If you really need to understand the code, you will just have to spend the time. Diagrams and tools may help a little, but ultimately, there are only so many bits you can get into your head per hour.
Why not? I don't see anything wrong with buying an HP or Compaq or other consumer PC. Consumer PCs are often a very good deal, in particular when they go on sale before being replaced with the next model.
I recommend reading this article on DDJ on the lightweight languages workshop at MIT. It talks about Python and similar languages, and their role in the world. Note that both the LL1 workshop and the FSF are at MIT.
first partition: gzip </dev/hda1 >/nfs/hp-backup-hda1.gz
second partition: (you figure it out)
If you can't figure out how to restore it, you probably shouldn't be using this method, and you use it at your own risk anyway. There are also commercial disk imagers that work over the network that you can use.
Your best bet for recovery is to image the drive yourself, over Ethernet, to some other disk. If you gzip it, it usually won't be that bad. That has worked better for me than even the recovery CDs, which usually are laborious and nosy.
How do you do this? Well, here is what has worked for me in th epast. Boot from a Linux recovery CD, NFS mount a remote directory, and use something like:
"gzip/nfs/hp-backup-hda.gz".
Or, you can do it partition by partition with something like "dd if=/dev/hda of=/nfs/hp-partition-info bs=1024 count=100", then "gzip/nfs/hp-backup-hda1.gz", etc. To restore, first restore the partition info, then the individual partitions.
I haven't found a bootable CD with USB support yet, but once that comes out, you can also image to a USB disk. There are lots of really cheap and small USB disks out there now that you can use for this kind of backup.
(Use this at your own risk and understand what you are doing. If it doesn't work for you, well, too bad.)
there are modern alternatives
on
Tandys Never Die
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There are actually lots of modern versions of the Model 100. Take a look at brainium.com, quickpad.com, calcuscribe.com, and alphasmart.com. The QuickPad runs DOS and uses CF for storage. Some others use WinCE 3.0. These also tend to run batteries.
So, if this is the kind of laptop you like, you can get modern alternatives, and they even run software for which you can get development systems.
MS mice are flashy and comfortably shaped for many hands. But MS has trouble with basic usability issues: the scroll wheel is not a very good controller for scrolling in actual experiments.
Now, about those Windows shortcut keys, if you want to use them in Linux, there is nothing stopping you. You can bind them to whatever kind of menu, modifier, or action you want.
There used to be plenty of single-tasking operating systems. There also were, and still are, plenty of small, real-time multitasking operating systems. What you call a "slow CPU" and may even be limited to 16bits could easily run BSD UNIX or Smalltalk.
What is so amazing about DOS is how bad its APIs really were and how little it managed to do on what was, at the time, a pretty powerful machine. DOS is really the bottom of the barrel when it comes to operating systems. Yes, having a small single-tasking OS as a choice is nice, but, gosh, would it be nice if it were something, anything, other than DOS.
Insecure coding practices are usually the result of a scramble to meet some deadline.
Sure, given large amounts of time and testing resources, you can make C programs reliable. But deadlines are a fact of life. That's why we need systems that allow programmers to write reliable code under real-world conditions and real-world deadlines.
thus it's pretty ignorant to blame the language.
I rather think it's ignorant to claim that C/C++ can be used for writing reliable and secure software under real-world deadlines when 30 years of experience show otherwise. Just look at the bug lists. It isn't working.
You see, after 20 years of programming (much of it in C and later C++), I have learned not to trust myself to do things right.
Sending out spam is no different from any of a number of other activities that give your business a bad name. If you publish an insensitive ad in a newspaper, you'll have to deal with that for years to come. If you send out spam, you'll end up in people's kill files. The fact that some of those kill files happen to be public for the convenience of users doesn't change that. Even if you could force all the public blacklists to remove your name, people would still have you in their private kill files.
