In order to send any signal, be it digital or analogue, down a transmission medium, be it wireless or wired, you have to transform it to an analogue signal in the end. What's special about so-called digital signals is not the signal, but the encoding and decoding process that allows to make the noise that affects all (analogue) signals a non-issue (up to a certain point, at least) and that allows you to compress the signal such that you can easily transmit "faster than real time". (Actually, it is possible to transmit "faster than real time" in a purely analogue context as well, but the buffering process required at the receiver side is much much trickier than with digital signals, so it isn't worth it.)
It's better to lead them to a cliff than to meander and starve in a jungle. But when realising that he or she got it wrong, the one thing that a really great leader will do, is to admit it and reconsider the options, explaining why and how. At that point, the conclusion/decision can be that jumping is the only option and the others will likely follow. But the conclusion can also be that there might be a better way out, even if chances of success are slim. In the latter case, they surely will follow such a leader to hell and back if needed.
The one and only defining characteristic of a leader is that he or she has followers, not drones or slaves.
Leaders don't focus on getting a task (e.g. jumping off a cliff at all cost) done. Leaders focus on convincing people that they are and remain worth following.
The saying is true, but often misunderstood and misused.
Having gone through a similar transformation about 4 and a bit years ago (and something similar but less extreme about 14 years ago), I can only say that I'd be very scared of an (ex-)techie who, when he turns manager, feels comfortable from the start, or even before he accepts the offer. That person may have been overlooked as a talent and his promotion hence long overdue, but that woudl be a (frustrated) exception. More likely than not such a person is an overconfident ignoramus who will create a mess.
The "people are promoted to the level of their own incompetence" saying, a.k.a. The Peter Principle, does not say that you should only be promoted when you are confident that you can handle it. It says that people who are promoted and then prove that they can not handle it generally get stuck at that level, as opposed to either climbing even further up the ladder or being demoted back to the job or level they can handle.
Any promotion must be based on the assessment that the person in question: 1) can handle the job to a sufficient extent to get started (possibly with assistance by senior coach, depending on the circumstances, risk, and availability); and 2) will be challenged beyond his current comfort zone, but able to rise up to meeting it.
First of all, all patents expire. In the original US law (by Jefferson, IIRC, but I could be mistaken in that) after 13 years, which was recently proven to be the optimal duration for the overall benefit of all. Nowadays it takes longer, but expire they still do.
Next, patents are only one solution within the realm of IP protection. That they are not optimal for any problem at hand is something everybody who is actually involved understands, including those who might apply for them and those who have to approve of them. Take that silly alphabet example; any idiot who invents the alphabet and then patents ite use (assuming that patent law allows for that, which is another flaw in your example) has just killed his own invention. Nobody would be that stupid, and certainly not somone intelligent enough to see the potential of something like the alphabet.
Finally, your post shows that you do not understand the topic at all. Mixing patents and copyright in the way you do is only the final nail in the coffin.
And now for the ultimate hammer: Where in any of my posts in this thread have I said that everything should be patented, copyrighted into oblivion, and kept a trade secret? (Please provide an exact reference!) All I have said is that there is an easy reasoning that is not totally devoid of logic that people will/may use to motivate why not every bit of research should be made publicly available. I have done so based on my own extensive experience (17 years) in R&D, instead of blowing smoke about something that I don't understand. But I have most certainly not said that this reasoning should be taken to its extreme (quite on the contrary). If you care to read my/. signature, you will also notice that I have a very long history in sharing open knowledge and promoting it. However, in life, nothing is "only black or white", and I've learned to consider and balance the points of view of all parties involved in any discussion or difference of opinion in order to come to the solution that hopefully generates combined maximum benefit for all, not just for those who think that know how the world should ideally be run using a one-size-fits all solution (be they ultra-left of ultra-right). Come back when you've grown up as well.
If you read my post again, you'll see that a lot of what that organisation does is put out for public use. Actually, the public gets more than it paid for (also considering that local tax money of a very small region in Europe is going into world-class results). But the public is not the only source of funding and the other parties also need to get what they paid for. There is no fundamantal difference between tax money and "ordinary" money: in both cases the previous owner wants to get something in return.
And no, this organisation does not "use predatory practices or exist to serve self-dealing boards or employees". Having worked there for a long time, I can tell you that compensation is fair but not stellar. This includes the board level. All the "profit" that is made on one program is eiter used to cover the losses in others (in high-tech, failure is part of the research process) or invested in (infrastructure for) new research.
