This is really no different than open-source SOAP. What SOAP (and I think Biztalk) are doing are serializing code (java) objects and putting them in XML. Thus the binary-looking stuff in the parent message. The recipient of the XML then de-serializes this back into a runnable object.
I knew someone would bring that up, but you mentioned the point that I would respond with. There should be some authorized user (ie root) intervention before privileged code is run.
A user program like the Sims should simply not be allowed to execute privileged code. My one year old should not be able to crash my Linux box by banging on the keyboard as long as he is not running as root.
regarding Windows allowing a user program to insert a dll/vxd into ring 0: are you serious? What versions of Windows? NT? 2000? I guess 95/98 would allow it, but NT/2000 still allow this? It's been a while since I've written any device drivers; OS/2 v2 was the last time I did this. I'm a little out of touch. Can a user-level program (ring 3) request the kernel to load and run something in ring 0? All without the user installing the ring 0 code? It's ridiculous to think a game should have code running in ring 0.
MS is never going to have a stable operating system if they allow 3rd parties to insert code into the kernel.
Pretty cool. You enter in the number of the station; for example, "961#" is 96Rock in Atlanta. Then you can hit 1 to hear what was most recently played or you key in the time of the song. You can preview the song first so you don't accidentically buy Barry Manilow.
You can hear samples of other songs on the CD too. Not bad.
An amazing story. Perhaps you should advertise the "Hellmouth" series
posted on slashdot.org (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/23/15212 50&mode=nested)
for your readership. One of the feedback responses was a link to your
story about Patrick Griffiths. Patrick showed an amazing amount of
independence and was punished for it. As Patrick probably knows, but
your readership many not be aware, these demonstrations of solidarity
and non-conformity are seldom met with admiration.
Take your suspension, Patrick, and wear it as a badge of honor. I, too,
was different in high school and often felt I was loosing my sanity.
Although I sold out to a degree and tried to conform, I wasn't very
successful. In fact, I was suspended for 10 days accused of drinking
alchohol when, actually, I was only associating with those that did.
Typical guilt-by-association and suspension of due-process that high
school officials exercise liberally. Now, at 32, I'm successful. I have a
great wife, an amazing one year old, and I'm CTO of an up-and-coming
company (not a typical.com - we're already in the
black). I refuse to conform to this day and that attitude has served
me well.
Sorry, but I cannot agree with the inheritance tax. While all his conclusions may be true if the inheritance tax is repealed, I believe people should decide what is done with THEIR money and NOT THE GOVERNMENT. When my parents died, the thought that the government was going to tax their hard-earned money yet-again (income tax) really pissed me off. Then I found out the first tier was at $600K - so we were well below that and weren't taxed.
I still believe the best tax solution is a simple 15-20% sales tax and NOTHING ELSE. Tax people when the spend the money not when they save it. Some institutions would be tax exempt like charity and schools. 15-20% may seem high, but it is roughly the same amount of tax you pay now through sales tax and income tax. After you turn 65 (for example), there is no sales tax. That is ncentive to save for the future.
A couple friends of mine and I started talking about starting our own business and the first order of business was our goals. We all have children, but our goals were to sell out after a few years and not to build a legacy for our kids. I don't want my son having a free ride. I'll pay for his school and any emergencies, but that's it. If he turns out to be a crackhead loser, then he deserves the life of a crackhead loser, not that of a RICH crackhead loser. (Hopefully he didn't turn out that way because of bad parenting, but even if so, giving him money out of guilt doesn't help him.)
I find that the most charitable people are those that clawed their way up from the bottom (or the middle).
I had the expansion case, 32K, floppy, 300 baud modem, speech synth, Gorilla dot-matrix printer, and the FORTH compiler! Hah!
I had more fun exploring different way to program the thing than writing the programs themselves. The sprites on Extended Basic were great. A friend and I wrong a stupid program called Fred and Ed. The equivilent today would be Itchy and Scratchy. Fred and Ed took turns killing each other. One day I gave Fred a bow and he shot Ed in the head with a great explosion of small red sprites. Early carnage. Too cool.
Anybody ever heard the voice in the Atlanta airport shuttle many years back? The voice sounded _exactly_ like the 99/4a speech synth.
It the responsibility of the patent filer. That is why patent attorneys make butt-loads of money. They have to research all related patents then determine if you'd have a leg to stand on in court.
There's nothing wrong with the culture per se it just that new stimuli (kids) expands our minds. I remember that I, too, was annoyed by crying kids at restaurants, stores, etc. Now I smile and sympathize with these parents (unless they're being irresponsible and discourteous).
