In the second film, while the heros are entering Le Vrai and walking up to the Merovingian's table, another person is being led away. He and Neo trade a Significant Glance[tm]. We never see him again.
Is this explained in the third movie? We're seeing it tonight, but I'd like to know this ahead of time.:-)
I hear you on the FBI thing. But consider: somewhere a just-not-worth-the-taxpayer's-money line has to be drawn. The FBI is seriously understaffed. (Go figure. The technologically astute are too proud to work for a measly $35K FBI salary, investigating tech crimes. Nooooo, gotta be making glamourous six-digit salaries on high-visibility programming projects.) But anyhow, the reason I'm posting is...
It's like the local cops who don't give a shit if your laptop, your radio, etc were stolen and hundreds of dollars in damage done to your car. But, mind you, they've got all day to sit out on 'speed patrol'...
Unless you live in Andy Griffith Town, the officers who sit on speed trap duty are not the same ones who investigate theft. Different division, different rules, different salaries, therefore a different allocation of officers/resources/time/budget.
A traffic cop "sitting all day" on watch costs less than an investigating agent spending even half a day looking for stolen laptops chock full o' pr0n. It's harder to hire investigative officers and detectives, it's more expensive to train them and pay them.
I choose particular models/versions of hardware and software based on many factors, and the champion individual maintainers have never figured into it. I'm curious why that should make a difference.
("Hey, you! Developer! The Customer says that the kernel version you required with our latest product sets the building on fire!" "But, but, but, that's a minor detail! The real test of the core of an operating system is how well the maintainer dude handles patches and bug reports! And this kernel version is maintained by a guy with cool hair, too!")
Sorry, I'm not flaming you, I'm just poking fun. Good maintainership means a lot to every project -- look how well XFree86 isn't doing in this regard -- but I'm missing how it's "the real test". Help me out here?
I've learned more than I ever wanted to know about the "137GB barrier" after buying a driver larger than that and discovering the hard way that neither Linux 2.4.22, nor Win2K, nor my BIOS, were prepared to see anything larger than that number. It's definitely not a Mac-only problem.
Basically, the standard LBA addressing mode uses 28 bits to hold an address/offset, which means you can only see 137 gigs. There are 48-bit LBA devices out there, nearly all of them PCI controller card, but support for those is either spotty or widespread, depending on which shill you talk to. I eventually got mine working under both OSes.
Usually, however, lack of support means that the device shows up as only being 137GB, not that the partitions are corrupted. Ick.
Umm, about that Jurassic Park scene...
on
Linux in Movies?
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· Score: 1
Two notes, in reverse order:
There was probably an xterm open somewhere offcamera or behind the file manager window so that a technician could enter commands in between the GUI clips that made it into the film.
On-screen computer activity is, as a rule, never "live". One missed mouse click, one badly-timed BSOD, one random error message, a typo on a hidden xterm or remote prompt, and that's a serious shitload of money down the drain. (Think costs of film, lights, salaries...) It's always done in advance, done to perfection, and then simply played back on screen.
where the girl sits down at a terminal, looks things over, then exclaims "This is Unix! I know Unix!". Silly, but then it was real, sort of: the screen shots were of an experimental 3D file manager from SGI.
Not that experimental. I went to ftp.sgi.com and downloaded the source from the anonymous public area. Took a while to get it to build on the Onyx servers, but I was eventually flying around my home directory. I forget what the shapes and colors indicated, but I think height represented file size.
Wasn't so much "experimental" as much it was "really freakin slow".
It's fashionable to conveniently forget that there we hordes of lurking bugs, waiting for the rollover to happen. De Jager woke people up to that fact, and it paid off. The critical bugs were fixed in time. Ahead of time, even; for the last couple years of the 90's, he was on record as saying that the worst problems were largely solved, that there would be no mushroom-cloud catastrophe.
But nobody pays attention to people when they're saying that. Only when they're screaming. So that's all he's remembered for.
If he had never done the screaming in the first place, managers would never have listened, and the worst bugs would never have been fixed. Or even noticed until it was too late.
It's like the population of Rohan getting pissed off at Gandalf and Aragorn for warning them about the oncoming army. "Fuckers! You said there was going to be disaster, so we spent all this time and money and effort building defenses and moving out of homes, and look! We're still alive! Buncha con artists..."
How much truth is there to the statement that 2 + 2 = 4? A lot. Why? Because that's how it's defined to work.
