Most embedded products are more than just
"code" - they are a product. Selling
yourself as a "coder" will not get you very far,
especially with so many experience telecom
guys now out of work and also looking for jobs.
One way to get more very sellable
and concrete experience would be to go
back to school and get a Master's in an
engineering field - most likely EE, but other
areas are possible too.
The EU believes that because the root
servers are not controlled and administered
by one central authority, they are unreliable.
This is true, to an extent. Different and widely
spread organizations run the root name servers,
using different OS's, hardware configurations,
and network connectivity.
And this is a Good Thing
Concentrating and centralizing the root name
servers would defeat the diversity that now
exists. If one goes down, the others pick
up the load. If there's a fatal hardware bug
in one, it probably won't affect the servers
running on different hardware. And, most of
all, A single business or management
failure will not disrupt root nameservice.
Whoever in the EU (I suspect it's some
ex-communist beaurocrat who loves centralized
authority) thinks that things are bad now should
read the RFC
2870, Root Name Server Operational Requirements and get a clue.
that seems
to be spreading to other linuces (xinetd, vi=vim,
and so on)
The basic LFS install is without xinetd,
but is with Vim. If you don't want to install
Vim, though, you're completely free to install
whatever you do want.
If only someone would mix
all of the BSD userland stuff with the Linux
kernel...
In which case GNUStep is not for you. It's
so completely and utterly different than
anything you've ever seen that "running vi"
doesn't make sense in the UI model.
War is mearly becoming symbolic.
I remember an original Star Trek episode,in which there was a conflict between two planets. The
Enterprise crew the war was mearly a computer simulation, but each side killed X amount of citezens
A much more chilling (and slightly earlier)
example was the movie/novel Failsafe,
where the US President nukes New York because
a US bomber - due to a series of mistakes -
drops bombs on Moscow. All to prevent
a gobal nuclear war from the mistakes.
Since they are Crayola, could they bring suit against the German company?
No, probably not. The German trademark laws
are strong in protecting trademarks of German
companies, but an "outsider" stands no chance.
Besides, I don't think that Binney&Smith have
ever claimed that they own the trademark on
"crayon", just "Crayola"
German companies have been "punitively" stripped
of their trademarks outside of Germany, however.
Perhaps the most famous example is the Bayer
trademark on Aspirin; this trademark
was taken away in the US and it became a generic
term there sometime around WW I. In most of the
rest of the world it is a trademark, not
a generic term.
Why can't they just support the OS with only the market-leading/most reliable X86 hardware?
That's more difficult than it sounds. Chipsets
last a couple of months; firmware changes
every couple of weeks. If your development/
release cycle is a couple of months long, you
are not going to be supporting the "current"
market-leading hardware.
This press release may contain forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements
involve risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, financing, completion of technology development, product demand,
competition, and other risks and uncertainties.
This has *long* been an April 1st joke
published in such hallowed rags as BYTE
and Datamation for at least as long
as I've been reading them (20 years).
The punchline to the joke was always along the
lines of
Of course, since this
compression works on random data, you can
repeatedly apply it to previously compressed
data. So if you get 100:1 on the first compression, you get 10000:1 on the second and
1000000:1 on the third.
Interesting Dr Dobbs article, especially on the
attitudes towards Perl and the attitudes by Perl
developers.
It's strange to me that Perl was even thought
of as a "lightweight language". My definition of
"lightweight" is that the whole language spec fits
in a book no thicker than K&R 1st edition. This
would barely begin to describe Perl's oddities
(all reference books are filled with footnotes
like "unless $/ is defined to be "\n\n" and the
-ip qualifier was used to invoke Perl").
Perl is also very different because it really
is an evolved language. It's a strong
testament to the overall framework that the
original language could be extended into what
we have today, and that the result is so widely
used (even though it may not be ideal for anything, it's usable for many things).
OTOH it also shows the signs of evolution
(see my comment about all the footnotes having
to deal with special cases for backwards-
compatiblity.)
For much historically-interesting software,
hobbyist-type licenses are available. (No, it's
not always open source, and it's not always
public-domain, but it's a start.)
See for example
the massive collection of PDP-10 (the architecture
that the Arpanet and early TCP/IP stuff was done
on, and certainly the source of much of the
hacker
culture) software at
That said, these only scratch the surface
of vitally interesting stuff that needs to
be preserved, so anything to further similar
projects is 100% goodness.
and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1
. . . After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them
had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing!
