Everyone I know -- including myself -- thinks this when first moving from an MS-Windows system to 4Dwm. (I don't know what the differences are between 4Dwm and this new 5dwm, so I'll stick to what I know.)
Then we all just eventually realize that we've fallen for Microsoft's trap: we've been trained to believe that the MS desktop and wm behavior are how a computer should behave. Once we get ourselves over that hurdle -- for example, right clicking on an object directly doesn't work, one must left click to select, and then right click to get the menu, which does come in useful occasionally -- we fly.
Still, I agree with you about KDE2. I like it better than 4Dwm, modulo the two or three annoying nonfatal bugs.
...that the most interesting thing about these "languages/platforms/buzzwords" isn't the language itself. It's the environment in which it runs. Java itself solves nothing new, does nothing new, is nothing but previous concepts in slightly different syntax; it's useful, but hardly a silver bullet. The required VM, however, is quite fascinating.
This was brought up in an editor's letter of a recent C++ journal.
Just earlier today Reuters reported on incresingly shoddy water and sewer pipes across the country. Basically, some of the major cities are running on piping that's a century old. St. Louis' pipes predate the Civil War. Nobody wants to spend the money to fix them.
This quote from the article relates to code as well as water pipes: "Is the sky falling? No, the sky is not falling today but unless people start taking this more seriously, within 10 to 15
years the cost of addressing these problems is going to be even higher. It's not an issue you can ignore
for long."
This doesn't have anything to do with the ultra-cool ksh, but I'd thought I'd mention it: this message is the announcement of removal of support for GCC running under UWIN. This decision came direct from RMS and generated lots of discussion over the next several days concerning legal-but-not-political decisions.
IIRC, there's also a dtksh, in which all of the CDE controlling scripts are written. It seems to be ksh with some GUI-ish stuff built in (kinda like Tk).
Anybody else remember that scene in Mostly Harmless where Ford Prefect breaks down the door to the head editor's office?
There are little nanotech bots in the doorframe whose sole purpose in life is to wait until this happens. Then they crawl out of the frame, assemble each other into larger bots, rebuild the door, disassemble each other, crawl back into frame, and wait...
Anyhow, I know some people working with MEMS. Very cool stuff.
The two high-school teachers who influenced me the most were my Honors History and Honors Lit teachers. My math teacher was another major positive influence.
You want "negative reinforcement" when you do something wrong? Forget the usual high school crap. When you feel bad because your teacher is disappointed in you, that's when you know you've got a good teacher. (Amazingly like parents in that respect...)
The most influential teacher in college was a CS prof who left to go into the seminary and become a minister.
I actually preferred the older teaser-trailer to this one. (I too saw it in the theaters.) There was more homage paid to the story in the previous trailer.
This trailer didn't mention Tolkien's name at all, aloud or on the screen.
Also, having read LOTR over and over again since I was a child, as well as The Silmarillion and other works so many times I can almost recite major passages, I am fairly certain that Arwen never rolls around on a bed of rose petals, eyes closed and smiling dreamily. Or if she did, Tolkien never told anyone. Except for maybe his wife.
The names are so similar it's easy for me to get confused.
...
Not buying that one? Okay, how about "I've re-read so much of the stuff on my bookshelf in the last two weeks that's it's all blurred together, also, I'm stupid." ?
There is a short story by Greg Bear (I think it's Greg Bear) titled something like "The Magic Bullet" (forgive my memory).
A genetic researcher discovers a way to make existing cells "cannibalize" oocytes in egg cells, making the host effectively immortal. Slight hitch: only half of the human race produces egg cells, and the researcher doesn't belong to that half.:-)
In an attempt to save mankind (literally), the male researcher tries to hide the results. However, he had experimented on mice first, and one of his (female) lab assistants noticed that some of the mice weren't dying...
Why don't people who are trying to communicate with the rest of the Universe stick to the basics - i.e. morse code?
Because assuming that space aliens understand English would be pathetically stupid?
