Hmmm, you broke the rules from the MS Press books. Both "Writing Solid Code", and "Code Complete" mentions specifically to never ever have code with side affects inside of an assert statement (more generally no side affects in debugging code). Both outstanding books, that have lead me down the path so I don't have war stories about debugging anymore. That and I don't do embedded programming anymore.
Good books, MS tools are weird mainly because I like my commandline a bit too much, but they publish some damn fine books about programming.
This is also a case of found easily by reading the output of gcc -E, you best friend when debugging code that has macro's anywhere near it.
I had never changed a flag that said I wanted it to strip them, so I assumed it wouldn't. Never trust M$
I hate to post a flame, but RTFM. On every compiler or tool you ever use, spend several days reading the manual and all associated docs you can find. Knowing how the compiler works, and how all the tools work is a hallmark of all the finest programmers I know. I used VC++ a handful of times 5 year ago, and I could have told you the asserts were stripped in from release mode. All you have to do is look at the full list of options it puts on the command line. That's relatively easy to find in the menuing system on VC 4.0 (the only version I used). The -DNDEBUG=1 flag turns off asserts.
Kirby
PS: Other then the keyboard and mouse I use, I haven't used a Microsoft product on a daily basis in years. It's about craftsmanship, and knowing your tools.
and it is best to limit oneself mostly to references to variables passed as function arguments
Unfortuantly, doing that leads to most of the optimization problems you were trying to avoid. Aliasing is not you're friend when doing optimization.
Things would be a lot less problematic if "pointer into the middle of an array", "pointer to local variable", "pointer to heap-allocated object", etc., all had different types.
Having all the various kinds of pointers be different would be a very bad idea. Very, very bad, especially if they added it to C++ where typesafty is important. Both a pointer and a reference are nothing more then an address with an associated layout (granted a pointer has more operations that are legal). You'd have to template anything that worked on a pointer, which isn't my idea of fast compilation, or small code.
The problem with most pointer code that is creative is it isn't the highly optimized case. For loops that work on pointers aren't as fast as the same for loop with an index, precisely because for loops with an index are more common, so more time is spent making them run optimally, not because there is anything about the code that isn't equivilent. It also involves aliasing, and several other things the compiler has to make conservative assumptions on which makes it very difficult to optimize. References are nice, but they aren't much better then pointers for optimization. Inlineing, and templates are where C++ really shines at optimization over C.
I found that hand-crafted pointer code that looked "efficient" didn't run any faster on modern hardware
That has nothing to do with modern hardware, and a lot to do with modern compilers. Modern compilers are orders of magnitude better at common case code. Ancient C compilers translated the code in obvious ways to assembler, so you used pointers, if you knew pointers were faster when generated by you're compiler. Compiler's are the big tricks, the hardware is merely a cost/reliability issue for most things.
If you use references in C++, you're using pointers. I'm well aware that there are semantic differences between the two, but a lot of the optimization problems that come from using pointers, also apply to references.
You're not particularly creative with pointers, if you honestly believe they can be replaced by arrays. Lots of neat affects are very easy to do with pointers, but a pain to do with arrays. Function pointers come to mind. Along with the fact, that pass by reference just doesn't exist in straight C. An array is nothing but a const pointer you didn't have to malloc the memory for most of the time. Linked lists can't be duplicated in any way shape or form in an array. They can be horribly cut into little useless pieces and sorta have the semantics of a linked list, except for that unlimited size part. Pointers are there for dynamic memory, and that can't be replaced with arrays.
Now in C++ because of the inlining, and some of the other neat tricks like templates, you don't have to use pointers nearly as much. Some of the aliasing problems go away, but pointer's are ungodly useful in C and C++. They get used all the time for overloading, and polymorphism in C++ so they aren't useless there either.
Oh yeah, pointer's at Intel don't have to be big enough to address all memory, just write some huge model DOS code... Oh the horror of working on that. Done it in a former life. In fact, on all recent x86 there is no such thing as a pointer that can address all of memory. On the 386SX, I believe there was a 16MB limit due to address lines coming off the CPU. But even those CPU's could address something like 64TB (yes that's a T as in Tera) of virtual address space. Even the latest greatest CPU's from Intel can't deal with that in a single pointer. Even Protected 32bit mode is segmented, just nobody in their right mind uses it for much.
I think the major beef with the Cg that a lot of people are missing is that it's being touted as highly portable to lots of hardware (hmm, that's my impression from what I've read, I don't know that I've seen the actual press release from NVidia), but has very, very specific design limitations so that there is a lot of hardware features on cards not made by NVidia that can't be taken advantage of. If they didn't try and say it'd be highly useful for competitor's hardware, and that it is specifically for their hardware, there would be fewer gripes. I'm not particularly up to speed on this area, but I think it would be a huge boon to be able to have a specific language for the a GPU. A lot of very cool stuff could be done using it. My guess is that nobody will want to deal with the lock-in problems of using a specific vendor's code on a non-embedded system. So it'd be less useful to somebody who was developing for stuff he couldn't control the GPU unit on (say like game developers). So NVidia is trying to bill it as portable so there is less concern. I hope it all ends up that cool 3d rendering is both easier, cheaper and faster, if that happens I'm happy.