How much truth is there to the statement that increased links equal increased google rank?
Uh, that's how Google documents it. That's how all of Google's employees define it. That's how everybody's experience pans out. Maybe they're all just making shit up with nobody ever calling them on it, but I'd argue for "that's actually how it works" myself. Try going to Google and clicking "About".
is this actually a usable loophole in google's ranking system?
Only if the log owners let the spam sit there long enough to be googled. If they do that, then my guess would be quite possibly yes.
Maybe compile a list of such spammers, then a list of the advertised sites. I'd like a checkbox on my google searches that says, "Ignore results on sites whose page rank is mostly due to asshole tactics."
The quote that the parent AC plagarized is from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French aircraft designer living in the first half of the 20th century. (And author of The Little Prince, if that hasn't been banned in America yet.) He was speaking in the context of original design, not individual features.
While the plane is still on paper, that's the time to remove all the unneccessary cruft. That's de Saint-Exupery's point. Not after the plane has been built; then the dependancy problems you mention arise. That's not the proper time. Certainly not in midflight.
If I'm remembering POSIX correctly, when the kernel goes to exec an interpreted file that doesn't have a #! at the beginning, it always uses/bin/sh. (Otherwise it would have to do things like look up the current user's login shell, or try to find the parent process and see what shell it is, etc, etc, all of which would be slow and fragile.)
So the article post is completely moronic; the currently running shell has no effect at all on an executed script.
If you find yourself writing C-shell-family script, consider a nice crack pipe and some hash brownies. Because you're fucking insane already. KIlling the rest of your brain cells would be a harmless mod. (I don't believe gmhowell to be one of these people; it just needed to be said.)
The C shell was written "to mimic the C programming language." What's the primary tool in the C programming language? Functions. What did csh remove that all other shells had? Functions. What are you supposed to use in their place?
goto
Give me a fucking break. Teaching scripting in [t]csh is like teaching structured programming in cobol, or recursive programming in fortran77. I'd like to reuse my code, thankyouverymuch, not copy and paste it everywhere.
And we're still teaching it wrongly
on
Happy Birthday, Atom
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Even today many schoolrooms have recently-published science books that show a model of the atom that looks like a little solar system, electrons in orbits and all. No mention of quantum/wave dynamics, or the fact that they don't behave anything like orbiting bodies in a solar system.
No, I don't expect 5th graders to learn quantum theory. But just because spherical trigonometry is also too hard for them, I don't expect them to be taught that the earth is flat.
Side note: http://www.intuitor.com/physics_test/index.html is from the same people who brought you the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site. See whether you know more about physics than a random chimpanzee!
(Credit goes to the Onion for that one, IIRC. No, I don't actually believe Iraq has WMD these days. We know they tried to make/buy/steal them, but they failed.)
First of all,/bin/sh is a statically linked minimalistic shell,
No it isn't. You're thinking of/sbin/sh, which is what root's shell is set to.
And it's not exactly minimalist, either./bin/sh has nearly all the POSIX features, they're just buggy as hell.
As far as scripting goes, every Bourne script I've seen starts off "#!/bin/sh", under the (reasonable) assumption that the shell there does not, in fact, suck ass. The C/POSIX interface bindings even specify that/bin/sh is the location of the POSIX shell; another place where Solaris falls down in the name of backwards compatability.
For re-execing shells, I typically use the header found in the Goat Book, or variants thereon. Usually I would do that in order to use ksh or bash features in a startup script in/etc/init.d, which Solaris unconditionally runs using/sbin/sh.
Actually, my solution would be to throw out fetchmail, throw out pop3 and the rest of its ilk, and do something completely different. There's no call for fetchmail in a sound design.
That's not what I'm criticizing. In fact, I strongly agree with your right-shell-for-the-right-job attitude. (Sun could ship a newer bash, but enh, whatever.)
The criticism is that/bin/sh is a flaming piece of shit. Not "traditional Bourne shell" in general, but specifically Solaris/bin/sh. It is full of quirks, bugs, and incompatabilities. And they will not change it, for the same hardcore backwards compat reasons I mentioned before. Somewhere there may be a customer whose ancient entangled shell scripts unwittingly depend on funky Sun behavior, and Sun will not break it for them.
