Yes, the correct Latin plural may well be `viri'. But `virus' has been part of the English language for well over four centuries now; perhaps it wouldn't be unreasonable to consider it naturalised by now? In which case it's an English word, and takes an English plural. Viruses.
...Unless you'd like to use all the correct Germanic, Scandinavian, French, etc. plurals for all the words that entered English from those directions too??
sending messages between to programs that'll never hook up to anything else doesn't require an existing bloated standard. Sometimes it's better just to use your own messages.
Fine. If you're sure that they really will never have to hook up to something else. And that you won't want to save development time by using one of the existing libraries for handling that standard. Or debugging or monitoring tools. Or any existing implementations for test purposes. Or any of the literature. Etc. etc.
Sure, there are times when it's really worth doing your own thing. But most popular standards have become so for a reason, and unless you have an equally good reason to avoid them, you might find that the extra bit of work supporting them pays off.
Not that they made a huge marketing effort even over here in their home country... But you're absolutely right. A year or so before they pulled out, they asked for comments and suggestions; we all mailed them saying that they had to market their products! That they had to market aggressively in the USA, that it would be worthwhile as there were lots of USians who would be very impressed if they ever got to hear of Psions, that third-party agreements just wouldn't cut it, that they had to MARKET to survive.
If your water is soft (or you're using distilled or deionised water) then maybe. But I've seen the thin layer of minerals that hard tap water can leave on electronics. I wouldn't try it myself...
I don't think we're in disagreement at all -- I was saying that Palm-style machines have given the impression that all pocket computers are as limited as that; we Psion users know just how wrong that impression is!
As you say, I can't wait for a new machine of similar power arrives. Open-source based would be nice, but EPOC is so well optimised for best use of the available screen space, application switching, use of the touch screen, etc. that I'd be surprised to find anything else as useful for a long while...
When it became clear that the 5mx was no longer supported, I looked around in case there was something better to move on to. A colour screen, headphone output, faster processor, etc. would have been tempting, but I've seen nothing even now that would let me do anywhere near all the things I use my 5mx for. So my future-proofing consists of a spare 5mx!
BTW, it's well worth upgrading to the 5mx if you can find one. The screen's much clearer, it's a lot faster, and the comms side of things is much more solid. Plus you can use Opera instead of Psion's browser, which is also faster and more compatible.
As a long-time user of various Psions (currently a Series 5mx), I view the popularity of Palm-style machines as a very mixed blessing. They've brought computer power to people and situations for which it wouldn't otherwise have been suitable, and many folk find them very useful. But they carry subliminal messages: Mobile computers are for data retrieval, not really data entry. They have little memory or computing power. The available applications are small, limited, and proprietary. They're only really suitable as an adjunct to a desktop computer, not a machine in their own right. Etc. etc.
These limitations (and I know that not all Palm-style machines have them all, but it's a common impression) don't apply to all palmtops. Mine has a keyboard you can touch-type on; I've used it to write articles for publication, large applications, etc. It has a 640x240 screen that's plenty wide enough to read books, web pages, spreadsheets, etc. Its OS (EPOC, the forerunner of Symbian OS currently powering many mobile phones) is exceptionally stable -- apart from hardware failure, I don't think it's crashed once. Although I have a powerful desktop machine, I only connect to it for backups; everything I use my Psion for stays there, and I've never felt the need to sync with anything else. I have lots of powerful applications at my fingertips: office apps that can exchange files with Word and Excel, route planning/GPS, capable web browsers, a Doom engine and many other games, you name it.
People are often amazed by the things I've got to hand: the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Brewer's, Webster's, the Jargon File, and loads of similar reference works; three different Bible translations; MBs of fiction and other books; the core data from the IMDB, etc. Most of the time it's my only email client, and also my only Off-Line Reader for the CIX BBS, holding well over 100,000 messages -- both connecting via my mobile phone as well as land lines. It has Java, Perl, Python, and also a powerful built-in language called OPL (recently open-sourced); and it's possible to do full-scale development on it (I know coz I'm co-author of the OLR mentioned before). It uses standard TrueType &c fonts, displays PDFs, connects with FTP and telnet, plays back MP3s, and loads more. In short, it's a fully-fledged, powerful computer in its own right.