Of course, if you had done a little bit of
research, you would've found out that GCC 3.0x
is not production quality and that
2.95.2
or 2.95.3 are considered the stable versions.
I'm actually a bit surprised that you got
everything to compile cleanly under gcc 3 -
but I'm not surprised that you got random crashes
after doing so.
Fortran already has most of the really
basic objects used to solve engineering/numerical
analysis problems: Integers, reals, arrays,
matrices, subroutines, functions, etc.
Object-oriented languages are so popular at
the moment because it's a way of adapting a
language to a new problem domain (keep in mind
that C was written to write an OS kernel, and
it's only through bad luck that folks are using
an extended version to do everything under the
sun today).
But just as C++ and Java are (slowly) displacing COBOL
for business applications, I think we'll see
object-oriented code displace Fortran and C
for number-crunching. (Remember, COBOL
was written specifically for Business applications!)
I honestly don't know of a good book on numeric
computation that is truly object-oriented. The
current edition of Numerical Recipes in C++
doesn't really take advantage of everything you
can get from an OO approach. Maybe the
new
edition of Numerical Recipes in C++ will
do a good job at this. Still, the current
version shouldn't be ignored, there are some good
ideas about how objects can really help in
large computational challenges.
The way you propose your idea - without any
details - it's hard to tell if your data really
does fit a DB model well. If your data is just
"all the files", it probably doesn't map well.
It's also not clear what problem you're trying
to solve. Is it a problem in administering the
large amounts of data? Is it a problem in
managing the complex relationships between the
data? Is it just a worry about the reliability
of the storage media?
If you've been using part of your filesystem
*as* a database (i.e. very large numbers of files
in a directory, where the filename is a key) then
you may come out ahead by putting the data where
it really belonged in the first place, a database!
It may very well be time to closely scrutinize
what all the files you have are and what they
contain. Store files with complex
interrelationships to each other on the same
machine; store other groups with little relations
somewhere else. Draw ER diagrams, do it in UML,
whatever tool you like. But you won't solve
a lack of understanding of all your files by
hiding them all behind a database layer of
abstraction, you'll just be brushing everything
under the rug.
It's not that they wouldn't report it. it's more a case of who to?
Internet security isn't as "new" as everybody
wants you to believe. CERT has had a
reporting hotline for many years now,
as well as guidelines on how to make a report.
To me, the amazing fact is that judging by
the comments folks are making, Most slashdotters
don't even know about CERT. How do we
expect the guy off the street (aka IIS
administrator) to know?
To me, the real problem is that every couple
of months folks come along like internet security
is something new, when in fact the exploits
and vulnerabilities of today are very much like
the same problems from a decade ago.
I agree, compressed XML (my favorite is bzip)
can save a huge factor in space requirements.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if certain big
names in the OS business start coming out with
"proprietary" XML extensions, just as they make
postscript printer drivers that are printer-brand-and-model-specific.
If markup languages such as XML will substitute proprietary binary formats like MS Word and so on, it will be
very nice!
Oh, the hard drive manufacturers will love this.
A simple one-page document will take gigabytes
of hard disk space:-).
Wasn't there a slashdot
story in the past year about how a common
binary protocol was being replaced with
XML, with a corresponding increase of
a factor in the hundreds in storage/network
requirements?
It has been updated as of this morning
(26-Dec-2001) but there are no mentions of
any nameserver woes (if all your nameservers
are also authorative for your domain, then
internally things can look just honky-dory even
though nobody outside can resolve you. I
suspect theregsiter's staff may be in this
situation...)
took me three days to figure out that I needed to type "startx" to get the desktop up.....
I used Linux for several years before I ever
saw a X11-desktop on it. And when I did, it
was twm... may as well go back to non-X11!
I'm sure my comment above is seen as that of a
old-timey guy - but the point is, the desktop is
not the OS.
Allow double clicking to execute files in desktop mode...yes I know this does work, but very few default this way without having to change them. Again, we want to
make it easy for newbies.....
Easy to execute malicious code? Easy to spread
E-mail virii? Easy to let in Trojan Horses?
Remember, these are newbies, chances are that
they're logged in as root, despite any warning
windows they got.
