One guy I knew used it to enforce discipline on himself. [...] one was work and one was play/
Yup. It's the exact same setup used in research labs, except one is unclassified and one is secret. At the end of the day, you power down, pop out the classified drive, and lock it in a safe.
Having worked as a programmer, I agree: everything needs to be well-thought-out first.
What does that have to do with the license under which the program is released? The amount of time/effort I spent designing (or not) has no bearing on whether I distribute source with my binaries (or not). This seems like a straw man argument.
You aren't pointing out flaws in the open source paradigm. You're pointing out flaws in the design capabilities and self-discipline of most of the random one-off K3wl Projects of the Week on sourceforge.net.
Well, managed software is a way to stability and readable source code!
No argument there; it's one way, but not the only way.
The angle of the wound suggests Otzi's assailant fired from below. The arrowhead, less than an inch long, ripped through his back, tore through the nerves of his left arm and sliced the veins, lodging itself between the shoulder blade and rib cage. He likely survived the initial assault, because the arrow did not strike any vital organs. But he probably lost feeling in his left arm from nerve damage, and he would have suffered massive hemorrhaging. The arrowhead stopped just short of his lungs.
Wow. They couldn't get anywhere near that detailed in the OJ Simpson case, but they can list point-for-point the assault on a dude frozen for 53 centuries.:-)
And ten years from now, new evidence will come to light. And some Italian-Austrian-Alps-area con man will claim to be Otzi's descendant, and sue for mistrial.
Not even/just/ death for virus writers/and spammers/.
Instead, death after a year of torture. Recorded on film, and shown to teenagers on the first day we give them access to Visual Basic. Sorta like driver's ed class.
Okay, I assumed that this is the same story that came out about 18 months ago, with the little flying-on-compressed-air red spherical thingies that resemble the doohickey shooting Luke Skywalker in the leg while he was practicing blindfolded, so I didn't read the article yet.
BUT... about the editor's comment...
Modified for Earth gravity? A little bit of air pressure will get the driod moving in zerogee. Do you have any idea how much air pressure we're talking about in order to sustain a relatively heavy object in a 1 gee field? Hovering? On air pressure? You'd be able to hear the fan a mile away! The air coming out the bottom of your SonyFlyingDroid would blow a hole in the floor!
Almost all of the top-rated articles as I write this contain some kind of joke about such-and-such being made John Romero's bitch, or vice-versa. I guess I missed something somewhere, would some kind soul fill me in?
Okay, while I'm glad on general principles that there's that much more money not going into the pockets of lawyers, I was looking forward to seeing whether the GPL would actually survive a legalistic grilling from a judge.
Since it hasn't been tested, threatening GPL violations is still sorta at the bluff stage, or so it seems to me. There's still no precedent.
There's a really long thread in the archives (some of it is still going on), but this message starts in the middle. The 16 byte stack alignment is on by default.
Okay, I'll take your word for it. It's been too long since I signed the papers, and memory isn't what it used... I forget what I was going to say.:-)
Oh crap -- data with priority flags
on
Internet2 Update
·
· Score: 2
And in a few years, it will be opened up to the public. It will become 3-D Porn, obnoxious teenagers who can't spell,
And you think the spam is bad now? From the article:
Researchers are also looking at ways to give some data transmissions higher priority than others. By marking the data as "urgent," researchers can make sure real-time video of surgeries cross the network before less time-sensitive data such as e-mail.
It doesn't matter what criteria are used to decide what's high-priority, spammers will find a way to abuse it. All of their email will suddenly become "absolutely the highest priority ever," squashing yours, and if some rules like "real-time video takes priority over email" are tried, well, now you have television commercials squashing out oeverything else.
Give high-priority rights to select organizations like hospitals? Only works until the professional spammers buy their way in, or just flat out forge the keys.
Sorry, I'm in a bad mood right now. Just got more spam. There isn't a single useful thing that we in the CS community can come up with that some cocksucking marketer can't abuse.
The problem I find with contributing to OpenOffice is that they will not accept code submissions over 10 lines of code if one has not assigned copyright to Sun.
