The fact is Justice should have pursued this when it really mattered, back when 95 was coming onto the scene. Back when there were alternatives to Windows on the desktop.
Back when there were viable alternatives, Microsoft wasn't a monopoly (almost by definition). What, exactly, would the Justice have pursued? Bill Gates' bad taste in neckties?
"We're breaking you up/now/ because in the future you will become a monopoly..."
I would be very surprised if many of the 25,000 don't get shuffled to Sun machines. They are extremely common in the DoD, and I think that Sun does make a StarOffice for Suns...
A quick and nimble company created by two guys out of their dorm room is now one of the most feared corporate instituations on the planet.
Okay, Google, what did Yahoo do wrong here?
What makes you think they did something wrong?
I would love to have started from my dorm room and ended up as any kind of corporate institution. (Loved and respected, preferably, but I'll take feared if that's the only quality left on the menu. Well, feared in a light cream sauce.) This is one of those rags-to-riches stories that the American Dream used to fuel.
...if you count Sun Solaris and Digital/Compaq DigitalUnix/Tru64, there are popular *nixes that have done native 64-bit hardware and OSes for many years. I remember seeing many early programs which were hard to port to DEC Alphas running Digital Unix because they assumed that 'long int' and pointers were 32 bits instead of 64.
Not just the name-mangling algorithm, either.
on
GCC 3.0 Released
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· Score: 2
My girlfriend just asked me this question. Here was my answer:
An ABI for a platform/language/environment combination specifies things
like the byte sex, the location of certain global variables (global
offset pointers, etc), which registers are used for passing parameters
during a function call, whether it's the calling function or the "callee"
function that saves and restores register contents during function calls
(and which registers can be ignored), the order of parameters passed on
the stack... basically all the things that have to be agreed upon at the
bitwise level in order for you to use Compiler A to make foo.o, and me to
use Compiler B to make bar.o, and then to be able to link foo.o and bar.o
together successfully. Usually for C++ everything all had to be done with
the same compiler because there wasn't an ABI that everyone could agree on.
Now various vendors can use various compilers and this stuff will "just
work" on IA-64 families.
First, read Cpt. Nitpick's response, he beat me to answering. Then consider this: all this does is up the ante. The fraudulent farmers will simply find new ways to cheat. The problem has not been solved.
potentially the USGS, who could suddenly be in the business of big business.
Between this publicity and cool people like Orlando Jones' character in _Evolution_ working for the USGS, I think I've found my new favorite organization.
Okay, seriously: Busting fraud is way cool in my book.
Putting code under the GPL implies that others would want to do something with your code.
Most of the code I've seen written by students -- including my own, when I was an undergrad -- wasn't of sufficient quality to be worth "protecting" with the GPL. I would be embarassed to defend some of the work I did as a student, heck, I'd be ashamed to admit that some of the first- and second-year code I wrote was actually mine in the first place.
Putting my first-year card-playing program (learning how to use aggregate types, wheeee) under the GPL would be like a 3-year-old claiming intellectual property rights on a finger painting.
There are two C++ libraries: v2 and v3. Only strstreams were available in v2. v2 has been dead for a couple years now; it gets bare-minimum maintaining while everybody works on v3.
GCC 2.9x, including the RH versions, ship with v2. Many people have written their own implementation of stringstreams for use with 2.9x.
v3 has had stringstreams for quite a while, but GCC 3.0 is the first official release to ship with v3.
You make a very good point in that MIX/MIXAL was never advocated as a first programming language. I just wanted to note...
90-10 rule: 90% of your running time is in 10 percent of your code... so you shouldn't be extremely picky about optimizing all your code on a first pass... just optimize the critical path once you identify it
All true, but the numbers are 80-20. It's not a fuzzy sum ("x" and "100-x"), because it isn't a sum in the first place. It's a ratio; 80% of the time is spent in 20% of the code. Two different nouns; you can't borrow from one and give to the other. The fact that they add to 100 is coincidence.
What's more, it's a recursive ratio. 64% of the time is spent in 4% of the code.
Proof? Examples? How the ratio was calculated in the first place? See either volume I or III of -- what else -- Knuth.:-)
To be a skilled programmer, you MUST know how a computer works at the fundamental level. Teaching java to beginning programmers only encourages sloppy programming, despite any admonitions from profs.
Hear, hear. I'm sick of seeing freshly-minted Java programmers grunt out mounds of steaming O(n!) code, believing that "this is good cuz it's Java."