The result is that if your correctly-written/bin/sh script works everywhere else, it may not work on Solaris, or it may only work some if the time. The GCC project found this out the hard way; occasionally Solaris/bin/sh will just fail at random times, on identical scripts. (See their FAQ.) If you have/usr/xpg4/bin before/usr/bin in your PATH, then "sh" actually gets you ksh (well, ksh88), but who starts their Bourne shell scripts with "#!/usr/bin/env sh" ?
I got sick of patching fetchmail for one buffer overrun after another. Unfortunately, there's nothing else out there that will do what it does, so until someone gets fed up with and rewrites it, we're stuck with it.
I especially like how the passwords are stored in cleartext in the various rc files, if you want fetchmail to run as a daemon. Yeah, real secure design there.
Fetchmail is a great victory for how open source can successfully work to rescue old code and turn it into something new and viable. It should not be used as an example of sound design.
Most slashdotters won't understand or agree with this, but the large bulk of Sun's customers appreciate the fact that command-line options do not mutate over time, that the default behavior of the -foo switch is now reversed, etc, etc. The GNU coreutils maintainer has been busily ripping out all kinds of traditional functionality in the name of POSIX standardization, which would normally be a good thing if he hadn't gone way too far. (I don't give a fuck if "uniq" and "head -1" aren't full POSIX, they're in my scripts, they're in my head, and they're staying there.)
If Sun tried to make as many incompatible changes to their core utilities as the GNU utils does, somewhere upwards of 80% of the customers would just walk away.
Yes, I install GNU coreutils and all kinds of happy stuff (like a decent shell) as soon as I open up a Sun box. But I leave their versions in place so that old PATHs still get the behavior they expect to find. Everyone here loves the cutting edge, and loves to cut down anyone using version ($latest-1). Sun's primary customers aren't like that. They want stability in the core utilities across years, not new features every few weeks, or even months.
(Yes, the last 3 or 4 versions of Solaris have all shipped with Perl. It's a slightly older, stable version of Perl. There's a bunch of stuff on the freeware companion CD too, as well as sunfreeware.com. Those who want a stable Solaris get it by default. Those who want bleeding-edge tools can easily download the packages.)
In the same sense as this article has used it, meaning, "run GCC on the device," yes, that would be difficult. GCC demands very few features from the host, but they do have to be there.
In the sense that most compiler developers mean it, "running GCC to produce code for the device, even though GCC is actually running on [something else]," that's much more common, and much easier.
Slashdot Mirror
So? You are not their target market.
In the second film, while the heros are entering Le Vrai and walking up to the Merovingian's table, another person is being led away. He and Neo trade a Significant Glance[tm]. We never see him again.
Is this explained in the third movie? We're seeing it tonight, but I'd like to know this ahead of time. :-)
First this happens, and then this happens. Fortunately, he doesn't seem to have lost any gadgetry along with the pants.
I hear you on the FBI thing. But consider: somewhere a just-not-worth-the-taxpayer's-money line has to be drawn. The FBI is seriously understaffed. (Go figure. The technologically astute are too proud to work for a measly $35K FBI salary, investigating tech crimes. Nooooo, gotta be making glamourous six-digit salaries on high-visibility programming projects.) But anyhow, the reason I'm posting is...
Unless you live in Andy Griffith Town, the officers who sit on speed trap duty are not the same ones who investigate theft. Different division, different rules, different salaries, therefore a different allocation of officers/resources/time/budget.
A traffic cop "sitting all day" on watch costs less than an investigating agent spending even half a day looking for stolen laptops chock full o' pr0n. It's harder to hire investigative officers and detectives, it's more expensive to train them and pay them.
Why is that the real test?
I choose particular models/versions of hardware and software based on many factors, and the champion individual maintainers have never figured into it. I'm curious why that should make a difference.
("Hey, you! Developer! The Customer says that the kernel version you required with our latest product sets the building on fire!" "But, but, but, that's a minor detail! The real test of the core of an operating system is how well the maintainer dude handles patches and bug reports! And this kernel version is maintained by a guy with cool hair, too!")
Sorry, I'm not flaming you, I'm just poking fun. Good maintainership means a lot to every project -- look how well XFree86 isn't doing in this regard -- but I'm missing how it's "the real test". Help me out here?I've learned more than I ever wanted to know about the "137GB barrier" after buying a driver larger than that and discovering the hard way that neither Linux 2.4.22, nor Win2K, nor my BIOS, were prepared to see anything larger than that number. It's definitely not a Mac-only problem.
