Ah, that's good to know. I'll have to tackle my programming prof if I ever see him again; he never mentioned which mission suffered because of the FORTRAN stupidity.
This has nothing to do with the English/metric thing; I just felt that this should go in the space-probe-thread rather than start a new one.
IIRC, the punctuation mistake they're talking about was an instance of the now-infamous DO LOOP constructs in FORTRAN. You can alternate between a period and a comma, and the result is two/completely different/ blocks of code, both legal.
With the comma, you actually get a loop. With the period, you get a funky-looking initialization statement and some useless labels. When I was a freshman in college, my introductory CS professor showed us this piece of code, explained the screwup, and added, "We lost a rocket in the 60's because of this.":-)
(I've never formally studied FORTRAN. If I've messed up the explanation above, oh well, mea culpa.)
There is an excellent interview with the XP creator in some recent issues of _C++ Report_ (which is itself a very respected journal). Some very good questions and answers are brought up by (IIRC) John Vlissides, the interviewer...
...whose last name I just horribly misspelled, probably.:-(
I think you missed a "not" in your Zeroth Law. Basically, robots must protect/humanity/ above protecting individual humans. (Although I can't find a list of Robot novels, so I don't know which ones to read to discover this.)
Roger Allen McBride has couple of really poorly-written novels that rip up the Three Laws, point out their problems and their resulting effects on humanity (!), and then proceed to create four New Laws.
The actual examination of the Three Laws is really well done, but unfortunately it's the only good piece of writing in the novels.
Go to any ol' pharmacy and look for something called HANDEZE. It's an eight-dollar "golf glove"-looking thing with no fingers, made out of medical-grade lycra.
It traps heat and causes friction, both of which increase circulation in the hand and to the fingers. It's no substitute for stretching and resting, but if you work in a room that can get cold sometimes, it can help reduce minor soreness.
(Why do I have one? Well, I'm a diabetic, and we usually have poor circulation. And any doctor will tell you that poor circulation increases the damage done by RSI -- for that matter, the Typing Injury FAQ will tell you that, too.)
"Sometimes I believe that the only thing that prevents all the interconnected machines of the Internet from achieving consciousness is that Bill Gates is responsible for the OS running on most of them."
You/really/ need to read the analysis papers. The gluing together was down in an extremely stupid fashion.
I'm not denying that the Worm was impressive or noteworthy; it surely was. But I take issue with the article's statement that it showed understanding of how things work.
First, to Shimrod: you didn't finish reading the main article before you posted, did you? The author specifically mentioned this already.
Second, to everybody: the Worm did not show any wizardly understanding of how everything worked. Gene Spafford (yes,/the/ spaf) wrote a couple of analysis papers of the Worm, after the code was decompiled. (His homepage is http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/spaf/ if you want to download the paper(s).) One of his conclusions was the author(s) didn't really understand what was going on, because so much of the code was buggy, broken, or "dead" (i.e., unreachable). It is likely that a number of other people wrote the small intelligent bits, and that Morris (or whomever) just glued them all together.
I forgot to give attribution to the Sysadmin Rant ("...the way of things.") part at the end of my post, though (Steve Conley).
I/am/ a sysadmin, and I/am/ having a bad day, and that/is/ how we look at advances in computer technology. Not something to be avoided, nor something to be feared, just something that will cause more fscking lusers to waste our time and make money off of us without helping.
How the computer operates is beside the point. The people who use them are still going to be assholes to the people who keep them running. So it sucks in quantum amounts; it still sucks. So we'll have "F1rst QuAnTuM P0st!" articles instead. Spam will come in multiple flavors: up, down, strange, charm...
All hardware sucks. All software sucks. Everybody is considered a jerk by somebody. Lusers get LARTed, BOFHs get drunk. The sun rises, the sun sets, the Sun crashes. It is the way of things.
Yes, GCC does have a steering committee, mainly to prevent a single person or group from exerting too much control over the project, thus paralyzing development. (The entire EGCS idea was to get away from exactly that problem, which is/why/ there was no new GCC for a long time.)
The Salon article talks about Jeff [Law] mentioning changes to the steering committee. This is the first article in the thread:
and the "changes" article comes later in the thread IIRC. Currently, Cygnus/RH employees together still don't have anywhere near a majority on the committee.
Yeah, I like the Neuromancer series (used Neuromancer as one of the books in my senior thesis for Honors Lit in high school; my first exposure to that book), but I will say this for Idoru: there is one big Usenet reference when discussing the history of the City. I liked that (what can I say, I grew up on Usenet -- still don't care for this young newcomer "web" thingy...)
> Finally - could you/would you trust someone else to > keep a server up 24-7 for your source code?