So? This is the exact same policy that the FSF has for all the core GNU programs and libraries. There's just way too much danger that some contributor will donate an entire module, wait until it becomes widespread and useful, and then claim exclusive ownership and demand money, i.e., "pull a Unisys/GIF."
What alternative would you suggest that would keep the code and coders safe from the lawyers?
This can not be done electronically, only by snail mail or fax.
Again, just like the FSF. (Well, you email the initial form, they snailmail you the document, you sign the document and mail it back.) This is how American law currently works, is all.
I was considering helping but I'd like to keep my copyright.
Dunno about Sun, but the form that you sign for the FSF gives you the right to pull back the copyright (given a month's notice in writing). Of course, I would expect that when you do that, everything you've donated to the project will get removed, but then that's probably the person's whole point of withdrawing the copyright assignment in the first place.
it talks about how New Mexico's attorney general is all on Microsoft's side now against the remaining states.
Um, lemme see. The single quote from the AG contains, "I am no longer persuaded a breakup remains appropriate or will ultimately be ordered by the courts. It is obvious Microsoft will continue to resist attempts to require this remedy." That doesn't come screaming out of the page at me as "being all on Microsoft's side."
That sounds more like, "they're not going to give up, and they have more money than all 19 states in the suit put together, so we would run out of money first. Let's go do something constructive instead."
Ah, but it's Slashdot. If you're not ranting against the evils of Microsoft, you're all on their side.
(Go ahead, smack me for wanting some journalistic integrity. I've got karma to blow.)
In fact, every sea-going european race extant at or a bit before plato's time talks about land to the far west of europe....
...because they knew from first-hand experience that going to the land to the east meant you got killed by migrating Mongols, going to the lands in the south meant you got killed by expanding Greeks, Romans, Persians, or Africans, and going to the lands in the north meant you froze to death or drowned. "Hey, there's nothing to the west that we can see; it's gotta be better than what we know right now, let's invent legends about it."
Okay, so I would've made a lousy anthropologist.:-)
A: GRAPEs and chess-playing computers, such as the one that tackled Kasparov (Deep Blue?), both accomplish their opening-up-of-cans-of-mathematical-whoopass via the same approach: functions in the innermost loops are done via calls to special-purpose hardcare cards. The rest is done with software.
So, say I take a GRAPE, and replace its special N-body gravitational daughtercard with one containing a few FPGAs programmed for, say, RC5; now I have a cracking machine. And then reprogram the FPGA to do image manipulation instead; now I have a renderer to make my own Toy Story. And then reprogram the FPGA to do, etc, etc.
Of course, I'm still lacking the software. So actually this post is mostly babbling.:-)
and the weirding modules are completely ignored (this was amongst the things that made House Atreides as strong as it was).
There are no such things as weirding modules. Clearly you're thinking the movie (starring Sting) was canonical. Try reading the actual books instead.
You can grep all six books and the phrase "weirding module" will not appear. This was one of the three major departures (read, "made it up out of thin air") that the original Dune movie made from the books. Basically, they didn't have the time to investigate the mystical powers on-screen, so they threw in some technobabble instead.
If the TV miniseries was based on the books rather than the piece of crap movie which was based on the books, then there won't be things like weirding modules. And that's good.
I was about to post a followup to my own followup, saying that my tone may have (upon retrospect) been a bit sharp. But then I saw your post, so this post now bears double duty...
Where I work (IBM), reading sites like./ is encouraged in my department (though not to the expense of not getting work done). I'm a QA tester, so I have LOTS of dead time while waiting for this or that to time out, etc, and surfing./, The Register, Toms Hardware, etc, are "in the line of duty", IMO, as they increase my knowledge, and thus my value.
Sweet! IBM is sounding cooler and cooler all the time. I distinctly recall the Apple TV advertisement that ran once during the '84 Olympics, announcing Macintosh, and portraying IBM as the Big Brother (1984, get it?). I guess IBM has been undergoing some revamping of their corporate culture.