Basically, the standard LBA addressing mode uses 28 bits to hold an address/offset, which means you can only see 137 gigs. There are 48-bit LBA devices out there, nearly all of them PCI controller card, but support for those is either spotty or widespread, depending on which shill you talk to. I eventually got mine working under both OSes.
Usually, however, lack of support means that the device shows up as only being 137GB, not that the partitions are corrupted. Ick.
Two notes, in reverse order:
On-screen computer activity is, as a rule, never "live". One missed mouse click, one badly-timed BSOD, one random error message, a typo on a hidden xterm or remote prompt, and that's a serious shitload of money down the drain. (Think costs of film, lights, salaries...) It's always done in advance, done to perfection, and then simply played back on screen.
Not that experimental. I went to ftp.sgi.com and downloaded the source from the anonymous public area. Took a while to get it to build on the Onyx servers, but I was eventually flying around my home directory. I forget what the shapes and colors indicated, but I think height represented file size.
Wasn't so much "experimental" as much it was "really freakin slow".
It's fashionable to conveniently forget that there we hordes of lurking bugs, waiting for the rollover to happen. De Jager woke people up to that fact, and it paid off. The critical bugs were fixed in time. Ahead of time, even; for the last couple years of the 90's, he was on record as saying that the worst problems were largely solved, that there would be no mushroom-cloud catastrophe.
But nobody pays attention to people when they're saying that. Only when they're screaming. So that's all he's remembered for.
If he had never done the screaming in the first place, managers would never have listened, and the worst bugs would never have been fixed. Or even noticed until it was too late.
It's like the population of Rohan getting pissed off at Gandalf and Aragorn for warning them about the oncoming army. "Fuckers! You said there was going to be disaster, so we spent all this time and money and effort building defenses and moving out of homes, and look! We're still alive! Buncha con artists..."
Plus a third button that reads, "Put this spammer's contact information, and a Mafia hit contract on his life, up on Ebay."
How much truth is there to the statement that 2 + 2 = 4? A lot. Why? Because that's how it's defined to work.
Uh, that's how Google documents it. That's how all of Google's employees define it. That's how everybody's experience pans out. Maybe they're all just making shit up with nobody ever calling them on it, but I'd argue for "that's actually how it works" myself. Try going to Google and clicking "About".
Only if the log owners let the spam sit there long enough to be googled. If they do that, then my guess would be quite possibly yes.
Maybe compile a list of such spammers, then a list of the advertised sites. I'd like a checkbox on my google searches that says, "Ignore results on sites whose page rank is mostly due to asshole tactics."
I've seen pseudo-blueprints of airplane designs by him; he was definitely designing something.
Good to hear that L.P. is still available, in some form at least.
The quote that the parent AC plagarized is from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French aircraft designer living in the first half of the 20th century. (And author of The Little Prince, if that hasn't been banned in America yet.) He was speaking in the context of original design, not individual features.
While the plane is still on paper, that's the time to remove all the unneccessary cruft. That's de Saint-Exupery's point. Not after the plane has been built; then the dependancy problems you mention arise. That's not the proper time. Certainly not in midflight.
If I'm remembering POSIX correctly, when the kernel goes to exec an interpreted file that doesn't have a #! at the beginning, it always uses
So the article post is completely moronic; the currently running shell has no effect at all on an executed script.
If you find yourself writing C-shell-family script, consider a nice crack pipe and some hash brownies. Because you're fucking insane already. KIlling the rest of your brain cells would be a harmless mod. (I don't believe gmhowell to be one of these people; it just needed to be said.)
The C shell was written "to mimic the C programming language." What's the primary tool in the C programming language? Functions. What did csh remove that all other shells had? Functions. What are you supposed to use in their place?
Give me a fucking break. Teaching scripting in [t]csh is like teaching structured programming in cobol, or recursive programming in fortran77. I'd like to reuse my code, thankyouverymuch, not copy and paste it everywhere.
Even today many schoolrooms have recently-published science books that show a model of the atom that looks like a little solar system, electrons in orbits and all. No mention of quantum/wave dynamics, or the fact that they don't behave anything like orbiting bodies in a solar system.
No, I don't expect 5th graders to learn quantum theory. But just because spherical trigonometry is also too hard for them, I don't expect them to be taught that the earth is flat.
Side note: http://www.intuitor.com/physics_test/index.html is from the same people who brought you the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site. See whether you know more about physics than a random chimpanzee!
