I wouldn't use C for the kind of applications you're talking about, although if I was forced to I'd look into something like the GNU Scientific Library. However, Java is a good choice for math heavy coding where you don't have the resources to do it Fortran. Arbitrary precision is possible using classes in the standard java.math package, which as the Javadoc states "provides classes for performing arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic (BigInteger) and arbitrary-precision decimal arithmetic (BigDecimal)". I'm not just saying that it's possible to do precise mathematical programming in Java, I know several people who do just that for nuclear physics projects at various academic and government institutions in and around Oxford, UK.
Why not just write a C string class? Or use an existing one like that found in glib? For stuff where I can't use GPL or even LGPL code, I wrote my own string class in C that has a similar API to the glib one. It took me all of a couple of hours, and includes a unit test that exercises each function. It removes the worry of memory leaks and buffer overruns from the vast majority of my C code that has tonhandle strings, all without the overhead of C++.
That example was amusing for me considering the job ad I had in my inbox a couple of months ago from Google. If web apps will replace C then why is the hottest web company of all looking for C programmers?
Was this an unsolicited email from Google offering you an interview? If so, then I had a similar one. At first I assumed it was some sort of spam, but there were no links in the email, just a request to reply to the senders google.com (not gmail) email address. The sender mentioned various postings I'd made to mailing lists such as the NetBSD ones as the reason I'd been contacted. As with you, they were interested in my C programming ability, as well as any knowledge I have of NetBSD (I've heard they use it for several systems alongside the Linux stuff). I deleted the message as I've worked at Yahoo! which was enough to put me off working for a big dot-com, but was left wondering how genuine the interview offer was.
Over at the Daily WTF, they have an article titled The Complicator's Gloves. Perhaps the submitter of this Slashdot article might want to give it a once over, and if the message still doesn't sink in PRINT THE F*CKING PICTURES OUT JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER WANTS.
Nicest laptop keyboards I've ever used are on an RDI Powerlite and older models of Tadpole SPARCBooks. They're actually better than most dekstop PC keyboards that I've used. Shame that my Powerlite only has a 50Mhz processor and is so heavy that your legs go numb after ten minutes of having it on your lap.
If you're referring to multics, no commercial operating systems have caught up to that yet.
What neat features of Multics haven't been implemented in some similar fashion by Unix or Linux? I've never actually used Multics, but I have read the Organick book that describes it and I can't think of anything genuinely useful that it has but hasn't got a decent equivalent in Unix.
I don't follow your logic. I can't see why the colonial language should have special status in a country that was once forcibly made part of an Empire. Anyway, as others have pointed out education in Russian is not banned in Estonian schools that are in areas with predominately Russian speaking populations. The mass media in the Russian Federation may say otherwise, but that's because their ownership is mostly in the hands of the state and its oligarchical sympathisers.
As for Ukraine, the west of the country largely speaks Ukrainian - a language that is distinct from Russian. I recently attended a talk by Andrey Kurkov, a Ukrainian author of mixed Russian-Ukrainian descent, where he said that the reason he writes in Russian rather than Ukrainian is because the languages are so different and he doesn't feel able to express himself well enough in Ukrainian. He emphasised two points, firstly that Ukrainian is a distinct language (despite Soviet era propaganda that belittled it as a worthless dialect) and secondly that he saw himself as Ukrainian, albeit one with a partly Russian heritage.
Returning to Estonia to the ethnic Russian situation would have been to make Russian an official language in the same way that Swedish was after Finnish independence. However, the recent history of each country and the resulting ethnic relationships made this rational approach much less likely. The Russo-centric regime in Moscow had tried to crush Estonian independence protests with force, and this didn't make any kind of rapprochement with an ethnic Russian minority a likelihood.
Be careful with your words too. While the post you were replying to failed to make the distinction between ordinary Soviet citizens and their leaders (Stalin and his cohorts cared little about the human cost of defeating the Axis powers), you state that 30 million Russians died in WWII. They were not only Russians but citizens from across the Soviet Union. This is why it's less likely that a statue that commerates the sacrifice of the ordinary Soviet soldier would be removed from the centre of somewhere like Minsk or Kiev. That said, the statues and other monuments that were erected in Eastern European countries and regions such as the Baltic did have an additional purpose. As well as commerating the dead, they were meant to be a constant reminder of Soviet power to people such as the Hungarians who were otherwise largely indifferent as to which side won WWII.