... I watched the Lucy Liu episode, which has some heavy RIAA-aligned propaganda against P2P file
sharing. It was somewhat disturbing to see that in such a cool show.
I don't think it was heavy-handed - I think it
was hilariously funny. Sure, they portrayed
us "computer geeks" in a manner similar to
The Simpson's episode
Homer Goes to College, but if I can't take some
ribbing about my friends then I've lost my sense
of perspective. And the portrayal of
"nappster.com" in the Futurama Episode you're
talking about I Dated a Robot shows how those in
the entertainment industry really do feel about
the "threat" of file-sharing services. (Hint:
Most of the real world doesn't recognize any
particular right to share arbitrary streams
of bytes.)
This not meant to be flamebait, but this site is over 4 years old
I've just spent some time trying to decode your
statement.
Are you making a complaint that the usability is
poor? I certainly don't
think agree with that.
Are you complaining that the site is "old" and
doesn't require you to make a shockwave download
for each and every access, like all "modern"
websites? If so, I prefer the old!
Slashdot Mirror
This is kind-of the definition of "CISC" - lots of instructions that are hardly ever (or never) used in real life.
It's also the definition of a compiler that has been heavily slanted towards building RISC code :-).
One way to get more very sellable and concrete experience would be to go back to school and get a Master's in an engineering field - most likely EE, but other areas are possible too.
This is true, to an extent. Different and widely spread organizations run the root name servers, using different OS's, hardware configurations, and network connectivity.
Concentrating and centralizing the root name servers would defeat the diversity that now exists. If one goes down, the others pick up the load. If there's a fatal hardware bug in one, it probably won't affect the servers running on different hardware. And, most of all, A single business or management failure will not disrupt root nameservice.Whoever in the EU (I suspect it's some ex-communist beaurocrat who loves centralized authority) thinks that things are bad now should read the RFC 2870, Root Name Server Operational Requirements and get a clue.
Look at other distros or - even better - Build your own with Linux From Scratch as a starting point.
that seems to be spreading to other linuces (xinetd, vi=vim, and so on)
The basic LFS install is without xinetd, but is with Vim. If you don't want to install Vim, though, you're completely free to install whatever you do want.
If only someone would mix all of the BSD userland stuff with the Linux kernel...
In which case GNUStep is not for you. It's so completely and utterly different than anything you've ever seen that "running vi" doesn't make sense in the UI model.
A much more chilling (and slightly earlier) example was the movie/novel Failsafe, where the US President nukes New York because a US bomber - due to a series of mistakes - drops bombs on Moscow. All to prevent a gobal nuclear war from the mistakes.
It still is, outside the US.
No, probably not. The German trademark laws are strong in protecting trademarks of German companies, but an "outsider" stands no chance. Besides, I don't think that Binney&Smith have ever claimed that they own the trademark on "crayon", just "Crayola"
German companies have been "punitively" stripped of their trademarks outside of Germany, however. Perhaps the most famous example is the Bayer trademark on Aspirin; this trademark was taken away in the US and it became a generic term there sometime around WW I. In most of the rest of the world it is a trademark, not a generic term.
That's more difficult than it sounds. Chipsets last a couple of months; firmware changes every couple of weeks. If your development/ release cycle is a couple of months long, you are not going to be supporting the "current" market-leading hardware.
The punchline to the joke was always along the lines of
It's strange to me that Perl was even thought of as a "lightweight language". My definition of "lightweight" is that the whole language spec fits in a book no thicker than K&R 1st edition. This would barely begin to describe Perl's oddities (all reference books are filled with footnotes like "unless $/ is defined to be "\n\n" and the -ip qualifier was used to invoke Perl").
Perl is also very different because it really is an evolved language. It's a strong testament to the overall framework that the original language could be extended into what we have today, and that the result is so widely used (even though it may not be ideal for anything, it's usable for many things).
OTOH it also shows the signs of evolution (see my comment about all the footnotes having to deal with special cases for backwards- compatiblity.)
See for example the massive collection of PDP-10 (the architecture that the Arpanet and early TCP/IP stuff was done on, and certainly the source of much of the hacker culture) software at
or the large number of historically interesting OS's and tools (including many early Unix releases) that you can run onThat said, these only scratch the surface of vitally interesting stuff that needs to be preserved, so anything to further similar projects is 100% goodness.
