I agree with you, I just want to expand on something:
...memory is only part of a computer. Yes, an important part, but only a part.
And it's the part that can benefit the most from this kind of thing. Not for size, but for speed. The speed of memory access is often the controlling factor in how fast a program runs. It doesn't matter if you just bought a 6000 terahertz CPU; if your memory is slow, your processor only waits more.
Currently CPUs are on the order of ten times as fast as the processor, and the gap is increasing. We need faster memory more than we need faster anything else. (Well, maybe faster pizza delivery.)
In Dante Alegheri's (sp?) Inferno, the center four regions of hell -- reserved for the worst kind of sinners -- are made up of a gigantic frozen ice plain.
The sinners are frozen into the ice, completely unable to move or respond to external stimuli...
Every time that something on/. would remind me about ICANN, I'd say, "Oh, yeah, while I'm thinking about it...," and try to register. And it would always be overloaded.
The first time that I tried going directly to members.icann.org without proceeding from/. (i.e.,/. was not the referring site), it worked.
Naturally, I'm still waiting for the password and whatnot to arrive in snailmail.
Larry Niven published "Rainbow Mars" a year or so ago. It's the first full-length Svetz novel (a kind of humour sci-fi based on the idea that time travel is fantasy; there are lots of literary jokes).
Anyhow, the idea of an orbital tether plays a significant role in the book. There's several pages of explanation, and since the main character is not at all a scientist, it's written at a very non-technical level. (And it's funny.)
I have avoided learning Perl for a couple of reasons. One of them (not the most important reason, obviously) is that the syntax looks vaguely like a memory dump. You know that Dilbert joke where Dilbert instructs Ratbert to dance on the keyboard so that Dilbert will have more bugs to fix, but in doing so Ratbert creates a web browser instead? I think it was written in Perl.
I'm really hoping Perl 6 will give us some more readable syntax. Hey, I like my C++ short and terse too, but I don't care for entire subroutines mostly written in punctuation.
Yeah, I know that syntax is a lame reason to like or not like a language, but I'm the one who has to stare at it. It's the little things that make the difference.
Why they /should/ be used, and more than one, too.
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
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· Score: 2
Responding point-by-point:
The server admin has no control over what sites are blocked. Frankly, I don't have time to keep up with the spammers. They find new open relays every day. I'm just as happy to let someone else spend 10-12 hours a day chasing them, and if they block something I don't like, I don't have to use them.
They change dynamically, and could potentially block sites you were talking to days before. That's the point, my friend! They change dynamically, just like the spammers do! If a site I was talking to days before gets a new admin, a new version of FooMail, a new routing table, whatever, and the spammers start abusing it, I want it blocked until the admins fix it. And once it's been fixed, these blackholers are traditionally very responsive in removing the system, just as dynamically.
Petty disputes like this one will cause trouble. Fortunately, there are more than one, and you can mix and match your blackholing sources. Would you rather have a single source and no choice at all? Besides, there are going to be petty disputes over everything, no matter what solution we choose.
The headlines alone are enough to point up the truth of what this AC is saying. When ZDNet posts something, it's all rumours and scandals. When a Linux-friendly magazine posts something, it's "reality" and "the TRUTH behind " out the wazoo.
I know that/. doesn't even bother pretending to be objective and unbiased, but this is no different from what "the enemy" does in their magazines. It's pathetic.
(Okay, just had to rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled "what happened to beer" spam.)
We're seeing a huge shift away from limited 7-bit ASCII to full 8-bit ASCII, and on to larger character sets to handle non-Western alphabets. Lets not take a conceptual step backwards to "the American alphabet is a "natural" encoding," please.
But after using my iMac for a while I've realized how superior the finder is to Windows desktop. This is certainly true. I know a few hard-core, old-school Unix people that love the new Macs. And ease-of-use when it comes to opening up the case kicks the ass of everything else out there. But I don't think Apple's lawyer-lovin' actions should be excused just because of that.
When Mac OSX rolls around even the geeks might find macintosh attractive. I've played with it. I liked the BSD core, until I kept having to reach for that mouse. My tendonitis is already making me "feel different," thanks. I don't need Apple's help there...