And there are people that will never learn even after having kids. Let's hope they never have any; the children end up being neglected.
I can't believe how "grown up" I feel. It's not really that bad....
Before my boy was born (10 months ago) we were asked if we wanted to pay $1500 to save the cord blood. At the time this was a considerable amount of money for us - we didn't sign up. Now I think that was some commercial outfit trying to make money. When Ian was born and before the doctor cut the cord, he drew a bunch of blood from it. I'm not really sure where it went (research, storage, etc??). I probably should have paid more attention. Luckily he is healthy and happy.
For anyone questioning the ethics of what that couple did, I ask you this, "do you have kids?". In general, I would guess you don't.
It is absolutely *unbelievable* the change in perspective a kid gives you. I would die or kill for Ian. When I see movies with sick or dying kids I have to turn away. The thought of anything happening to him makes my heart sink.
I'm the fourth of four kids and I was a "mistake". Sure proof that "rhythm method" contraception doesn't work. Did my parents love me? Of course you morons - No sane person can look at their own flesh and blood and not feel overwhelming love.
Finally, a Mozilla discussion so I can gripe about memory usage. For the record, I've never had a single complaint about Mozilla, etc. Here is my first.
Running gtop reports a memory footprint of Mozilla (build 2000080712) of 169708k. I'm assuming this is counting resident, shared, and virtual. However, I can run VMWare running Win98 running IE5.5 and use only 120768k. What's up with that?
What is Mozilla doing that it needs more memory than an OS, an OS virtualizer, and a browser?
I don't know where those people worked, but where I worked doing DoD research we had pretty severe restrictions. For a while all the computers had to be Tempest approved (for low-emissions). If not, they were used inside "the can" which was a large metal room within another room. Both had massive combination locks on them and motion sensors. Once, we were throwing network cables above the drop-ceiling - we didn't know about the motions sensors - and when they went off we all shit a brick.
All machines had removable hard-drives that would be locked in safes. After use, the hard drive was removed and the machines power was cycled. None of these machines were networked. The only network was within "the can" and that didn't go external.
When photocopying classified, you had to run blank sheets through the copier when finished. And you had to have a second person with you to check everything when you were done.
When classified as to be destroyed (and that isn't easy to get approval) we had an incinerator in the building for it. We all wondered if we could use it to cremate deceased pets....
We were apart of a University with many foreign nationals. Part of the CS school had facilities in our building where the students would go. When security found out they kicked all foreign nationals out of the building. We lost a couple good grad students because of it.
Security violations were severe since we could potentially lose all funding if our clearance was revoked. Auditors came around yearly and quizzed randomly on procedures.
All in all, it wasn't a huge hassle to do all this stuff - it was part of the routine. Of course, I avoided classified work as much as possible...
I setup a heterogeneous 3-tiered system at a client's office. Linux runs the app-server, Postgresql, etc on a raid 5 box. All the workstations are Win95, NT, etc. I wrote the server software on the Linux box and the client software on the Windows boxes. How do I support all this stuff? On my laptop with VMWare.
I have a Dell Inspiron 7500 w/192 MB running Mandrake. I have the same app-server, Postgresql, etc. running on it as runs on the raid 5 server. I have Win98 running on VMWare and all the client software running on it. I can develop, debug, and test right on the laptop. The only change I have to make when I deploy is to change the server IP number to the real server (which I keep in a text config file) - *everything* else is the same.
If you have a similar situation, then VMWare is the killer app for Linux. I highly recommend it.
I'm sure many colleges offer study in the history of computers/technology. I know Georgia Tech does. Look here. It seems pretty broad including stuff like sociology too.
Check out Beck's Extreme Programming. In it, he describes a highly interative approach to design and coding. I, too, have experienced coding blocks and my approach is to go ahead with whatever design I have and code what I can. After it's coded, I can easily see what I should change. I usually cannot see that until I've written something. You will throw away code, maybe even a lot of it, but you're first "released" version will be about your third internal version which makes for a much more solid release.
Also, I'm NOT suggesting you ignore design. Design what you can - leave those fuzzy areas out for now. They will be much less fuzzy when you start writing the code around them.
MySQL's documentation is bad?? I always thought it was pretty good.
Interbase, on the other hand, looks sparse in the documentation department. There are no books available (one old hit at FatBrain that was never published) and I cannot find anything online at www.interbase.com. There is a grassroots effort here but there is no content!
I haven't installed the RPMs yet - anyone know if there is any documentation installed? I hope I don't have to read man pages to administer this thing.
