Backend the silly stuff onto PostgreSQL (which is the best for clean transactionality and locking). To heck with this low level mucking about in the filesystem, that should be left to the database designers.
"I think the best that's been done is called the 'tacky' bit (chmod +t) on an executable. Traditionally, that left the executable loaded 'in swap', presumably for faster startup."
To get this effect cheaply and repeatably in Linux, copy the relevant binaries under a tmpfs mounted directory.
"In a bid to help European online sales, the EU is planning to tax online transactions."
You don't think they care about "sales" or "the economy" in abstract do you? They care about power and loot - so goods that bypass their larceny are null data to them. A vibrant untaxed economy is "no sales", a grinding tax recession is "many sales". Thus do thieves^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htaxmen account things.
It's worth your time (assuming "your" = nonprogramming manager) to buy this to avoid having to go through N iterations of web guys to find the one who has done this before, and knows how to do it properly. As opposed to your typical web guy who's still wet behind the ears and fond of doing everything in Dreamweaver.
=> the programmer time you don't have to waste reimplementing the wheel
=> not having to face the horrible realization that you're losing customers because your reimplemented wheel only plays nice in IE version x.y, and breaks or looks ugly on anything else. And wedges the browser solid on IE version x.z
...if you aren't "playing god", you aren't yet fully human.
What is a human? A human is a rational ape. A human who choses to demphasize their rationality and live like an ape, are they a human? Barely if at all. But a human who stretches what they are into what they could be by means of the science that is rooted in disciplned, non-self-decieving thought, they acheve the pinnacle of humanity precisely when they gain the power to move by rational choice and deliberate action beyond the old form of what was human.
Thus do I welcome all advances in the science of germline eugenic creation of post-humans.
They evolved - the selection pressure was human choice, but from a standpoint of actual evolution, that doesn't matter. And, the small types can no longer reach to mate with the huge types. If all the intervening sized breeds were to go extinct, it would be physiologically impossible for them to exchange genes - they would be different species.
"If you don't want projects to turn into a death march, you have to get firm requirements."
There aint no such thing.
Common error situation: they think they know the application domain, but they have no idea what the computer solution can and can't actually do within reasonable resources. They keep changing their mind, you keep changing the code, it never quite gets finished and it tangles into an unusable mess.
Your approach would by contrast play out like this: do lots of pretty drawings and requirements capture. Do lots of design. Get it set in stone, and send it to the coders. A while later they turn up with a finished product that does exactly what they were told to, and DOES NOT DO WHAT THE USERS NOW WANT.
Managers will simply not allow this to happen, they will come down on you with whips and enforce the first approach. They are not paying you to sit on your ass designing academic boondoggles.
The only viable REAL fix is: short repeated iterations that deliver a known fixed subset of real functionality (eg: "this iteration, build use cases 1, 2, and 3"). The iteration boundaries are frequent enough to cope with changed minds, and most importantly, YOU DO NOT END UP REDESIGNING NONWORKING CODE. This is the most important. If you redesign, you need unit tests there to show it worked before, it worked after, and everybody's happy. Not, compounding of bugs upon bugs.
"Public" as a category of property does not exist. Property can be owned, or unclaimed.
"Tax" is an euphemism, semantically a perfect subset of "theft". The money taken remains owned by those from whom it was stolen. Unfortunately when it's mixed into the undifferentiated tax take, partially spent etc, there's no traceable ownership chain. Therefore all "public" property is unclaimed, free-for-all, finders keepers.
To anybody who lives off tax funds, shame on you, thief! Get a real job!
If one were to grant the concept of copyright, one could say that the software made by programmers taking tax funds belonged to the coder personally, since whatever contract they made was with a null entity for unclaimed funds. However I don't grant that concept - software is not physical, therefore it is merely an unownable pattern in an ownable medium. The medium itself being tax funded, is of course unclaimed and may be legitimately taken by anyone.
"It seems to me it would make it more appealing to.coms to use the free software but..."
Well, no, it wouldn't. The classic manager response to a money drought would not be "how can we be more efficient", it would be to squeeze out any experimentation with "trendy new stuff" and stick to what's already there and operational.
This approach is, actually, pretty sane. There are plenty of costs associated with the muddle and uncertainty of changing across to the new-and-efficient from the tried-and-true-but-clunky.
You said: "Humans are limited by the natural capabilities of their brain; whatever they choose to do, they are acting as humans - nothing more."
Animals are limited by their current state.
Humans started beyond this from Cro-magnon times onward with the extension of capablitlies through technology - and the limit was the the human body/mind.
We are now reaching the stage where we can begin to lift even that limit - technogy reflexively removing limits on the bodies and minds that create technology.