While there are rules, a PERSON, casts the electoral vote. An honest to God live human fills out a ballot and sends it in. If I remember correctly, the trick is who picks those people. If you win the majority vote in the state, you pick the people who get to vote (this might differ state to state, so don't quote me on that one, but feel free to correct me).
So the Dem and Rep each have a group of people who vote. They vote, if they don't follow the laws/rules/regulations, that's irrelevant, short of being bribed/blackmailed their vote is final. Those people are electoral college voters. So if Dubya had picked people in Florida who felt like voting for Gore because of the fiasco that happened, Gore could have won. It was my understanding that there was some serious concern about that happening. In the past, in huge landslide cases, a rouge voter didn't follow the rules of the state. This is why time ran out on the vote. If you don't have you're electoral votes in by Dec 20th or so, you're state abstained from voting in the electoral college.
As to why the electoral college exists, go look at a county based map of the US and which candidate won them. There was an interesting map that showed that Bush won like 85-90% of the geographic areas broken up by county. Gore was only popular in major cities. For good better or for worse, it's the system we have.
Actually, they have an aversion to not owning the trademark on the name of the processors. AMD was selling "486"'s, so Intel tried to trademark (or use some legal to prohibit AMD or Cyrix from naming their product lines the same) "586". They pretty much got laughed as if I remember correctly, and had to come up with a trademarkable name. Hence the term "Pentium", notice how nobody else makes Pentiums, but everybody made 486's. That's why. If I remember right they tried to trademark MMX, and lost in court over that too.
I'm not sure how they came up with the name 8086, probably from the 4004 to the 8080 to 8086, but the 8086 was named. It was a 16 bit bus. The 8088 was actually newer but had an 8 bit bus so it was named 8086. The 80186, it a 16bit bus and the next generation of the 16 bit bus. The Pentium Pro was is commonly refered to as the as 686 (probably because Intel developed it under that name). The Pentium Pro, P2, and P3 all used the same basic core. The P4 is a new core. A P5 IMHO should be dubed "Decium", as it is the 10th chip in the line x86 line.
Hmmm, no, read up on the IP level and try again. UDP/TCP/ICMP aren't the only protocols. There are lots of others, one of them happens to be "NVP" or whatever the hell it is. It is "service 11", as in grep "11"/etc/protocols and you'll see it right there. If you're on a UNIX box when you call socket(), you have to give it a protocol (the third parameter). IP is it's own protocol, and does not need to run TCP or UDP on top of it, you can use it as a transport for anything you want. Normally when you call socket, you tell it the type (the second parameter) and pass zero for the protocol and it does the right thing. However, if you so chose to you could call:
getprotoent() repeatedly
and find the protocol number you want to use.
If I remember correctly, all of the BGP and EGP, and a number of the router protocols speak something besides straight TCP/UDP. It's essentially anything you can do on layer 4 of the OSI network model.
It's not a port. It's not a port. It's not a port. It's a protocol (you know like the "P" in TCP). It isn't TCP, it doesn't need to be dumbed down with an analogy. Lots of plenty intelligent people on slashdot actually understand some of the technology they post on, honest.
You might want to bone up on some basic networking before talking down to a guy who clearly understands piles more about networking then you demonstrated in your previous post. For all I know you're a networking guru, your last post however did not display that very well.
Service 11 (which communicates over both TCP and UDP according to RH 7.2's/etc/service) is systat, which is a good idea to disable as it gives out information about you're machine. So the idea of shutting off port 11 probably isn't a bad one...
Thanks,
Kirby
PS: Sorry to post a complete flame, but the people talking about service 11 (NVP), do actually know a lot about what they are talking about. They don't need somebody to beat them with a cluestick about how ports work in TCP, by somebody who seems completely unaware of the fact that protocols besides TCP/UDP/ICMP exist, and that numbers refer to something other then ports.
1. Legal Where. There are a lot of legal jurisdictions, which one are we discussing.
2. After we know where, how is it determined to actually be legal. Wouldn't it take a court ruling to be sure. If it isn't obviously legal, could they be taken to court. Nearly anything can be put under scrutiny by the DMCA that is an attempt to circumvent access controls. Short of a court order that it is legal, you've only got a lawyers opinion. I know that they have the right spirit, but this looks like it could come down to a lot of stupid arguments.
To be blatantly honest, I'm just repeating a statistic I can't cite the source because I've forgotten where I heard it. Surviving isn't all about the plane not crash landing. It's about living after you get out of the plane. There is an incredible engineering that could go into creating a "seat" that if a human was in it and hit the ground at 400MPH the would survive. If the black box can survive, more then likely a human can too. It just isn't cost effective to do that for 180 people on the plane.
Okay, did you know that they can make airplanes and cars lots, lots safer. It just so happens that for an airplane company to make it safer would cost about 2Mil per seat, however, the average cost of a lawsuit for a plane crash is less then 2Mil, so the financial marginal benefit of creating a safer plane is not there. It is better to make it less safe, and just pay the families of airplane crash victems. Simple economics.