You'll just have to be more careful next time. As you discovered, the cost of relaying spam is higher than you may have thought originally. Eventually, those entries will go away. But even consumers have to wait many years before bad credit information goes away.
I'm not concerned that much about GPS, I'm concerned about amateur radio. And, yes, computer equipment is a big problem, both poorly designed cable modems, as well as people who run their computers with the case open. But UWB could end up being much worse.
It's an aphorism among software engineers that languages don't matter, people matter. They claim that you can get a handle on security with better management, better design, better development methodologies. Too bad software engineers have been saying this for decades, and they have completely failed to deliver.
The only known and proven way you can get problems like buffer overflows under control is to use high-level languages and tools that make them impossible. Yes, your programs run slower, but a compromise is much more expensive than a couple more machines. Yes, there will still be plenty of other security holes possible, but we can address those through better tools as well.
Microsoft's management approaches to security are doomed to failure, as are efforts and arguments in the open source community that the open source process magically addresses security problems. Microsoft's real security initiative is their switch to C# and "managed APIs". The open source community should take notice. Unless systems like web servers, file servers, mail servers, and authentication under Linux get rewritten in safe, high-level languages like Java, C#, or others, Linux will be so unreliable relative to Microsoft's and other systems that it will become irrelevant.
(However, given the choice between buggy Microsoft C++ code and buggy open source C++ code, I'll still take the buggy open source C++ code any day--it's easier to fix and fixes come out more rapidly.)
"Whats the difference." indeed. You can join the discussion again once you have at least the minimal degree of understanding to be able to answer that question.
Concerns about UWB interference are legitimate. Sprint is not alone in them. Amateur radio operators and many others are also concerned about interference from UWB.
In fact, there is no question that UWB interference occurs. The question is whether one can allow UWB to be used at any power level without seriously disrupting normal radio traffic when it becomes widely adopted.
Of course, UWB is no threat to other UWB systems. Therefore, UWB licensees would not be opposed to it. In fact, one might well interpret UWB to be an attempt at doing an end-run around current channel allocations, and, ultimately, an attempt at forcing anybody who wants to have some sort of reliable radio communications to buy proprietary UWB technology. Whether it actually is or not depends on the level of interference it causes when deployed widely, and that is still an open question.
In other words, there is no reason to rush UWB to market--we can take our time testing the technology. In fact, there is no real reason for the FCC to approve UWB before the patents run out--why should we increase the noise floor of all our channels for the benefit of a single patent holder? If UWB is still interesting after the patents run out, great.
The ARRL believes that not enough is known about UWB and that approval is premature. See these two articles: 1 and
2 (you can find others on the ARRL site using Google).
In fact, at some point, UWB will inevitably lead to interference. That is a simple fact of how radio works. The only question really is how much power and what UWB applications one can permit before UWB-related interference for non-UWB services becomes a real problem.
Unrestricted surveillance won't fly with people because just about everybody feels embarrassed in some situations. And a lot of information can be distorted and altered by the people involved for their own purposes.
But there is some information that I strongly believe should be public: tax returns (which, of course, include salary information), credit records, itemized donations to non-profit organizations, ownership of investments, driving records, driver's licenses (including photographs), places of residence, ownership of real property, beneficiaries of trusts, most police records, etc.
That kind of information would allow people to negotiate and participate more rationally in our economic system (e.g., in salary negotiations), and it would allow you to assess conflict of interest issues of other people involved in political decisions. In fact, arguably, without such information, our market economy and political system simply cannot function efficiently.
The [telephone] monopoly was bad, but deregulation is proving to be a bigger disaster.
Deregulation is only problematic because telephone companies are merging again to form new monopolies. If government policies had ensured that customers actually have a choice among several phone companies, things would be better. How? For example, not letting phone companies buy cable companies might have been a start. And requiring that anybody that runs a wire to your home to offer both Internet access and phone service at reasonable rates, whether they want to or not, would have helped, too.