Use the Russian "space mirror" idea to put 24/7 illumination on some patch of otherwise useless desert somewhere. Sit solar arrays there. Zero orbiting moving parts equals low maintenance costs and no risk that some sneaky sod will use it as a weapon.
Some thoughts for you. My personal opinions, for what they're worth.
The two slants you can give marketing:
1) Marketing to the customer ("chase the prey")
2) Marketing about the product ("set snares")
You cannot market to a group. The averaged behavior of any group of two or more people is misleading about the individual needs and desires of individuals in that group. The fundamental error of mass marketing is to assume that one can survey to get at for example "what geeks want". Anything aimed at this average will necessarily cause dissonance in every member of that group. They'll be annoyed at being stereotyped and pigeonholed, and the root of that annoyance is the knowledge that as individuals they want things you aren't providing, and they don't want things you're parading in-front of them with fanfares etc.
You say: "First, to correct someone else who commented earlier, the point of marketing is not to convince someone to buy what they don't need. That's nuts; getting someone to buy something they don't need is no way to build a business."
Observe that marketing to a group will always have that exact unwanted slant. They don't want it, you're trying to sell it. They do want it, and you've left them out in the cold.
There are two ways of marketing that I think will work.
1) Marketing about a product, trustably. The reason that people ignore marketing about products is (a) irrational annoying razzmatazz (b) a typical advert is semantically null, utterly meaningless. Ditch the "oh my god it's so wonderful" attitude, completely. Very likely, it's not wonderful. It may have a few snazzy features, it may be evolutionarily better, it may even be revolutionarily better - so tell people that. But if it was important enough to merit dancing in the streets, your audience would already have heard about it on the news. Lying promotes distrust, especially emotional lying.
The way to cause trust when marketing about a product is: be realistic, and provide cold hard facts without blurring them with spin. If it's snazzier, say how, say why, refer across to valid proof, then STOP and don't include the catchy tune and the dancing hamsters. Or people will just remember the dancing hamsters and ignore your product. This goes likewise for "dancing hamsters" in the product name. No overstatements, no cutesiness, no deliberate misspellings. Where trade descriptions are enforced, misspellings are read to indicate lies: "Joosy froot" gum will contain no fruit.
A perfect best-practice example is the Ronseal "it does exactly what it says on the tin" adverts on UK television.
By marketing about your product with only realistic glee, and providing information people can crosscheck, they will find and buy your product. In this case Google is doing the "to" part of the marketing.
2) You can market to individuals. Harder, but doable, this being the topic of the slashdot article. The approach being: marketing employees who actually share an interest with the target group join in with topical interactions, and when individuals complain of a problem, the employee can present the widget being sold as the solution. Provided it actually is a proper solution.
Tis does not mean spamming, but rather personal one-on-one recommendations by people who know the topic. Neither does this mean "astroturf" - the reaction to falsified grassroots support is to treat all grassroots support for that product as tainted. Marketers working with topical groups should not hide the fact they have something to sell.
I am not anti big business - I'm strongly pro capitalist in fact. I just sometimes wish they'd get their act together and start acting like groups of sane humans, rather than acting autistic/manic/paranoid and shouting BS in my metaphorcal ear all the time.
Another one I've thought of for awhile: orbit large sheets of very strong thin cloth (say tight woven kevlar) going in the other direction. Spin them to keep them opened out. Debris will hit, be swept up into one place, lose energy and deorbit. it would be the same effect as hitting a curtain with a stick - the forward motion would be checked, turned into deformation motion of the fabric sheet. One sheet could catch one big item or many small ones.
If nothing else the swept-up debris will be in a more convenient form to laser and deorbit.
This new language frightens me. I say that as a perl coder who plays with the old version for a living and makes it do some funky tricks already. Perl 6 is skating worryingly close to the edge at which line noise parses and runs.
You say "This patch allows the rescheduling of in-flight kernel syscalls if a higher-priority process than the process calling the syscalls becomes eligible to run." - does that mean that syscalls can pile up and logjam behind some higher-priority process? Does it slow up the kernel?
Slashdot Mirror
Backend the silly stuff onto PostgreSQL (which is the best for clean transactionality and locking). To heck with this low level mucking about in the filesystem, that should be left to the database designers.
"I think the best that's been done is called the 'tacky' bit (chmod +t) on an executable. Traditionally, that left the executable loaded 'in swap', presumably for faster startup."
To get this effect cheaply and repeatably in Linux, copy the relevant binaries under a tmpfs mounted directory.
...then KDE must be bad too, because it's at least equally tightly integrated to Konqueror. Perhaps more so.
"In a bid to help European online sales, the EU is planning to tax online transactions."
You don't think they care about "sales" or "the economy" in abstract do you? They care about power and loot - so goods that bypass their larceny are null data to them. A vibrant untaxed economy is "no sales", a grinding tax recession is "many sales". Thus do thieves^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htaxmen account things.