Not that I'm particularly proud of this, but in Georgia where _I_ live (Kennesaw) we are _required_ to own a firearm. Thankfully, it's not a law that is rigorously enforced.
I agree, but instead of deciding on the libraries themselves, how about standardizing the interfaces instead? This will allow anyone to create a library in whatever language they choose. I cannot see an easy way to create a common set of static or dynamic linkages to satisfy all languages, but you could standardize socket interfaces. For example, a math package daemon could sit out on port 9000 (e.g.) and take commands to do things like complex math, matrix math, etc. Then a plotting package sits on 9001 waiting for a 2-D data stream, 3-D data stream, etc. Don't like your plotting package? Download and install a different one. This is a lot of what enterprise java beans (EJB) are trying to do.
The cool thing is that, if you want, you could publish these services to allow others to use them on your box. App servers anyone?
I can see how the network overhead might be a problem, but if you only need localhost support perhaps a virtual network driver (similar to what VMWARE does) could virtualize the requests so they are all software and, therefore, much faster than an actual network socket call.
When they were here in Atlanta in 1996, they had every store with a name similar to "Olympic" change its name. The local news profiled one small cafe' with the name something like "Olympic Cafe" that had been in business for over ten years. They changed their name to avoid the suit. Typical strong arm tactics. It would seem that a trademark like "Olympic" would be sufficiently diluted after, oh, 2500 years...
yes. This link has a document on MP3 from the MPEG standards group. quoting:
Open standard MPEG is defined as an open standard. The specification is available (for a fee) to everybody interested in implementing the standard. While there are a number of patents covering MPEG Audio encoding and decoding, all patent holders have declared that they will license the patents on fair and reasonable terms to everybody. No single company owns the standard. Public example source code is available to help implementers to avoid misunderstand the standards text. The format is well defined. With the exception of some incomplete implementations no problems with interoperability of equipment and software from different vendors have been reported.
It seems to me that creating an mp3 encoder or decoder in clean room is legal without having to pay a license fee. But if you "borrowed" the algorithms that have been patented, then you need to pay up.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really no different than open-source SOAP. What SOAP (and I think Biztalk) are doing are serializing code (java) objects and putting them in XML. Thus the binary-looking stuff in the parent message. The recipient of the XML then de-serializes this back into a runnable object.
This is how SOAP passes objects around.
-tim
I knew someone would bring that up, but you mentioned the point that I would respond with. There should be some authorized user (ie root) intervention before privileged code is run.
A user program like the Sims should simply not be allowed to execute privileged code. My one year old should not be able to crash my Linux box by banging on the keyboard as long as he is not running as root.
-tim
regarding Windows allowing a user program to insert a dll/vxd into ring 0: are you serious? What versions of Windows? NT? 2000? I guess 95/98 would allow it, but NT/2000 still allow this? It's been a while since I've written any device drivers; OS/2 v2 was the last time I did this. I'm a little out of touch. Can a user-level program (ring 3) request the kernel to load and run something in ring 0? All without the user installing the ring 0 code? It's ridiculous to think a game should have code running in ring 0.
MS is never going to have a stable operating system if they allow 3rd parties to insert code into the kernel.
-tim
Pretty cool. You enter in the number of the station; for example, "961#" is 96Rock in Atlanta. Then you can hit 1 to hear what was most recently played or you key in the time of the song. You can preview the song first so you don't accidentically buy Barry Manilow.
You can hear samples of other songs on the CD too. Not bad.
-tim
An amazing story. Perhaps you should advertise the "Hellmouth" series2 50&mode=nested)
.com - we're already in the
posted on slashdot.org (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/23/1521
for your readership. One of the feedback responses was a link to your
story about Patrick Griffiths. Patrick showed an amazing amount of
independence and was punished for it. As Patrick probably knows, but
your readership many not be aware, these demonstrations of solidarity
and non-conformity are seldom met with admiration.
Take your suspension, Patrick, and wear it as a badge of honor. I, too,
was different in high school and often felt I was loosing my sanity.
Although I sold out to a degree and tried to conform, I wasn't very
successful. In fact, I was suspended for 10 days accused of drinking
alchohol when, actually, I was only associating with those that did.
Typical guilt-by-association and suspension of due-process that high
school officials exercise liberally. Now, at 32, I'm successful. I have a
great wife, an amazing one year old, and I'm CTO of an up-and-coming
company (not a typical
black). I refuse to conform to this day and that attitude has served
me well.
