I'm relatively moderate on bandwidth already, so I think I'd manage to get by with less. I used to get by fine on 33k6 anyway. I'd probably order in my Ubuntu ISOs rather than downloading them. Turning off pictures in my browser would help. So would caching proxies at the provider level.
But I don't think it will happen anytime soon. More and more bandwidth is used up by malware and spammers. I imagine that in a case of a real bandwidth crisis, those people would face serious charges, and available bandwidth would triple easily.
Of course what I would *really* do in the case of a global bandwidth crisis is to go sit in a corner in fetal position and cry.
It'd be interesting to see where this guy stood on his mortgage payments.... For a house that has been in his family for 120 years, one would hope that it was fully paid for.
Correct me if my memory fails me but just recently they managed to raise a million dollars. How much more before the cash donation is considered 'major'? Perhaps the business model is wrong? Depending on how things are set up, a million only pays a years' worth of salary for 25 people. Would distributed hosting by volunteers be a way out?
Software is hard AND there's lots of incompetence
on
Why Software is Hard
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yes, writing software is hard, especially writing good software. The hardest part is to make things simple, even harder is to make things simple AND flexible. The need for a thorough analysis is greatly underappreciated.
Incompetent developers tend to make things more complex than necessary. From that point on, under economic pressure, workarounds are needed to get things done. This in turn makes things even more complex than necessary. THAT is what makes writing software hard. The problem is, it is difficult to be aware of the skills that we lack. As such, a lot of programmers with a huge ego don't deserve one.
I'm not into Extreme Programming per se, but I've noticed that if multiple people look at a piece of software, chances of problems going undetected get smaller and smaller. Yes, even if you, a master programmer, show your code to a rookie, the chance of bugs going undetected will reduce. In fact, it will inevitably result in more bugs being detected before rolling them out to customers.
...is almost a year back. They were my backup 5.25 inch floppy disks from 15 years ago. Interestingly, I could only read them under Linux- my BIOS doesn't have FDD int13h support anymore. The motherboard doesn't boot from them anymore (so no DOS) and FreeDOS also uses int13h to read floppy disks.
As a result, I could only run my ancient projects by burning them to CD first, then running them from FreeDOS. Kinda cute too, to see what my code looked like back then *shudder*:)
It is a pity though, that he said that "there is no need to worry about security" - I think this passes the wrong message, "security is not important".
There is too a need to worry about security. In fact the GNU/Linux community has gone great lengths worrying about it. Just because there are no viruses in the wild, that doesn't mean you should open up dozens of ports on your firewall and leave your machine vulnerable to hack attacks.
FTA: This new technology relies on the DirectX (a graphics technology provided on most modern graphics cards and also a requirement for the new Aero user interface) graphics engine to draw the interface leading providing new features such as 3D and animation. This statement seems to contradict itself. So what is DirectX- a software engine or hardware technology?
You will be surprised just how noob some users are.
I have written a cross-platform application that consists of just an executable and a shared library (DLL/.so, respectively).
Even with the email-assistance I give them, regularly it proves too difficult for users to copy the library file to the default library directory (c:\windows\system32 or/usr/local/lib, respectively). Especially Mac users have trouble because they have to do this as root user, which often is a concept unknown to them.
This happens so often that I'm working on an installer now. End users just can't be bothered with technicalities and procedures.
I tried to pull a practical joke on my coworkers by booting their system from an ubuntu live CD. Unfortunately, I've never managed to properly boot an out-of-the-box ubuntu on a Dell, and I've tried booting on several different models. Are Dell computers built on weird undocumented proprietary hardware, or is it a problem with the distro?
Nice idea, some concepts (string functions, (associative) arrays, file I/O) may be portable across some languages and in these cases rosettacode will be useful.
But I think the actual problem is not given due value. Sometimes performing the same task in the same language requires different code on different platforms. Examples: Reading a file bigger than 4 Gigabyte in gnu-flavored C++ on mac, linux, windows; figuring out the total number of sectors on disk, etc.
Also, we should accept that not all languages can do everything. Try creating an array of functions in VBA. Or (also in VBA) even simply breaking out of a loop, for that matter. Try exceptions in ANSI pascal or ANSI C. Try using pointers in Java. Try writing a GUI windowed interface in ANSI Pascal (no, Turbo Pascal doesn't count). Try recursion in GWBasic (this is actually possible).
I see this ending up as an effort to shoehorn concepts unique to one language to another language (building web sites in COBOL *shiver*). Rather than using the wrong tool, it will pay off to actually learn the other language.
I fail to see the point of forking an entire Operating System for the sake of haveing 4 or 5 applications installed on it.