This infrastructure, by the way, is extremely expensive to install and keep running, so there is no way that it could be made available for "half the jobs to do truly free research on" using only public funding. It's a binary thing: no machines, no freedom to research and no results. At some point one has to stop dreaming of the ideal free world without money, greed, bosses, and whatnot and instead actually do something tangible aimed at improving the lives of the real people that live in the real world. A world in which one does not control everything and in which others have the extremely valuable freedom to have a different opinion (including about economy) and in which they have the right to eran a living and/or make a buck building the stuff that you need to do your "free for all" research. Theories don't solve problems, people do.
My (previous) employer is a non-profit organisation, created by and partially funded by the local government. They get more than just public results out of the place, they also get jobs (1500 at the place where I worked and a lot more in companies created and/or attracted by us). Not to mention millions of foreign high-tech investment from all the big names in our industry, which is good for the economy. Not to mention also the fact that we publish over 1000 research papers each year, so you can earn your dollars using results that our government and partners paid Euro's for. I.e.: it wasn't even your tax money in the first place!
Nope. The guy with the 3 letters was the one who was paid. Here's how it works: some public body says: "OK, we'll fund you to to this work under these and these conditions. You'll get 3 person-years of funding spread out over 1.5 years." The lab internally then says: "Well, who are our most expensive people that we can allocate to this project, if need be only for 10% of their time?" Provided that these prople are not yet funded elsewhere and can credibly be claimed to work on the project, be it for doing the core work or for supervising, they are the ones that go on the list.
Besides, I worked with a lot of "three letter" guys for a long time, and they do a lot more work than you seem to think. We always had unpaid undergrads do some of the "monkey work" for us, but we also had a rule that any work that really needed doing or doing well would not be assigned to them. When attracting undergrads, you always try to get the good ones and you hope you'll be lucky, but in reality you're running a major risk as well if you depend on them. I've seen some stunningly incompetent ones.
Last but not least, on my last project before embarking on my MBA study, I was the so-called fat guy who did limited real work and spent most of his time on politics. The real R&D work was done by two very senior "three letter" people. I myself didn't have three letters back then. Stereotypes can kill.
It's not even hard to do so. A lot the publicly funded research builds on non-publicly funded work that has previously been done at the same place or that is being done in parallel with the publicly funded stuff in that very same place. It's not like you can always carve out a complete research item and work on it independently of prior knowledge or of any additional non-public funding.
I've worked in research for many years, and we always had a combination of public and private/corporate funding ongoing for just about anything we did. In fact, doing so was a necessity, as there was no way we could have built and sustained the critical mass needed to be able to even qualify for most public funding if we had been using only public money. In fact, on most programs we got a maximum of 50% public funds. We had to put part of our results in the open in return by publishing, or by providing free licenses to certain parties (who needn't always be a member of the research program). But our work always included material and IP that was privately funded as well. Because of all this, we actually developed a model in which we even gave access to some of the privately funded bits developed with money from company X to company Y (and vice versa) or even to "the public". But it goes without saying that no company X or Y would have funded us if we'd have applied that model to everything we did, just because someone in our lab who was "working on the same big picture" had a public fellowship or was working within the scope of a governmental project.
Here's a perfect example of what I mean: iwo_jima_crop. Take a look at the 4th picture, compare it to the 5th one, and read the text. See? The "intended layout" was modified on purpose. Twice, actually, if you condider that the whole picture was staged in the first place (as per the same page).
If you don't like it, don't use it. If you don't use it, nothing gets destroyed.
It's not like cropping pictures was a new invention of the digital age either. Good old analoge photographers have been cropping and "zooming during development" (as opposed to while taking the picture) for ages as well in order to improve the artistic aspects of their work, especially for "action" pictures. And newspapers most definitely have been cropping for decades.
In short, the artistic argument is nonsense. Much more worrying, especially in journalism, is the new/improved possibility to remove relevant content from "get the facts" pictures. But then again, as a concept, that ain't exactly new either.
For Christ's sake, get your geography right! the KU Leuven is one of the oldest universities in the world and quite well known around that same world. (For instance, it is the university where the Rijndael algorithmused in AES was developed.) Leuven is in Belgium. Belgium, like in 'the capital of Brussels", for ignorant Americans, or "the country of which Brussels is the capital" for the rest of us.