For similar logic, the testing and procedures to develop less buggie code is probably not in the interest of the software writing companies. Microsoft is completely capable of writing bug free software. Trust me, if Bill Gates said look boys we write bug free software, it could happen. However, the would release new copies of Windows every 10 years, they would have possible 10 new features, and nothing inovative.
This $60B loss will continue to happen, until the users pass the loss onto the vendor so they have to eat it all. The other problem is that $60B is an accounting number, and doesn't account for all the savings because they left the bugs in. It is entirely possible that removing the bugs during the cheapest phase (design), would have cost more then $60B dollars.
I just checked the site, it does in fact appear to be Registered, it uses the stupid R with a circle, which might not be the same as TM, but it means they have some legal rights to the name. IANAL, so I don't know all the differences between the R/TM/C and what all that means. I'm sure somebody explained all of it to me.
Kirby
Actually, I bet I could get UnitedXerox trademarked, but Xerox could sue to get it revoked. In the case of Linux, I don't think Linus would object to this name in any way shape or form. I'm not terrible familar with Trademark law, but hell Microsoft got "Windows" thru the trademark process so it can't be that hard.
Yes you can. However, you can't call it UnitedLinux, that is an infringement on their Trademark (I'm assuming they have that name trademarked). If they are very clever, they will pull the OpenBSD trick of copyrighting the ISO Images and directory layout.
Suse has had nearly this policy for a while. I know they haven't given out ISO's for a while, I'm not sure on binary packages. I'm going to guess that some of the companies are going to give out free ISO images that are based on the UnitedLinux source, but aren't "UnitedLinux". So you can't claim it is certified.
People will still want the free desktop OS for workstations and whoever continues to provide that has a huge marketing/PR advantage over everyone else. However, that advantage can be quite costly to provide. So it might all come out in the wash.
RedHat does essentially this in the Advanced Server Platform. Go try and find those ISO's. They aren't anywhere on RedHat's site. I've hunted high and low for them. It is very similar to the Personal/Professional release execpt for some of the kernel patches they apply, and a few 3rd party tools.
The next step after this is that RedHat isn't bothering to get Oracle certified under all of the Personal/Professional Releases, only on the Advanced server. If isn't certified, Oracle shouldn't support you. I would imagine with all big proprietary products will be the same. It isn't cost effective to re-certify RedHat for all the big name products every release. So from a purely business perspective it makes a lot of sense.
So RedHat can give away free workstation copies but get you to buy a copy of Advanced server for all of you're server machines. I'd imagine that UnitedLinux will end up doing something similar somehow.
First of all, you have to license each individual file. All of the code should be licensed individually per file. Now, because the artwork presummable doesn't link with the GPL'ed application (or is it one of those new fangled JPEG viruses? *grin*). The artwork can be under any license you want. It doesn't have to be GPL'ed now, because it isn't linked into the application. So you're distributing two different works on the same media. Datafiles don't have to have the same license as the data they operate on, or output. Your artwork license can be roughly the SPL (Soulless Public License), which is roughly you have to give me you're soul to use my works in any way shape or form, including merely reading the license or viewing the file in a file browser. It is legal (okay the my SPL example might not be). You can put it in the public domain and it is legal. You can put it into any old license you want and the artwork is legal.
You're estimating positions, they are estimating series of moves. There is a difference. There are several series of moves to get to any single position so naturally your number must be smaller then their number. The really funny part, is that youre estimage is way, way, way to high. It is absolutely impossible to have the entire board filled with white queens, but your number counts that. It counts it filled entirely with white kings, and all pawns, and all kinds of other crap that can't happen. They use series of moves, because that is the primary data structure used to contruct a computer based chess game.
Homograph is a real word (spelled identically, but have different meanings think fair ( just or morally right (life isn't fair), appealling appearance (fair skinned), a market place), but they are using it a new context. The occurance of using Unicode to do bad things with domains is so uncommon there is no word for it, they coined a word to make it something they could actually talk about.
In this case, they high-jacked another word that had roughly the right meaning. Homograph had a meaning long before Unicode or IE, or Microsoft existed, so the strict English definition has nothing to do with where they used it. Assuming it becomes a common enough usage, it won't rate quotes. I'm sure an expression like "surfing the 'net", and other terms that were coined started life out with quotes.
Of course, this site's name has been turned into a verb, and nobody blinks an eye. As a general rule geeks grok overloading a word quite well, so this is all me being redundent in explaining it.
Uhhh, this is slashdot we don't do rational, we don't think things thru. We lash out at everybody, and cheer if they somebody gets slapped around in the same way they did something to us. You're too rational and right thing for around here. We never stop to think that once Sony gets done with blizzard we might be next. We like mob rule, we like group hysteria. We don't like your kind, you can leave.. If you hurry you might not catch what we have. God knows we don't want what you have.
All depends. I have probably 8 C++ books that have lots of different useful information in them. Really, I probably only need 3 of them, the ISO standard (yes I own a copy), Strousup's C++ Language and Jossutis's book (big black book, can't remember the title).