I mention all this not to show off (well, maybe just a bit:) but to show that there's much more to pocket computers than most people think. (Lots of folks, especially in the USA, have never heard of Psions, which is a shame. Although they're no longer made, second-hand ones are highly sought-after.) And yet most people still think of a palmtop as something just for looking at a few agenda entries, checking a few addresses, and playing a few games.
If that's all you think a PDA is good for, then no wonder people think you can squeeze it all onto a phone! But for those of us who really use our palmtops, this seems a waste, a travesty of what mobile computing could be.
OTOH, maybe things aren't so depressing. It's possible that once all those simple PDA functions have been transferred to phones, that there will be room for some market differentiation, and that more powerful palmtops might become more popular. When Psion pulled out of the consumer market, their message was effectively "everyone wants Palms; too few people want something more powerful". Maybe if all of those light users move onto something even smaller (in every respect), there will be enough of us left for it to be worth making powerful pocket computers again.
If people start to remove money from the equation, what's left?
Firstly, as other folks have said, `the equation' is a broad area, covering applications software, systems software, consumer hardware, infrastructure, services, and loads of other parts. This simply affects one part.
And secondly, we're not starting to remove money from this part; we're simply ensuring it doesn't enter it! Think about it: almost all the standards for which the web etc. have become known are patent-free. Do you think the web would have taken off in the first place had HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. been patent-encumbered? And yet it's become widely used, and lots of people are making money from it in other ways anyway. This isn't a new way of doing things by any stretch.
Yep. And they don't have long at all this time around. Symbian is hardly a new kid on the block - their OS, for example, has been in development for the best part of a decade, and is on its seventh generation already. M$ can throw money and FUD, but they'll have a hard time matching Symbian's experience and mindshare amongst all the mobile phone manufacturers.
The problem is that DRM makes copyright terms effectively infinite! It doesn't matter when it becomes legal for you to do something you can't physically do.
Maybe that would be the basis of a better question:
"Do any of the current or proposed methods of protecting digital rights expire when the corresponding copyright term expires? If not, don't they effectively provide an infinite copyright term? How do you square this with the spirit of the `limited terms' clause of the Copyright Act?"
(Assuming I've got the legal reference right; I'm not a USian.)
My wife was a math major in college, and she sometimes has problems doing calculations in her head.
Yeah, coz all we learn about in advanced maths is arithmetic. We spend our time learning how to multiply 17-digit numbers, and calculating cube roots...
(Seriously, there are some people who seem to think that!) It's ironic, really, as the higher you get in maths, the less you use numbers at all. By degree level, you can get away with 0, 1, i, and various species of infinity. Oh, and 17. (And there's a prize for anyone who can tell me why 17:)
Re:Intel C++ Compiler 7.1 Rules
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GCC 3.3 Released
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Can only dream about? I can't speak for C# (not that I'd want to anyway), but Java's singly-rooted object tree means that it can already do all that stuff. Templates/generics would only add a little compile-time safety. And they're coming in JDK1.5, anyway.
Re:Intel C++ Compiler 7.1 Rules
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GCC 3.3 Released
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It's also got extremely good error messages, which [is] very important for C++ programmers.
Let's just look at that line again for a bit, shall we?
I wonder whether that says more about the cruftiness of the language, or the incompetence of most of its programmers...
[fx: enters nuclear bunker]
Re:What does "solicited" mean?
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Spam, Milord
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I wouldn't be surprised to find that your common-sense definition differs significantly from legal definitions. (Which probably differ themselves between jurisdictions...)
Those were relatively easy cases, anyway; what about one where you've expressly agreed to receiving particular types of email from a party (without commenting on other types) and they send you another type? Or a mail that could be construed as being of either type? What if you've agreed to receiving any email from a company, and you receive one from another company in the same group? Or from someone acting as their agent, or subcontractor, or who's taken over their business?
And this `existing trading relationship' - what types of email should that justify sending you? And for how long after any contact from your are they justified in sending you email?