Didn't you know that eternal history of both earth and the universe revolves around the US? After all, have serious aliens ever landed outside the US? Whenever they threatened the world, haven't they destroyed New-York or Washington in particular? The Martians don't care about Mexico. Ask Hollywood, those people can know first hand.
Same here. I'd like to use D2, but this one thing keeps me from doing it. Maybe the suckers implementing the site can finally get this fixed after so many months of working on D2 instead of calling their users suckers. Something as simple as this can't be that hard to get right, now, can it?
At least in my country (which is not the US), the government has no monopoly on the terms "confidential", "secret", or "top secret". The government does have a clear definition of them for its own purposes, and it is special in that breaching the applicable regulations has immediate legal consequences, but that does not disallow companies from having their own classification schemes that uses those same terms. In fact, there are provisions in national and NATO regulations that explicitly allow for dealing with both kinds of classifications in parallel if they exist.
Imagine a priceless, moving work of art that nobody knows about, or ever has known about. What is this work of art's purpose? Why does it exist? Don't you feel a sense of loss that something so moving and complex cannot be appreciated?
Circular reasoning. You're imagining the problem away and then saying that hence there is none. That work of art of yours was made by someone (hence already the impossibility of your premise). If nobody else ever saw it and (s)he took it into his/her grave and now nobody knows about it, nobody will feel a loss the day the grave gets blasted into oblivion by a meteor, or gets melted by the dying sun. Face it, we're dust.
It's good for finding files that are not being accessed anymore (doh). This may not be a big issue on a personal desktop, but in a corporate network with tons of centrally installed tools - and even more versions thereof - it very much is. I've made in the past extensive use of it for exactly that purpose.
It's also good for automatically getting rid of the many defunct temporary files people tend to leave behind in shared directories such as/tmp. Again think multi-user machines.
I've also used it as a debugging feature. Both to debug software and to de bug wetware (i.e. brains of people who are convinced they are telling their computer to do one thing while actually telling it something else).
It's not up to kernel developers to do this. I'm more than capable of compiling my own custom kernel, but I do not want to do that everytime I install a machine or upgrade a kernel in order to overrule some other guy's personal preference. I don't have the time for that (anymore). It's up to the distribution builders to make a default decision regarding atime and to do it in such a way as to allow their customers to overrule it with minimal effort by (not) specifying a mount option. In other words: everything works just fine as-is and nothing at all needs to be changed.
Sorry, but you need to go back to law school (or to reading comprehension class). They are bound to v2, but v2 does not at all imply v3. If they don't like v3, they just keep using v2. If a package author changes his or her distribution license to v3 (or later), this does not affect copies previousy distributed under other licneses in any way. Not even if there is not a single other change in the package.
The main problem (but not the only one) is called "object destructors". You have to make sure they are called. All of them, and in the correct order, at all the nested scopes of execution you are in when the exception occurs. And you need to make sure not to call them on any object not yet constructed (always remember that constructors can throw exceptions too) and never to call a destructor twice (I've seen this kind of bug multiple times in multiple compilers). And then there is the fun of exceptions thrown by destructors, not to mention the possibility that it all happens in the middle of constructing or destructing an array of objects.
All that is why setjmp()/longjmp(), also known as C's non-local goto, don't cut it, which in turn means that you need to complicate function return mechanisms. And just when you think you got that problem sorted out, you need to be aware that C++ functions can call (library) C functions that were never compiled to even know about exceptions but that in turn can call C++ functions that may again throw an exception. The entire construction needs to be able to handle this.
As I wrote in an other post in this thread, it can be done. But it is not easy. Note that the entire object destructor issue also applies within a single scope, which is why life is not as easy as replacing every "throw" statement by "goto end;".
Of course C++ exceptions are what I meant. What else would I mean when using the word "exceptions" in this context?
And yes, C++ exceptions can be expressed in C. After all, C is a glorified assembler and the resulting code from C++ translation is assembler as well. It all depends in the level of abstraction at which write the C code is written and on the amount of uglyness/inefficiency you're willing to take on board (and also the trade-off between both of the latter). But that's not the point. The point of this thread is that nowadays it makes no sense to make use of this capability in a C++ compiler. Especially not when considering that a user of a C++ compiler wants more than just a compiler. He also wants a debugger that is able to meaningfully link up the binary and the original C++ source. If you're a C++ compiler vendor, using C as an IL does nothing but complicate your own life. Twice.
