Re:What goes around comes around
on
The Future of NetBSD
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you'd read the email log more closely, you'd notice that Charles Hannum one of those who was involved in the removal of de Raadt's commit privileges, but then tried to come up with a workable way for Theo to continue working on the project. The whole story has never come out, as the NetBSD core group kept very quiet about what the motivation for removing de Raadt's commit privileges were. However what is not in doubt is that Theo's attitude on the NetBSD mailing lists was abusive towards anyone who he felt was not as technically competent or as well informed as him. This was annoying fellow developers and alienating potential users. Theo was asked to tone down his attitude, or at least ignore postings that he would otherwise have posted inflammatory replies to. He didn't, and my assumption is that the core group removed the commit privileges to distant the "official" project from Theo's shitty attitude. Theo obviously resented this, but continued to badmouth people until he finally forked NetBSD to create OpenBSD - a sandpit where he could fuck people off to his hearts content.
Now it seems Charles Hannum is pissed at someone, and has decided to belittle the work of many current NetBSD developers by cross posting his flame to the Free, Net and Open mailing lists. My opinion for what it's worth? The NetBSD Foundation appears to be dominated by Wasabi personnel, and as a result the decisions it takes may be in the interests of Wasabi commercial interests rather than Charles Hannums. However, there is good work going on in the NetBSD project, and all Hannum's post will do is make the Linux/anti-BSD zealots shriller.
Adobe has.swf specification on their website, so anyone could develop an animation tool or plugin that outputs to.swf format.
No, the license specifically states that you cannot use the specification to write authoring tools, but simply to support the display of SWF files.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
Flash is not an awesome web development platform. It doesn't allow use of an MVC architecture, placing all your functionality and business logic in code that the user has to download as part of the Flash movie. Database access is dirrect - meaning you need to open your database directly to the outside world rather than delegating access via something like a J2EE webapp. The XML support is hilariously poor, and along with the database support it is very unreliable. I've heard that there's an expensive addon that allows you to delegate database access, but given all the other deficiencies of Flash as a web development and presentation system, why bother when J2EE is free?
not many companies allow the use of 3rd party libraries
I assume the review author hasn't worked for many companies then. I have yet to find any company the doesn't use third party packages. Logging, XML parsing and unit testing are just the first three things that spring to mind when I consider what might require a third party package. As for the "DLL hell" that someone alleges in a post to this thread, it's virtually non-existant. You ship the third party packages with your application (as a single JAR or WAR file), and rely on the accepted good practice that people don't set a default CLASSPATH these days.
Israel was certainly not created by "the group of nations that won WWII". It was created by Jewish refugees from Europe, who carried out terrorist attacks on the British administration in Palestine, and then proceeded to ethnically cleanse large chunks of Palestine to form Israel. Large numbers of the displaced Palestinians ended up in Lebanon, where they and their descendants form much of the support base for Hisbullah. This influx of Palestinians caused tensions inside Lebanon and was partly behind the massacres carried out by Christian militias during Israels 1982 invasion.
Wow, you make a really dubious leap from events that happened over 60 years ago to suggest Finland is a hotbed of extreme right politics. In fact, Finland has never had a far right movement of any significant size, even when these things were fashionable in the 1930's. There was the Lapua movement, but that was a small group with very hazy political views. As for resentment over the land taken by the Soviet Union, there is no serious interest in reclaiming this territory. Every Finnish citizen in that territory was rehomed across the rest of Finland before the land was ceded to the Soviets. Since then, a few tiny groups have tried to raise the issue of this territory, and even the status of Karelia, which has a some cultural affinity with Finland. This hasn't produced much interest in the populace at large in Finland (nor in the Karelians).