They were offered Estonian citizenship after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Estonian independence. Many ethnic Russians chose not to take it, but remained in the country.
For the love of freedom, just patch the boxes and shut up!
You just don't get it do you? A DDOS is not indicative of a flaw in the systems under attack, it is using the regular means of access to the systems (HTTP requests mostly) but doing it on a massive scale from machines around the world taht have been compromised. Or are you suggesting that Estonian sysadmins perform the impossible and patch all these lousy Windows boxes on various ISP accounts around the world?
Unless you've experienced a large scale DDOS or read the detailed summary of how one was handled then all I can suggest is looking at some descriptions of what a DDOS is. Wikipedia is a good start. Our Payment Service Provider received a blackmail threat a couple of years ago, and then experienced a massive ten day long DDOS attack. Once it was over they provided us with a very detailed account of the attack. What impressed me was the sheer number of machines used in the attack and how evenly spread around the world they were. Trying to contact the relevant sysadmins or ISPs for these machines was simply not feasible.
Nope the starting point of this was the relocation of a large statue of a Soviet soldier from central Tallinn to a Soviet Army military cemetery on the outskirts of the city. The Estonians were occupied twice by the Soviet Union, once at the beginning of World War II and again at the end. The second occupation was billed as a liberation of Estonia by the Soviets, but both times large numbers of Estonians were deported to labour camps in the east of the Soviet Union, many to never return. As a result, the statue came to symbolise the occupation of Estonia, and it was felt it should not be in the centre of the countries capital.
During the Soviet era, a large number of ethnic Russians were settled in Estonia and a program of Russification carried out that tried to extinguish Estonian language and culture. This was a common policy across the Soviet Union, as it was seen as a way of preventing a future break up of the union. The Putin government plays on the tensions amongst these former Soviet populations as a way of reasserting Russias importance in the region.
The bodies that are often mentioned in the news reports are actually located some distance from the original site of the statue. They have been located (there was no sign of their presence above ground) under a tram stop and road junction. Excavation was carried out, and the coffins relocated to the same cemetery as the statue. This is in accordance with war graves agreements that are part of internation law.
A DDOS attack is basically an attempt to saturate the capacity of the target. The "distributed" part means that it is difficult to screen out the attackers because the machines are on so many different subnets. The flaws that a DDOS relies on are not in the attacked systems, but in the attacking ones which have been compromised and have had software installed that makes them a "bot". A network of these "bots" are then coordinated by the attacker.
And if you think that shutting down the websites of pretty much every government institution, bank and commercial enterprise in a highly connected country like Estonia amounts to "a few eggs thrown over the fence" then just think what it would do your nations economy.
Thanks for the info on OPENSTEP. Hmm, and I hadn't realised that the finder in OS X is a Carbon app.
I still do some things on my NeXT machine, such as word processing for personal stuff, but I don't really surf the web from it even though OmniWeb's installed. What I often wonder about is whether the added features of OS X really justify the massive increase in power required of a machine to run it. Comparing an old version of Linux (say RedHat 4.2) with a recent one it's clear that the apps have improved, but as with the Mach kernel in NeXT versus the one in OS X, I wonder if the Linux kernel is that much better for desktop use. The extra sophistication at the kernel level on seems to benefit larger servers, running under a reasonable load.
I've not tried OpenStep, but I understood it was just a rebranding after NeXT decided to drop support for their own black hardware and concentrate on x86 support. As for Java and Mac OS compatability, I'm not aware of any apps I regularly use on OS X which launch a JVM and I don't use any Carbon apps (nor did I use any kind of Mac emulation on my NeXT slab). While I can understand extra subsystems in the kernel (such as firewire and USB) requiring more memory and a bit more processing power, what I don't get is why a machine that is roughly 20 times more powerful than my slab feels more sluggish. Is the eye candy in OS X really that resource intensive?!?