I don't believe that the moral dividing line between acceptable email and spam is necessarily that narrow; and as I said, I expect the legal one to be similarly broad, once you take loopholes into account.
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want.
I'm surprised to see this. We already have the Fax Preference Service which you can register with, after which it's unlawful to fax you without prior consent. It works well, too - as does the corresponding Telephone Preference Service for normal phone calls.
What does "solicited" mean?
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Spam, Milord
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· Score: 1
"Please send me stuff I don't want you to send me."?
Yeah, it's funny, but it raises a serious question: just what exactly does "unsolicited" mean in this context?
That you expressly asked for this particular piece of email?
That you expressly asked for emails of this type from this party?
That you didn't expressly ask NOT to get emails of this type?
That you expressly asked for any and all emails from this party?
That you didn't expressly ask NOT to get any email from them?
Etc. Etc.
It seems to me that there are different levels of "solicited". And that this is where spammers will find loopholes to use to their advantage...
Re:Reminds me of Linux circa 1994
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OS X Hacks
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Ah, maybe I'm a little out of date, then...
[fx: wanders off muttering about writing database code before you were born, etc.]
Re:Reminds me of Linux circa 1994
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OS X Hacks
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· Score: 1
If I were a non-geek reading that review I would be offended
If you were a non-geek, then you wouldn't be installing a database! And yes, that's exactly the point.
I'm all for making things as simple to install, understand, and use as possible; I hate some of the elitism that you get in tech circles, especially where Open Source is concerned. But you have to bear in mind your audience. Databases can't be compared to consumer apps like browsers and music players, or even to window managers and simple command-line tools. They're complex beasties, and few folks need 'em; if you can't set one up from the docs, then what's the chance you're going to be able to use it once it's set up anyway?
Better would be languages which are self-documenting... you don't need to read the comments because the purpose is clear anyway.
Even if you could program in plain English, that would still only tell you the how: the low level of what it's doing and how it does it. Those sort of comments are usually redundant or obsolete, anyway.
What's important to comment is why: the big picture of what's being done and how it fits into the rest of the system. Once you know that, then you can work out the rest, readable code or not, and work effectively. And that's what no amount of self-documenting code can do.
What next, for the RAM itself? I don't think there's much that value in further doublings...either of capacity, or soon, of speed.
Capacity, maybe, but speed? I remember the days when RAM ran at the same speed as the processor. Then we had processors running at multiples of the RAM speed, then cache memory because the RAM wasn't fast enough, then two levels of cache, three... Cache is very ingenious and useful, but now that we have processors running at twenty times the RAM speed, it has a lot of catching up to do, and I can't see how you can say that soon, faster RAM won't be of benefit.
ANSI C does define NULL to be exactly zero. K&R 2nd ed, section 5.4, p.102:
Pointers and integers are not interchangeable. Zero is the sole exception: the constant zero may be assigned to a pointer, and a pointer may be compared with the constant zero. The symbolic constant
NULL is often used in place of zero, as a mnemonic to indicate more clearly that this is a special value for a pointer. NULL is defined in <stdio.h>.
Just above, it says that:
C guarantees that zero is never a valid address for data
As far as the C language is concerned, the null pointer is always zero; zero is a special value which tells the compiler that you mean a null pointer. The compiler may map that to any bit pattern it likes to match the underlying machine architecture, but that's completely transparent to the programmer.
That's why NULL is defined to be plain 0. Always. Not even (void *) 0, as many think, though that wouldn't do any harm. Plain zero is all that's needed. You could use plain zeroes all through your code, and it'd still be completely portable, though less readable. In fact, we all rely on it being zero every time we test for a null pointer with the ! operator!
Slashdot Mirror
ObQuote: "Quite frankly I'm against people who give vent to their loquacity by extraneous bombastic circumlocution."
Diabolicalness? Diabolicism, perhaps. Diabolicity?
[fx: checks dictionary]
Ah. Diabolism. Or even diablerie. Easy once you know, innit?!
Fine. If you're sure that they really will never have to hook up to something else. And that you won't want to save development time by using one of the existing libraries for handling that standard. Or debugging or monitoring tools. Or any existing implementations for test purposes. Or any of the literature. Etc. etc.