-tim drury
tdrury@mindspring.com
Sorry, but I cannot agree with the inheritance tax. While all his conclusions may be true if the inheritance tax is repealed, I believe people should decide what is done with THEIR money and NOT THE GOVERNMENT. When my parents died, the thought that the government was going to tax their hard-earned money yet-again (income tax) really pissed me off. Then I found out the first tier was at $600K - so we were well below that and weren't taxed.
I still believe the best tax solution is a simple 15-20% sales tax and NOTHING ELSE. Tax people when the spend the money not when they save it. Some institutions would be tax exempt like charity and schools. 15-20% may seem high, but it is roughly the same amount of tax you pay now through sales tax and income tax. After you turn 65 (for example), there is no sales tax. That is ncentive to save for the future.
A couple friends of mine and I started talking about starting our own business and the first order of business was our goals. We all have children, but our goals were to sell out after a few years and not to build a legacy for our kids. I don't want my son having a free ride. I'll pay for his school and any emergencies, but that's it. If he turns out to be a crackhead loser, then he deserves the life of a crackhead loser, not that of a RICH crackhead loser. (Hopefully he didn't turn out that way because of bad parenting, but even if so, giving him money out of guilt doesn't help him.)
I find that the most charitable people are those that clawed their way up from the bottom (or the middle).
-tim
why the hell was that moderated "offtopic"? It's a link to the damn Ebay auction where some dude claims to be selling an Enigma!
-tim
I hate to do this to you guys but:
I had the expansion case, 32K, floppy, 300 baud modem, speech synth, Gorilla dot-matrix printer, and the FORTH compiler! Hah!
I had more fun exploring different way to program the thing than writing the programs themselves. The sprites on Extended Basic were great. A friend and I wrong a stupid program called Fred and Ed. The equivilent today would be Itchy and Scratchy. Fred and Ed took turns killing each other. One day I gave Fred a bow and he shot Ed in the head with a great explosion of small red sprites. Early carnage. Too cool.
Anybody ever heard the voice in the Atlanta airport shuttle many years back? The voice sounded _exactly_ like the 99/4a speech synth.
I, too, regret throwing mine away.
-tim
It the responsibility of the patent filer. That is why patent attorneys make butt-loads of money. They have to research all related patents then determine if you'd have a leg to stand on in court.
-tim
There's nothing wrong with the culture per se it just that new stimuli (kids) expands our minds. I remember that I, too, was annoyed by crying kids at restaurants, stores, etc. Now I smile and sympathize with these parents (unless they're being irresponsible and discourteous).
And there are people that will never learn even after having kids. Let's hope they never have any; the children end up being neglected.
I can't believe how "grown up" I feel. It's not really that bad....
-tim
Before my boy was born (10 months ago) we were asked if we wanted to pay $1500 to save the cord blood. At the time this was a considerable amount of money for us - we didn't sign up. Now I think that was some commercial outfit trying to make money. When Ian was born and before the doctor cut the cord, he drew a bunch of blood from it. I'm not really sure where it went (research, storage, etc??). I probably should have paid more attention. Luckily he is healthy and happy.
For anyone questioning the ethics of what that couple did, I ask you this, "do you have kids?". In general, I would guess you don't.
It is absolutely *unbelievable* the change in perspective a kid gives you. I would die or kill for Ian. When I see movies with sick or dying kids I have to turn away. The thought of anything happening to him makes my heart sink.
I'm the fourth of four kids and I was a "mistake". Sure proof that "rhythm method" contraception doesn't work. Did my parents love me? Of course you morons - No sane person can look at their own flesh and blood and not feel overwhelming love.
Have one and see. I'm glad I did.
-tim
I downloaded the lastest (as of 9/20/2000) and gtop now reports 153160k. Not a big improvement. Are your numbers coming from gtop?
-tim
Finally, a Mozilla discussion so I can gripe about memory usage. For the record, I've never had a single complaint about Mozilla, etc. Here is my first.
Running gtop reports a memory footprint of Mozilla (build 2000080712) of 169708k. I'm assuming this is counting resident, shared, and virtual. However, I can run VMWare running Win98 running IE5.5 and use only 120768k. What's up with that?
What is Mozilla doing that it needs more memory than an OS, an OS virtualizer, and a browser?
-tim
I don't know where those people worked, but where I worked doing DoD research we had pretty severe restrictions. For a while all the computers had to be Tempest approved (for low-emissions). If not, they were used inside "the can" which was a large metal room within another room. Both had massive combination locks on them and motion sensors. Once, we were throwing network cables above the drop-ceiling - we didn't know about the motions sensors - and when they went off we all shit a brick.