I'd feel better about these "how to transition your project to open source" guidelines if the first step weren't
Okay, okay, just kidding.
Yes, I think we're in violent agreement. :-)
Because we kept the receipts.
(Credit goes to the Onion for that one, IIRC. No, I don't actually believe Iraq has WMD these days. We know they tried to make/buy/steal them, but they failed.)
No it isn't. You're thinking of /sbin/sh, which is what root's shell is set to.
And it's not exactly minimalist, either. /bin/sh has nearly all the POSIX features, they're just buggy as hell.
As far as scripting goes, every Bourne script I've seen starts off "#!/bin/sh", under the (reasonable) assumption that the shell there does not, in fact, suck ass. The C/POSIX interface bindings even specify that /bin/sh is the location of the POSIX shell; another place where Solaris falls down in the name of backwards compatability.
For re-execing shells, I typically use the header found in the Goat Book, or variants thereon. Usually I would do that in order to use ksh or bash features in a startup script in /etc/init.d, which Solaris unconditionally runs using /sbin/sh.
Actually, my solution would be to throw out fetchmail, throw out pop3 and the rest of its ilk, and do something completely different. There's no call for fetchmail in a sound design.
Everybody's heard of Microsoft, Dubya, France, and politicians. The tactics of the RIAA have been making mainstream press.
SCO and Darl McBride are hardly household words in any country, and certainly not in America.
That's not what I'm criticizing. In fact, I strongly agree with your right-shell-for-the-right-job attitude. (Sun could ship a newer bash, but enh, whatever.)
The criticism is that /bin/sh is a flaming piece of shit. Not "traditional Bourne shell" in general, but specifically Solaris /bin/sh. It is full of quirks, bugs, and incompatabilities. And they will not change it, for the same hardcore backwards compat reasons I mentioned before. Somewhere there may be a customer whose ancient entangled shell scripts unwittingly depend on funky Sun behavior, and Sun will not break it for them.
The result is that if your correctly-written /bin/sh script works everywhere else, it may not work on Solaris, or it may only work some if the time. The GCC project found this out the hard way; occasionally Solaris /bin/sh will just fail at random times, on identical scripts. (See their FAQ.) If you have /usr/xpg4/bin before /usr/bin in your PATH, then "sh" actually gets you ksh (well, ksh88), but who starts their Bourne shell scripts with "#!/usr/bin/env sh" ?
I got sick of patching fetchmail for one buffer overrun after another. Unfortunately, there's nothing else out there that will do what it does, so until someone gets fed up with and rewrites it, we're stuck with it.
I especially like how the passwords are stored in cleartext in the various rc files, if you want fetchmail to run as a daemon. Yeah, real secure design there.
Fetchmail is a great victory for how open source can successfully work to rescue old code and turn it into something new and viable. It should not be used as an example of sound design.
Most slashdotters won't understand or agree with this, but the large bulk of Sun's customers appreciate the fact that command-line options do not mutate over time, that the default behavior of the -foo switch is now reversed, etc, etc. The GNU coreutils maintainer has been busily ripping out all kinds of traditional functionality in the name of POSIX standardization, which would normally be a good thing if he hadn't gone way too far. (I don't give a fuck if "uniq" and "head -1" aren't full POSIX, they're in my scripts, they're in my head, and they're staying there.)
If Sun tried to make as many incompatible changes to their core utilities as the GNU utils does, somewhere upwards of 80% of the customers would just walk away.
Yes, I install GNU coreutils and all kinds of happy stuff (like a decent shell) as soon as I open up a Sun box. But I leave their versions in place so that old PATHs still get the behavior they expect to find. Everyone here loves the cutting edge, and loves to cut down anyone using version ($latest-1). Sun's primary customers aren't like that. They want stability in the core utilities across years, not new features every few weeks, or even months.
(Yes, the last 3 or 4 versions of Solaris have all shipped with Perl. It's a slightly older, stable version of Perl. There's a bunch of stuff on the freeware companion CD too, as well as sunfreeware.com. Those who want a stable Solaris get it by default. Those who want bleeding-edge tools can easily download the packages.)
In the same sense as this article has used it, meaning, "run GCC on the device," yes, that would be difficult. GCC demands very few features from the host, but they do have to be there.
In the sense that most compiler developers mean it, "running GCC to produce code for the device, even though GCC is actually running on [something else]," that's much more common, and much easier.