Sure, there are times when it's really worth doing your own thing. But most popular standards have become so for a reason, and unless you have an equally good reason to avoid them, you might find that the extra bit of work supporting them pays off.
There are times I hate to be proved right...
If your water is soft (or you're using distilled or deionised water) then maybe. But I've seen the thin layer of minerals that hard tap water can leave on electronics. I wouldn't try it myself...
As you say, I can't wait for a new machine of similar power arrives. Open-source based would be nice, but EPOC is so well optimised for best use of the available screen space, application switching, use of the touch screen, etc. that I'd be surprised to find anything else as useful for a long while...
When it became clear that the 5mx was no longer supported, I looked around in case there was something better to move on to. A colour screen, headphone output, faster processor, etc. would have been tempting, but I've seen nothing even now that would let me do anywhere near all the things I use my 5mx for. So my future-proofing consists of a spare 5mx!
BTW, it's well worth upgrading to the 5mx if you can find one. The screen's much clearer, it's a lot faster, and the comms side of things is much more solid. Plus you can use Opera instead of Psion's browser, which is also faster and more compatible.
These limitations (and I know that not all Palm-style machines have them all, but it's a common impression) don't apply to all palmtops. Mine has a keyboard you can touch-type on; I've used it to write articles for publication, large applications, etc. It has a 640x240 screen that's plenty wide enough to read books, web pages, spreadsheets, etc. Its OS (EPOC, the forerunner of Symbian OS currently powering many mobile phones) is exceptionally stable -- apart from hardware failure, I don't think it's crashed once. Although I have a powerful desktop machine, I only connect to it for backups; everything I use my Psion for stays there, and I've never felt the need to sync with anything else. I have lots of powerful applications at my fingertips: office apps that can exchange files with Word and Excel, route planning/GPS, capable web browsers, a Doom engine and many other games, you name it.
People are often amazed by the things I've got to hand: the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Brewer's, Webster's, the Jargon File, and loads of similar reference works; three different Bible translations; MBs of fiction and other books; the core data from the IMDB, etc. Most of the time it's my only email client, and also my only Off-Line Reader for the CIX BBS, holding well over 100,000 messages -- both connecting via my mobile phone as well as land lines. It has Java, Perl, Python, and also a powerful built-in language called OPL (recently open-sourced); and it's possible to do full-scale development on it (I know coz I'm co-author of the OLR mentioned before). It uses standard TrueType &c fonts, displays PDFs, connects with FTP and telnet, plays back MP3s, and loads more. In short, it's a fully-fledged, powerful computer in its own right.
I mention all this not to show off (well, maybe just a bit :) but to show that there's much more to pocket computers than most people think. (Lots of folks, especially in the USA, have never heard of Psions, which is a shame. Although they're no longer made, second-hand ones are highly sought-after.) And yet most people still think of a palmtop as something just for looking at a few agenda entries, checking a few addresses, and playing a few games.
If that's all you think a PDA is good for, then no wonder people think you can squeeze it all onto a phone! But for those of us who really use our palmtops, this seems a waste, a travesty of what mobile computing could be.
OTOH, maybe things aren't so depressing. It's possible that once all those simple PDA functions have been transferred to phones, that there will be room for some market differentiation, and that more powerful palmtops might become more popular. When Psion pulled out of the consumer market, their message was effectively "everyone wants Palms; too few people want something more powerful". Maybe if all of those light users move onto something even smaller (in every respect), there will be enough of us left for it to be worth making powerful pocket computers again.
Well, I can hope...
In any case, as you say, being able to bypass the access control is unlikely to be useful, safe, or worthwhile other than as (maybe) a security risk.
Firstly, as other folks have said, `the equation' is a broad area, covering applications software, systems software, consumer hardware, infrastructure, services, and loads of other parts. This simply affects one part.
And secondly, we're not starting to remove money from this part; we're simply ensuring it doesn't enter it! Think about it: almost all the standards for which the web etc. have become known are patent-free. Do you think the web would have taken off in the first place had HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. been patent-encumbered? And yet it's become widely used, and lots of people are making money from it in other ways anyway. This isn't a new way of doing things by any stretch.