Isn't Linux a centrally planned OS (Linus)?
Pretty much every commercial and free project is centrally planned. There is no problem with central planning of projects as long as all the projects participate in a competitive market. The market provides the incentives and feedback that keeps the planners from slacking off. Microsoft is largely decoupled from that kind of market feedback. In the one area where they have been challenged, Java, they did respond (although merely by cloning, not innovating, but it's a start).
"You can have any language you want, as long as it is C#."
Still, while.NET is largely a Java clone, and while it really isn't any more or less language neutral than the Java JVM, it is a big step forward for Microsoft and can only serve to improve the quality of Windows software.
First, if there were a common operating system that most people in the world used, writing software would become much easier for programmers. No more portability headaches. You'd have a set of guaranteed APIs that just work, you don't have to spend time angsting
And the economy would run so much more efficiently if we just planned it centrally, right? And the telephone system was just so wonderful and cheap when a single, large monopoly ran it, right?
Our economic system is based on competition, choice, and variety. Yes, there are some inefficiencies associated with that, but nothing compared to the inefficiencies of having a single, centrally planned operating system everywhere.
I'm happy for you if Windows gets your work done. It doesn't get my work done, though, yet I'm effectively forced to pay for it with every machine, and I'm forced to use it at times as well.
The problem in the case of Windows is not its popularity. The problem is that its design is driven not by the goals of quality, but by profit.
That is exactly what happens with monopolies. And that's exactly why we need choice and competition, even if breaking up a natural monopoly imposes some extra costs in the short run.
Windows isn't one big program, it's lots of DLLs, drivers, kernel modules, and executables developed all over Microsoft. There probably doesn't even exist a single Windows source tree.
Even if it did exist, what would programmers say other than "yes, with enough hacking, we can separate this out"? I mean, with enough hacking, you can get OS/2 to emulate Windows, or Linux. And if Windows cannot be split up, it only means that it is not well-modularized (but you guessed that already).
Most of these problems come from the peculiar notion in the US legal system that a company must have done something wrong in order to be subject to monopoly restrictions. The simple fact is that dominance of the operating system market by any system, be it Windows, Linux, or whatever, is not good. We need a diversity of operating systems, and that's what remedies should be aimed at. Leave Microsoft's source code alone.
Your statement is true only for two point sources and infinite space. If you have many speakers enclosed in a room, you can do a lot better. The real limit here is causality and predictability, not sources.
Airlines use voice recognition for flight reservations and confirmations (something like this was actually one of the DARPA benchmark tasks). It works reasonably well. The long distance companies are using it as well.
The whole description makes sense if you read "UV" or "light" instead of "RF". Most likely, they are tagging objects with mixtures of fluorescent dyes or pigments--easy to apply, mostly invisible, easy to discriminate using filters, and easy to detect using pulsed UV light sources (perhaps the new UV LEDs). Different mixtures identify different objects, in analogy to visible light taggants.
So? That would seem to be a problem with PowerPoint and the way it's being used, not with computers in general. You can goof off with a bunch of pens and some paper as well. As for your students expecting a high grade on day n+1--it would seem to be easy to have cured them of that misconception by day n+2.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really need to understand the code, you will just have to spend the time. Diagrams and tools may help a little, but ultimately, there are only so many bits you can get into your head per hour.
Why not? I don't see anything wrong with buying an HP or Compaq or other consumer PC. Consumer PCs are often a very good deal, in particular when they go on sale before being replaced with the next model.
I recommend reading this article on DDJ on the lightweight languages workshop at MIT. It talks about Python and similar languages, and their role in the world. Note that both the LL1 workshop and the FSF are at MIT.
Whole disk:
Partition by partition:
If you can't figure out how to restore it, you probably shouldn't be using this method, and you use it at your own risk anyway. There are also commercial disk imagers that work over the network that you can use.