Why is it not enough anymore to say "it's MY damned computer, get your interfering mitts off of it!"
It's worth your time (assuming "your" = nonprogramming manager) to buy this to avoid having to go through N iterations of web guys to find the one who has done this before, and knows how to do it properly. As opposed to your typical web guy who's still wet behind the ears and fond of doing everything in Dreamweaver.
What are you paying for?
=> the programmer time you don't have to waste reimplementing the wheel
=> not having to face the horrible realization that you're losing customers because your reimplemented wheel only plays nice in IE version x.y, and breaks or looks ugly on anything else. And wedges the browser solid on IE version x.z
The proper term for a "wetland" is "bog", "marsh", "swamp", or "useless muddy ground".
The proper term for a government environmental regulator is "pinko hippy", "land thief", and "target".
...if you aren't "playing god", you aren't yet fully human.
What is a human? A human is a rational ape. A human who choses to demphasize their rationality and live like an ape, are they a human? Barely if at all. But a human who stretches what they are into what they could be by means of the science that is rooted in disciplned, non-self-decieving thought, they acheve the pinnacle of humanity precisely when they gain the power to move by rational choice and deliberate action beyond the old form of what was human.
Thus do I welcome all advances in the science of germline eugenic creation of post-humans.
Here it is for ya: dogs.
They evolved - the selection pressure was human choice, but from a standpoint of actual evolution, that doesn't matter. And, the small types can no longer reach to mate with the huge types. If all the intervening sized breeds were to go extinct, it would be physiologically impossible for them to exchange genes - they would be different species.
"If you don't want projects to turn into a death march, you have to get firm requirements."
There aint no such thing.
Common error situation: they think they know the application domain, but they have no idea what the computer solution can and can't actually do within reasonable resources. They keep changing their mind, you keep changing the code, it never quite gets finished and it tangles into an unusable mess.
Your approach would by contrast play out like this: do lots of pretty drawings and requirements capture. Do lots of design. Get it set in stone, and send it to the coders. A while later they turn up with a finished product that does exactly what they were told to, and DOES NOT DO WHAT THE USERS NOW WANT.
Managers will simply not allow this to happen, they will come down on you with whips and enforce the first approach. They are not paying you to sit on your ass designing academic boondoggles.
The only viable REAL fix is: short repeated iterations that deliver a known fixed subset of real functionality (eg: "this iteration, build use cases 1, 2, and 3"). The iteration boundaries are frequent enough to cope with changed minds, and most importantly, YOU DO NOT END UP REDESIGNING NONWORKING CODE. This is the most important. If you redesign, you need unit tests there to show it worked before, it worked after, and everybody's happy. Not, compounding of bugs upon bugs.
"Public" as a category of property does not exist. Property can be owned, or unclaimed.
"Tax" is an euphemism, semantically a perfect subset of "theft". The money taken remains owned by those from whom it was stolen. Unfortunately when it's mixed into the undifferentiated tax take, partially spent etc, there's no traceable ownership chain. Therefore all "public" property is unclaimed, free-for-all, finders keepers.
To anybody who lives off tax funds, shame on you, thief! Get a real job!
If one were to grant the concept of copyright, one could say that the software made by programmers taking tax funds belonged to the coder personally, since whatever contract they made was with a null entity for unclaimed funds. However I don't grant that concept - software is not physical, therefore it is merely an unownable pattern in an ownable medium. The medium itself being tax funded, is of course unclaimed and may be legitimately taken by anyone.
"It seems to me it would make it more appealing to .coms to use the free software but..."
Well, no, it wouldn't. The classic manager response to a money drought would not be "how can we be more efficient", it would be to squeeze out any experimentation with "trendy new stuff" and stick to what's already there and operational.
This approach is, actually, pretty sane. There are plenty of costs associated with the muddle and uncertainty of changing across to the new-and-efficient from the tried-and-true-but-clunky.
A lisa 2,and you've sicced Slashdot on it?
You cruel, cruel person...
You said: "Humans are limited by the natural capabilities of their brain; whatever they choose to do, they are acting as humans - nothing more."
Animals are limited by their current state.
Humans started beyond this from Cro-magnon times onward with the extension of capablitlies through technology - and the limit was the the human body/mind.
We are now reaching the stage where we can begin to lift even that limit - technogy reflexively removing limits on the bodies and minds that create technology.
THAT is "playing god".
THAT is what the superstitious types fear.
...and be damned with all those "they're playing god" types. Hell yes they're playing god - and if you aren't too, then you're less than fully human.
Take a look... it basically is Ada, redone with C syntax and without the built in tasking niftiness.