And at the same time, SGI -- who was one of the neatest places to work at -- says they're killing off their employee's website. Bummer.
First Law of Slashdot: Every extreme example must be countered by an equally-extreme counterexample.
You didn't ask your employer's permission to use your employer's computer for non-work-related activities.
Nor did you, I suspect, when you posted to Slashdot last week Thursday, Tuesday, and Monday. We all use our work computers for non-work-related activities. We all don't goto prison for it.
*sigh* Of course not. Clearly every employer who doesn't have their heads shoved up their own arse -- and even some that do -- recognize that some company time/resources will be lost for purposes of morale. Reading slashdot is like setting aside part of an unused cubicle for a small fridge and a coffee machine, or getting a phone call from the SO to remind you to pick up milk on the way home. No, they aren't strictly work activites, and no, they don't bring in immediate revenue (or whatever).
(The number of people who like to point this out every time the topic comes up disturbs me. What's required is good judgement. My boss doesn't care if I use the web to look up movie times for that evening, but running my own MP3 streaming radio station from my office would be out of line.)
And I repeat: yes, I agree the penalty is too steep. I just don't think the guy should get off scot-free in the name of science.
Okay, so maybe the penalty is a little steep, but how many times are we going to rehash the same damn story on slashdot? (Oh yeah, I forgot that the collective attention span here lasts abou- hey, look, shiny things.)
It's very simple, folks:
It's your employer's computer, not yours.
You didn't ask your employer's permission to use your employer's computer for non-work-related activities.
I found a lot of satisfaction in shooting the stars and getting a nice position fix.
Well, that's a decision everyone must make for himself. Personally, I enjoy brewing some coffee and getting a nice caffeine fix, but whatever. One man's cheese is another man's rotted milk.
...
Um. We're not talking about the same thing, are we?:-)
The fact that the C++ vector implementation increments and decrements a counter on pushes and pops instead of when size() is called
Problems there:
The ISO C++ Standard doesn't require this behavior. The vector (or any other container) is allowed to not do the count of elements until size() is called.
The Standard recommends, but does not require, that vector et al use an O(1) size() -- thereby requiring the behavior which you describe -- but the time/space tradeoff choice is left to the implementation.
The STL from HP/SGI is the basis of the implementation of the "STL subset" of the C++ Standard Library for many compilers, including GCC 3.0. And it does not do as you write; it postpones the count until size() is called, leading to O(n) behavior.
Thus, use v.empty() rather than v.size() == 0 for tests.
The FAQ at the SGI STL site discusses this further. It's good reading.
Okay, side note: when you're responding to a sentence with two phrases, and you're disagreeing violently with one of them, don't use pronouns. "Anyone who says what" -- the part about the Daleks or the part about the thinking? I either strongly agree with you, or I thnk you're an idiot, depending on which one you meant.:-)
Anyhow.
I remember shortly after the Matrix came out, some folks in a newsgroup were discussing how such a malevolent AI could come about in the first place. One suggested some bad code someplace. Another responded with, "It's extremely unlikely that an AI could turn hostile due to sloppy programming. On the other hand, that fucking paperclip in Word 97 seems to do whatever the fuck it wants."
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. It's the exact same setup used in research labs, except one is unclassified and one is secret. At the end of the day, you power down, pop out the classified drive, and lock it in a safe.
Nothing new here, move along, move along... :-)
Having worked as a programmer, I agree: everything needs to be well-thought-out first.
What does that have to do with the license under which the program is released? The amount of time/effort I spent designing (or not) has no bearing on whether I distribute source with my binaries (or not). This seems like a straw man argument.
You aren't pointing out flaws in the open source paradigm. You're pointing out flaws in the design capabilities and self-discipline of most of the random one-off K3wl Projects of the Week on sourceforge.net.
No argument there; it's one way, but not the only way.
Wow. They couldn't get anywhere near that detailed in the OJ Simpson case, but they can list point-for-point the assault on a dude frozen for 53 centuries. :-)
And ten years from now, new evidence will come to light. And some Italian-Austrian-Alps-area con man will claim to be Otzi's descendant, and sue for mistrial.