All machines had removable hard-drives that would be locked in safes. After use, the hard drive was removed and the machines power was cycled. None of these machines were networked. The only network was within "the can" and that didn't go external.
When photocopying classified, you had to run blank sheets through the copier when finished. And you had to have a second person with you to check everything when you were done.
When classified as to be destroyed (and that isn't easy to get approval) we had an incinerator in the building for it. We all wondered if we could use it to cremate deceased pets....
We were apart of a University with many foreign nationals. Part of the CS school had facilities in our building where the students would go. When security found out they kicked all foreign nationals out of the building. We lost a couple good grad students because of it.
Security violations were severe since we could potentially lose all funding if our clearance was revoked. Auditors came around yearly and quizzed randomly on procedures.
All in all, it wasn't a huge hassle to do all this stuff - it was part of the routine. Of course, I avoided classified work as much as possible...
-tim
Here is how I use it:
I setup a heterogeneous 3-tiered system at a client's office. Linux runs the app-server, Postgresql, etc on a raid 5 box. All the workstations are Win95, NT, etc. I wrote the server software on the Linux box and the client software on the Windows boxes. How do I support all this stuff? On my laptop with VMWare.
I have a Dell Inspiron 7500 w/192 MB running Mandrake. I have the same app-server, Postgresql, etc. running on it as runs on the raid 5 server. I have Win98 running on VMWare and all the client software running on it. I can develop, debug, and test right on the laptop. The only change I have to make when I deploy is to change the server IP number to the real server (which I keep in a text config file) - *everything* else is the same.
If you have a similar situation, then VMWare is the killer app for Linux. I highly recommend it.
-tim
I'm sure many colleges offer study in the history of computers/technology. I know Georgia Tech does. Look here. It seems pretty broad including stuff like sociology too.
-tim
and if I point at you while you are wearing your T-shirt, am I guilty of linking?
-tim
>ping penis
penis is alive!
Check out Beck's Extreme Programming. In it, he describes a highly interative approach to design and coding. I, too, have experienced coding blocks and my approach is to go ahead with whatever design I have and code what I can. After it's coded, I can easily see what I should change. I usually cannot see that until I've written something. You will throw away code, maybe even a lot of it, but you're first "released" version will be about your third internal version which makes for a much more solid release.
Also, I'm NOT suggesting you ignore design. Design what you can - leave those fuzzy areas out for now. They will be much less fuzzy when you start writing the code around them.
YMMV,
-tim
You just discovered use-cases :) As much as I hate to write/document requirements, they make the design much more solid.
-tim
MySQL's documentation is bad?? I always thought it was pretty good.
Interbase, on the other hand, looks sparse in the documentation department. There are no books available (one old hit at FatBrain that was never published) and I cannot find anything online at www.interbase.com. There is a grassroots effort here but there is no content!
I haven't installed the RPMs yet - anyone know if there is any documentation installed? I hope I don't have to read man pages to administer this thing.
-tim
Not that I'm particularly proud of this, but in Georgia where _I_ live (Kennesaw) we are _required_ to own a firearm. Thankfully, it's not a law that is rigorously enforced.
-tim
I agree, but instead of deciding on the libraries themselves, how about standardizing the interfaces instead? This will allow anyone to create a library in whatever language they choose. I cannot see an easy way to create a common set of static or dynamic linkages to satisfy all languages, but you could standardize socket interfaces. For example, a math package daemon could sit out on port 9000 (e.g.) and take commands to do things like complex math, matrix math, etc. Then a plotting package sits on 9001 waiting for a 2-D data stream, 3-D data stream, etc. Don't like your plotting package? Download and install a different one. This is a lot of what enterprise java beans (EJB) are trying to do.
The cool thing is that, if you want, you could publish these services to allow others to use them on your box. App servers anyone?
I can see how the network overhead might be a problem, but if you only need localhost support perhaps a virtual network driver (similar to what VMWARE does) could virtualize the requests so they are all software and, therefore, much faster than an actual network socket call.
-tim
When they were here in Atlanta in 1996, they had every store with a name similar to "Olympic" change its name. The local news profiled one small cafe' with the name something like "Olympic Cafe" that had been in business for over ten years. They changed their name to avoid the suit. Typical strong arm tactics. It would seem that a trademark like "Olympic" would be sufficiently diluted after, oh, 2500 years...
-tim
It seems to me that creating an mp3 encoder or decoder in clean room is legal without having to pay a license fee. But if you "borrowed" the algorithms that have been patented, then you need to pay up.
-tim