How do you do this? Well, here is what has worked for me in th epast. Boot from a Linux recovery CD, NFS mount a remote directory, and use something like: "gzip /nfs/hp-backup-hda.gz".
Or, you can do it partition by partition with something like "dd if=/dev/hda of=/nfs/hp-partition-info bs=1024 count=100", then "gzip /nfs/hp-backup-hda1.gz", etc. To restore, first restore the partition info, then the individual partitions.
I haven't found a bootable CD with USB support yet, but once that comes out, you can also image to a USB disk. There are lots of really cheap and small USB disks out there now that you can use for this kind of backup.
(Use this at your own risk and understand what you are doing. If it doesn't work for you, well, too bad.)
So, if this is the kind of laptop you like, you can get modern alternatives, and they even run software for which you can get development systems.
Now, about those Windows shortcut keys, if you want to use them in Linux, there is nothing stopping you. You can bind them to whatever kind of menu, modifier, or action you want.
What is so amazing about DOS is how bad its APIs really were and how little it managed to do on what was, at the time, a pretty powerful machine. DOS is really the bottom of the barrel when it comes to operating systems. Yes, having a small single-tasking OS as a choice is nice, but, gosh, would it be nice if it were something, anything, other than DOS.
Sure, given large amounts of time and testing resources, you can make C programs reliable. But deadlines are a fact of life. That's why we need systems that allow programmers to write reliable code under real-world conditions and real-world deadlines.
thus it's pretty ignorant to blame the language.
I rather think it's ignorant to claim that C/C++ can be used for writing reliable and secure software under real-world deadlines when 30 years of experience show otherwise. Just look at the bug lists. It isn't working.
You see, after 20 years of programming (much of it in C and later C++), I have learned not to trust myself to do things right.
You'll just have to be more careful next time. As you discovered, the cost of relaying spam is higher than you may have thought originally. Eventually, those entries will go away. But even consumers have to wait many years before bad credit information goes away.
I'm not concerned that much about GPS, I'm concerned about amateur radio. And, yes, computer equipment is a big problem, both poorly designed cable modems, as well as people who run their computers with the case open. But UWB could end up being much worse.
The only known and proven way you can get problems like buffer overflows under control is to use high-level languages and tools that make them impossible. Yes, your programs run slower, but a compromise is much more expensive than a couple more machines. Yes, there will still be plenty of other security holes possible, but we can address those through better tools as well.
Microsoft's management approaches to security are doomed to failure, as are efforts and arguments in the open source community that the open source process magically addresses security problems. Microsoft's real security initiative is their switch to C# and "managed APIs". The open source community should take notice. Unless systems like web servers, file servers, mail servers, and authentication under Linux get rewritten in safe, high-level languages like Java, C#, or others, Linux will be so unreliable relative to Microsoft's and other systems that it will become irrelevant.
(However, given the choice between buggy Microsoft C++ code and buggy open source C++ code, I'll still take the buggy open source C++ code any day--it's easier to fix and fixes come out more rapidly.)
"Whats the difference." indeed. You can join the discussion again once you have at least the minimal degree of understanding to be able to answer that question.
In fact, there is no question that UWB interference occurs. The question is whether one can allow UWB to be used at any power level without seriously disrupting normal radio traffic when it becomes widely adopted.
Of course, UWB is no threat to other UWB systems. Therefore, UWB licensees would not be opposed to it. In fact, one might well interpret UWB to be an attempt at doing an end-run around current channel allocations, and, ultimately, an attempt at forcing anybody who wants to have some sort of reliable radio communications to buy proprietary UWB technology. Whether it actually is or not depends on the level of interference it causes when deployed widely, and that is still an open question.
In other words, there is no reason to rush UWB to market--we can take our time testing the technology. In fact, there is no real reason for the FCC to approve UWB before the patents run out--why should we increase the noise floor of all our channels for the benefit of a single patent holder? If UWB is still interesting after the patents run out, great.