That said, comparing OS X on an 800Mhz Mac to Windows XP on a 1.6Ghz PC shows Apple's OS in a very favourable light. XP regularly grinds to a halt doing something as simple as opening an Explorer window, and often wont even let me minimise it in the meantime. I'm also impressed that up until now, each major release of OS X has felt snappier on the same hardware. Compare that to Vista over XP...
Seriously, in this day and age of 30-inch displays, who maximizes anything anymore outside the rare instances where a "Full Screen" option would be better?
Those of us who use a laptop as their main machine? I like OS X, in fact when I bought my Mac I only expected to tinker with it before installing Linux or NetBSD, but the way the resize button doesn't maximise is an annoyance. At least it should have been made an option, even if it's one that only a third party tool like Onyx can tweak. For moving between applications I use Apple-Tab (equivalent to Alt-Tab on Windows and most Unix window managers), as it's more convenient than raising and lowering or tiling application windows.
Nope, grey square with a black "X" in it closes a NeXTstep program. I've still not worked out why NeXTstep 5.0 (aka Mac OS X) struggles to perform well on an 800Mhz Powerbook, while NeXTstep 3.3 works much more smoothly on a 33Mhz NeXT slab.
Sorry, the early Solbourne kit was not Sun compatible. It used a different instruction set, albeit one based on the SPARC instruction set. I'm not sure when or even if the Solbournes became truly Sun compatible, but they weren't on the radar when a former employer went looking for Sun4 compatible stuff (nope, I wasn't "associated" with Solbourne or Axil but I was using Sun4c and Sun4m kit as part of a document scanning system in the early to mid 1990's).
Sun make their money primarily from hardware sales. Open sourcing Solaris makes a lot of sense, as it encourages people to try it who would otherwise just stick with Linux in part because they will only use an open source operating system. There's still enough good stuff in Solaris that differentiates it from Linux, particularly if you need something that scales well across a large number of CPU's or cores.
Nope, Kroah is just coming up with an excuse for the core Linux developers to be lazy. Using the argument that only binary drivers can benefit from a stable driver interface is ignoring the pain for all driver developers in maintaining support across even a minor kernel release. Just because a driver compiles doesn't mean it works, and not all drivers are compiled before a release anyway. So having the driver in the vanilla kernel release is not a magic bullet - for Kroah to claim otherwise is just an attempt at misleading advocacy. People like him need to stop believing the drivel all to often spouted by Torvalds, ESR and Stallman.
Bullshit. Solbourne weren't the only people making Sun compatible kit, nor where they the first - Axil were. Meanwhile Tadpole and RDI were making Sparc based portables (I hesitate to call them laptops as the weight would cut the blood flow off from your legs) which were basically SS5s with an LCD screen. Tadpole later acquired RDI. Compatibles came in two forms, those with licensed mainboard designs from Sun, and those with mainboards designed in house. The reason for the demise of most of these companies was not down to licensing shenanigans but the simple fact that few of these machines offered benefits over the Suns own kit. The exception was the portables, and that's most likely why Tadpole are still around.
java applications never really took of in either the commercial or opensource desktop software markets
Now you're talking bull. Search on the major IT job advertising websites by language, and you'll notice that there is a massive demand for Java programmers. Not only to work on J2EE web related stuff, but Swing based applications, particularly for banks. C# and.Net have started to eat into this market to some extent, but there's a serious amount of Java code that would have to be ported or thrown away and keeps some people from moving to MicroSofts alternative. Having just been through a round of job interviews, it's also clear that C++ and Perl are not as widley used as they were thanks to Java. The performance is close enough to C++ that it's no longer an issue, while the tools, best practices and documentation mean that Java development are far less of a gamble than Perl.
Musicians should not rely on Pro Tools. That's all.
Have to agree. Most people can't help themselves when faced with the possibility of tidying up their playing after the fact, and end up tweaking things note by note or cutting and pasting one bar over and over again. The result? Sterile recordings that have hardly any dynamics or feeling. I'm more than happy to use a direct to disk recorder, but I'd much rather do another couple of takes and get each part right in one pass than do a cut and pasting exercise.