So, you imagining of strong Nazi symapthies in Finland are just that - your imagination. As for the Finnish experience in World War Two, the Finns fought three wars, twice against the Soviets and once against the Germans in Lapland. Even when they were allied to the Axis bloc, Finland retained full independence and did not implement racial policies. The typical Finn is not Aryan, being racially closer to the Slavs that were so despised by Hitler.
same with the legality of the existence of the UN in the first place
How's that? It was founded with the backing of a majority of the worlds states as a League Of Nations v2.0. The main goal was to arbitrate world crises and hopefully prevent another global war. It has a charter, and last time I checked every national state is a member.
The major flaw with the UN is that the security council is dominated by the United States and Russia, who feel they can wield their vetoes regardless of the majority of votes going against their position. This is exactly what we've seen in the last few weeks with the Israeli/Lebanese crisis.
Maybe next time you can avoid calling people stupid when they didn't anticipate everything you could possibly do to fuck up the software they've written.
With an attitude like that I've got to ask, can my company hire you for our technical support department?
There are ways to optimise it, but case insensitive filesystems make many operations more complex. For instance, searching a file heirarchy for files name "foo*". In a case sensitive filesystem I can ignore anything started with the letter "F" without considering any other letters. In a case insensitive but case aware filesystem I can't hash the filenames (expensive in itself and only beneficial if performing whole name matches), or store two versions of the filename - the display variant preserving case, and a second one that adopts a consistent convention of either uppercasing or lowercasing the name for fast operations.
So from an implementation perspective case aware but case insensitive filesystems chug cock.
The first two runtimes came from the GNU project (Stallman himself wrote the second one, and deprecated the #import preprocessor directive which is why I still had Makefiles with -Wno-import aliased as RMS_ME_HARDER). The third one came from a Norwegian guy who worked at NeXT.
The default object is useful - I've personally coded a number of applications that didn't need the functionality or overhead of a full Foundation like framework and derived its classes from Object. An example of the kind of applications I am talking about is a web server, where having OO support in the implementation language was useful, but where things like dynamic string handling weren't.
Yes, it does require a case sensitive filesystem. I have to admit being slightly bemused that Apple had gone down the same braindead route as Microsoft in this respect - having a case aware but case insensitive filesystem. NeXTstep used a "normal" case-sensitive Unix filesystem, so I can't understand why they switched bahaviour instead of adding the extra metadata and fork support to UFS.
Qt, a toolkit written in a language that Trolltech finds so deficient that they extended it, a language that has such a baroque library that Trolltech wrote their own. As for Glib and GTK+, I have been through a fair bit of the code, and it is a work of art. I'm not saying that the Qt code isn't a work of art, but your criticism of Glib/GTK+ is bullshit.
The pkgsrc project www.pkgsrc.org supports Mac OS X. The packages it contains are much more up to date than either Fink or DarwinPorts, and can also be used on a number of other Unix like operating systems. I bought a Mac at the beginning of the year, and intended to wipe the disk to install NetBSD. I ended up dual booting it because I found I liked Mac OS X so much, especially when I can use pkgsrc on it.
sure, which is only slightly different from the current truth: "write once, debug everywhere"
It's not that I disbelieve you, but could you give me examples where you've needed to do something platform specific with code written for J2SE or J2EE? I have written several very large Java apps (both standalone and web applications) but never had issues with running the resulting code on different platforms. Heck, the last system I worked on ran out of the box on Solaris, Windows, Linux and NetBSD. The only time I've run into platform specific issues is with handheld devices running a third party JVM. I do keep on seeing these complaints about "write once, debug anywhere", but never had an opportunity to find out why.
One interesting feature the compiler/IDE system I was using at the time (TopSpeed's) had was this concept that all their language compilers (M2, C, C++, etc) all compiled into an intermediate binary form, and their final compiler did very heavy optimizations on that "byte code".
That's no different to most compilers. GCC for instance parses the "frontend" language (C, C++, etc) into an intermediate language and performs most optimisations on that intermediate language before translating it to assembler instructions. Optimisation can be performed in the high level language, and even the assembler, but most is performed at the intermediate level as this way all frontends can potentially benefit.