I own probably 500 computer books that completely cover an 6ft by 6ft section on my wall. No I haven't read all of them, but I have read 80% of them cover to cover, and I know the table of contents on the rest of the books. It's generally very useful to keep lots of reference material "grey matter indexed". That is, I know which book to find it in and roughly where it is in the book. I have found on-line documentation to be of very low quality personally, and I like to peruse it when I don't have a computer handy
The other consideration is it is nice to know the documentation isn't going to change, or move, or do anything weird. Of course it isn't going to get updated either so, cuts both ways.
Well, if a Linux/Unix solution will work for the Linux heads, why not install Cygwin and get an X server up and running ( I don't know if it does headless or not ). Connect up a Linux box, and use the 3270 emulator off the remote machine. Not ideal, but it will work.
No it isn't easy, but it is nearly free. Extra Linux servers might be costly, but the licensing is free.
Nope, this guy is confused (even CEO's get confused), its in the contracts that the cable company will play the spots. Yep I bet that is the truth. This guy's customers are cable companies that purchase his content for a price and then ship it to my house. He and the cable company get to put ad's in the shows, which is fine by me. He has just forgotten that he is so far from the general public as a consumer that he as lost his completely perspective on reality.
Quick lesson in business, if the advertisers won't pay as much for skipped ad's due to PVR's then charge more the the cable companies for the content to make up for the lost revenue. Then start paying everybody a less who stars in the shows to lower costs. Then start moving away from the coasts to the mid-west or south for the lower cost of doing business. If not, you go out of business. Generally calling the paying consumer a thief, and generally attempting to control their actions and limit the use of legitimate technology sounds like a good way to go out of business.
If there is demand for good high quality content, it'll get paid for, if not it won't. Stop attempting to legislate technology, or as a corporation attempt to control it. There is no point. For $500 in equipment, you can put together a good PVR himself. If the guy was really smart he try and find a revenue stream off of this. If not, you know what if there is demand, somebody will pay for it, and somebody will make money for generating the content. If this goober isn't the guy making the money, that's not my problem and he should stop calling people theives for using commonly available items in a manner in which he doesn't like, but is completely legal. I'd really like some yahoo PVR user to sue this guy for liable. He'd lose, but it be fun to have this guy taken to court for being an ass.
Of course if being an ass were worth having to go to court, I probably never get to leave the courthouse.
Well, I have seen a lot of people speak to reasons why it can't be done, here is yet another. Think about any two port protocol (FTP comes to mind first). You send the second port out as Data in a TCP packet, unless the ARP tricks or hardware solutions out there want to deal with this you're screwed. All those goofy modules for NAT under Linux exist for very specific reasons. You can't make it work correctly for everybody.
You can do quite a bit, a ton in fact on a single port protocols. However, you screwing with IP addresses which might screw up IP/VPN/Security/Authentication mechanisms all over the place causing people more problems then just explaining they have to configure the network properly. The real problem is all of the solutions are executing a man in the middle attack. In this case, it is a useful "attack", but an attack none the less. A good security protocol might pick up on it and stop working.
If you just want them to be able to surf the web, yeah no problem. To reliable be able to accomplish useful work using any tools they are use to, nope too many configuration and or problems with it.
Kirby
What, you tried to a use a list::iterator where you should have used a list.
It occurred on line 109 of readply.cpp? Now I'll grant it took 30 seconds to decode, mostly because you appear to have lost some characters in posting to slashdot and the character wraps at odd places.
The really hard part was finding the 'to non-scalar type' in there to find the start of the second type. It isn't hard once you get use to it.
Yes it is, in fact it is a commonly known optimization to override an allocator. Lots of written material mentions it if you take the time to readup on it. Write a custom allocator, you know the third option to all of the STL containers? Bjarne in fact says that is the whole reason why it was added was specifically so people could get very fine control over memory allocation. Nearly everything about the STL and all of the templated types in C++ is to give you completely control over the performance/size parameters of the code. Bjarne knew nobody would use it otherwise.
They got control to control both placement and the memory allocation routines. The default allocation calls malloc, writing your own can commonly speed up code an order of magnitude.
That was in Design and Evolution of C++, if you want to know how to write an allocation check out boost.org, and Jossutis's book. Several people linked to the book above.
<flame>
Remember:
Just because you didn't know how to do it doesn't make it impossible.
</flame>
Sorry about the flame, but people who don't know enough about C++ and then say it is fundamentally flawed in ways that it was specifically designed to accomadate aggrevate me very much. It isn't you're particular situation (heck you might have done this before allocators got standardized). Just so many people are ignorant of the facts and then blame C++ because it does the right thing 95% of the time and gives them control of the other 5% to override it.
And yes I own a copy of the ISO C++ standard. I am that much of a C++ geek.
Most software pirated in the US is from casual copying, end of story
I'll just point out, your offering up exactly the same non-supported, anecodotal evidence as the BSA here. Personally, I have never come across a "professional" pirate. I use know some pretty hardcore warez people which isn't neccessarily casual coping. You probably have a similar experince as I do, that most of it is just John Doe installing the latest Windows on several of his machines without licenses.