This is a very good point, but there's an obvious bigger problem. Not only do their machines have to be up and running, but you have to be able to get to them. If something between you and them goes down (and there are a/lot/ of things that can go wrong), you're hosed.
What would be/really/ cool is if they rolled up all the software that they use and distributed/that/. Each of the components (CVS, a mail server, mailing list software, etc) is easy. Tying them all together is not so trivial. If I could go to a new development team here at work and say, "Good, your new server is working. Here are all the tools you'll need, tied together," type a little, and be done... ohhhhh...
While you and I and all the other/. kids know that Windows sucks, my employer (the USAF) is not going to say, "Oh, hey, you're right, let's throw out Windows and move completely to Linux overnight." In fact, they've been doing the exact opposite.
We use Cygwin here in order to do porting efforts, to help use good software on a worthless platform. If Cygwin suddenly vanishes because RH can't make money off of a POSIX emulation library, life is going to suck a little bit more.
I know that you (Foogle) are aware of the issues, but there's a lot of others in this thread that need to realize that you don't just throw NT out all in one day, as crappy as it may be. That's the real world. Deal with it.
Cygwin is one of the best toolsets there is to help developers with that "real world," and suddenly its future is in doubt. You expect me to greet this with joy?
> Will they open source Source Navigator, for example?
While that would be great for us developers, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a clause in the buyout agreement specifying that previously closed-source commercial Cygnus products will remain closed-source and commercial. Else they'd be getting a lot of complaints from people who bought those products before the sellout.
> [RH are] protecting their interests by ensuring they > don't lose their development toolchain,
Ummm, was there/ever/ any chance that they might? Somehow I just don't see everybody suddenly walking away from GCC, regardless of how badly GCC and Linux get along in any possible futures.
> It'll be interesting to see what they do with the > parts of Cygnus that aren't related to their core Linux business, though.
That's what bothers me. I like things like Cygwin, whereas RH has no interest in Windows-related software.
Yeah, it's a great move for the RH business folks, but I don't know whether it was a good call on the part of Cygnus.
While Cygnus' *current* work and RedHat's *current* work are orthogonal, there's no guarantee that they will stay that way after they merge. In fact, they almost certainly won't.
I like Cygnus. A lot. I don't like RedHat. A lot. I want them to *stay* orthogonal.
What will happen to the quality of Cygnus products once they start being targeted specifically for RH? Our Suns and NT machines are starting to not suck nearly as much due to Cygnus tools; I don't like the idea of Really Cool Product Version 14.73 being only on RH, while all the other platforms only have Version 2.2 because those don't generate revenue for RH and aren't "worth" porting.
The book _Microserfs_ is another excellent novel that's been out for quite some time now. It follows a programming nerd through some job changes, including a Silicon Valley startup. Very good book. Very funny. Somewhat insightful. (Goodly speaking English is me.)
Whether Gold is completely off his rocker or not (hey, I'm conservative and skeptical here, too), I'm also glad to see that some of the interview subjects praised him for stepping out with these new theories.
If there is such a thing as an Iconoclast Award -- OTHER than being immortalized in a "think different" Macintosh commercial -- Gold definitely deserves it.
(Me, I'm a big fan of the Darwi Odrade character, and some of the things she says in _Chapterhouse: Dune_ point to people like Gold as being absolutely necessary for culture survival. I won't quote anything here, since I've gone on long enough.)
> Are you telling me that there are multiple flavors of Linux out there?
As a programmer and a sysadmin, this is my only problem with the billions of distributions. Newbies get a particular distro and refer to that as "Linux" to the exclusion of all else. Just yesterday I had to figure out what my fencing apponent was talking about when he said "Linux 6.1" (it doesn't ring a bell to me because I don't use RH).
I like the idea that any ol' J. Random Burner can throw a selection of stuff together and burn his own JRB Linux v52.8 CD distro. I/don't/ like it when said distributors start referring to themselves as/the/ Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, that's good to know. I'll have to tackle my programming prof if I ever see him again; he never mentioned which mission suffered because of the FORTRAN stupidity.
This has nothing to do with the English/metric thing; I just felt that this should go in the space-probe-thread rather than start a new one.
/completely different/ blocks of code, both legal.
:-)
IIRC, the punctuation mistake they're talking about was an instance of the now-infamous DO LOOP constructs in FORTRAN. You can alternate between a period and a comma, and the result is two
With the comma, you actually get a loop. With the period, you get a funky-looking initialization statement and some useless labels. When I was a freshman in college, my introductory CS professor showed us this piece of code, explained the screwup, and added, "We lost a rocket in the 60's because of this."