Knuth continues to use MIX (and the new MMIX) and MIXAL in TAOCP for this reason; once you know how the computer works, and which algorithms are the proper ones to use, your choice of high-level language often becomes irrelevent. Just a choice of style.
Wake up, people: you can write FORTRAN in any language.
There's a really great book out called _Accelerated C++_, by Koenig and Moo. (Yes folks, that Koenig and that Moo, the C++ gods.) It's a very new approach to teaching C++ as a first language, and everybody who's used it or even just reviewed it has loved it.
It doesn't even introduce pointers for several chapters. Students learn how to write simple loops, manage collections of things using std::vector, do the common 90% of string-related tasks using std::string, write some useful and practical programs, all before ever seeing a pointer.
Side note: the book is part of the C++ In-Depth series, being edited by Stroustrup. One of the rules for the series is that the main body text of the book must be no more than 300 pages. No filler crap, no 1500-page tomes to raise revenue; make your point simple and clear and then shut up.
If I want to get Sun's C++ compiler, I go to their try and buy page, and download it.
It stops working after about a month. That's more than enough time to decide whether you like it, and if you do, to go through the purchase order and whatnot.
24 hours for licensing information? It took me twelve minutes. Most of that was waiting for Timothy to get off the damn phone and let me call up.
(Note, I happen to be a regular contributor to GCC. So please don't think I'm slamming GCC. I just don't like the smell of fresh bullshit wafting from my monitor.)
Tolkien on the saddest moment in the whole story
on
Lord of the Geeks
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· Score: 2
What about Gollum?
In quite a few of his letters to friends, family, and random fans, Tolkien told of (in his opinion) the scene which always brought a tear to his eye.
Gollum/Smeagol is having one of those arguments with himself. He almost, almost convinces himself to repent -- and then Sam walks up and says something condescending and insulting. Gollum never considers repenting again.
The only way to read The Silmarillion
on
Lord of the Geeks
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· Score: 2
but never so much as when I read the entire trilogy aloud to my wife, and years later to my whole family. His stuff is a pleasure to read aloud,
First off, it's not a trilogy! Tolkien himself pointed out this error many times. It's a single story, consisting of six books, originally published in three volumes for financial reasons.
Anyhow, yes, you are correct; much of his works were designed to be read aloud, in the sense of a bard telling a tale to villagers. People tend to not like the Silmarillion because we're so addicted to dialogue, so they sneer at a narrative style. Imagine the Sil stories being read aloud and you really get pulled into it.
I'm sure that Tolkien was aware of it; it's no accident that the language of the Rohirrim (rendered in the story as Anglo-Saxon) seemed to Meriadoc to be a richer, fuller version of his own Westron tongue (rendered as English).
Oh, absolutely. He mentions this a few times in his letters. Welsh and Gaelic played significant roles in the evolution of the Elvish languages (by their sounds, at least, not spellings).
Tolkien's words on the "allegory" thing...
on
Lord of the Geeks
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· Score: 2
I think anyone who hasn't read a copy of Tolkien's Letters should be banned from commenting on this whole article. What a load of... anyhow.
Just because Tolkien dispenses with allegory, does not mean he disavows metaphor.
Exactly. He himself wrote that people tend to confuse allegory with applicability. The second is the reader's freedom to interpret the story, while the first "lies in the purposed dominion of the author."
If Tolkien writes a story that seems to you to be applicable to a certain situation, hey, that's great. That doesn't mean that Tolkien set out to write a story for your situation.
So, if we're too scared that OSS can't win a legitimate victory, we resort to fraud?
Isn't this the exact same thing that Microsoft and its ilk do? Instead of competing in the software arena, make your point by pulling dirty tricks in court?
While I agree with your conlusion -- no one cares -- you picked some
really crummy examples.
The FDA has very, very strict rules on what can go on the labels
and packages of food, right down to minimum point sizes of fonts. To use your
example, if the package says, "no artificial colors," then you can
bet your career that it contains no artificial colors. (You can bet yours,
because the entire upper and middle management of the food company has bet
theirs by saying so.)
Another example: ever see a dessert marked as "no sugar added"
and wonder why they don't save some ink and use "sugar free" instead?
They don't have a choice. Many dairy products (yogurt, ice cream, ice milk
(and there are rules on what must be called ice cream vs ice milk)) have the
no sugar added mark because milk contains lactose, another natural form of
sugar, which means that "sugar free" yogurt would be deceptive.
(I could go on for hours. You can learn an amazingly cool amount of stuff when your dad has a master's in food chemistry.)
Unfortunately, the watchdog organization for movie reviewers is a little
more open to money-greasing than the FDA is.