However, that doesn't preclude the possibility of an organized crime group doing it for money, it just means you have probably never come across it. I agree with you that it is most likely casual copying, but don't accuse the BSA of having no stats, and then offer up facts with no statistics. At least try to say in my experience, or something, don't state is as a fact. Gives credibility to when the BSA does that, and they have a slightly bigger reputation then either you or I in the eyes of business people.
Oh yeah, and I'd worry if the BSA started using stats. Stats are the single easiest way to lie, because you tell the whole truth, just inaccurately by using the property of your stats to show what you want. Stats are a wonderful way to lie.
Nope, One Time Pads are the ideal encryption, but not "perfect". The real difference between OTP and key based encryption is that I figuring out one message doesn't lead to a weakness in all the messages. With RSA/DES/AES I crack the key, I get them all, with a OTP I crack one I get one.
For an uncrackable method, use a caeser shift with a one time pad. All messages are equally likely. Assuming you have a truly random number generator it can't be broken. All plaintext could possibly turn into any given ciphertext using the proper key. If they find a copy of the pad you're screwed. To be more useful, use the same shift for 2 chars in a row (see later, yes it has issues, but it solves a major problem with OTP).
One Time Pads also have so many problems in terms of implementation, that is sorta like saying well why bother with those slow clunky Turing machines, quantum based computers are so much better. Yeah right up until you try and use them.
One time pads are handy with a person who you know you're sending off into the wild and know the total amount of communication necessary, but they are kinda limited once you run out of them and have to send another pad. I suppose if you're running out of pad and you can transmit more data then you consume in pad you can overcome this problem (however you probably give up some information to an attack because of this not enough to be truly useful, but some).
You have to be able to securely communicate with that person before hand. I suppose RSA Keys could be used to send the OTP. However now you're encryption is only as good as can RSA is. You must be able to communicate in an absolutely secure way to give them the original pad. For a person who wants to communicate securely with you, and has absolutely no way of communicate securely just once with you can't ever use a OTP. So other methods like Public Key Crypto are good for solving that case.
OTP, isn't very useful for encrypted storage either. If you keep a copy of the OTP around that isn't very secure either now is it?
So don't hold OTP's up as the one true encryption technology. Good encryption guys are smart, if they thought it was feasible they would use it if it was perfect. OTP's could also be broken (aquiring a copy of the Pad), and go undetected, at least with the Quantum stuff in theory, you'd know if it was broken or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Good books, MS tools are weird mainly because I like my commandline a bit too much, but they publish some damn fine books about programming.
This is also a case of found easily by reading the output of gcc -E, you best friend when debugging code that has macro's anywhere near it.
I had never changed a flag that said I wanted it to strip them, so I assumed it wouldn't. Never trust M$
I hate to post a flame, but RTFM. On every compiler or tool you ever use, spend several days reading the manual and all associated docs you can find. Knowing how the compiler works, and how all the tools work is a hallmark of all the finest programmers I know. I used VC++ a handful of times 5 year ago, and I could have told you the asserts were stripped in from release mode. All you have to do is look at the full list of options it puts on the command line. That's relatively easy to find in the menuing system on VC 4.0 (the only version I used). The -DNDEBUG=1 flag turns off asserts.
Kirby
PS: Other then the keyboard and mouse I use, I haven't used a Microsoft product on a daily basis in years. It's about craftsmanship, and knowing your tools.
Unfortuantly, doing that leads to most of the optimization problems you were trying to avoid. Aliasing is not you're friend when doing optimization.
Things would be a lot less problematic if "pointer into the middle of an array", "pointer to local variable", "pointer to heap-allocated object", etc., all had different types.
Having all the various kinds of pointers be different would be a very bad idea. Very, very bad, especially if they added it to C++ where typesafty is important. Both a pointer and a reference are nothing more then an address with an associated layout (granted a pointer has more operations that are legal). You'd have to template anything that worked on a pointer, which isn't my idea of fast compilation, or small code.
The problem with most pointer code that is creative is it isn't the highly optimized case. For loops that work on pointers aren't as fast as the same for loop with an index, precisely because for loops with an index are more common, so more time is spent making them run optimally, not because there is anything about the code that isn't equivilent. It also involves aliasing, and several other things the compiler has to make conservative assumptions on which makes it very difficult to optimize. References are nice, but they aren't much better then pointers for optimization. Inlineing, and templates are where C++ really shines at optimization over C.
I found that hand-crafted pointer code that looked "efficient" didn't run any faster on modern hardware
That has nothing to do with modern hardware, and a lot to do with modern compilers. Modern compilers are orders of magnitude better at common case code. Ancient C compilers translated the code in obvious ways to assembler, so you used pointers, if you knew pointers were faster when generated by you're compiler. Compiler's are the big tricks, the hardware is merely a cost/reliability issue for most things.
Kirby
You're not particularly creative with pointers, if you honestly believe they can be replaced by arrays. Lots of neat affects are very easy to do with pointers, but a pain to do with arrays. Function pointers come to mind. Along with the fact, that pass by reference just doesn't exist in straight C. An array is nothing but a const pointer you didn't have to malloc the memory for most of the time. Linked lists can't be duplicated in any way shape or form in an array. They can be horribly cut into little useless pieces and sorta have the semantics of a linked list, except for that unlimited size part. Pointers are there for dynamic memory, and that can't be replaced with arrays.