(I've never formally studied FORTRAN. If I've messed up the explanation above, oh well, mea culpa.)
A recent reposted article in alt.humor.best-of-usenet mentioned:
A moment of silence for our favourite weaponsmith please, and then we blow up a BMW.
The link is here.
He shall be missed. I recommend seeing The World Is Not Enough again just for his exit scene. Chear loudly, and then leave to see some better movie.
Gah, this joke is so old it has hair on it. Yeah, it's hilarious, but does /. need to be turned into another "FW: (fwd): FWD: >>>> JOKES" site?
Yeah, yeah, bah humbug...
There is an excellent interview with the XP creator in some recent issues of _C++ Report_ (which is itself a very respected journal). Some very good questions and answers are brought up by (IIRC) John Vlissides, the interviewer...
:-(
...whose last name I just horribly misspelled, probably.
I think you missed a "not" in your Zeroth Law. Basically, robots must protect /humanity/ above protecting individual humans. (Although I can't find a list of Robot novels, so I don't know which ones to read to discover this.)
Roger Allen McBride has couple of really poorly-written novels that rip up the Three Laws, point out their problems and their resulting effects on humanity (!), and then proceed to create four New Laws.
The actual examination of the Three Laws is really well done, but unfortunately it's the only good piece of writing in the novels.
...something
Go to any ol' pharmacy and look for something called HANDEZE. It's an eight-dollar "golf glove"-looking thing with no fingers, made out of medical-grade lycra.
It traps heat and causes friction, both of which increase circulation in the hand and to the fingers. It's no substitute for stretching and resting, but if you work in a room that can get cold sometimes, it can help reduce minor soreness.
(Why do I have one? Well, I'm a diabetic, and we usually have poor circulation. And any doctor will tell you that poor circulation increases the damage done by RSI -- for that matter, the Typing Injury FAQ will tell you that, too.)
Can't recall where I saw a quote like this:
"Sometimes I believe that the only thing that prevents all the interconnected machines of the Internet from achieving consciousness is that Bill Gates is responsible for the OS running on most of them."
Hmmmmm...
You /really/ need to read the analysis papers. The gluing together was down in an extremely stupid fashion.
I'm not denying that the Worm was impressive or noteworthy; it surely was. But I take issue with the article's statement that it showed understanding of how things work.
First, to Shimrod: you didn't finish reading the main article before you posted, did you? The author specifically mentioned this already.
/the/ spaf) wrote a couple of analysis papers of the Worm, after the code was decompiled. (His homepage is http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/spaf/ if you want to download the paper(s).) One of his conclusions was the author(s) didn't really understand what was going on, because so much of the code was buggy, broken, or "dead" (i.e., unreachable). It is likely that a number of other people wrote the small intelligent bits, and that Morris (or whomever) just glued them all together.
Second, to everybody: the Worm did not show any wizardly understanding of how everything worked. Gene Spafford (yes,
Wow. Cool. I was serious, too... :-)
/am/ a sysadmin, and I /am/ having a bad day, and that /is/ how we look at advances in computer technology. Not something to be avoided, nor something to be feared, just something that will cause more fscking lusers to waste our time and make money off of us without helping.
I forgot to give attribution to the Sysadmin Rant ("...the way of things.") part at the end of my post, though (Steve Conley).
I
How the computer operates is beside the point. The people who use them are still going to be assholes to the people who keep them running. So it sucks in quantum amounts; it still sucks. So we'll have "F1rst QuAnTuM P0st!" articles instead. Spam will come in multiple flavors: up, down, strange, charm...
All hardware sucks. All software sucks. Everybody is considered a jerk by somebody. Lusers get LARTed, BOFHs get drunk. The sun rises, the sun sets, the Sun crashes. It is the way of things.
-A Sysadmin Having a Bad Day
Yes, GCC does have a steering committee, mainly to prevent a single person or group from exerting too much control over the project, thus paralyzing development. (The entire EGCS idea was to get away from exactly that problem, which is /why/ there was no new GCC for a long time.)
h tml
The Salon article talks about Jeff [Law] mentioning changes to the steering committee. This is the first article in the thread:
http://egcs.cygnus.com/ml/gcc/1999-11/msg00421.
and the "changes" article comes later in the thread IIRC. Currently, Cygnus/RH employees together still don't have anywhere near a majority on the committee.
Yeah, I like the Neuromancer series (used Neuromancer as one of the books in my senior thesis for Honors Lit in high school; my first exposure to that book), but I will say this for Idoru: there is one big Usenet reference when discussing the history of the City. I liked that (what can I say, I grew up on Usenet -- still don't care for this young newcomer "web" thingy...)