I can give you over a thousand examples, with the help of our f[r]iendly patent office (my tax dollars at work). Just go to
http://www.uspto.gov/, look under the green Patent Grants area, follow the Advanced Search link, and search on "compiler and optimization". Doing this today, I got 1,261 patents, but some of them don't apply here.
Er, that is to say, I got 1,261 search results each representing a patent. I don't have 1,261 patents myself.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing I don't particularly care for about GUILE is that it's a bit LISPish... still.
Ah, okay, I understand now. Thanks!
Forgive my ignorance of all things DVD, but is DVD-RAM what it sounds like it is? What's it used for? (Is it cheaper than RAMBUS?)
If you're using your DVD for RAM, I'd hate to see what you're using for swap...
It's been a while since I saw some of those legendary people... and in the case of McElwaine, I hope it's a long time before I see his posts again.
Does Argic still go nuts around Thanksgiving?
Back when there were viable alternatives, Microsoft wasn't a monopoly (almost by definition). What, exactly, would the Justice have pursued? Bill Gates' bad taste in neckties?
"We're breaking you up /now/ because in the future you will become a monopoly..."
I would be very surprised if many of the 25,000 don't get shuffled to Sun machines. They are extremely common in the DoD, and I think that Sun does make a StarOffice for Suns...
What makes you think they did something wrong?
I would love to have started from my dorm room and ended up as any kind of corporate institution. (Loved and respected, preferably, but I'll take feared if that's the only quality left on the menu. Well, feared in a light cream sauce.) This is one of those rags-to-riches stories that the American Dream used to fuel.
...if you count Sun Solaris and Digital/Compaq DigitalUnix/Tru64, there are popular *nixes that have done native 64-bit hardware and OSes for many years. I remember seeing many early programs which were hard to port to DEC Alphas running Digital Unix because they assumed that 'long int' and pointers were 32 bits instead of 64.
My girlfriend just asked me this question. Here was my answer:
An ABI for a platform/language/environment combination specifies things like the byte sex, the location of certain global variables (global offset pointers, etc), which registers are used for passing parameters during a function call, whether it's the calling function or the "callee" function that saves and restores register contents during function calls (and which registers can be ignored), the order of parameters passed on the stack... basically all the things that have to be agreed upon at the bitwise level in order for you to use Compiler A to make foo.o, and me to use Compiler B to make bar.o, and then to be able to link foo.o and bar.o together successfully. Usually for C++ everything all had to be done with the same compiler because there wasn't an ABI that everyone could agree on. Now various vendors can use various compilers and this stuff will "just work" on IA-64 families.
You seem to prefer to flame rather than think.
First, read Cpt. Nitpick's response, he beat me to answering. Then consider this: all this does is up the ante. The fraudulent farmers will simply find new ways to cheat. The problem has not been solved.
Between this publicity and cool people like Orlando Jones' character in _Evolution_ working for the USGS, I think I've found my new favorite organization.
Okay, seriously: Busting fraud is way cool in my book.
"VMS is a single-player text adventure game. If you win, you get to use Unix."
(Back when DEC Alphas were running both OpenVMS and OSF/1.)
Putting code under the GPL implies that others would want to do something with your code.
Most of the code I've seen written by students -- including my own, when I was an undergrad -- wasn't of sufficient quality to be worth "protecting" with the GPL. I would be embarassed to defend some of the work I did as a student, heck, I'd be ashamed to admit that some of the first- and second-year code I wrote was actually mine in the first place.
Putting my first-year card-playing program (learning how to use aggregate types, wheeee) under the GPL would be like a 3-year-old claiming intellectual property rights on a finger painting.
There are two C++ libraries: v2 and v3. Only strstreams were available in v2. v2 has been dead for a couple years now; it gets bare-minimum maintaining while everybody works on v3.
GCC 2.9x, including the RH versions, ship with v2. Many people have written their own implementation of stringstreams for use with 2.9x.
v3 has had stringstreams for quite a while, but GCC 3.0 is the first official release to ship with v3.
There are some patches and plans for this, but they were put on hold until 3.1.
All true, but the numbers are 80-20. It's not a fuzzy sum ("x" and "100-x"), because it isn't a sum in the first place. It's a ratio; 80% of the time is spent in 20% of the code. Two different nouns; you can't borrow from one and give to the other. The fact that they add to 100 is coincidence.You make a very good point in that MIX/MIXAL was never advocated as a first programming language. I just wanted to note...
What's more, it's a recursive ratio. 64% of the time is spent in 4% of the code.