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I wouldn't use C for the kind of applications you're talking about, although if I was forced to I'd look into something like the GNU Scientific Library. However, Java is a good choice for math heavy coding where you don't have the resources to do it Fortran. Arbitrary precision is possible using classes in the standard java.math package, which as the Javadoc states "provides classes for performing arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic (BigInteger) and arbitrary-precision decimal arithmetic (BigDecimal)". I'm not just saying that it's possible to do precise mathematical programming in Java, I know several people who do just that for nuclear physics projects at various academic and government institutions in and around Oxford, UK.
Why not just write a C string class? Or use an existing one like that found in glib? For stuff where I can't use GPL or even LGPL code, I wrote my own string class in C that has a similar API to the glib one. It took me all of a couple of hours, and includes a unit test that exercises each function. It removes the worry of memory leaks and buffer overruns from the vast majority of my C code that has tonhandle strings, all without the overhead of C++.
That example was amusing for me considering the job ad I had in my inbox a couple of months ago from Google. If web apps will replace C then why is the hottest web company of all looking for C programmers?
Was this an unsolicited email from Google offering you an interview? If so, then I had a similar one. At first I assumed it was some sort of spam, but there were no links in the email, just a request to reply to the senders google.com (not gmail) email address. The sender mentioned various postings I'd made to mailing lists such as the NetBSD ones as the reason I'd been contacted. As with you, they were interested in my C programming ability, as well as any knowledge I have of NetBSD (I've heard they use it for several systems alongside the Linux stuff). I deleted the message as I've worked at Yahoo! which was enough to put me off working for a big dot-com, but was left wondering how genuine the interview offer was.
Over at the Daily WTF, they have an article titled The Complicator's Gloves. Perhaps the submitter of this Slashdot article might want to give it a once over, and if the message still doesn't sink in PRINT THE F*CKING PICTURES OUT JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER WANTS.
Nicest laptop keyboards I've ever used are on an RDI Powerlite and older models of Tadpole SPARCBooks. They're actually better than most dekstop PC keyboards that I've used. Shame that my Powerlite only has a 50Mhz processor and is so heavy that your legs go numb after ten minutes of having it on your lap.
If you're referring to multics, no commercial operating systems have caught up to that yet.
What neat features of Multics haven't been implemented in some similar fashion by Unix or Linux? I've never actually used Multics, but I have read the Organick book that describes it and I can't think of anything genuinely useful that it has but hasn't got a decent equivalent in Unix.
Opera?
Cool. Where can I get the source code to compile it seeing as they don't provide a binary for Alpha?
I don't follow your logic. I can't see why the colonial language should have special status in a country that was once forcibly made part of an Empire. Anyway, as others have pointed out education in Russian is not banned in Estonian schools that are in areas with predominately Russian speaking populations. The mass media in the Russian Federation may say otherwise, but that's because their ownership is mostly in the hands of the state and its oligarchical sympathisers.
As for Ukraine, the west of the country largely speaks Ukrainian - a language that is distinct from Russian. I recently attended a talk by Andrey Kurkov, a Ukrainian author of mixed Russian-Ukrainian descent, where he said that the reason he writes in Russian rather than Ukrainian is because the languages are so different and he doesn't feel able to express himself well enough in Ukrainian. He emphasised two points, firstly that Ukrainian is a distinct language (despite Soviet era propaganda that belittled it as a worthless dialect) and secondly that he saw himself as Ukrainian, albeit one with a partly Russian heritage.
Returning to Estonia to the ethnic Russian situation would have been to make Russian an official language in the same way that Swedish was after Finnish independence. However, the recent history of each country and the resulting ethnic relationships made this rational approach much less likely. The Russo-centric regime in Moscow had tried to crush Estonian independence protests with force, and this didn't make any kind of rapprochement with an ethnic Russian minority a likelihood.
Be careful with your words too. While the post you were replying to failed to make the distinction between ordinary Soviet citizens and their leaders (Stalin and his cohorts cared little about the human cost of defeating the Axis powers), you state that 30 million Russians died in WWII. They were not only Russians but citizens from across the Soviet Union. This is why it's less likely that a statue that commerates the sacrifice of the ordinary Soviet soldier would be removed from the centre of somewhere like Minsk or Kiev. That said, the statues and other monuments that were erected in Eastern European countries and regions such as the Baltic did have an additional purpose. As well as commerating the dead, they were meant to be a constant reminder of Soviet power to people such as the Hungarians who were otherwise largely indifferent as to which side won WWII.