You, whenever you compile C++ code, as it is compiled to C before machine code (unless you are using an exotic compiler such as the Compaq AXP C++ compiler for TRU64).
Excuse me???? That was not even true anymore when I started using C++, back in 1992. There are features in the C++ standard that are so extremely difficult to correctly implement in standard compliant C that it's a complete waste of effort trying to pass via C while compiling. Exception handling comes to mind as the prime example. A failed attempt to support exceptions was the reason why Cfront 4.0 was abandoned. Note that 3.0 was released as early as 1991. The last Cfront based compiler I had the horor of using was HP's CC. It was superseeded by the new native aCC by 1994 at the latest.
By the way, I used to write C/C++ compilation/optimisation stuff for a living, so I guess I know something about the topic....:-)
Well, I was there back then (read my sig) and yet even so I enjoyed the trip down Linux memory lane while going through this article. Sure, this is not top-quality journalism, but if you don't want to read it, then don't.
Slashdot is not anymore what to used to be when I joined (look at my/. id to see what I mean), but even so I still use it as my home page on my home boxen. If there's stuff that I don't want to read, I simply don't.
PS: I happen to be interested in military history as well. So yes, I do still read stuff about WWI, archduke included, even after so many years. In fact, your mentionaing of it just caused me to read what Wikipedia says about Franz Ferdinand.
Excuse me: "without the tabs" and "Firefox... is synonymous with security"? For me Firefox is also - and actually formost - synonym with tabbed browsing.
My own windows box has IE 7 for the sake of those few sites that really need IE (Windows Update, mainly). Of course I use Mozilla (albeit Seamonkey, not Firefox) for all other browsing on Linux as well as Windows. But recently I had the misfortune of having to intensively use IE 6 for two months "at work". The one thing that I hated most was the absense of tabs, not the lesser security.
Don't get me wrong, the security argument is very valid. But the target audience is going to be much more convinced by the tabs. If not, I suggest putting Lynx on the machines. It's even more leightweight, and it even has more security advantages, since no hacker targets it (anymore) and since features that aren't there can't be abused. Now really...
Slashdot Mirror
In order to send any signal, be it digital or analogue, down a transmission medium, be it wireless or wired, you have to transform it to an analogue signal in the end. What's special about so-called digital signals is not the signal, but the encoding and decoding process that allows to make the noise that affects all (analogue) signals a non-issue (up to a certain point, at least) and that allows you to compress the signal such that you can easily transmit "faster than real time". (Actually, it is possible to transmit "faster than real time" in a purely analogue context as well, but the buffering process required at the receiver side is much much trickier than with digital signals, so it isn't worth it.)
No!
It's better to lead them to a cliff than to meander and starve in a jungle. But when realising that he or she got it wrong, the one thing that a really great leader will do, is to admit it and reconsider the options, explaining why and how. At that point, the conclusion/decision can be that jumping is the only option and the others will likely follow. But the conclusion can also be that there might be a better way out, even if chances of success are slim. In the latter case, they surely will follow such a leader to hell and back if needed.
The one and only defining characteristic of a leader is that he or she has followers, not drones or slaves.
Leaders don't focus on getting a task (e.g. jumping off a cliff at all cost) done. Leaders focus on convincing people that they are and remain worth following.
The saying is true, but often misunderstood and misused.
Having gone through a similar transformation about 4 and a bit years ago (and something similar but less extreme about 14 years ago), I can only say that I'd be very scared of an (ex-)techie who, when he turns manager, feels comfortable from the start, or even before he accepts the offer. That person may have been overlooked as a talent and his promotion hence long overdue, but that woudl be a (frustrated) exception. More likely than not such a person is an overconfident ignoramus who will create a mess.
The "people are promoted to the level of their own incompetence" saying, a.k.a. The Peter Principle, does not say that you should only be promoted when you are confident that you can handle it. It says that people who are promoted and then prove that they can not handle it generally get stuck at that level, as opposed to either climbing even further up the ladder or being demoted back to the job or level they can handle.
Any promotion must be based on the assessment that the person in question: 1) can handle the job to a sufficient extent to get started (possibly with assistance by senior coach, depending on the circumstances, risk, and availability); and 2) will be challenged beyond his current comfort zone, but able to rise up to meeting it.
First of all, all patents expire. In the original US law (by Jefferson, IIRC, but I could be mistaken in that) after 13 years, which was recently proven to be the optimal duration for the overall benefit of all. Nowadays it takes longer, but expire they still do.