Proof? Examples? How the ratio was calculated in the first place? See either volume I or III of -- what else -- Knuth. :-)
Hear, hear. I'm sick of seeing freshly-minted Java programmers grunt out mounds of steaming O(n!) code, believing that "this is good cuz it's Java."
Knuth continues to use MIX (and the new MMIX) and MIXAL in TAOCP for this reason; once you know how the computer works, and which algorithms are the proper ones to use, your choice of high-level language often becomes irrelevent. Just a choice of style.
Wake up, people: you can write FORTRAN in any language.
There's a really great book out called _Accelerated C++_, by Koenig and Moo. (Yes folks, that Koenig and that Moo, the C++ gods.) It's a very new approach to teaching C++ as a first language, and everybody who's used it or even just reviewed it has loved it.
It doesn't even introduce pointers for several chapters. Students learn how to write simple loops, manage collections of things using std::vector, do the common 90% of string-related tasks using std::string, write some useful and practical programs, all before ever seeing a pointer.
Side note: the book is part of the C++ In-Depth series, being edited by Stroustrup. One of the rules for the series is that the main body text of the book must be no more than 300 pages. No filler crap, no 1500-page tomes to raise revenue; make your point simple and clear and then shut up.
Um, no.
If I want to get Sun's C++ compiler, I go to their try and buy page, and download it.
It stops working after about a month. That's more than enough time to decide whether you like it, and if you do, to go through the purchase order and whatnot.
24 hours for licensing information? It took me twelve minutes. Most of that was waiting for Timothy to get off the damn phone and let me call up.
(Note, I happen to be a regular contributor to GCC. So please don't think I'm slamming GCC. I just don't like the smell of fresh bullshit wafting from my monitor.)
In quite a few of his letters to friends, family, and random fans, Tolkien told of (in his opinion) the scene which always brought a tear to his eye.
Gollum/Smeagol is having one of those arguments with himself. He almost, almost convinces himself to repent -- and then Sam walks up and says something condescending and insulting. Gollum never considers repenting again.
First off, it's not a trilogy! Tolkien himself pointed out this error many times. It's a single story, consisting of six books, originally published in three volumes for financial reasons.
Anyhow, yes, you are correct; much of his works were designed to be read aloud, in the sense of a bard telling a tale to villagers. People tend to not like the Silmarillion because we're so addicted to dialogue, so they sneer at a narrative style. Imagine the Sil stories being read aloud and you really get pulled into it.
Oh, absolutely. He mentions this a few times in his letters. Welsh and Gaelic played significant roles in the evolution of the Elvish languages (by their sounds, at least, not spellings).
I think anyone who hasn't read a copy of Tolkien's Letters should be banned from commenting on this whole article. What a load of... anyhow.
Exactly. He himself wrote that people tend to confuse allegory with applicability. The second is the reader's freedom to interpret the story, while the first "lies in the purposed dominion of the author."
If Tolkien writes a story that seems to you to be applicable to a certain situation, hey, that's great. That doesn't mean that Tolkien set out to write a story for your situation.
So, if we're too scared that OSS can't win a legitimate victory, we resort to fraud?
Isn't this the exact same thing that Microsoft and its ilk do? Instead of competing in the software arena, make your point by pulling dirty tricks in court?
While I agree with your conlusion -- no one cares -- you picked some really crummy examples.
The FDA has very, very strict rules on what can go on the labels and packages of food, right down to minimum point sizes of fonts. To use your example, if the package says, "no artificial colors," then you can bet your career that it contains no artificial colors. (You can bet yours, because the entire upper and middle management of the food company has bet theirs by saying so.)
Another example: ever see a dessert marked as "no sugar added" and wonder why they don't save some ink and use "sugar free" instead? They don't have a choice. Many dairy products (yogurt, ice cream, ice milk (and there are rules on what must be called ice cream vs ice milk)) have the no sugar added mark because milk contains lactose, another natural form of sugar, which means that "sugar free" yogurt would be deceptive.
(I could go on for hours. You can learn an amazingly cool amount of stuff when your dad has a master's in food chemistry.)
Unfortunately, the watchdog organization for movie reviewers is a little more open to money-greasing than the FDA is.
I can give you over a thousand examples, with the help of our f[r]iendly patent office (my tax dollars at work). Just go to http://www.uspto.gov/, look under the green Patent Grants area, follow the Advanced Search link, and search on "compiler and optimization". Doing this today, I got 1,261 patents, but some of them don't apply here.
Er, that is to say, I got 1,261 search results each representing a patent. I don't have 1,261 patents myself. :-)