Longstanding conventions inhibit Java programmers from using Java code within Web pages now.
That's because you don't want to mix business logic with presentation logic. Any "programmatic" logic you need for presentation can be accomplished with the JSTL, hence most people disable scriptlet support. Only novices would advocate placing code into templates. I shouldn't complain though, as I can rely on these novices fucking things up so much that I can always find work replacing their abominations with something scalable and maintainable.
Hmm, too many beers during the Portugal v Mexico football match. My laptop comment was supposed to be attached to the spontaneously combusting Dell story!
I have my laptop pretty far forward, almost wobbling on my knees. The result is no overheated knackersack, instead I get back ache from leaning over the laptop...
Hi Michi, I'm pleasantly surprised to see your responses on Slashdot!
Perhaps it's the C programmer in me, but I find IDL very easy to understand and writing a parser for it looks straightfoward (I once poked around the internals of libIDL and ORBit to see how much work it would be to revive its Name Service). As for CORBA's POA, I still don't really see the need for a hierarchical structure, but perhaps I'm missing something. I'm not qualified to comment on the actual implementation of IIOP as I've never needed to look at it, but the concept of a single wire format must be better than the total omission of one in the JMS spec. Finally, the Event and Notification services may not be perfect, but they certainly scale well both for me and others that I know use them.
I'm still playing with ICE as time permits, and I'm impressed that it is available as open source. If a future project requires the kind of functionality where I've currently CORBA, then I will definitely consider it. However, the general tone of your article seems to be contrary to my experience. CORBA is one of those technologies that lacks hype or glamour, but crops up in a suprising number of places.
Slashdot Mirror
If you'd read the email log more closely, you'd notice that Charles Hannum one of those who was involved in the removal of de Raadt's commit privileges, but then tried to come up with a workable way for Theo to continue working on the project. The whole story has never come out, as the NetBSD core group kept very quiet about what the motivation for removing de Raadt's commit privileges were. However what is not in doubt is that Theo's attitude on the NetBSD mailing lists was abusive towards anyone who he felt was not as technically competent or as well informed as him. This was annoying fellow developers and alienating potential users. Theo was asked to tone down his attitude, or at least ignore postings that he would otherwise have posted inflammatory replies to. He didn't, and my assumption is that the core group removed the commit privileges to distant the "official" project from Theo's shitty attitude. Theo obviously resented this, but continued to badmouth people until he finally forked NetBSD to create OpenBSD - a sandpit where he could fuck people off to his hearts content.
Now it seems Charles Hannum is pissed at someone, and has decided to belittle the work of many current NetBSD developers by cross posting his flame to the Free, Net and Open mailing lists. My opinion for what it's worth? The NetBSD Foundation appears to be dominated by Wasabi personnel, and as a result the decisions it takes may be in the interests of Wasabi commercial interests rather than Charles Hannums. However, there is good work going on in the NetBSD project, and all Hannum's post will do is make the Linux/anti-BSD zealots shriller.
Ah, ok. Can I distribute patches?
Yes, that's exactly how you get the patchsets that enable JDK builds on FreeBSD and NetBSD.
my PC (located in the living room) is so silent, my wife sometimes ask me if the thing is on or off.
I wasn't aware that people who have a computer in the living room were allowed to have wives.
Adobe has .swf specification on their website, so anyone could develop an animation tool or plugin that outputs to .swf format.
No, the license specifically states that you cannot use the specification to write authoring tools, but simply to support the display of SWF files.
Flash is not an awesome web development platform. It doesn't allow use of an MVC architecture, placing all your functionality and business logic in code that the user has to download as part of the Flash movie. Database access is dirrect - meaning you need to open your database directly to the outside world rather than delegating access via something like a J2EE webapp. The XML support is hilariously poor, and along with the database support it is very unreliable. I've heard that there's an expensive addon that allows you to delegate database access, but given all the other deficiencies of Flash as a web development and presentation system, why bother when J2EE is free?
not many companies allow the use of 3rd party libraries
I assume the review author hasn't worked for many companies then. I have yet to find any company the doesn't use third party packages. Logging, XML parsing and unit testing are just the first three things that spring to mind when I consider what might require a third party package. As for the "DLL hell" that someone alleges in a post to this thread, it's virtually non-existant. You ship the third party packages with your application (as a single JAR or WAR file), and rely on the accepted good practice that people don't set a default CLASSPATH these days.