No different from "Go" menu -- but also there's...
on
Web Site "Lock-In"
·
· Score: 2
...the very simple work-around of hitting ^N to pop up a new browser window. Drag the link into the new window, or drag the little green-yellow thing by the location bar into the new window, and boom, there you go.
Or just right-click on a link and select "open in new window," etc, etc.
When you're done browsing, kill the window. The original one remains where you left it.
I haven't had to worry about "lock-in" for years. I don't see what the problem is.
And speaking from the extreme opposite end of the spectrum...
Your post is a perfect example of why we need somebody with a moderate viewpoint to be the first person in. Somebody who can agree to say, "Okay, we feel this is bad, but we'll live with it for now and change it later," rather than, "You want me to use blue ink instead of green? PISS OFF! I'LL NEVER SELL OUT, AND MAKING ANY CHANGE AT ALL WOULD BE SELLING OUT!"
We're not going to get all of our desires overnight, friend. We're not going to completely revamp the entire "system" without also being altered. One step at a time. (Yeah, hey, I admire the uncompromising positions too, but I'd rather get something accomplished.)
I understand your concerns. But those pro-corporate and commerce-friendly stances are why ESR is a good choice. He knows how to talk to the suits. He understands their points of view.
Who do you think is going to get better results: a man who walks into a new office and says, "Okay, there are a couple problems here, I see a few misunderstandings, here's a better way," or a man who cannot compromise in the least? Someone who walks in and immediately starts off with, "No, all of you are wrong. There's only one way to do this, and it's mine."
How are we going to see "real change," as you say, if we aren't also willing to make changes?
...when I use Slackware. The other distros feel heavily commercialized to me. It's not that I think Debian is/bad/; I like it too. Both of them certainly irritate me a lot less than RedHat.
It breaks miserably on every system we have here, with every user. It breaks even worse on friends' and colleagues' systems. It is simply not designed to run under anything other than its own OS. Naturally.
Whaddya wanna bet that if they create any *nix-based tools (hey, they tried to make IE run under Solaris) to increase their dominance, they'll embed the '#' character into a filename somewhere. And then all the tools that we love to work with won't work, because the "comment character" will break the line too early.
Then they can require that their own nasty-ass build tools be used for developing D-flat.:-)
I was hoping my sarcasm was self-evident, but I forgot this is slashdot. Okay, next time I'll surround my jokes with tags...
And apparently this book gets you chicks too.
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
·
· Score: 2
That's right -- he recruited a full-fledged novice user, capable of little more than e-mail and word processing, and turned her into a decent programmer while reviewing this book. (She became Mrs. Heller shortly after that.)
So, all I need to do is pick my target babe^H^H^H^H new user, get her to read this book, and she marries me? Man, a whole "Nutshell" series of books could come out of this...
I know perfectly well what CVS is for. I use it daily. You are responding to the wrong parts of my message (because you feel cool doing so, or something).
Let me try again. Read carefully. The book is not about "how to use CVS". It is not about "how to apply CVS to whatever you work on". It is not the CVS manual. It is not, repeat NOT, addressing general development issues like CVS does. CVS != this book.
The book is specifically targeted towards open source development. The first poster's complaint was that the book -- NOT CVS, JUST THE BOOK -- didn't treat proprietary stuff. My point is that the book -- NOT CVS, JUST THE BOOK -- made no claim of treating proprietary topics.
Since I contribute to GNU projects, the FSF wanted the usual disclaimer from my employer (since I also happen to be employed to do programming). So I asked my manager, and he asked the local contracting people.
Two days later, it had been kicked all the way up to the head office, hundreds of miles away, and the corporate lawyer was freaking out. He drew up some questions and handed them back down the chain to me.
The first one was, "Who or what is GNU?"
*sigh*
/shift/ of community, lack of continuity
on
The Leased Life?
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· Score: 2
I won't say that I've never met some of my best friends, but I will say that I've never met some of my best co-workers and colleagues.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you, I just want to expand on something:
And it's the part that can benefit the most from this kind of thing. Not for size, but for speed. The speed of memory access is often the controlling factor in how fast a program runs. It doesn't matter if you just bought a 6000 terahertz CPU; if your memory is slow, your processor only waits more.
