We use perforce, too. We've been less than satisfied with it. I'm don't know the size of the companies people with positive views of perforce are working for, but with a couple hundred developers, and on the order of a couple of thousand different code lines, the perforce server often grinds to a halt. More hardware has been thrown at it, more disk, etc, and no one can seem to figure out where the bottleneck is. It's very unpleasant when checkouts are taking 10 minutes, in the middle of the day.
Jesus. Both have their uses. You use TCP if you need the reliability, and a stateful connection. You use UDP if it doesn't matter that a packet gets dropped here or there. Things like games and streaming media are good examples. This is rather like comparing Pepsi to milk. They both have their place. It's the job of a good engineer to determine which is most apropriate.
"Showstopper!" was fascinating. David Cutler really is a genius. NT had the potential to be a truly great operating system. I would have loved to have gotten a chance to play with it before they bolted win32 on top of it. Everyone who has the slightest interest in operating systems should read Showstopper.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1814
If you could build a balloon that was strong enough to contain a vacuum without collapsing, yet having a large enough volume to reduce the total density to less than air, vacuum would be the ideal contents of a baloon.
But what you're doing is exchanging additional structural elements for the the weight of the gas, so you're really getting nothing. In addition, it would be impractical to build a vaccuum chamber that would resist crushing close to the ground. Your balloon would have to be made out of steel.
The problem is that, as a balloon rises, the force pushing it up decreases. As the density of the gas inside the balloon approaches the density of the air outside of the balloon, the forces of gravity and reach equilibrium.
Any balloon is going to have an absolute limit as to how high it can go.
Seriously, I can only recall seeing two or three viruses in the wild in the 15 or so years that I've been using computers seriously. One of them was in highschool, in a public computer lab, another was in college, in a machine that had dozens of students using it.
Antivirus companies thrive on hysteria. Computing is just like sex... if you take a few easy precautions, it's pretty safe.
Of course, these days "easy precautions" include not running any Microsoft applications, but you shouldn't be having unprotected sex in bathhouses, either. High-risk behavior.
... horrible place to work, though. I used to contract with them, as a unix administrator. It was a fun place to learn unix, but pretty incompetent with a lot of things. No centralized password scheme, etc.
They had some really dirty tricks though. They'd hire Russian programmers for well under market, and hold their green cards over their heads. Working there as a contractor meant that you were basically mulch.
I should hope that stock exchange machines are running something more secure than *nix, with compartmentalized security, such that one password can't get at the entire machine.
... in that story is that there is a town in the Netherlands called Hoofddorp.
Hoofddorp.
The fact that there is a town named Hoofddorp made my entire day. Hoofddorp. It's impossible to say without smiling. H00fdd0rp. It's a floor topping and a dessert polish! H00FDD0RP!
I don't think this is so much a password-free login as single sign-on. The keychain database is unlocked when the user logs in, and from then on, any applications which have been allowed to use it can get their registered passwords from the database, without having to ask the user.
Some people like single sign-on, others don't. Personally, I like its convenience. I think it should be done correctly, the database should, for instance, be relocked when the screen is locked, but it's a good solution for users, if used carefully.
There's a difference between writing truly secure software, and writing truly high-performance software. Most libraries aren't really targetted at writing secure software, they'd be too slow to use as a general case.
It's not, at least in older versions of libstdc++. The problem lies in caching the representation for efficiency. If a string is copied, and the copy is used in a different thread, bad things can happen.
I believe what you mean is never use vector, which breaks certain semantics.
vector is the most useful container in the STL, and is the basis for the STL string class.
We used the MSDN STL documentation, and while Microsoft's implementation may agree with that API spec, Solaris' certainly didn't. See the signature of the map::delete method for an interesting example.
SGI's STL documentation is excellent. I always have a browser window open to it while I'm coding. And, as it's the basis of the STL in g++'s libstdc++, it's quite accurate. SGI's STL is actually used by a number of platforms, and works pretty well.
One think to watch out for is that the string class isn't thread-safe under linux.
MS is backing x86-64 over Intel's IA-64, and that MS has apparently convinced Intel to move to x86-64!
x86-64 is much closer to the old x86 architecture than IA64. x86 SUCKS. It has sucked for years. Moving to IA64 would mean trashing a bunch of legacy code, but it also means that new applications wouldn't be saddled with 25 years of architectural baggage from an architecture that should have been taken out and shot 20 years ago.
So once again, by chosing backwards-compatibility over everything, Microsoft is holding back the industry.
With any luck, this will trigger a new space race. The US has become far too complacent, and Russia is pretty broken right now. New competition may mean that we'll actually get off this rock before it gets hit by an asteroid or something.
Slashdot Mirror
(oh, yes. RT is free software.)
http://www.fsck.com/projects/rt/
RT is very good. I've never heard anyone say a bad thing about it. It is very much worth checking out.