In fact, at some point, UWB will inevitably lead to interference. That is a simple fact of how radio works. The only question really is how much power and what UWB applications one can permit before UWB-related interference for non-UWB services becomes a real problem.
But there is some information that I strongly believe should be public: tax returns (which, of course, include salary information), credit records, itemized donations to non-profit organizations, ownership of investments, driving records, driver's licenses (including photographs), places of residence, ownership of real property, beneficiaries of trusts, most police records, etc.
That kind of information would allow people to negotiate and participate more rationally in our economic system (e.g., in salary negotiations), and it would allow you to assess conflict of interest issues of other people involved in political decisions. In fact, arguably, without such information, our market economy and political system simply cannot function efficiently.
Deregulation is only problematic because telephone companies are merging again to form new monopolies. If government policies had ensured that customers actually have a choice among several phone companies, things would be better. How? For example, not letting phone companies buy cable companies might have been a start. And requiring that anybody that runs a wire to your home to offer both Internet access and phone service at reasonable rates, whether they want to or not, would have helped, too.
Isn't Linux a centrally planned OS (Linus)?
Pretty much every commercial and free project is centrally planned. There is no problem with central planning of projects as long as all the projects participate in a competitive market. The market provides the incentives and feedback that keeps the planners from slacking off. Microsoft is largely decoupled from that kind of market feedback. In the one area where they have been challenged, Java, they did respond (although merely by cloning, not innovating, but it's a start).
Still, while .NET is largely a Java clone, and while it really isn't any more or less language neutral than the Java JVM, it is a big step forward for Microsoft and can only serve to improve the quality of Windows software.
And the economy would run so much more efficiently if we just planned it centrally, right? And the telephone system was just so wonderful and cheap when a single, large monopoly ran it, right?
Our economic system is based on competition, choice, and variety. Yes, there are some inefficiencies associated with that, but nothing compared to the inefficiencies of having a single, centrally planned operating system everywhere.
I'm happy for you if Windows gets your work done. It doesn't get my work done, though, yet I'm effectively forced to pay for it with every machine, and I'm forced to use it at times as well.
The problem in the case of Windows is not its popularity. The problem is that its design is driven not by the goals of quality, but by profit.
That is exactly what happens with monopolies. And that's exactly why we need choice and competition, even if breaking up a natural monopoly imposes some extra costs in the short run.
Even if it did exist, what would programmers say other than "yes, with enough hacking, we can separate this out"? I mean, with enough hacking, you can get OS/2 to emulate Windows, or Linux. And if Windows cannot be split up, it only means that it is not well-modularized (but you guessed that already).
Most of these problems come from the peculiar notion in the US legal system that a company must have done something wrong in order to be subject to monopoly restrictions. The simple fact is that dominance of the operating system market by any system, be it Windows, Linux, or whatever, is not good. We need a diversity of operating systems, and that's what remedies should be aimed at. Leave Microsoft's source code alone.
Your statement is true only for two point sources and infinite space. If you have many speakers enclosed in a room, you can do a lot better. The real limit here is causality and predictability, not sources.
Airlines use voice recognition for flight reservations and confirmations (something like this was actually one of the DARPA benchmark tasks). It works reasonably well. The long distance companies are using it as well.
The whole description makes sense if you read "UV" or "light" instead of "RF". Most likely, they are tagging objects with mixtures of fluorescent dyes or pigments--easy to apply, mostly invisible, easy to discriminate using filters, and easy to detect using pulsed UV light sources (perhaps the new UV LEDs). Different mixtures identify different objects, in analogy to visible light taggants.
So? That would seem to be a problem with PowerPoint and the way it's being used, not with computers in general. You can goof off with a bunch of pens and some paper as well. As for your students expecting a high grade on day n+1--it would seem to be easy to have cured them of that misconception by day n+2.
I labeled my assumption as an assumption; what more do you want? If you have any more to contribute, please do so.