Currently CPUs are on the order of ten times as fast as the processor, and the gap is increasing. We need faster memory more than we need faster anything else. (Well, maybe faster pizza delivery.)
I think in the outer areas of the ice, they were only in ice up to their heads. In the inner areas, they were completely encased. I think.
With Satan, of course, stuck in the center up to his waist, chewing on three people in particular. Lovely. :-)
In Dante Alegheri's (sp?) Inferno, the center four regions of hell -- reserved for the worst kind of sinners -- are made up of a gigantic frozen ice plain.
The sinners are frozen into the ice, completely unable to move or respond to external stimuli...
Every time that something on /. would remind me about ICANN, I'd say, "Oh, yeah, while I'm thinking about it...," and try to register. And it would always be overloaded.
/. (i.e., /. was not the referring site), it worked.
The first time that I tried going directly to members.icann.org without proceeding from
Naturally, I'm still waiting for the password and whatnot to arrive in snailmail.
Larry Niven published "Rainbow Mars" a year or so ago. It's the first full-length Svetz novel (a kind of humour sci-fi based on the idea that time travel is fantasy; there are lots of literary jokes).
Anyhow, the idea of an orbital tether plays a significant role in the book. There's several pages of explanation, and since the main character is not at all a scientist, it's written at a very non-technical level. (And it's funny.)
I have avoided learning Perl for a couple of reasons. One of them (not the most important reason, obviously) is that the syntax looks vaguely like a memory dump. You know that Dilbert joke where Dilbert instructs Ratbert to dance on the keyboard so that Dilbert will have more bugs to fix, but in doing so Ratbert creates a web browser instead? I think it was written in Perl.
I'm really hoping Perl 6 will give us some more readable syntax. Hey, I like my C++ short and terse too, but I don't care for entire subroutines mostly written in punctuation.
Yeah, I know that syntax is a lame reason to like or not like a language, but I'm the one who has to stare at it. It's the little things that make the difference.
Responding point-by-point:
Frankly, I don't have time to keep up with the spammers. They find new open relays every day. I'm just as happy to let someone else spend 10-12 hours a day chasing them, and if they block something I don't like, I don't have to use them.
That's the point, my friend! They change dynamically, just like the spammers do! If a site I was talking to days before gets a new admin, a new version of FooMail, a new routing table, whatever, and the spammers start abusing it, I want it blocked until the admins fix it. And once it's been fixed, these blackholers are traditionally very responsive in removing the system, just as dynamically.
Fortunately, there are more than one, and you can mix and match your blackholing sources. Would you rather have a single source and no choice at all? Besides, there are going to be petty disputes over everything, no matter what solution we choose.
The headlines alone are enough to point up the truth of what this AC is saying. When ZDNet posts something, it's all rumours and scandals. When a Linux-friendly magazine posts something, it's "reality" and "the TRUTH behind " out the wazoo.
/. doesn't even bother pretending to be objective and unbiased, but this is no different from what "the enemy" does in their magazines. It's pathetic.
I know that
(Okay, just had to rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled "what happened to beer" spam.)
We're seeing a huge shift away from limited 7-bit ASCII to full 8-bit ASCII, and on to larger character sets to handle non-Western alphabets. Lets not take a conceptual step backwards to "the American alphabet is a "natural" encoding," please.
(Yes, I'm an American. Always have been.)
But after using my iMac for a while I've realized how superior the finder is to Windows desktop.
This is certainly true. I know a few hard-core, old-school Unix people that love the new Macs. And ease-of-use when it comes to opening up the case kicks the ass of everything else out there.
But I don't think Apple's lawyer-lovin' actions should be excused just because of that.
When Mac OSX rolls around even the geeks might find macintosh attractive.
I've played with it. I liked the BSD core, until I kept having to reach for that mouse. My tendonitis is already making me "feel different," thanks. I don't need Apple's help there...
...the very simple work-around of hitting ^N to pop up a new browser window. Drag the link into the new window, or drag the little green-yellow thing by the location bar into the new window, and boom, there you go.
Or just right-click on a link and select "open in new window," etc, etc.