To us pro-audio guys this is great news. My guess is you're not into pro audio. You must have missed my other post. You'll see, the number of applications is significantly bigger than that.
Secondly, pro audio is a field that places some very specific requirements on the OS. For years on end, I've needed to manually rebuild my kernel to include Ingo Molnar's low latency patches. Without these patches, linux audio will either suffer dropouts (not a huge deal for gaming but intolerable for pro audio) or feel sluggish. For quite a while, doing pro audio on Linux meant following endless HOWTO's, patching the kernel, and so on. A fork prevents this, without bothering other users with features that are not ready for prime time. *That* is the point.
I'm thrilled to see that after years, a lot of the progress that has been made has found actually ended up finding its way into the mainstream kernel, and I'm sure this will keep happening. I'm particularly happy about ALSA being part of the kernel now. I've also gladly welcomed the O(1) I/O scheduler, and recently, at last, as of kernel 2.6.18, Ingo Molnar&co's low latency patch finally made it into there. No more re-compiling the kernel for realtime support!
Linux audio is maturing at a rapid pace. Where at one point I considered it not mature enough for studio use, this is rapidly changing. With Ingo Molnar & co's low latency patches being integral part as of kernel 2.6.18, the hard part is taken care of.
The rest is a matter of finding the right audio and music software. Here's a list of the software that I've actually used personally and that I consider the best of breed audio and music software for Linux. You will find these packages to fulfill most any audio need you might have. If you are going to get started on Linux audio for the first time, check these out before anything else.
Transport:
JACK audio connection kit: supported by almost all linux audio software. Allows routing audio between jack-enabled applications. Use with qjackctl.
Mixing:
Ardour: Multi track Digital Audio Workstation. Very complete and definitely very usable. Main downside: Not all mixing parameters can be MIDI-controlled by an external mixer (yet), this is currently my main obstacle to integrating my mixer into my linux audio chain.
Audio editing:
Rezound: A decent wave editor. Feature rich, although not very suitable for multi-track work. Audacity: Another good wave editor. mhwaveedit: A small wave editor, which, although a bit limited, I've found very reliable for recording jack streams. Gnu Wave Cleaner: To remove noise, pops and crackle from recordings. Works well, but unfortunately is rather unstable. Make a backup of your audio before denoising it.
Soft synths:
ZynAddSubFX: A very nice virtual analog synth fluidsynth: Sample-based synth, use with qsynth or (better) java-based fluidgui LinuxSampler: More powerful sampler than fluidsynth, albeit with higher latency Aeolus: A virtual pipe organ. Believable to the untrained ear.
Composition:
soundtracker: IT-tracker style music editor hydrogen: A drum machine (or more accurately, a drum sequencer). Rosegarden: A MIDI sequencer. Use in combination with one of the above soft synths. I've experienced some trouble combining both MIDI and audio inside the same project.
Real-time processing:
LADSPA plugins: Effect processing for almost any purpose. Most prominently absent is a good pitch corrector/auto tune. freqtweak: Create all kinds of interesting effects by tweaking parameters in the frequency domain. Jack-rack: Process incoming JACK audio in realtime.
Other:
amidi: Command line utility to dump incoming MIDI traffic and send MIDI traffic.
Very useful for MIDI diagnostics hd24tools: A jack-enabled suite that allows playing disks recorded on Alesis HD24 recorder.
Main things I feel are still lacking:
- Replacing audio peaks by drums: I've written a small tool, drumreplacer, which does this for a single audio channel. However it is rather limited and uses a lot of CPU. Still a far cry from the capabilities of drumagog. - Auto tune - A tool to 'unwobble' wobbly drum tracks in real time
A much better way to save lives of 'the boys' would be to withdraw the troops already, instead of inventing stuff to make war more efficient and which (therefore) will cost more lives. No matter what side those lives are lost on, they have equal value! But why would he care, at least it will make him a few bucks, right?
The machine builds houses in 1/200 of the time at 1/5 of the cost.
Who wants to bet the price of houses will stay around the same level?
Almost any random 2-bedroom house in the Netherlands costs a quarter
of a million euros nowadays. The same size house sells around a
hundred thousand in Portugal. In Canada, this price range can get
you a 5-bedroom house.
Based on these numbers, it would seem to me that the cost of building
the house itself is just a minor factor in the price of a house.
Does that mean that God is a good programmer? Quite a dreadful one, actually. Sure, he wrote this terraforming application in just six days, but a bit more planning would have been wise. Just look at the amount of bugs it has! He's been busy 'fixing' them them ever since, but for every bug eliminated, another was introduced... it's not strange that things haven't evolved since. It's an unmaintainable legacy application by now, a rewrite from scratch would be best.