Don't get me wrong, I mostly agree with the rest of your article. But if you take a fellow Earthling who can't speak English, doesn't know the Roman alphabet, and isn't aware of the truly fucked-up spelling rules we use, and send him a message in Morse, he isn't going to get it either.
Yet another consequence of speaking a language whose vocabulary came from German but whose grammar comes from Latin.:-)
What is it about C++ and OOP that Slashdot has to continually disparage it?
Because/. is written in Perl and PHP and who knows what else. Not C++. You'll note that/. doesn't post major articles attacking Perl, because that would make them look like hypocrites. Anyhow...
Programmers interested in security should definitely take a closer look at std::string. I agree with you that the reason that it's only used in one out of 300 programs is because they're writing an OS, not an application nor a library nor an extensible framework, etc, etc. But std::string answers most of the same security concerns they brought up!
I'll just give two reasons right here:
It grows as necessary. You can't have buffer overflows if the buffer keeps expanding. Eventually the size of the buffer will use up all your RAM and swap space, but if that happens you have bigger coding problems. It will not, however, allow the buffer to spill onto the code stack.
It's freakishly extensible. It would be absolutely trivial to specialize char_traits to use the strl* routines they were going on about. Put that in the system headers, and boom -- every instance of std::string in the system uses strl* to do its underlying work. Automatically.
But of course, you won't hear about it on/. if they do any of that, because that would make C++ look useful.
Just because it's a "virtual" carpetbombing of a "virtual" community, people tend not to look outside all of the software-based possibilities. Like, say, the police where the kid lives.
The cute "dept" tagline asks where's the KGB when you need 'em. Well, if there are ISPs going out of business because of this kid's actions, then law enforcement agencies will take interest.
Right, so, now that we've voted to bell the cat, who wants to contact the Romanian embassy?:-)
no plans for the future versions of the kernel, 2.5, 3.0,
I was surprised and a bit worried when I read Linus saying that about 3.0. Why is it that nearly every software product in the last half-decade has a version sequence like this:
Folks, I remember running the 1.x kernel series. The 2.x introduced some major changes, and we were thrilled to get it. But I haven't heard what new things could require (or deserve) a jump to 3.x.
How is it I can submit this article as the news is breaking and it's rejected, but once it's old news/. will post it? Anyhow...
They read my
resume and probably talk to me on the phone, but you can see a look of surprise in many an interviewer's eyes
when his next applicant is a 6 foot tall black guy.
This is one of the many reasons I love open source collaboration over the net. None of us have any idea whether each other is white, black, purple, or -- strictly speaking -- even from the same planet. You are judged purely on how you present yourself, and in email that laregly equates to how much time you spend proofreading your messages.:-)
It's much harder to be racist when everybody else is only seen as two-color bitmapped text, and you chose those colors...
Yeah, just fraud. And the people they defrauded were stupid, too. (I'm going to pay money for an opportunity to work at home... waitaminute.)
I want to see people jailed just for sending spam.
My dream is to secede from the Earth. Build a gigantic space station, or a Niven ring. And in my country -- of course I'm the benevolent dictator, what the freak did you expect -- spamming would be illegal, under the category of "abuse of community resources," which on an isolated space station would be a pretty serious crime...
Sitting in front of a lousy stupid computer (keyboard+monitor, voice detector, telepathic CPU interface, whatever) while normal people go out and party because it's New Year's Eve.
You were talking about our people, i.e., nerds, right?
My credentials for this post: I've worked for a few defense contractors, both as a programmer and a sysadmin.
The overall caliber of all our job applicants is really very low in any case. It's quite dismaying.
Friend, that's because you (the collective "you" of the defense industry) don't pay worth shit. You don't let us use the tools that we want because 80% of you are retired military and therefore are both clueless and scared about free-speech software. And, most damning of all...
Every design decision is purely political. We all know that lots of decisions are political, in every computer industry subfield (games, OSes, browsers, tools, whatever). That's unfortunate, but inevitable and expected. But the defense computing industry... shiver me timbers! Technical considerations get about halfway up the ladder, and then they *all* get trampled by the Good 'Ol Boy system. It's rampant. It's like no other part of the computer industry.