Now in C++ because of the inlining, and some of the other neat tricks like templates, you don't have to use pointers nearly as much. Some of the aliasing problems go away, but pointer's are ungodly useful in C and C++. They get used all the time for overloading, and polymorphism in C++ so they aren't useless there either.
Oh yeah, pointer's at Intel don't have to be big enough to address all memory, just write some huge model DOS code... Oh the horror of working on that. Done it in a former life. In fact, on all recent x86 there is no such thing as a pointer that can address all of memory. On the 386SX, I believe there was a 16MB limit due to address lines coming off the CPU. But even those CPU's could address something like 64TB (yes that's a T as in Tera) of virtual address space. Even the latest greatest CPU's from Intel can't deal with that in a single pointer. Even Protected 32bit mode is segmented, just nobody in their right mind uses it for much.
I think the major beef with the Cg that a lot of people are missing is that it's being touted as highly portable to lots of hardware (hmm, that's my impression from what I've read, I don't know that I've seen the actual press release from NVidia), but has very, very specific design limitations so that there is a lot of hardware features on cards not made by NVidia that can't be taken advantage of. If they didn't try and say it'd be highly useful for competitor's hardware, and that it is specifically for their hardware, there would be fewer gripes. I'm not particularly up to speed on this area, but I think it would be a huge boon to be able to have a specific language for the a GPU. A lot of very cool stuff could be done using it. My guess is that nobody will want to deal with the lock-in problems of using a specific vendor's code on a non-embedded system. So it'd be less useful to somebody who was developing for stuff he couldn't control the GPU unit on (say like game developers). So NVidia is trying to bill it as portable so there is less concern. I hope it all ends up that cool 3d rendering is both easier, cheaper and faster, if that happens I'm happy.
Kirby
So the Dem and Rep each have a group of people who vote. They vote, if they don't follow the laws/rules/regulations, that's irrelevant, short of being bribed/blackmailed their vote is final. Those people are electoral college voters. So if Dubya had picked people in Florida who felt like voting for Gore because of the fiasco that happened, Gore could have won. It was my understanding that there was some serious concern about that happening. In the past, in huge landslide cases, a rouge voter didn't follow the rules of the state. This is why time ran out on the vote. If you don't have you're electoral votes in by Dec 20th or so, you're state abstained from voting in the electoral college.
As to why the electoral college exists, go look at a county based map of the US and which candidate won them. There was an interesting map that showed that Bush won like 85-90% of the geographic areas broken up by county. Gore was only popular in major cities. For good better or for worse, it's the system we have.
Kirby
I'm not sure how they came up with the name 8086, probably from the 4004 to the 8080 to 8086, but the 8086 was named. It was a 16 bit bus. The 8088 was actually newer but had an 8 bit bus so it was named 8086. The 80186, it a 16bit bus and the next generation of the 16 bit bus. The Pentium Pro was is commonly refered to as the as 686 (probably because Intel developed it under that name). The Pentium Pro, P2, and P3 all used the same basic core. The P4 is a new core. A P5 IMHO should be dubed "Decium", as it is the 10th chip in the line x86 line.
Kirby
It's "protocol 11", not "service 11"... I'm might know something about networking, but I don't know dick about proof reading... Kirby
getprotoent() repeatedly
and find the protocol number you want to use.
If I remember correctly, all of the BGP and EGP, and a number of the router protocols speak something besides straight TCP/UDP. It's essentially anything you can do on layer 4 of the OSI network model.
It's not a port. It's not a port. It's not a port. It's a protocol (you know like the "P" in TCP). It isn't TCP, it doesn't need to be dumbed down with an analogy. Lots of plenty intelligent people on slashdot actually understand some of the technology they post on, honest.
You might want to bone up on some basic networking before talking down to a guy who clearly understands piles more about networking then you demonstrated in your previous post. For all I know you're a networking guru, your last post however did not display that very well.
Service 11 (which communicates over both TCP and UDP according to RH 7.2's /etc/service) is systat, which is a good idea to disable as it gives out information about you're machine. So the idea of shutting off port 11 probably isn't a bad one...
Thanks, Kirby
PS: Sorry to post a complete flame, but the people talking about service 11 (NVP), do actually know a lot about what they are talking about. They don't need somebody to beat them with a cluestick about how ports work in TCP, by somebody who seems completely unaware of the fact that protocols besides TCP/UDP/ICMP exist, and that numbers refer to something other then ports.
2. After we know where, how is it determined to actually be legal. Wouldn't it take a court ruling to be sure. If it isn't obviously legal, could they be taken to court. Nearly anything can be put under scrutiny by the DMCA that is an attempt to circumvent access controls. Short of a court order that it is legal, you've only got a lawyers opinion. I know that they have the right spirit, but this looks like it could come down to a lot of stupid arguments.
To be blatantly honest, I'm just repeating a statistic I can't cite the source because I've forgotten where I heard it. Surviving isn't all about the plane not crash landing. It's about living after you get out of the plane. There is an incredible engineering that could go into creating a "seat" that if a human was in it and hit the ground at 400MPH the would survive. If the black box can survive, more then likely a human can too. It just isn't cost effective to do that for 180 people on the plane.