Yep. And they don't have long at all this time around. Symbian is hardly a new kid on the block - their OS, for example, has been in development for the best part of a decade, and is on its seventh generation already. M$ can throw money and FUD, but they'll have a hard time matching Symbian's experience and mindshare amongst all the mobile phone manufacturers.
Maybe that would be the basis of a better question:
(Assuming I've got the legal reference right; I'm not a USian.)Yeah, coz all we learn about in advanced maths is arithmetic. We spend our time learning how to multiply 17-digit numbers, and calculating cube roots...
(Seriously, there are some people who seem to think that!) It's ironic, really, as the higher you get in maths, the less you use numbers at all. By degree level, you can get away with 0, 1, i, and various species of infinity. Oh, and 17. (And there's a prize for anyone who can tell me why 17 :)
Can only dream about? I can't speak for C# (not that I'd want to anyway), but Java's singly-rooted object tree means that it can already do all that stuff. Templates/generics would only add a little compile-time safety. And they're coming in JDK1.5, anyway.
Let's just look at that line again for a bit, shall we?
I wonder whether that says more about the cruftiness of the language, or the incompetence of most of its programmers...
[fx: enters nuclear bunker]
Those were relatively easy cases, anyway; what about one where you've expressly agreed to receiving particular types of email from a party (without commenting on other types) and they send you another type? Or a mail that could be construed as being of either type? What if you've agreed to receiving any email from a company, and you receive one from another company in the same group? Or from someone acting as their agent, or subcontractor, or who's taken over their business?
And this `existing trading relationship' - what types of email should that justify sending you? And for how long after any contact from your are they justified in sending you email?
I don't believe that the moral dividing line between acceptable email and spam is necessarily that narrow; and as I said, I expect the legal one to be similarly broad, once you take loopholes into account.
I bet you folks in the US have just as many. The difference is: we don't immediately look around for someone to sue...
Yeah, it's funny, but it raises a serious question: just what exactly does "unsolicited" mean in this context?
- That you expressly asked for this particular piece of email?
- That you expressly asked for emails of this type from this party?
- That you didn't expressly ask NOT to get emails of this type?
- That you expressly asked for any and all emails from this party?
- That you didn't expressly ask NOT to get any email from them?
- Etc. Etc.
It seems to me that there are different levels of "solicited". And that this is where spammers will find loopholes to use to their advantage...[fx: wanders off muttering about writing database code before you were born, etc.]
If you were a non-geek, then you wouldn't be installing a database! And yes, that's exactly the point.
I'm all for making things as simple to install, understand, and use as possible; I hate some of the elitism that you get in tech circles, especially where Open Source is concerned. But you have to bear in mind your audience. Databases can't be compared to consumer apps like browsers and music players, or even to window managers and simple command-line tools. They're complex beasties, and few folks need 'em; if you can't set one up from the docs, then what's the chance you're going to be able to use it once it's set up anyway?
What's important to comment is why: the big picture of what's being done and how it fits into the rest of the system. Once you know that, then you can work out the rest, readable code or not, and work effectively. And that's what no amount of self-documenting code can do.
Capacity, maybe, but speed? I remember the days when RAM ran at the same speed as the processor. Then we had processors running at multiples of the RAM speed, then cache memory because the RAM wasn't fast enough, then two levels of cache, three... Cache is very ingenious and useful, but now that we have processors running at twenty times the RAM speed, it has a lot of catching up to do, and I can't see how you can say that soon, faster RAM won't be of benefit.
As far as the C language is concerned, the null pointer is always zero; zero is a special value which tells the compiler that you mean a null pointer. The compiler may map that to any bit pattern it likes to match the underlying machine architecture, but that's completely transparent to the programmer.
That's why NULL is defined to be plain 0. Always. Not even (void *) 0, as many think, though that wouldn't do any harm. Plain zero is all that's needed. You could use plain zeroes all through your code, and it'd still be completely portable, though less readable. In fact, we all rely on it being zero every time we test for a null pointer with the ! operator!