Not even
Instead, death after a year of torture. Recorded on film, and shown to teenagers on the first day we give them access to Visual Basic. Sorta like driver's ed class.
Okay, I assumed that this is the same story that came out about 18 months ago, with the little flying-on-compressed-air red spherical thingies that resemble the doohickey shooting Luke Skywalker in the leg while he was practicing blindfolded, so I didn't read the article yet.
BUT... about the editor's comment...
Modified for Earth gravity? A little bit of air pressure will get the driod moving in zerogee. Do you have any idea how much air pressure we're talking about in order to sustain a relatively heavy object in a 1 gee field? Hovering? On air pressure? You'd be able to hear the fan a mile away! The air coming out the bottom of your SonyFlyingDroid would blow a hole in the floor!
Still, I'd buy one. :-)
Almost all of the top-rated articles as I write this contain some kind of joke about such-and-such being made John Romero's bitch, or vice-versa. I guess I missed something somewhere, would some kind soul fill me in?
Thanks.
The government cannot take down Microsoft, but Microsoft can take down the government...
*ponder*
Right, so, who wants to build a space station with me and leave this BS behind? I'll bring cookies.
Okay, while I'm glad on general principles that there's that much more money not going into the pockets of lawyers, I was looking forward to seeing whether the GPL would actually survive a legalistic grilling from a judge.
Since it hasn't been tested, threatening GPL violations is still sorta at the bluff stage, or so it seems to me. There's still no precedent.
There's a really long thread in the archives (some of it is still going on), but this message starts in the middle. The 16 byte stack alignment is on by default.
Okay, I'll take your word for it. It's been too long since I signed the papers, and memory isn't what it used... I forget what I was going to say. :-)
And you think the spam is bad now? From the article:
It doesn't matter what criteria are used to decide what's high-priority, spammers will find a way to abuse it. All of their email will suddenly become "absolutely the highest priority ever," squashing yours, and if some rules like "real-time video takes priority over email" are tried, well, now you have television commercials squashing out oeverything else.
Give high-priority rights to select organizations like hospitals? Only works until the professional spammers buy their way in, or just flat out forge the keys.
Sorry, I'm in a bad mood right now. Just got more spam. There isn't a single useful thing that we in the CS community can come up with that some cocksucking marketer can't abuse.
So? This is the exact same policy that the FSF has for all the core GNU programs and libraries. There's just way too much danger that some contributor will donate an entire module, wait until it becomes widespread and useful, and then claim exclusive ownership and demand money, i.e., "pull a Unisys/GIF."
What alternative would you suggest that would keep the code and coders safe from the lawyers?
Again, just like the FSF. (Well, you email the initial form, they snailmail you the document, you sign the document and mail it back.) This is how American law currently works, is all.
Dunno about Sun, but the form that you sign for the FSF gives you the right to pull back the copyright (given a month's notice in writing). Of course, I would expect that when you do that, everything you've donated to the project will get removed, but then that's probably the person's whole point of withdrawing the copyright assignment in the first place.
Not what was displayed on my screen, it wasn't... Maybe the /. editors are in fact reading a different article than I was.
Um, lemme see. The single quote from the AG contains, "I am no longer persuaded a breakup remains appropriate or will ultimately be ordered by the courts. It is obvious Microsoft will continue to resist attempts to require this remedy." That doesn't come screaming out of the page at me as "being all on Microsoft's side."
That sounds more like, "they're not going to give up, and they have more money than all 19 states in the suit put together, so we would run out of money first. Let's go do something constructive instead."
Ah, but it's Slashdot. If you're not ranting against the evils of Microsoft, you're all on their side.
(Go ahead, smack me for wanting some journalistic integrity. I've got karma to blow.)
...because they knew from first-hand experience that going to the land to the east meant you got killed by migrating Mongols, going to the lands in the south meant you got killed by expanding Greeks, Romans, Persians, or Africans, and going to the lands in the north meant you froze to death or drowned. "Hey, there's nothing to the west that we can see; it's gotta be better than what we know right now, let's invent legends about it."