Of course it does, you do realise it's the first time ever they caught a serial killer. Or a criminal for that matter. It's a major progress !
No, it's not. First of all, they've caught serial killers and criminals often enough *without* cameras. If it is true what you say and indeed this is the first time that the killer was actually caught *because of* the cameras, this only shows how ineffective cameras are for security purposes. Meanwhile there are plenty of stories around where so-called 'security' cameras were abused to invade on people's privacy.
I understand the sensitiveness of the subject, but the problem with child porn has little to do with freedom of expression - it is about harm being done to the children as they are being kidnapped, molested and humiliated for the sake of entertainment.
The same difference applies between snuff movies vs. splatter movies. In one, someone is actually getting killed and this is being filmed; in the other, it is faked, but no one gets harmed. Most people would agree that the first is unacceptable, whereas the second isn't considered a problem (although we may choose not to watch it) and may even serve a purpose. The same would apply for real vs. animated child porn. I wouldn't watch it; but at least no child would be harmed for its sake.
As movies get more and more realistic (not in the last place due to computer graphics) it is understandable that discussion is going on about whether movies 'faking' certain situations are suitable for viewing by the general public, as they may give people ideas.
This may be an argument against movies such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for instance. We should then keep in mind that reality is often sicker than the movies. What came first- movies in which children are molested, or the idea to make such movies? Texas Chainsaw Massacre was based on actual events. There have been many movies about the holocaust with lots of violence in them- these, too, are based on actual events. It is important that these events are communicated to the public, so that they can form a well-founded opinion on the subject.
I recognize that before turning adult, some people have trouble distinguishing between movies and reality; this is why an age rating system is applied.
From a certain age on, people can be expected to behave like the adults that they are. From that point on, they should be capable of judging between reality and fantasy and be held responsible for their own actions. In these cases, blaming one's actions on the lack of censorship is just running away from responsibility.
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...never ever in his life used illegal software. Or did he?
wasn't it?
I'm relatively moderate on bandwidth already, so I think I'd manage to get by with less. I used to get by fine on 33k6 anyway. I'd probably order in my Ubuntu ISOs rather than downloading them. Turning off pictures in my browser would help. So would caching proxies at the provider level.
But I don't think it will happen anytime soon. More and more bandwidth is used up by malware and spammers. I imagine that in a case of a real bandwidth crisis, those people would face serious charges, and available bandwidth would triple easily.
Of course what I would *really* do in the case of a global bandwidth crisis is to go sit in a corner in fetal position and cry.
Hellow. I WANT ONE.
It'd be interesting to see where this guy stood on his mortgage payments....
For a house that has been in his family for 120 years, one would hope that it was fully paid for.
Correct me if my memory fails me but just recently they managed to raise a million dollars. How much more before the cash donation is considered 'major'? Perhaps the business model is wrong? Depending on how things are set up, a million only pays a years' worth of salary for 25 people. Would distributed hosting by volunteers be a way out?
And you live where, in the Land of the Free?
Yes, writing software is hard, especially writing good software. The hardest part is to make things simple, even harder is to make things simple AND flexible. The need for a thorough analysis is greatly underappreciated.
Incompetent developers tend to make things more complex than necessary. From that point on, under economic pressure, workarounds are needed to get things done. This in turn makes things even more complex than necessary. THAT is what makes writing software hard. The problem is, it is difficult to be aware of the skills that we lack. As such, a lot of programmers with a huge ego don't deserve one.
I'm not into Extreme Programming per se, but I've noticed that if multiple people look at a piece of software, chances of problems going undetected get smaller and smaller. Yes, even if you, a master programmer, show your code to a rookie, the chance of bugs going undetected will reduce. In fact, it will inevitably result in more bugs being detected before rolling them out to customers.
...is almost a year back. They were my backup 5.25 inch floppy disks from 15 years ago. Interestingly, I could only read them under Linux- my BIOS doesn't have FDD int13h support anymore. The motherboard doesn't boot from them anymore (so no DOS) and FreeDOS also uses int13h to read floppy disks.
:)
As a result, I could only run my ancient projects by burning them to CD first, then running them from FreeDOS. Kinda cute too, to see what my code looked like back then *shudder*
"Because the systems are designed to keep data on a server, sensitive information isn't lost if a terminal gets lost, stolen or damaged."
Yeah, but what if some thief runs away with the mainframe?
It is a pity though, that he said that "there is no need to worry about security" - I think this passes the wrong message, "security is not important".