It's unbelievably disheartening, watching projects get utterly horked over and over due to nontechnical concerns. It makes Dilbert look like a great place to work. The few skilled coders I know that have remained in the defense industry all A) have no military background, and B) are spinning off into more commercial groups. Everybody else has left, and all of them cited low pay and head-stuck-up-ass management.
Again, nothing against you personally, Courageous, but I seriously hope you aren't surprised with the quality of your applicants.
What you say about Trotter is true. Also, the original main character's name was Bingo. One of his companions was named Frodo.
After many revisions, the characters stayed the same although their names were changed. Bingo became Frodo, and Frodo became either Pippin or Merry; I don't recall offhand which.
Also, Tolkien had no idea what the Palantir was. He just needed something shiny to be thrown out the window.:-) Discovering it to be one of the Stones of Seeing was as big as surprise to him as it was to Gandalf and Aragorn.
I love authors who discover and translate their worlds instead of merely creating them.
RoboRally kicks ass. Lots of ass. A smorgasbord, a veritable cornucopia of ass is kicked by RoboRally.
For a grad school simulations course, we did a RR simulator and told it to find the best overall strategy for winning a game. I think move-before-turning won.
Can you imagine if a Boeing engineer didn't fix ALL of the occurances of a wiring flaw? Why not at least try to engineer software in the same way?
Hear, hear! Two of my pet peeves right there:
(1) Why is it that the same bugs keep reappearing? Why is it that we assume bugs only occur in one place? Why is it that we hear, "I fixed the bug," as if a programmer can only screw up in one place?
(2) Every other piece of engineering goes through major scrutiny. Teams are brought in from the outside to look over blueprints. For open source software, we assume that just because anybody can look at the code, that everybody is. Even in OSS, we need to go to outside, objective reviewers and say, "Here's some money, and here's our code [or maybe, here's the URL for our code:-) ]. Please review it and tell us where we screwed up."
Mr. de Raadt knows his stuff; the coders do this themselves, and they take it seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone I know -- including myself -- thinks this when first moving from an MS-Windows system to 4Dwm. (I don't know what the differences are between 4Dwm and this new 5dwm, so I'll stick to what I know.)
Then we all just eventually realize that we've fallen for Microsoft's trap: we've been trained to believe that the MS desktop and wm behavior are how a computer should behave. Once we get ourselves over that hurdle -- for example, right clicking on an object directly doesn't work, one must left click to select, and then right click to get the menu, which does come in useful occasionally -- we fly.
Still, I agree with you about KDE2. I like it better than 4Dwm, modulo the two or three annoying nonfatal bugs.
...that the most interesting thing about these "languages/platforms/buzzwords" isn't the language itself. It's the environment in which it runs. Java itself solves nothing new, does nothing new, is nothing but previous concepts in slightly different syntax; it's useful, but hardly a silver bullet. The required VM, however, is quite fascinating.
This was brought up in an editor's letter of a recent C++ journal.
Just earlier today Reuters reported on incresingly shoddy water and sewer pipes across the country. Basically, some of the major cities are running on piping that's a century old. St. Louis' pipes predate the Civil War. Nobody wants to spend the money to fix them.
This quote from the article relates to code as well as water pipes: "Is the sky falling? No, the sky is not falling today but unless people start taking this more seriously, within 10 to 15 years the cost of addressing these problems is going to be even higher. It's not an issue you can ignore for long."
This doesn't have anything to do with the ultra-cool ksh, but I'd thought I'd mention it: this message is the announcement of removal of support for GCC running under UWIN. This decision came direct from RMS and generated lots of discussion over the next several days concerning legal-but-not-political decisions.
IIRC, there's also a dtksh, in which all of the CDE controlling scripts are written. It seems to be ksh with some GUI-ish stuff built in (kinda like Tk).
Anybody else remember that scene in Mostly Harmless where Ford Prefect breaks down the door to the head editor's office?