> Finally - could you/would you trust someone else to
/lot/ of things that can go wrong), you're hosed.
/really/ cool is if they rolled up all the software that they use and distributed /that/. Each of the components (CVS, a mail server, mailing list software, etc) is easy. Tying them all together is not so trivial. If I could go to a new development team here at work and say, "Good, your new server is working. Here are all the tools you'll need, tied together," type a little, and be done... ohhhhh...
> keep a server up 24-7 for your source code?
This is a very good point, but there's an obvious bigger problem. Not only do their machines have to be up and running, but you have to be able to get to them. If something between you and them goes down (and there are a
What would be
John was only referring to that specific book.
:-)
Keep in mind that the New Testament as we know it wouldn't be assembled for years to come.
Don't feel bad; everybody reads that and immediately leaps to the same conclusion.
Indeed. BIND is arguably the glue that holds all this crap together. We owe him a /lot/, and he doesn't get recognized for it nearly enough.
While you and I and all the other /. kids know that Windows sucks, my employer (the USAF) is not going to say, "Oh, hey, you're right, let's throw out Windows and move completely to Linux overnight." In fact, they've been doing the exact opposite.
We use Cygwin here in order to do porting efforts, to help use good software on a worthless platform. If Cygwin suddenly vanishes because RH can't make money off of a POSIX emulation library, life is going to suck a little bit more.
I know that you (Foogle) are aware of the issues, but there's a lot of others in this thread that need to realize that you don't just throw NT out all in one day, as crappy as it may be. That's the real world. Deal with it.
Cygwin is one of the best toolsets there is to help developers with that "real world," and suddenly its future is in doubt. You expect me to greet this with joy?
> Will they open source Source Navigator, for example?
/ever/ any chance that they might? Somehow I just don't see everybody suddenly walking away from GCC, regardless of how badly GCC and Linux get along in any possible futures.
While that would be great for us developers, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a clause in the buyout agreement specifying that previously closed-source commercial Cygnus products will remain closed-source and commercial. Else they'd be getting a lot of complaints from people who bought those products before the sellout.
> [RH are] protecting their interests by ensuring they
> don't lose their development toolchain,
Ummm, was there
> It'll be interesting to see what they do with the
> parts of Cygnus that aren't related to their core Linux business, though.
That's what bothers me. I like things like Cygwin, whereas RH has no interest in Windows-related software.
Yeah, it's a great move for the RH business folks, but I don't know whether it was a good call on the part of Cygnus.
While Cygnus' *current* work and RedHat's *current* work are orthogonal, there's no guarantee that they will stay that way after they merge. In fact, they almost certainly won't.
:-(
I like Cygnus. A lot. I don't like RedHat. A lot. I want them to *stay* orthogonal.
What will happen to the quality of Cygnus products once they start being targeted specifically for RH? Our Suns and NT machines are starting to not suck nearly as much due to Cygnus tools; I don't like the idea of Really Cool Product Version 14.73 being only on RH, while all the other platforms only have Version 2.2 because those don't generate revenue for RH and aren't "worth" porting.
Just my two timeslices. Flame away.
I've not been paying attention to the previous years' awards. Do we vote? Do they vote? Is a name pulled out of a hat?
(Personally, I'd vote for either W. Richard Stevens (RIP), or Jeffrey Law.)
The book _Microserfs_ is another excellent novel that's been out for quite some time now. It follows a programming nerd through some job changes, including a Silicon Valley startup. Very good book. Very funny. Somewhat insightful. (Goodly speaking English is me.)
Whether Gold is completely off his rocker or not (hey, I'm conservative and skeptical here, too), I'm also glad to see that some of the interview subjects praised him for stepping out with these new theories.
If there is such a thing as an Iconoclast Award -- OTHER than being immortalized in a "think different" Macintosh commercial -- Gold definitely deserves it.
(Me, I'm a big fan of the Darwi Odrade character, and some of the things she says in _Chapterhouse: Dune_ point to people like Gold as being absolutely necessary for culture survival. I won't quote anything here, since I've gone on long enough.)
> Are you telling me that there are multiple flavors of Linux out there?
/don't/ like it when said distributors start referring to themselves as /the/ Linux.
As a programmer and a sysadmin, this is my only problem with the billions of distributions. Newbies get a particular distro and refer to that as "Linux" to the exclusion of all else. Just yesterday I had to figure out what my fencing apponent was talking about when he said "Linux 6.1" (it doesn't ring a bell to me because I don't use RH).
I like the idea that any ol' J. Random Burner can throw a selection of stuff together and burn his own JRB Linux v52.8 CD distro. I
Enh, just my two timeslices.