There is too a need to worry about security. In fact the GNU/Linux community has gone great lengths worrying about it. Just because there are no viruses in the wild, that doesn't mean you should open up dozens of ports on your firewall and leave your machine vulnerable to hack attacks.
FTA: This new technology relies on the DirectX (a graphics technology provided on most modern graphics cards and also a requirement for the new Aero user interface) graphics engine to draw the interface leading providing new features such as 3D and animation.
This statement seems to contradict itself. So what is DirectX- a software engine or hardware technology?
You will be surprised just how noob some users are.
/usr/local/lib, respectively). Especially Mac users have trouble because they have to do this as root user, which often is a concept unknown to them.
I have written a cross-platform application that consists of just an executable and a shared library (DLL/.so, respectively).
Even with the email-assistance I give them, regularly it proves too difficult for users to copy the library file to the default library directory (c:\windows\system32 or
This happens so often that I'm working on an installer now. End users just can't be bothered with technicalities and procedures.
I tried to pull a practical joke on my coworkers by booting their system from an ubuntu live CD. Unfortunately, I've never managed to properly boot an out-of-the-box ubuntu on a Dell, and I've tried booting on several different models. Are Dell computers built on weird undocumented proprietary hardware, or is it a problem with the distro?
Nice idea, some concepts (string functions, (associative) arrays, file I/O) may be portable across some languages and in these cases rosettacode will be useful.
But I think the actual problem is not given due value. Sometimes performing the same task in the same language requires different code on different platforms. Examples: Reading a file bigger than 4 Gigabyte in gnu-flavored C++ on mac, linux, windows; figuring out the total number of sectors on disk, etc.
Also, we should accept that not all languages can do everything. Try creating an array of functions in VBA. Or (also in VBA) even simply breaking out of a loop, for that matter. Try exceptions in ANSI pascal or ANSI C. Try using pointers in Java. Try writing a GUI windowed interface in ANSI Pascal (no, Turbo Pascal doesn't count). Try recursion in GWBasic (this is actually possible).
I see this ending up as an effort to shoehorn concepts unique to one language to another language (building web sites in COBOL *shiver*). Rather than using the wrong tool, it will pay off to actually learn the other language.
I fail to see the point of forking an entire Operating System for the sake of haveing 4 or 5 applications installed on it.
To us pro-audio guys this is great news. My guess is you're not into pro audio. You must have missed my other post. You'll see, the number of applications is significantly bigger than that.
Secondly, pro audio is a field that places some very specific requirements on the OS. For years on end, I've needed to manually rebuild my kernel to include Ingo Molnar's low latency patches. Without these patches, linux audio will either suffer dropouts (not a huge deal for gaming but intolerable for pro audio) or feel sluggish. For quite a while, doing pro audio on Linux meant following endless HOWTO's, patching the kernel, and so on. A fork prevents this, without bothering other users with features that are not ready for prime time. *That* is the point.
I'm thrilled to see that after years, a lot of the progress that has been made has found actually ended up finding its way into the mainstream kernel, and I'm sure this will keep happening. I'm particularly happy about ALSA being part of the kernel now. I've also gladly welcomed the O(1) I/O scheduler, and recently, at last, as of kernel 2.6.18, Ingo Molnar&co's low latency patch finally made it into there. No more re-compiling the kernel for realtime support!
Linux audio is maturing at a rapid pace. Where at one point I considered it not mature enough for studio use, this is rapidly changing. With Ingo Molnar & co's low latency patches being integral part as of kernel 2.6.18, the hard part is taken care of.
The rest is a matter of finding the right audio and music software. Here's a list of the software that I've actually used personally and that I consider the best of breed audio and music software for Linux. You will find these packages to fulfill most any audio need you might have. If you are going to get started on Linux audio for the first time, check these out before anything else.
Transport:
JACK audio connection kit: supported by almost all linux audio software.
Allows routing audio between jack-enabled applications. Use with qjackctl.
Mixing:
Ardour: Multi track Digital Audio Workstation. Very complete and definitely very usable. Main downside: Not all mixing parameters can be MIDI-controlled by an external mixer (yet), this is currently my main obstacle to integrating my mixer into my linux audio chain.
Audio editing:
Rezound: A decent wave editor. Feature rich, although not very suitable for multi-track work.
Audacity: Another good wave editor.
mhwaveedit: A small wave editor, which, although a bit limited, I've found very reliable for recording jack streams.
Gnu Wave Cleaner: To remove noise, pops and crackle from recordings. Works well, but unfortunately is rather unstable. Make a backup of your audio before denoising it.