Next, patents are only one solution within the realm of IP protection. That they are not optimal for any problem at hand is something everybody who is actually involved understands, including those who might apply for them and those who have to approve of them. Take that silly alphabet example; any idiot who invents the alphabet and then patents ite use (assuming that patent law allows for that, which is another flaw in your example) has just killed his own invention. Nobody would be that stupid, and certainly not somone intelligent enough to see the potential of something like the alphabet.
Finally, your post shows that you do not understand the topic at all. Mixing patents and copyright in the way you do is only the final nail in the coffin.
And now for the ultimate hammer: Where in any of my posts in this thread have I said that everything should be patented, copyrighted into oblivion, and kept a trade secret? (Please provide an exact reference!) All I have said is that there is an easy reasoning that is not totally devoid of logic that people will/may use to motivate why not every bit of research should be made publicly available. I have done so based on my own extensive experience (17 years) in R&D, instead of blowing smoke about something that I don't understand. But I have most certainly not said that this reasoning should be taken to its extreme (quite on the contrary). If you care to read my /. signature, you will also notice that I have a very long history in sharing open knowledge and promoting it. However, in life, nothing is "only black or white", and I've learned to consider and balance the points of view of all parties involved in any discussion or difference of opinion in order to come to the solution that hopefully generates combined maximum benefit for all, not just for those who think that know how the world should ideally be run using a one-size-fits all solution (be they ultra-left of ultra-right). Come back when you've grown up as well.
If you read my post again, you'll see that a lot of what that organisation does is put out for public use. Actually, the public gets more than it paid for (also considering that local tax money of a very small region in Europe is going into world-class results). But the public is not the only source of funding and the other parties also need to get what they paid for. There is no fundamantal difference between tax money and "ordinary" money: in both cases the previous owner wants to get something in return.
And no, this organisation does not "use predatory practices or exist to serve self-dealing boards or employees". Having worked there for a long time, I can tell you that compensation is fair but not stellar. This includes the board level. All the "profit" that is made on one program is eiter used to cover the losses in others (in high-tech, failure is part of the research process) or invested in (infrastructure for) new research.
This infrastructure, by the way, is extremely expensive to install and keep running, so there is no way that it could be made available for "half the jobs to do truly free research on" using only public funding. It's a binary thing: no machines, no freedom to research and no results. At some point one has to stop dreaming of the ideal free world without money, greed, bosses, and whatnot and instead actually do something tangible aimed at improving the lives of the real people that live in the real world. A world in which one does not control everything and in which others have the extremely valuable freedom to have a different opinion (including about economy) and in which they have the right to eran a living and/or make a buck building the stuff that you need to do your "free for all" research. Theories don't solve problems, people do.
The place is IMEC in Belgium. The reasons why I left are in part personal, so I don't want to explain the details here.
My (previous) employer is a non-profit organisation, created by and partially funded by the local government. They get more than just public results out of the place, they also get jobs (1500 at the place where I worked and a lot more in companies created and/or attracted by us). Not to mention millions of foreign high-tech investment from all the big names in our industry, which is good for the economy. Not to mention also the fact that we publish over 1000 research papers each year, so you can earn your dollars using results that our government and partners paid Euro's for. I.e.: it wasn't even your tax money in the first place!
And since we were non-profit...
Nope. The guy with the 3 letters was the one who was paid. Here's how it works: some public body says: "OK, we'll fund you to to this work under these and these conditions. You'll get 3 person-years of funding spread out over 1.5 years." The lab internally then says: "Well, who are our most expensive people that we can allocate to this project, if need be only for 10% of their time?" Provided that these prople are not yet funded elsewhere and can credibly be claimed to work on the project, be it for doing the core work or for supervising, they are the ones that go on the list.
Besides, I worked with a lot of "three letter" guys for a long time, and they do a lot more work than you seem to think. We always had unpaid undergrads do some of the "monkey work" for us, but we also had a rule that any work that really needed doing or doing well would not be assigned to them. When attracting undergrads, you always try to get the good ones and you hope you'll be lucky, but in reality you're running a major risk as well if you depend on them. I've seen some stunningly incompetent ones.
Last but not least, on my last project before embarking on my MBA study, I was the so-called fat guy who did limited real work and spent most of his time on politics. The real R&D work was done by two very senior "three letter" people. I myself didn't have three letters back then. Stereotypes can kill.