Of course, if you had done a little bit of research, you would've found out that GCC 3.0x is not production quality and that 2.95.2 or 2.95.3 are considered the stable versions.
I'm actually a bit surprised that you got everything to compile cleanly under gcc 3 - but I'm not surprised that you got random crashes after doing so.
Fortran already has most of the really basic objects used to solve engineering/numerical analysis problems: Integers, reals, arrays, matrices, subroutines, functions, etc.
Object-oriented languages are so popular at the moment because it's a way of adapting a language to a new problem domain (keep in mind that C was written to write an OS kernel, and it's only through bad luck that folks are using an extended version to do everything under the sun today).
But just as C++ and Java are (slowly) displacing COBOL for business applications, I think we'll see object-oriented code displace Fortran and C for number-crunching. (Remember, COBOL was written specifically for Business applications!)
I honestly don't know of a good book on numeric computation that is truly object-oriented. The current edition of Numerical Recipes in C++ doesn't really take advantage of everything you can get from an OO approach. Maybe the new edition of Numerical Recipes in C++ will do a good job at this. Still, the current version shouldn't be ignored, there are some good ideas about how objects can really help in large computational challenges.
It's also not clear what problem you're trying to solve. Is it a problem in administering the large amounts of data? Is it a problem in managing the complex relationships between the data? Is it just a worry about the reliability of the storage media?
If you've been using part of your filesystem *as* a database (i.e. very large numbers of files in a directory, where the filename is a key) then you may come out ahead by putting the data where it really belonged in the first place, a database!
It may very well be time to closely scrutinize what all the files you have are and what they contain. Store files with complex interrelationships to each other on the same machine; store other groups with little relations somewhere else. Draw ER diagrams, do it in UML, whatever tool you like. But you won't solve a lack of understanding of all your files by hiding them all behind a database layer of abstraction, you'll just be brushing everything under the rug.
Internet security isn't as "new" as everybody wants you to believe. CERT has had a reporting hotline for many years now, as well as guidelines on how to make a report.
To me, the amazing fact is that judging by the comments folks are making, Most slashdotters don't even know about CERT. How do we expect the guy off the street (aka IIS administrator) to know?
To me, the real problem is that every couple of months folks come along like internet security is something new, when in fact the exploits and vulnerabilities of today are very much like the same problems from a decade ago.
Reminds me of what was presumably Ford's old motto - Quantity is job one!
I agree, compressed XML (my favorite is bzip) can save a huge factor in space requirements.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if certain big names in the OS business start coming out with "proprietary" XML extensions, just as they make postscript printer drivers that are printer-brand-and-model-specific.
Oh, the hard drive manufacturers will love this. A simple one-page document will take gigabytes of hard disk space :-).
Wasn't there a slashdot story in the past year about how a common binary protocol was being replaced with XML, with a corresponding increase of a factor in the hundreds in storage/network requirements?
Dude, you *do* know that the "B" in "BSD" is a rather famous public school?
I used Linux for several years before I ever saw a X11-desktop on it. And when I did, it was twm... may as well go back to non-X11!
I'm sure my comment above is seen as that of a old-timey guy - but the point is, the desktop is not the OS.
Allow double clicking to execute files in desktop mode...yes I know this does work, but very few default this way without having to change them. Again, we want to make it easy for newbies.....
Easy to execute malicious code? Easy to spread E-mail virii? Easy to let in Trojan Horses? Remember, these are newbies, chances are that they're logged in as root, despite any warning windows they got.
I don't think it was heavy-handed - I think it was hilariously funny. Sure, they portrayed us "computer geeks" in a manner similar to The Simpson's episode Homer Goes to College, but if I can't take some ribbing about my friends then I've lost my sense of perspective. And the portrayal of "nappster.com" in the Futurama Episode you're talking about I Dated a Robot shows how those in the entertainment industry really do feel about the "threat" of file-sharing services. (Hint: Most of the real world doesn't recognize any particular right to share arbitrary streams of bytes.)
I've just spent some time trying to decode your statement.
Are you making a complaint that the usability is poor? I certainly don't think agree with that.
Are you complaining that the site is "old" and doesn't require you to make a shockwave download for each and every access, like all "modern" websites? If so, I prefer the old!