Soft synths:
ZynAddSubFX: A very nice virtual analog synth
fluidsynth: Sample-based synth, use with qsynth or (better) java-based fluidgui
LinuxSampler: More powerful sampler than fluidsynth, albeit with higher latency
Aeolus: A virtual pipe organ. Believable to the untrained ear.
Composition:
soundtracker: IT-tracker style music editor
hydrogen: A drum machine (or more accurately, a drum sequencer).
Rosegarden: A MIDI sequencer. Use in combination with one of the above soft synths. I've experienced some trouble combining both MIDI and audio inside the same project.
Real-time processing:
LADSPA plugins: Effect processing for almost any purpose. Most prominently absent is a good pitch corrector/auto tune.
freqtweak: Create all kinds of interesting effects by tweaking parameters in the frequency domain.
Jack-rack: Process incoming JACK audio in realtime.
Other:
amidi: Command line utility to dump incoming MIDI traffic and send MIDI traffic.
Very useful for MIDI diagnostics
hd24tools: A jack-enabled suite that allows playing disks recorded on Alesis HD24 recorder.
Main things I feel are still lacking:
- Replacing audio peaks by drums: I've written a small tool, drumreplacer, which does this for a single audio channel. However it is rather limited and uses a lot of CPU. Still a far cry from the capabilities of drumagog.
- Auto tune
- A tool to 'unwobble' wobbly drum tracks in real time
> Do computers designed by women run quicker?
> Does software written by women take up less memory?
> Do processors designed by women emit less heat?
Is it a coincidence that COBOL was designed by a woman?
A much better way to save lives of 'the boys' would be to withdraw the troops already, instead of inventing stuff to make war more efficient and which (therefore) will cost more lives. No matter what side those lives are lost on, they have equal value! But why would he care, at least it will make him a few bucks, right?
Worse than a serial killer, that's what he is.
The machine builds houses in 1/200 of the time at 1/5 of the cost. Who wants to bet the price of houses will stay around the same level? Almost any random 2-bedroom house in the Netherlands costs a quarter of a million euros nowadays. The same size house sells around a hundred thousand in Portugal. In Canada, this price range can get you a 5-bedroom house. Based on these numbers, it would seem to me that the cost of building the house itself is just a minor factor in the price of a house.
Does that mean that God is a good programmer? Quite a dreadful one, actually. Sure, he wrote this terraforming application in just six days, but a bit more planning would have been wise. Just look at the amount of bugs it has! He's been busy 'fixing' them them ever since, but for every bug eliminated, another was introduced... it's not strange that things haven't evolved since. It's an unmaintainable legacy application by now, a rewrite from scratch would be best.
Of course it does, you do realise it's the first time ever they caught a serial killer. Or a criminal for that matter. It's a major progress !
No, it's not. First of all, they've caught serial killers and criminals often enough *without* cameras. If it is true what you say and indeed this is the first time that the killer was actually caught *because of* the cameras, this only shows how ineffective cameras are for security purposes.
Meanwhile there are plenty of stories around where so-called 'security' cameras were abused to invade on people's privacy.
You typed a comma in there.
"It will have the ability to restrict your network access if you have a down-level machine."
Ehm... and who decides what is a down-level machine?
I understand the sensitiveness of the subject, but the problem with child porn has little to do with freedom of expression - it is about harm being done to the children as they are being kidnapped, molested and humiliated for the sake of entertainment.
The same difference applies between snuff movies vs. splatter movies. In one, someone is actually getting killed and this is being filmed; in the other, it is faked, but no one gets harmed. Most people would agree that the first is unacceptable, whereas the second isn't considered a problem (although we may choose not to watch it) and may even serve a purpose.
The same would apply for real vs. animated child porn. I wouldn't watch it; but at least no child would be harmed for its sake.
As movies get more and more realistic (not in the last place due to computer graphics) it is understandable that discussion is going on about whether movies 'faking' certain situations are suitable for viewing by the general public, as they may give people ideas.
This may be an argument against movies such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for instance. We should then keep in mind that reality is often sicker than the movies. What came first- movies in which children are molested, or the idea to make such movies? Texas Chainsaw Massacre was based on actual events. There have been many movies about the holocaust with lots of violence in them- these, too, are based on actual events. It is important that these events are communicated to the public, so that they can form a well-founded opinion on the subject.
I recognize that before turning adult, some people have trouble distinguishing between movies and reality; this is why an age rating system is applied.
From a certain age on, people can be expected to behave like the adults that they are. From that point on, they should be capable of judging between reality and fantasy and be held responsible for their own actions. In these cases, blaming one's actions on the lack of censorship is just running away from responsibility.