It's not even hard to do so. A lot the publicly funded research builds on non-publicly funded work that has previously been done at the same place or that is being done in parallel with the publicly funded stuff in that very same place. It's not like you can always carve out a complete research item and work on it independently of prior knowledge or of any additional non-public funding.
I've worked in research for many years, and we always had a combination of public and private/corporate funding ongoing for just about anything we did. In fact, doing so was a necessity, as there was no way we could have built and sustained the critical mass needed to be able to even qualify for most public funding if we had been using only public money. In fact, on most programs we got a maximum of 50% public funds. We had to put part of our results in the open in return by publishing, or by providing free licenses to certain parties (who needn't always be a member of the research program). But our work always included material and IP that was privately funded as well. Because of all this, we actually developed a model in which we even gave access to some of the privately funded bits developed with money from company X to company Y (and vice versa) or even to "the public". But it goes without saying that no company X or Y would have funded us if we'd have applied that model to everything we did, just because someone in our lab who was "working on the same big picture" had a public fellowship or was working within the scope of a governmental project.
Here's a perfect example of what I mean: iwo_jima_crop. Take a look at the 4th picture, compare it to the 5th one, and read the text. See? The "intended layout" was modified on purpose. Twice, actually, if you condider that the whole picture was staged in the first place (as per the same page).
If you don't like it, don't use it. If you don't use it, nothing gets destroyed.
It's not like cropping pictures was a new invention of the digital age either. Good old analoge photographers have been cropping and "zooming during development" (as opposed to while taking the picture) for ages as well in order to improve the artistic aspects of their work, especially for "action" pictures. And newspapers most definitely have been cropping for decades.
In short, the artistic argument is nonsense. Much more worrying, especially in journalism, is the new/improved possibility to remove relevant content from "get the facts" pictures. But then again, as a concept, that ain't exactly new either.
For Christ's sake, get your geography right! the KU Leuven is one of the oldest universities in the world and quite well known around that same world. (For instance, it is the university where the Rijndael algorithmused in AES was developed.) Leuven is in Belgium. Belgium, like in 'the capital of Brussels", for ignorant Americans, or "the country of which Brussels is the capital" for the rest of us.
Didn't you know that eternal history of both earth and the universe revolves around the US? After all, have serious aliens ever landed outside the US? Whenever they threatened the world, haven't they destroyed New-York or Washington in particular? The Martians don't care about Mexico. Ask Hollywood, those people can know first hand.
Same here. I'd like to use D2, but this one thing keeps me from doing it. Maybe the suckers implementing the site can finally get this fixed after so many months of working on D2 instead of calling their users suckers. Something as simple as this can't be that hard to get right, now, can it?
At least in my country (which is not the US), the government has no monopoly on the terms "confidential", "secret", or "top secret". The government does have a clear definition of them for its own purposes, and it is special in that breaching the applicable regulations has immediate legal consequences, but that does not disallow companies from having their own classification schemes that uses those same terms. In fact, there are provisions in national and NATO regulations that explicitly allow for dealing with both kinds of classifications in parallel if they exist.
Imagine a priceless, moving work of art that nobody knows about, or ever has known about. What is this work of art's purpose? Why does it exist? Don't you feel a sense of loss that something so moving and complex cannot be appreciated?
Circular reasoning. You're imagining the problem away and then saying that hence there is none. That work of art of yours was made by someone (hence already the impossibility of your premise). If nobody else ever saw it and (s)he took it into his/her grave and now nobody knows about it, nobody will feel a loss the day the grave gets blasted into oblivion by a meteor, or gets melted by the dying sun. Face it, we're dust.It's good for finding files that are not being accessed anymore (doh). This may not be a big issue on a personal desktop, but in a corporate network with tons of centrally installed tools - and even more versions thereof - it very much is. I've made in the past extensive use of it for exactly that purpose.
It's also good for automatically getting rid of the many defunct temporary files people tend to leave behind in shared directories such as /tmp. Again think multi-user machines.
I've also used it as a debugging feature. Both to debug software and to de bug wetware (i.e. brains of people who are convinced they are telling their computer to do one thing while actually telling it something else).
It's not up to kernel developers to do this. I'm more than capable of compiling my own custom kernel, but I do not want to do that everytime I install a machine or upgrade a kernel in order to overrule some other guy's personal preference. I don't have the time for that (anymore). It's up to the distribution builders to make a default decision regarding atime and to do it in such a way as to allow their customers to overrule it with minimal effort by (not) specifying a mount option. In other words: everything works just fine as-is and nothing at all needs to be changed.