When you're done browsing, kill the window. The original one remains where you left it.
I haven't had to worry about "lock-in" for years. I don't see what the problem is.
The original "Proposal to encode Tengwar in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646-2" is here:
n 1641.htm
http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1641/
http://sss-mag.com/pdf/freqchrt.pdf
This lists all allocations from 3KHz to 300GHz.
And speaking from the extreme opposite end of the spectrum...
Your post is a perfect example of why we need somebody with a moderate viewpoint to be the first person in. Somebody who can agree to say, "Okay, we feel this is bad, but we'll live with it for now and change it later," rather than, "You want me to use blue ink instead of green? PISS OFF! I'LL NEVER SELL OUT, AND MAKING ANY CHANGE AT ALL WOULD BE SELLING OUT!"
We're not going to get all of our desires overnight, friend. We're not going to completely revamp the entire "system" without also being altered. One step at a time. (Yeah, hey, I admire the uncompromising positions too, but I'd rather get something accomplished.)
I almost fell for it myself.
I understand your concerns. But those pro-corporate and commerce-friendly stances are why ESR is a good choice. He knows how to talk to the suits. He understands their points of view.
Who do you think is going to get better results: a man who walks into a new office and says, "Okay, there are a couple problems here, I see a few misunderstandings, here's a better way," or a man who cannot compromise in the least? Someone who walks in and immediately starts off with, "No, all of you are wrong. There's only one way to do this, and it's mine."
How are we going to see "real change," as you say, if we aren't also willing to make changes?
...when I use Slackware. The other distros feel heavily commercialized to me. It's not that I think Debian is /bad/; I like it too. Both of them certainly irritate me a lot less than RedHat.
Have you ever tried it?
Naturally.
It breaks miserably on every system we have here, with every user. It breaks even worse on friends' and colleagues' systems. It is simply not designed to run under anything other than its own OS. Naturally.
Whaddya wanna bet that if they create any *nix-based tools (hey, they tried to make IE run under Solaris) to increase their dominance, they'll embed the '#' character into a filename somewhere. And then all the tools that we love to work with won't work, because the "comment character" will break the line too early.
:-)
/. reader: I'M JOKING.)
Then they can require that their own nasty-ass build tools be used for developing D-flat.
(Note to standard
I was hoping my sarcasm was self-evident, but I forgot this is slashdot. Okay, next time I'll surround my jokes with tags...
That's right -- he recruited a full-fledged novice user, capable of little more than e-mail and word processing, and turned her into a decent programmer while reviewing this book. (She became Mrs. Heller shortly after that.)
So, all I need to do is pick my target babe^H^H^H^H new user, get her to read this book, and she marries me? Man, a whole "Nutshell" series of books could come out of this...
I know perfectly well what CVS is for. I use it daily. You are responding to the wrong parts of my message (because you feel cool doing so, or something).
Let me try again. Read carefully. The book is not about "how to use CVS". It is not about "how to apply CVS to whatever you work on". It is not the CVS manual. It is not, repeat NOT, addressing general development issues like CVS does. CVS != this book.
The book is specifically targeted towards open source development. The first poster's complaint was that the book -- NOT CVS, JUST THE BOOK -- didn't treat proprietary stuff. My point is that the book -- NOT CVS, JUST THE BOOK -- made no claim of treating proprietary topics.
there isn't much in the way of setting up CVS for commercial use [...] I was hoping this book would fill in those gaps but it just doesn't.
*boggle*
What part of Open Source Development with CVS did you not understand? Why would anyone expect this book to cover commercial software?
"Hey, this book is titled Tips for Baking Chocolate-Chip Cookies, so I'll purchase it because I'm hoping it will also cover meatloaf."
Since I contribute to GNU projects, the FSF wanted the usual disclaimer from my employer (since I also happen to be employed to do programming). So I asked my manager, and he asked the local contracting people.
Two days later, it had been kicked all the way up to the head office, hundreds of miles away, and the corporate lawyer was freaking out. He drew up some questions and handed them back down the chain to me.
The first one was, "Who or what is GNU?"
*sigh*
I won't say that I've never met some of my best friends, but I will say that I've never met some of my best co-workers and colleagues.