OS X 10.0 came out about 17 months ago. $130 every 18 months doesn't seem too unreasonable.
We use perforce, too. We've been less than satisfied with it. I'm don't know the size of the companies people with positive views of perforce are working for, but with a couple hundred developers, and on the order of a couple of thousand different code lines, the perforce server often grinds to a halt. More hardware has been thrown at it, more disk, etc, and no one can seem to figure out where the bottleneck is. It's very unpleasant when checkouts are taking 10 minutes, in the middle of the day.
Qt does require a strange precompiler. This is the biggest reason I avoid it. I'd rather my programs remain standard C++.
Jesus. Both have their uses. You use TCP if you need the reliability, and a stateful connection. You use UDP if it doesn't matter that a packet gets dropped here or there. Things like games and streaming media are good examples. This is rather like comparing Pepsi to milk. They both have their place. It's the job of a good engineer to determine which is most apropriate.
"Showstopper!" was fascinating. David Cutler really is a genius. NT had the potential to be a truly great operating system. I would have loved to have gotten a chance to play with it before they bolted win32 on top of it. Everyone who has the slightest interest in operating systems should read Showstopper.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1814
I'd find it quite amusing if the jamming intended to stop remotely-triggered explosive devices triggered those devices.
But Schadenfreude is my favorite passtime.
If you could build a balloon that was strong enough to contain a vacuum without collapsing, yet having a large enough volume to reduce the total density to less than air, vacuum would be the ideal contents of a baloon.
But what you're doing is exchanging additional structural elements for the the weight of the gas, so you're really getting nothing. In addition, it would be impractical to build a vaccuum chamber that would resist crushing close to the ground. Your balloon would have to be made out of steel.
The problem is that, as a balloon rises, the force pushing it up decreases. As the density of the gas inside the balloon approaches the density of the air outside of the balloon, the forces of gravity and reach equilibrium.
Any balloon is going to have an absolute limit as to how high it can go.
"This little sucker is going to replace CDs. Looks like I'm going to have to buy the White Album again." (Men in Black)
Seriously, I can only recall seeing two or three viruses in the wild in the 15 or so years that I've been using computers seriously. One of them was in highschool, in a public computer lab, another was in college, in a machine that had dozens of students using it.
... if you take a few easy precautions, it's pretty safe.
Antivirus companies thrive on hysteria. Computing is just like sex
Of course, these days "easy precautions" include not running any Microsoft applications, but you shouldn't be having unprotected sex in bathhouses, either. High-risk behavior.
... horrible place to work, though. I used to contract with them, as a unix administrator. It was a fun place to learn unix, but pretty incompetent with a lot of things. No centralized password scheme, etc.
They had some really dirty tricks though. They'd hire Russian programmers for well under market, and hold their green cards over their heads. Working there as a contractor meant that you were basically mulch.
I really learned to despise Irix on that job.
I should hope that stock exchange machines are running something more secure than *nix, with compartmentalized security, such that one password can't get at the entire machine.
But I'm probably being too optimistic.
... in that story is that there is a town in the Netherlands called Hoofddorp.
Hoofddorp.
The fact that there is a town named Hoofddorp made my entire day. Hoofddorp. It's impossible to say without smiling. H00fdd0rp. It's a floor topping and a dessert polish! H00FDD0RP!
I don't think this is so much a password-free login as single sign-on. The keychain database is unlocked when the user logs in, and from then on, any applications which have been allowed to use it can get their registered passwords from the database, without having to ask the user.
Some people like single sign-on, others don't. Personally, I like its convenience. I think it should be done correctly, the database should, for instance, be relocked when the screen is locked, but it's a good solution for users, if used carefully.
The 500XJ was the only piece of hardware I've ever owned with a five-year warranty. Telling. I wish everything were built that well.
There's a difference between writing truly secure software, and writing truly high-performance software. Most libraries aren't really targetted at writing secure software, they'd be too slow to use as a general case.
It's not, at least in older versions of libstdc++.
The problem lies in caching the representation for efficiency. If a string is copied, and the copy is used in a different thread, bad things can happen.
I misspoke. vector is the boogeyman.
I believe what you mean is never use vector, which breaks certain semantics.
vector is the most useful container in the STL, and is the basis for the STL string class.
One think to watch out for is that the string class isn't thread-safe under linux.
http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/
I also recommend Scot Meyers' "Effective STL".
x86-64 is much closer to the old x86 architecture than IA64. x86 SUCKS. It has sucked for years. Moving to IA64 would mean trashing a bunch of legacy code, but it also means that new applications wouldn't be saddled with 25 years of architectural baggage from an architecture that should have been taken out and shot 20 years ago. So once again, by chosing backwards-compatibility over everything, Microsoft is holding back the industry.
With any luck, this will trigger a new space race.
The US has become far too complacent, and Russia is pretty broken right now. New competition may mean that we'll actually get off this rock before it gets hit by an asteroid or something.