Okay, so I would've made a lousy anthropologist. :-)
A: GRAPEs and chess-playing computers, such as the one that tackled Kasparov (Deep Blue?), both accomplish their opening-up-of-cans-of-mathematical-whoopass via the same approach: functions in the innermost loops are done via calls to special-purpose hardcare cards. The rest is done with software.
So, say I take a GRAPE, and replace its special N-body gravitational daughtercard with one containing a few FPGAs programmed for, say, RC5; now I have a cracking machine. And then reprogram the FPGA to do image manipulation instead; now I have a renderer to make my own Toy Story. And then reprogram the FPGA to do, etc, etc.
Of course, I'm still lacking the software. So actually this post is mostly babbling. :-)
I think that's going in my collection of sigs.
The Silmarillion is one of my all-time favorites. One word: scope.
There are no such things as weirding modules. Clearly you're thinking the movie (starring Sting) was canonical. Try reading the actual books instead.
You can grep all six books and the phrase "weirding module" will not appear. This was one of the three major departures (read, "made it up out of thin air") that the original Dune movie made from the books. Basically, they didn't have the time to investigate the mystical powers on-screen, so they threw in some technobabble instead.
If the TV miniseries was based on the books rather than the piece of crap movie which was based on the books, then there won't be things like weirding modules. And that's good.
You know, actually, that doesn't strike me as so bad...
*straight face*
Well, mostly. :-)
I was about to post a followup to my own followup, saying that my tone may have (upon retrospect) been a bit sharp. But then I saw your post, so this post now bears double duty...
Sweet! IBM is sounding cooler and cooler all the time. I distinctly recall the Apple TV advertisement that ran once during the '84 Olympics, announcing Macintosh, and portraying IBM as the Big Brother (1984, get it?). I guess IBM has been undergoing some revamping of their corporate culture.
And at the same time, SGI -- who was one of the neatest places to work at -- says they're killing off their employee's website. Bummer.
First Law of Slashdot: Every extreme example must be countered by an equally-extreme counterexample.
*sigh* Of course not. Clearly every employer who doesn't have their heads shoved up their own arse -- and even some that do -- recognize that some company time/resources will be lost for purposes of morale. Reading slashdot is like setting aside part of an unused cubicle for a small fridge and a coffee machine, or getting a phone call from the SO to remind you to pick up milk on the way home. No, they aren't strictly work activites, and no, they don't bring in immediate revenue (or whatever).
(The number of people who like to point this out every time the topic comes up disturbs me. What's required is good judgement. My boss doesn't care if I use the web to look up movie times for that evening, but running my own MP3 streaming radio station from my office would be out of line.)
And I repeat: yes, I agree the penalty is too steep. I just don't think the guy should get off scot-free in the name of science.
Okay, so maybe the penalty is a little steep, but how many times are we going to rehash the same damn story on slashdot? (Oh yeah, I forgot that the collective attention span here lasts abou- hey, look, shiny things.)
It's very simple, folks:
Well, that's a decision everyone must make for himself. Personally, I enjoy brewing some coffee and getting a nice caffeine fix, but whatever. One man's cheese is another man's rotted milk.
...
Um. We're not talking about the same thing, are we? :-)
Problems there:
The FAQ at the SGI STL site discusses this further. It's good reading.
Okay, side note: when you're responding to a sentence with two phrases, and you're disagreeing violently with one of them, don't use pronouns. "Anyone who says what" -- the part about the Daleks or the part about the thinking? I either strongly agree with you, or I thnk you're an idiot, depending on which one you meant.
Anyhow.
I remember shortly after the Matrix came out, some folks in a newsgroup were discussing how such a malevolent AI could come about in the first place. One suggested some bad code someplace. Another responded with, "It's extremely unlikely that an AI could turn hostile due to sloppy programming. On the other hand, that fucking paperclip in Word 97 seems to do whatever the fuck it wants."