Israel was certainly not created by "the group of nations that won WWII". It was created by Jewish refugees from Europe, who carried out terrorist attacks on the British administration in Palestine, and then proceeded to ethnically cleanse large chunks of Palestine to form Israel. Large numbers of the displaced Palestinians ended up in Lebanon, where they and their descendants form much of the support base for Hisbullah. This influx of Palestinians caused tensions inside Lebanon and was partly behind the massacres carried out by Christian militias during Israels 1982 invasion.
Wow, you make a really dubious leap from events that happened over 60 years ago to suggest Finland is a hotbed of extreme right politics. In fact, Finland has never had a far right movement of any significant size, even when these things were fashionable in the 1930's. There was the Lapua movement, but that was a small group with very hazy political views. As for resentment over the land taken by the Soviet Union, there is no serious interest in reclaiming this territory. Every Finnish citizen in that territory was rehomed across the rest of Finland before the land was ceded to the Soviets. Since then, a few tiny groups have tried to raise the issue of this territory, and even the status of Karelia, which has a some cultural affinity with Finland. This hasn't produced much interest in the populace at large in Finland (nor in the Karelians).
So, you imagining of strong Nazi symapthies in Finland are just that - your imagination. As for the Finnish experience in World War Two, the Finns fought three wars, twice against the Soviets and once against the Germans in Lapland. Even when they were allied to the Axis bloc, Finland retained full independence and did not implement racial policies. The typical Finn is not Aryan, being racially closer to the Slavs that were so despised by Hitler.
same with the legality of the existence of the UN in the first place
How's that? It was founded with the backing of a majority of the worlds states as a League Of Nations v2.0. The main goal was to arbitrate world crises and hopefully prevent another global war. It has a charter, and last time I checked every national state is a member.
The major flaw with the UN is that the security council is dominated by the United States and Russia, who feel they can wield their vetoes regardless of the majority of votes going against their position. This is exactly what we've seen in the last few weeks with the Israeli/Lebanese crisis.
as many have already pointed out, most users really want case aware case insensitive filesystems.
Pointers to studies to back that up please. In my experience, the user gets very upset when "foo" is the same as "Foo" or "fOo" or "foO".
Maybe next time you can avoid calling people stupid when they didn't anticipate everything you could possibly do to fuck up the software they've written.
With an attitude like that I've got to ask, can my company hire you for our technical support department?
I never knew about HFS-X. I'll consider converting my Mac over to it seeing as I don't use Photoshop or Dashboard widgets.
There are ways to optimise it, but case insensitive filesystems make many operations more complex. For instance, searching a file heirarchy for files name "foo*". In a case sensitive filesystem I can ignore anything started with the letter "F" without considering any other letters. In a case insensitive but case aware filesystem I can't hash the filenames (expensive in itself and only beneficial if performing whole name matches), or store two versions of the filename - the display variant preserving case, and a second one that adopts a consistent convention of either uppercasing or lowercasing the name for fast operations.
So from an implementation perspective case aware but case insensitive filesystems chug cock.
The first two runtimes came from the GNU project (Stallman himself wrote the second one, and deprecated the #import preprocessor directive which is why I still had Makefiles with -Wno-import aliased as RMS_ME_HARDER). The third one came from a Norwegian guy who worked at NeXT.
The default object is useful - I've personally coded a number of applications that didn't need the functionality or overhead of a full Foundation like framework and derived its classes from Object. An example of the kind of applications I am talking about is a web server, where having OO support in the implementation language was useful, but where things like dynamic string handling weren't.