There are little nanotech bots in the doorframe whose sole purpose in life is to wait until this happens. Then they crawl out of the frame, assemble each other into larger bots, rebuild the door, disassemble each other, crawl back into frame, and wait...
Anyhow, I know some people working with MEMS. Very cool stuff.
The two high-school teachers who influenced me the most were my Honors History and Honors Lit teachers. My math teacher was another major positive influence.
You want "negative reinforcement" when you do something wrong? Forget the usual high school crap. When you feel bad because your teacher is disappointed in you, that's when you know you've got a good teacher. (Amazingly like parents in that respect...)
The most influential teacher in college was a CS prof who left to go into the seminary and become a minister.
Mortimer's Gray's History of Death was just damn weird.... good story, but weird.
I actually preferred the older teaser-trailer to this one. (I too saw it in the theaters.) There was more homage paid to the story in the previous trailer.
This trailer didn't mention Tolkien's name at all, aloud or on the screen.
Also, having read LOTR over and over again since I was a child, as well as The Silmarillion and other works so many times I can almost recite major passages, I am fairly certain that Arwen never rolls around on a bed of rose petals, eyes closed and smiling dreamily. Or if she did, Tolkien never told anyone. Except for maybe his wife.
Stableford, Bear, Stableford, Bear...
The names are so similar it's easy for me to get confused.
...
Not buying that one? Okay, how about "I've re-read so much of the stuff on my bookshelf in the last two weeks that's it's all blurred together, also, I'm stupid." ?
There is a short story by Greg Bear (I think it's Greg Bear) titled something like "The Magic Bullet" (forgive my memory).
A genetic researcher discovers a way to make existing cells "cannibalize" oocytes in egg cells, making the host effectively immortal. Slight hitch: only half of the human race produces egg cells, and the researcher doesn't belong to that half. :-)
In an attempt to save mankind (literally), the male researcher tries to hide the results. However, he had experimented on mice first, and one of his (female) lab assistants noticed that some of the mice weren't dying...
Stupid Intel chips use too much power.
If all the hot Silicon Valley companies would switch to PowerPC chips, power consumption would go way down. :-)
If Star Trek has taught us nothing else - and it hasn't - its that all sentient biengs in the universe speak English as their mother tongue.
Very true. In addition, Doctor Who also taught us that they speak it with a British accent.
This is of course at odds with the beliefs of the hitchhikers who get around that by sticking a fish in their ear.
Heh. I was just reading that book last night.
Because assuming that space aliens understand English would be pathetically stupid?
Don't get me wrong, I mostly agree with the rest of your article. But if you take a fellow Earthling who can't speak English, doesn't know the Roman alphabet, and isn't aware of the truly fucked-up spelling rules we use, and send him a message in Morse, he isn't going to get it either.
Yet another consequence of speaking a language whose vocabulary came from German but whose grammar comes from Latin. :-)
Because /. is written in Perl and PHP and who knows what else. Not C++. You'll note that /. doesn't post major articles attacking Perl, because that would make them look like hypocrites. Anyhow...
Programmers interested in security should definitely take a closer look at std::string. I agree with you that the reason that it's only used in one out of 300 programs is because they're writing an OS, not an application nor a library nor an extensible framework, etc, etc. But std::string answers most of the same security concerns they brought up!
I'll just give two reasons right here:
But of course, you won't hear about it on /. if they do any of that, because that would make C++ look useful.
...but somebody will repost it in its entirety anyhow, just to be safe.
Just because it's a "virtual" carpetbombing of a "virtual" community, people tend not to look outside all of the software-based possibilities. Like, say, the police where the kid lives.
The cute "dept" tagline asks where's the KGB when you need 'em. Well, if there are ISPs going out of business because of this kid's actions, then law enforcement agencies will take interest.