For similar logic, the testing and procedures to develop less buggie code is probably not in the interest of the software writing companies. Microsoft is completely capable of writing bug free software. Trust me, if Bill Gates said look boys we write bug free software, it could happen. However, the would release new copies of Windows every 10 years, they would have possible 10 new features, and nothing inovative.
This $60B loss will continue to happen, until the users pass the loss onto the vendor so they have to eat it all. The other problem is that $60B is an accounting number, and doesn't account for all the savings because they left the bugs in. It is entirely possible that removing the bugs during the cheapest phase (design), would have cost more then $60B dollars.
I just checked the site, it does in fact appear to be Registered, it uses the stupid R with a circle, which might not be the same as TM, but it means they have some legal rights to the name. IANAL, so I don't know all the differences between the R/TM/C and what all that means. I'm sure somebody explained all of it to me. Kirby
Kirby
Suse has had nearly this policy for a while. I know they haven't given out ISO's for a while, I'm not sure on binary packages. I'm going to guess that some of the companies are going to give out free ISO images that are based on the UnitedLinux source, but aren't "UnitedLinux". So you can't claim it is certified.
People will still want the free desktop OS for workstations and whoever continues to provide that has a huge marketing/PR advantage over everyone else. However, that advantage can be quite costly to provide. So it might all come out in the wash.
RedHat does essentially this in the Advanced Server Platform. Go try and find those ISO's. They aren't anywhere on RedHat's site. I've hunted high and low for them. It is very similar to the Personal/Professional release execpt for some of the kernel patches they apply, and a few 3rd party tools.
The next step after this is that RedHat isn't bothering to get Oracle certified under all of the Personal/Professional Releases, only on the Advanced server. If isn't certified, Oracle shouldn't support you. I would imagine with all big proprietary products will be the same. It isn't cost effective to re-certify RedHat for all the big name products every release. So from a purely business perspective it makes a lot of sense.
So RedHat can give away free workstation copies but get you to buy a copy of Advanced server for all of you're server machines. I'd imagine that UnitedLinux will end up doing something similar somehow.
Kirby
First of all, you have to license each individual file. All of the code should be licensed individually per file. Now, because the artwork presummable doesn't link with the GPL'ed application (or is it one of those new fangled JPEG viruses? *grin*). The artwork can be under any license you want. It doesn't have to be GPL'ed now, because it isn't linked into the application. So you're distributing two different works on the same media. Datafiles don't have to have the same license as the data they operate on, or output. Your artwork license can be roughly the SPL (Soulless Public License), which is roughly you have to give me you're soul to use my works in any way shape or form, including merely reading the license or viewing the file in a file browser. It is legal (okay the my SPL example might not be). You can put it in the public domain and it is legal. You can put it into any old license you want and the artwork is legal.
You're estimating positions, they are estimating series of moves. There is a difference. There are several series of moves to get to any single position so naturally your number must be smaller then their number. The really funny part, is that youre estimage is way, way, way to high. It is absolutely impossible to have the entire board filled with white queens, but your number counts that. It counts it filled entirely with white kings, and all pawns, and all kinds of other crap that can't happen. They use series of moves, because that is the primary data structure used to contruct a computer based chess game.
Homograph is a real word (spelled identically, but have different meanings think fair ( just or morally right (life isn't fair), appealling appearance (fair skinned), a market place), but they are using it a new context. The occurance of using Unicode to do bad things with domains is so uncommon there is no word for it, they coined a word to make it something they could actually talk about.
In this case, they high-jacked another word that had roughly the right meaning. Homograph had a meaning long before Unicode or IE, or Microsoft existed, so the strict English definition has nothing to do with where they used it. Assuming it becomes a common enough usage, it won't rate quotes. I'm sure an expression like "surfing the 'net", and other terms that were coined started life out with quotes.
Of course, this site's name has been turned into a verb, and nobody blinks an eye. As a general rule geeks grok overloading a word quite well, so this is all me being redundent in explaining it.
Uhhh, this is slashdot we don't do rational, we don't think things thru. We lash out at everybody, and cheer if they somebody gets slapped around in the same way they did something to us. You're too rational and right thing for around here. We never stop to think that once Sony gets done with blizzard we might be next. We like mob rule, we like group hysteria. We don't like your kind, you can leave.. If you hurry you might not catch what we have. God knows we don't want what you have.
I own probably 500 computer books that completely cover an 6ft by 6ft section on my wall. No I haven't read all of them, but I have read 80% of them cover to cover, and I know the table of contents on the rest of the books. It's generally very useful to keep lots of reference material "grey matter indexed". That is, I know which book to find it in and roughly where it is in the book. I have found on-line documentation to be of very low quality personally, and I like to peruse it when I don't have a computer handy
The other consideration is it is nice to know the documentation isn't going to change, or move, or do anything weird. Of course it isn't going to get updated either so, cuts both ways.
No it isn't easy, but it is nearly free. Extra Linux servers might be costly, but the licensing is free.