They were offered Estonian citizenship after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Estonian independence. Many ethnic Russians chose not to take it, but remained in the country.
For the love of freedom, just patch the boxes and shut up!
You just don't get it do you? A DDOS is not indicative of a flaw in the systems under attack, it is using the regular means of access to the systems (HTTP requests mostly) but doing it on a massive scale from machines around the world taht have been compromised. Or are you suggesting that Estonian sysadmins perform the impossible and patch all these lousy Windows boxes on various ISP accounts around the world?
Unless you've experienced a large scale DDOS or read the detailed summary of how one was handled then all I can suggest is looking at some descriptions of what a DDOS is. Wikipedia is a good start. Our Payment Service Provider received a blackmail threat a couple of years ago, and then experienced a massive ten day long DDOS attack. Once it was over they provided us with a very detailed account of the attack. What impressed me was the sheer number of machines used in the attack and how evenly spread around the world they were. Trying to contact the relevant sysadmins or ISPs for these machines was simply not feasible.
Nope the starting point of this was the relocation of a large statue of a Soviet soldier from central Tallinn to a Soviet Army military cemetery on the outskirts of the city. The Estonians were occupied twice by the Soviet Union, once at the beginning of World War II and again at the end. The second occupation was billed as a liberation of Estonia by the Soviets, but both times large numbers of Estonians were deported to labour camps in the east of the Soviet Union, many to never return. As a result, the statue came to symbolise the occupation of Estonia, and it was felt it should not be in the centre of the countries capital.
During the Soviet era, a large number of ethnic Russians were settled in Estonia and a program of Russification carried out that tried to extinguish Estonian language and culture. This was a common policy across the Soviet Union, as it was seen as a way of preventing a future break up of the union. The Putin government plays on the tensions amongst these former Soviet populations as a way of reasserting Russias importance in the region.
The bodies that are often mentioned in the news reports are actually located some distance from the original site of the statue. They have been located (there was no sign of their presence above ground) under a tram stop and road junction. Excavation was carried out, and the coffins relocated to the same cemetery as the statue. This is in accordance with war graves agreements that are part of internation law.
You haven't got a clue.
A DDOS attack is basically an attempt to saturate the capacity of the target. The "distributed" part means that it is difficult to screen out the attackers because the machines are on so many different subnets. The flaws that a DDOS relies on are not in the attacked systems, but in the attacking ones which have been compromised and have had software installed that makes them a "bot". A network of these "bots" are then coordinated by the attacker.
And if you think that shutting down the websites of pretty much every government institution, bank and commercial enterprise in a highly connected country like Estonia amounts to "a few eggs thrown over the fence" then just think what it would do your nations economy.
Thanks for the info on OPENSTEP. Hmm, and I hadn't realised that the finder in OS X is a Carbon app.
I still do some things on my NeXT machine, such as word processing for personal stuff, but I don't really surf the web from it even though OmniWeb's installed. What I often wonder about is whether the added features of OS X really justify the massive increase in power required of a machine to run it. Comparing an old version of Linux (say RedHat 4.2) with a recent one it's clear that the apps have improved, but as with the Mach kernel in NeXT versus the one in OS X, I wonder if the Linux kernel is that much better for desktop use. The extra sophistication at the kernel level on seems to benefit larger servers, running under a reasonable load.
I've not tried OpenStep, but I understood it was just a rebranding after NeXT decided to drop support for their own black hardware and concentrate on x86 support. As for Java and Mac OS compatability, I'm not aware of any apps I regularly use on OS X which launch a JVM and I don't use any Carbon apps (nor did I use any kind of Mac emulation on my NeXT slab). While I can understand extra subsystems in the kernel (such as firewire and USB) requiring more memory and a bit more processing power, what I don't get is why a machine that is roughly 20 times more powerful than my slab feels more sluggish. Is the eye candy in OS X really that resource intensive?!?