Right, so, now that we've voted to bell the cat, who wants to contact the Romanian embassy? :-)
I was surprised and a bit worried when I read Linus saying that about 3.0. Why is it that nearly every software product in the last half-decade has a version sequence like this:
x.0
x.1
x.2
x.3
(x+1).0
(x+1).1
(x+1).5
(x+2).0
(x+3).0
(x+4).0
Folks, I remember running the 1.x kernel series. The 2.x introduced some major changes, and we were thrilled to get it. But I haven't heard what new things could require (or deserve) a jump to 3.x.
I'm just seriously looking forward to 2.4.1. :-)
How is it I can submit this article as the news is breaking and it's rejected, but once it's old news
This is one of the many reasons I love open source collaboration over the net. None of us have any idea whether each other is white, black, purple, or -- strictly speaking -- even from the same planet. You are judged purely on how you present yourself, and in email that laregly equates to how much time you spend proofreading your messages. :-)
It's much harder to be racist when everybody else is only seen as two-color bitmapped text, and you chose those colors...
Yeah, just fraud. And the people they defrauded were stupid, too. (I'm going to pay money for an opportunity to work at home... waitaminute.)
My dream is to secede from the Earth. Build a gigantic space station, or a Niven ring. And in my country -- of course I'm the benevolent dictator, what the freak did you expect -- spamming would be illegal, under the category of "abuse of community resources," which on an isolated space station would be a pretty serious crime...
...punishable by deportation to Earth.
Sitting in front of a lousy stupid computer (keyboard+monitor, voice detector, telepathic CPU interface, whatever) while normal people go out and party because it's New Year's Eve.
You were talking about our people, i.e., nerds, right?
My credentials for this post: I've worked for a few defense contractors, both as a programmer and a sysadmin.
Friend, that's because you (the collective "you" of the defense industry) don't pay worth shit. You don't let us use the tools that we want because 80% of you are retired military and therefore are both clueless and scared about free-speech software. And, most damning of all...
Every design decision is purely political. We all know that lots of decisions are political, in every computer industry subfield (games, OSes, browsers, tools, whatever). That's unfortunate, but inevitable and expected. But the defense computing industry... shiver me timbers! Technical considerations get about halfway up the ladder, and then they *all* get trampled by the Good 'Ol Boy system. It's rampant. It's like no other part of the computer industry.
It's unbelievably disheartening, watching projects get utterly horked over and over due to nontechnical concerns. It makes Dilbert look like a great place to work. The few skilled coders I know that have remained in the defense industry all A) have no military background, and B) are spinning off into more commercial groups. Everybody else has left, and all of them cited low pay and head-stuck-up-ass management.
Again, nothing against you personally, Courageous, but I seriously hope you aren't surprised with the quality of your applicants.
What you say about Trotter is true. Also, the original main character's name was Bingo. One of his companions was named Frodo.
After many revisions, the characters stayed the same although their names were changed. Bingo became Frodo, and Frodo became either Pippin or Merry; I don't recall offhand which.
Also, Tolkien had no idea what the Palantir was. He just needed something shiny to be thrown out the window. :-) Discovering it to be one of the Stones of Seeing was as big as surprise to him as it was to Gandalf and Aragorn.
I love authors who discover and translate their worlds instead of merely creating them.
RoboRally kicks ass. Lots of ass. A smorgasbord, a veritable cornucopia of ass is kicked by RoboRally.
For a grad school simulations course, we did a RR simulator and told it to find the best overall strategy for winning a game. I think move-before-turning won.
Hear, hear! Two of my pet peeves right there:
(1) Why is it that the same bugs keep reappearing? Why is it that we assume bugs only occur in one place? Why is it that we hear, "I fixed the bug," as if a programmer can only screw up in one place?
(2) Every other piece of engineering goes through major scrutiny. Teams are brought in from the outside to look over blueprints. For open source software, we assume that just because anybody can look at the code, that everybody is. Even in OSS, we need to go to outside, objective reviewers and say, "Here's some money, and here's our code [or maybe, here's the URL for our code :-) ]. Please review it and tell us where we screwed up."
Mr. de Raadt knows his stuff; the coders do this themselves, and they take it seriously.