RU, EBCDIC, EUC-KR, EUC-JP, shift-JIS, Shift-JIS-the-Jphone-version, ISCII, VISCII, ISO-2022-*, and the many many other encodings that have evolved in different times and environments.
Seriously, which is going to be easier to secure (and otherwise manage) -- one encoding (which is HEAVILY documented and discussed) or a large number of encodings (the actual number being ever-changing and impossible to really know) many of which are not well documented and have forgotten ramifications and assumptions?
Right -- so now you know why people use Unicode so much.
But the interesting question is, why is one error ("All teh world is teh USA lol! Shouldn't you learn to speak English?") rightly jumped on and pounded flat, whereas another form that's actually more problematic ("All teh world is C on UNIX lolz!! Shouldn't you stop wanting dangerous extra features?") isn't?
Actually, I see in another window that some people have indeed been pounding the parent poster flat, so perhaps my question isn't valid after all.
It would be instructive to consider the Internet's small but active flounder population, whose emoticons look like this:
Notice the distinctive adaptation to a 'flounder-like' way of percieving faces. Of course you may object that internet-using flounders are imaginary. As a matter of fact, that's an objection was raised even by many prominent flounders when the 'unicorn flounder' smiley was first circulated:
-..)
Thank you for your question -- it's true that because of the 'psychic burnout' caused by energizing the dot I forgot to actually give licensing information.
The dot itself is copyright me (kahei) 2007. Obviously, I do not claim that the copyright extends to ANY use of the '.' character -- only to the published work whose text is '.'
Clearly Uri Geller has no "psychic" abilities whatsoever
I'll thank you not to post baseless, unprovable defamatory statements about Mr. Geller. His 'Orange Dot' (see google) was almost certainly the single most amazing thing ever done in the sphere of psychic activity. Seriously, which is more likely:
Proposition A: Uri Geller does have psychic abilities
Proposition B: A high proportion of the human race, if you print an orange dot in a newspaper and tell them touching it will make their dreams come true, will take it *very seriously indeed*.
I think you'll agree the latter proposition is simply ludicrous. Therefore it behooves anyone who'd consider themselves a free thinker to consider proposition A.
Incidentally, I myself possess something of Mr. Geller's gift. While he is able to energize a large orange dot on high-quality newsprint, I can only perform the lesser feat of energizing a small black dot on the flimsy medium of a cathode ray tube or TFT. I have focused my spirit energy on this dot and it is now fully energized. Empty your mind, gaze on the dot and let the spirit energy fill you and uplift you.
Here is the Dot: .
Reach out. Touch it. Imagine you are floating on a bed of marshmallows(*). Who knows? Your dreams might just come true!
(*)Genuine quote from Uri Geller, used here as "fair use" as I know Mr. Geller would never stoop to abusing copyright law.
Yeah, fair point.
But consider this: if a number can be illegal to distribute, how do you know your post was legal? Maybe some part of that post is some part of the key to something. It's impossible to know until someone accuses you. Maybe some bit of information in your post facilitates the cracking of some form of protection on some content. Or maybe someone just *thinks* it does. Maybe your post is actually the encrypted version of some illegal data -- can you *prove* it isn't? (that last one is UK-only)
See the problem with indiscriminately criminalizing more and more simple actions in order to enforce existing (and justified, though sometimes abused) rights?
I think it's that, rather than the fact that some things are copyrighted and you have to pay for them, which is bothering people.
Lots of people have already jumped on you for the above post (a 'dogpile' -- if you've seen a large group of dogs fighting the analogy will be obvious) but let me just jump onto that pile myself and tear off some more skin.
Leaving aside the error in the above code (which was made possible by the use of gotos -- it's easy to misplace a goto label but hard to misplace a } and still have the code compile), consider all the *good* solutions you had to ignore in order to wind up with the above.
You had to ignore exceptions.
You had to ignore "Resource Acquisition Is Initialization".
Maybe, just maybe, there is no C++ compiler for your platform, but there is a C compiler. In that unlikely case, I think I might venture to suggest:
if(a) free(a);
if(b) free(b);
See how that frees those pointers that were allocated, WITHOUT involving a branch that spans the whole function for each one?
Or, if allocation is expensive and you don't want to allocate b if a fails:
a = malloc();
if(a) { b = malloc();
if(b)
} else { free (b);}
} else { free (a);}
This used to be called 'structured programming' back before OO existed.
Of course, that's assuming you can't do it the right way, with OO constructs such as exceptions.
Now, the error-prone and complex way you have chosen to free that memory is less easy to arrive at, IMHO, than many of the good ways of doing it. It also has a twisted elegance which is kind of attractive. I think that this is an example of a bright and competent programmer -- you -- working in an environment where you are under little pressure either to research best practises, or to compare your code to that of others. It's a classic example of how good programming ability is worth very little without the ability to communicate and learn.
Well yeah. You're the guy who produces, and they (muggers etc) are parasites -- so the burden's always going to be on you, whether it's the burden of paying more for your iPod or the burden of paying tax for a proper legal and penal system, or (if you roll that way) the burden of throwing more money at an education system which focuses entirely on league-tables and 'building self esteem'.
The UK's like the USA -- it educates *some* of its own people but generally it relies on attracting people who were educated elsewhere and immigrate in order to make money. Actually, these days the UK is *more* like this than the USA is -- it's an economy that depends utterly on immigration. This leaves the lower-class young UK-ians, who are often educated to a horrifyingly low level, with a stark choice between crime, the Army, and the supermarket checkout. In the USA the latter two are more likely overall, but in the UK the crime option is a lot safer, and thus the iPod problem.
I think it's just one of those things that nothing much can be done about.
Like the endless parade of anti-IP-infringement measures, like the endless surveillance and mail-sifting programs, this is yet another result of a bunch of people facing (or creating) a social problem, and then trying to convince themselves that a nifty gadget will fix it.
And it's the latest in a long parade.
What they've got is a culture that favors the instigator, rather than the victim, in robbery, street violence, and general antisocial behavior. Here are their solutions so far:
--Cameras
--Electronic tags
--New Databases (rather like many large companies, the UK government loves greating A New Database to solve any kind of problem)
--Magic dream iPods that can't be stolen or some such rubbish
It's a simple choice -- you can either address a problem, or you can talk about how cool it would be if a gadget would make it go away.