That said, comparing OS X on an 800Mhz Mac to Windows XP on a 1.6Ghz PC shows Apple's OS in a very favourable light. XP regularly grinds to a halt doing something as simple as opening an Explorer window, and often wont even let me minimise it in the meantime. I'm also impressed that up until now, each major release of OS X has felt snappier on the same hardware. Compare that to Vista over XP ...
(Oh hell, I'm turning into an Apple fanboy).
Seriously, in this day and age of 30-inch displays, who maximizes anything anymore outside the rare instances where a "Full Screen" option would be better?
Those of us who use a laptop as their main machine? I like OS X, in fact when I bought my Mac I only expected to tinker with it before installing Linux or NetBSD, but the way the resize button doesn't maximise is an annoyance. At least it should have been made an option, even if it's one that only a third party tool like Onyx can tweak. For moving between applications I use Apple-Tab (equivalent to Alt-Tab on Windows and most Unix window managers), as it's more convenient than raising and lowering or tiling application windows.
Nope, grey square with a black "X" in it closes a NeXTstep program. I've still not worked out why NeXTstep 5.0 (aka Mac OS X) struggles to perform well on an 800Mhz Powerbook, while NeXTstep 3.3 works much more smoothly on a 33Mhz NeXT slab.
Oh yes - a Full Metal Jacket reference. You be da man, as I believe the young people would say.
Sorry, the early Solbourne kit was not Sun compatible. It used a different instruction set, albeit one based on the SPARC instruction set. I'm not sure when or even if the Solbournes became truly Sun compatible, but they weren't on the radar when a former employer went looking for Sun4 compatible stuff (nope, I wasn't "associated" with Solbourne or Axil but I was using Sun4c and Sun4m kit as part of a document scanning system in the early to mid 1990's).
Sun make their money primarily from hardware sales. Open sourcing Solaris makes a lot of sense, as it encourages people to try it who would otherwise just stick with Linux in part because they will only use an open source operating system. There's still enough good stuff in Solaris that differentiates it from Linux, particularly if you need something that scales well across a large number of CPU's or cores.
Nope, Kroah is just coming up with an excuse for the core Linux developers to be lazy. Using the argument that only binary drivers can benefit from a stable driver interface is ignoring the pain for all driver developers in maintaining support across even a minor kernel release. Just because a driver compiles doesn't mean it works, and not all drivers are compiled before a release anyway. So having the driver in the vanilla kernel release is not a magic bullet - for Kroah to claim otherwise is just an attempt at misleading advocacy. People like him need to stop believing the drivel all to often spouted by Torvalds, ESR and Stallman.
Sun is hemmoraging cash.
I've never heard of a company that's making a profit described in those terms.
Bullshit. Solbourne weren't the only people making Sun compatible kit, nor where they the first - Axil were. Meanwhile Tadpole and RDI were making Sparc based portables (I hesitate to call them laptops as the weight would cut the blood flow off from your legs) which were basically SS5s with an LCD screen. Tadpole later acquired RDI. Compatibles came in two forms, those with licensed mainboard designs from Sun, and those with mainboards designed in house. The reason for the demise of most of these companies was not down to licensing shenanigans but the simple fact that few of these machines offered benefits over the Suns own kit. The exception was the portables, and that's most likely why Tadpole are still around.
java applications never really took of in either the commercial or opensource desktop software markets
Now you're talking bull. Search on the major IT job advertising websites by language, and you'll notice that there is a massive demand for Java programmers. Not only to work on J2EE web related stuff, but Swing based applications, particularly for banks. C# and .Net have started to eat into this market to some extent, but there's a serious amount of Java code that would have to be ported or thrown away and keeps some people from moving to MicroSofts alternative. Having just been through a round of job interviews, it's also clear that C++ and Perl are not as widley used as they were thanks to Java. The performance is close enough to C++ that it's no longer an issue, while the tools, best practices and documentation mean that Java development are far less of a gamble than Perl.
Musicians should not rely on Pro Tools. That's all.
Have to agree. Most people can't help themselves when faced with the possibility of tidying up their playing after the fact, and end up tweaking things note by note or cutting and pasting one bar over and over again. The result? Sterile recordings that have hardly any dynamics or feeling. I'm more than happy to use a direct to disk recorder, but I'd much rather do another couple of takes and get each part right in one pass than do a cut and pasting exercise.