Quick lesson in business, if the advertisers won't pay as much for skipped ad's due to PVR's then charge more the the cable companies for the content to make up for the lost revenue. Then start paying everybody a less who stars in the shows to lower costs. Then start moving away from the coasts to the mid-west or south for the lower cost of doing business. If not, you go out of business. Generally calling the paying consumer a thief, and generally attempting to control their actions and limit the use of legitimate technology sounds like a good way to go out of business.
If there is demand for good high quality content, it'll get paid for, if not it won't. Stop attempting to legislate technology, or as a corporation attempt to control it. There is no point. For $500 in equipment, you can put together a good PVR himself. If the guy was really smart he try and find a revenue stream off of this. If not, you know what if there is demand, somebody will pay for it, and somebody will make money for generating the content. If this goober isn't the guy making the money, that's not my problem and he should stop calling people theives for using commonly available items in a manner in which he doesn't like, but is completely legal. I'd really like some yahoo PVR user to sue this guy for liable. He'd lose, but it be fun to have this guy taken to court for being an ass.
Of course if being an ass were worth having to go to court, I probably never get to leave the courthouse.
Kirby
You can do quite a bit, a ton in fact on a single port protocols. However, you screwing with IP addresses which might screw up IP/VPN/Security/Authentication mechanisms all over the place causing people more problems then just explaining they have to configure the network properly. The real problem is all of the solutions are executing a man in the middle attack. In this case, it is a useful "attack", but an attack none the less. A good security protocol might pick up on it and stop working.
If you just want them to be able to surf the web, yeah no problem. To reliable be able to accomplish useful work using any tools they are use to, nope too many configuration and or problems with it. Kirby
It occurred on line 109 of readply.cpp? Now I'll grant it took 30 seconds to decode, mostly because you appear to have lost some characters in posting to slashdot and the character wraps at odd places.
The really hard part was finding the 'to non-scalar type' in there to find the start of the second type. It isn't hard once you get use to it.
Kirby
They got control to control both placement and the memory allocation routines. The default allocation calls malloc, writing your own can commonly speed up code an order of magnitude.
That was in Design and Evolution of C++, if you want to know how to write an allocation check out boost.org, and Jossutis's book. Several people linked to the book above.
<flame> Remember: Just because you didn't know how to do it doesn't make it impossible. </flame>
Sorry about the flame, but people who don't know enough about C++ and then say it is fundamentally flawed in ways that it was specifically designed to accomadate aggrevate me very much. It isn't you're particular situation (heck you might have done this before allocators got standardized). Just so many people are ignorant of the facts and then blame C++ because it does the right thing 95% of the time and gives them control of the other 5% to override it.
And yes I own a copy of the ISO C++ standard. I am that much of a C++ geek.
I'll just point out, your offering up exactly the same non-supported, anecodotal evidence as the BSA here. Personally, I have never come across a "professional" pirate. I use know some pretty hardcore warez people which isn't neccessarily casual coping. You probably have a similar experince as I do, that most of it is just John Doe installing the latest Windows on several of his machines without licenses.
However, that doesn't preclude the possibility of an organized crime group doing it for money, it just means you have probably never come across it. I agree with you that it is most likely casual copying, but don't accuse the BSA of having no stats, and then offer up facts with no statistics. At least try to say in my experience, or something, don't state is as a fact. Gives credibility to when the BSA does that, and they have a slightly bigger reputation then either you or I in the eyes of business people.
Oh yeah, and I'd worry if the BSA started using stats. Stats are the single easiest way to lie, because you tell the whole truth, just inaccurately by using the property of your stats to show what you want. Stats are a wonderful way to lie.
For an uncrackable method, use a caeser shift with a one time pad. All messages are equally likely. Assuming you have a truly random number generator it can't be broken. All plaintext could possibly turn into any given ciphertext using the proper key. If they find a copy of the pad you're screwed. To be more useful, use the same shift for 2 chars in a row (see later, yes it has issues, but it solves a major problem with OTP).
One Time Pads also have so many problems in terms of implementation, that is sorta like saying well why bother with those slow clunky Turing machines, quantum based computers are so much better. Yeah right up until you try and use them.
One time pads are handy with a person who you know you're sending off into the wild and know the total amount of communication necessary, but they are kinda limited once you run out of them and have to send another pad. I suppose if you're running out of pad and you can transmit more data then you consume in pad you can overcome this problem (however you probably give up some information to an attack because of this not enough to be truly useful, but some).
You have to be able to securely communicate with that person before hand. I suppose RSA Keys could be used to send the OTP. However now you're encryption is only as good as can RSA is. You must be able to communicate in an absolutely secure way to give them the original pad. For a person who wants to communicate securely with you, and has absolutely no way of communicate securely just once with you can't ever use a OTP. So other methods like Public Key Crypto are good for solving that case.
OTP, isn't very useful for encrypted storage either. If you keep a copy of the OTP around that isn't very secure either now is it?
So don't hold OTP's up as the one true encryption technology. Good encryption guys are smart, if they thought it was feasible they would use it if it was perfect. OTP's could also be broken (aquiring a copy of the Pad), and go undetected, at least with the Quantum stuff in theory, you'd know if it was broken or not.
Kirby