Yes, it does require a case sensitive filesystem. I have to admit being slightly bemused that Apple had gone down the same braindead route as Microsoft in this respect - having a case aware but case insensitive filesystem. NeXTstep used a "normal" case-sensitive Unix filesystem, so I can't understand why they switched bahaviour instead of adding the extra metadata and fork support to UFS.
Qt, a toolkit written in a language that Trolltech finds so deficient that they extended it, a language that has such a baroque library that Trolltech wrote their own. As for Glib and GTK+, I have been through a fair bit of the code, and it is a work of art. I'm not saying that the Qt code isn't a work of art, but your criticism of Glib/GTK+ is bullshit.
The pkgsrc project www.pkgsrc.org supports Mac OS X. The packages it contains are much more up to date than either Fink or DarwinPorts, and can also be used on a number of other Unix like operating systems. I bought a Mac at the beginning of the year, and intended to wipe the disk to install NetBSD. I ended up dual booting it because I found I liked Mac OS X so much, especially when I can use pkgsrc on it.
And with gcc, for years, NeXT managed to comply with the GPL while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project.
Apart from an implementation of the Objective C frontend and runtime. But don't let facts get in the way of your ill informed ranting.
sure, which is only slightly different from the current truth: "write once, debug everywhere"
It's not that I disbelieve you, but could you give me examples where you've needed to do something platform specific with code written for J2SE or J2EE? I have written several very large Java apps (both standalone and web applications) but never had issues with running the resulting code on different platforms. Heck, the last system I worked on ran out of the box on Solaris, Windows, Linux and NetBSD. The only time I've run into platform specific issues is with handheld devices running a third party JVM. I do keep on seeing these complaints about "write once, debug anywhere", but never had an opportunity to find out why.
One interesting feature the compiler/IDE system I was using at the time (TopSpeed's) had was this concept that all their language compilers (M2, C, C++, etc) all compiled into an intermediate binary form, and their final compiler did very heavy optimizations on that "byte code".
That's no different to most compilers. GCC for instance parses the "frontend" language (C, C++, etc) into an intermediate language and performs most optimisations on that intermediate language before translating it to assembler instructions. Optimisation can be performed in the high level language, and even the assembler, but most is performed at the intermediate level as this way all frontends can potentially benefit.
Longstanding conventions inhibit Java programmers from using Java code within Web pages now.
That's because you don't want to mix business logic with presentation logic. Any "programmatic" logic you need for presentation can be accomplished with the JSTL, hence most people disable scriptlet support. Only novices would advocate placing code into templates. I shouldn't complain though, as I can rely on these novices fucking things up so much that I can always find work replacing their abominations with something scalable and maintainable.
Hmm, too many beers during the Portugal v Mexico football match. My laptop comment was supposed to be attached to the spontaneously combusting Dell story!
I have my laptop pretty far forward, almost wobbling on my knees. The result is no overheated knackersack, instead I get back ache from leaning over the laptop ...
Hi Michi, I'm pleasantly surprised to see your responses on Slashdot!
Perhaps it's the C programmer in me, but I find IDL very easy to understand and writing a parser for it looks straightfoward (I once poked around the internals of libIDL and ORBit to see how much work it would be to revive its Name Service). As for CORBA's POA, I still don't really see the need for a hierarchical structure, but perhaps I'm missing something. I'm not qualified to comment on the actual implementation of IIOP as I've never needed to look at it, but the concept of a single wire format must be better than the total omission of one in the JMS spec. Finally, the Event and Notification services may not be perfect, but they certainly scale well both for me and others that I know use them.
I'm still playing with ICE as time permits, and I'm impressed that it is available as open source. If a future project requires the kind of functionality where I've currently CORBA, then I will definitely consider it. However, the general tone of your article seems to be contrary to my experience. CORBA is one of those technologies that lacks hype or glamour, but crops up in a suprising number of places.