[Ada => Cyclone]
type checking => type checking
exceptions => exceptions
discriminated types => tagged unions
parameterized types => polymorphic data structures
access types => * pointers
polymorphism => polymorphic functions
private sections in package spec => abstract types
array slices => subtypes
Ada has a lot more features, the only ones Cyclone boasts over Ada are: garbage collection as the norm not the exception, and tuples.
...is over here
;-)
Go sign it, and don't forget to write snail mail to your representatives too.
PS: do not put white powder in the envelopes. That will result in them not being read.
Use the Russian "space mirror" idea to put 24/7 illumination on some patch of otherwise useless desert somewhere. Sit solar arrays there. Zero orbiting moving parts equals low maintenance costs and no risk that some sneaky sod will use it as a weapon.
Some thoughts for you. My personal opinions, for what they're worth.
The two slants you can give marketing:
1) Marketing to the customer ("chase the prey")
2) Marketing about the product ("set snares")
You cannot market to a group. The averaged behavior of any group of two or more people is misleading about the individual needs and desires of individuals in that group. The fundamental error of mass marketing is to assume that one can survey to get at for example "what geeks want". Anything aimed at this average will necessarily cause dissonance in every member of that group. They'll be annoyed at being stereotyped and pigeonholed, and the root of that annoyance is the knowledge that as individuals they want things you aren't providing, and they don't want things you're parading in-front of them with fanfares etc.
You say: "First, to correct someone else who commented earlier, the point of marketing is not to convince someone to buy what they don't need. That's nuts; getting someone to buy something they don't need is no way to build a business."
Observe that marketing to a group will always have that exact unwanted slant. They don't want it, you're trying to sell it. They do want it, and you've left them out in the cold.
There are two ways of marketing that I think will work.
1) Marketing about a product, trustably. The reason that people ignore marketing about products is (a) irrational annoying razzmatazz (b) a typical advert is semantically null, utterly meaningless. Ditch the "oh my god it's so wonderful" attitude, completely. Very likely, it's not wonderful. It may have a few snazzy features, it may be evolutionarily better, it may even be revolutionarily better - so tell people that. But if it was important enough to merit dancing in the streets, your audience would already have heard about it on the news. Lying promotes distrust, especially emotional lying.
The way to cause trust when marketing about a product is: be realistic, and provide cold hard facts without blurring them with spin. If it's snazzier, say how, say why, refer across to valid proof, then STOP and don't include the catchy tune and the dancing hamsters. Or people will just remember the dancing hamsters and ignore your product. This goes likewise for "dancing hamsters" in the product name. No overstatements, no cutesiness, no deliberate misspellings. Where trade descriptions are enforced, misspellings are read to indicate lies: "Joosy froot" gum will contain no fruit.
A perfect best-practice example is the Ronseal "it does exactly what it says on the tin" adverts on UK television.
By marketing about your product with only realistic glee, and providing information people can crosscheck, they will find and buy your product. In this case Google is doing the "to" part of the marketing.
2) You can market to individuals. Harder, but doable, this being the topic of the slashdot article. The approach being: marketing employees who actually share an interest with the target group join in with topical interactions, and when individuals complain of a problem, the employee can present the widget being sold as the solution. Provided it actually is a proper solution.
Tis does not mean spamming, but rather personal one-on-one recommendations by people who know the topic. Neither does this mean "astroturf" - the reaction to falsified grassroots support is to treat all grassroots support for that product as tainted. Marketers working with topical groups should not hide the fact they have something to sell.
I am not anti big business - I'm strongly pro capitalist in fact. I just sometimes wish they'd get their act together and start acting like groups of sane humans, rather than acting autistic/manic/paranoid and shouting BS in my metaphorcal ear all the time.
Polaroid: expensive, fiddly, make porno snaps without going through Boots developers, and show them to your friends
Digital: expensive, fiddly, make porno snaps without going through Boots developers, and show them to the entire civilized universe
Clear case of better technology wins out, IMO.
Another one I've thought of for awhile: orbit large sheets of very strong thin cloth (say tight woven kevlar) going in the other direction. Spin them to keep them opened out. Debris will hit, be swept up into one place, lose energy and deorbit. it would be the same effect as hitting a curtain with a stick - the forward motion would be checked, turned into deformation motion of the fabric sheet. One sheet could catch one big item or many small ones.
If nothing else the swept-up debris will be in a more convenient form to laser and deorbit.
This new language frightens me. I say that as a perl coder who plays with the old version for a living and makes it do some funky tricks already. Perl 6 is skating worryingly close to the edge at which line noise parses and runs.
Sever them from the net. Firewall their IPs, bounce their mail domains, manually, and never turn those firewallings back off.
You say "This patch allows the rescheduling of in-flight kernel syscalls if a higher-priority process than the process calling the syscalls becomes eligible to run." - does that mean that syscalls can pile up and logjam behind some higher-priority process? Does it slow up the kernel?
Basically, why is this not the default behavior?