Sorry, but you need to go back to law school (or to reading comprehension class). They are bound to v2, but v2 does not at all imply v3. If they don't like v3, they just keep using v2. If a package author changes his or her distribution license to v3 (or later), this does not affect copies previousy distributed under other licneses in any way. Not even if there is not a single other change in the package.
The main problem (but not the only one) is called "object destructors". You have to make sure they are called. All of them, and in the correct order, at all the nested scopes of execution you are in when the exception occurs. And you need to make sure not to call them on any object not yet constructed (always remember that constructors can throw exceptions too) and never to call a destructor twice (I've seen this kind of bug multiple times in multiple compilers). And then there is the fun of exceptions thrown by destructors, not to mention the possibility that it all happens in the middle of constructing or destructing an array of objects.
All that is why setjmp()/longjmp(), also known as C's non-local goto, don't cut it, which in turn means that you need to complicate function return mechanisms. And just when you think you got that problem sorted out, you need to be aware that C++ functions can call (library) C functions that were never compiled to even know about exceptions but that in turn can call C++ functions that may again throw an exception. The entire construction needs to be able to handle this.
As I wrote in an other post in this thread, it can be done. But it is not easy. Note that the entire object destructor issue also applies within a single scope, which is why life is not as easy as replacing every "throw" statement by "goto end;".
Of course C++ exceptions are what I meant. What else would I mean when using the word "exceptions" in this context?
And yes, C++ exceptions can be expressed in C. After all, C is a glorified assembler and the resulting code from C++ translation is assembler as well. It all depends in the level of abstraction at which write the C code is written and on the amount of uglyness/inefficiency you're willing to take on board (and also the trade-off between both of the latter). But that's not the point. The point of this thread is that nowadays it makes no sense to make use of this capability in a C++ compiler. Especially not when considering that a user of a C++ compiler wants more than just a compiler. He also wants a debugger that is able to meaningfully link up the binary and the original C++ source. If you're a C++ compiler vendor, using C as an IL does nothing but complicate your own life. Twice.You, whenever you compile C++ code, as it is compiled to C before machine code (unless you are using an exotic compiler such as the Compaq AXP C++ compiler for TRU64).
Excuse me???? That was not even true anymore when I started using C++, back in 1992. There are features in the C++ standard that are so extremely difficult to correctly implement in standard compliant C that it's a complete waste of effort trying to pass via C while compiling. Exception handling comes to mind as the prime example. A failed attempt to support exceptions was the reason why Cfront 4.0 was abandoned. Note that 3.0 was released as early as 1991. The last Cfront based compiler I had the horor of using was HP's CC. It was superseeded by the new native aCC by 1994 at the latest.
By the way, I used to write C/C++ compilation/optimisation stuff for a living, so I guess I know something about the topic.... :-)
Well, I was there back then (read my sig) and yet even so I enjoyed the trip down Linux memory lane while going through this article. Sure, this is not top-quality journalism, but if you don't want to read it, then don't.
Slashdot is not anymore what to used to be when I joined (look at my /. id to see what I mean), but even so I still use it as my home page on my home boxen. If there's stuff that I don't want to read, I simply don't.
PS: I happen to be interested in military history as well. So yes, I do still read stuff about WWI, archduke included, even after so many years. In fact, your mentionaing of it just caused me to read what Wikipedia says about Franz Ferdinand.
Thank you for making my very point. Maybe you should read stuff more thoroughly before replying to it.
Excuse me: "without the tabs" and "Firefox ... is synonymous with security"? For me Firefox is also - and actually formost - synonym with tabbed browsing.
My own windows box has IE 7 for the sake of those few sites that really need IE (Windows Update, mainly). Of course I use Mozilla (albeit Seamonkey, not Firefox) for all other browsing on Linux as well as Windows. But recently I had the misfortune of having to intensively use IE 6 for two months "at work". The one thing that I hated most was the absense of tabs, not the lesser security.
Don't get me wrong, the security argument is very valid. But the target audience is going to be much more convinced by the tabs. If not, I suggest putting Lynx on the machines. It's even more leightweight, and it even has more security advantages, since no hacker targets it (anymore) and since features that aren't there can't be abused. Now really...