The cars have doubled their speed and (guess) tripelled their complexity during the last fifty years. Computers and software do that within 14 months. Most books take longer to be printed than the information in them takes to become 50% worthless.
If you want to get exact reliable figures, you can have them. Sure! But only for projects we did 5 years ago - no ploblem, mistel, new calbulatol needed. Will be leady tomollow evening and cost 350 dollals!
"When I first wrote about this topic, nobody took a blind bit of notice."
No, sir, I did and many collegues who were also interested in good timely work. We lent your books to each other with the notion "that's something you should read".
Great to hear that you are still alife and enjoying to give programmers and their managers something to look at and something worth to read and think about.
Youngsters, better pay respect to this old software camel with the hole in the sole of his shoe (and probably also in his all-too British pullover), or I DDOS your toilet!
... the economy is still not really growing - only able to level even.
Rising is never as fast as falling. And the mergers are not going to reduce the over-capacities. OK the memory was really too cheap, I think. But the rest? Flatscreens are not _that_ cheap.
So all comes down to wishfull thinking for my opinion. We have ample time to compare prices and bargain. I don't need a Dell or HP - on the inside they are pretty much the same anyway.
If anybody needs dollars to act responseably he is not the politician who gets my vote. If the dirty old $$-politicians are continuing their copyright-extensions they kill their own political base of the future - the young people.
A better tactic would be to inform the youngsters of what is going on. Let's better support a FreeCopy movement with free webspace and bandwidth.
Today it's MP3, tomorrow it's our freedom which is at stake.
This fight between old and new society is going on all over the planet - be it copyright or patentability of software.
The current usage of copyrighting software (and even more patenting it) will create a lot of the so called 'illegal' activities. Pretty much like the prohibition created 'illegal' deeds.
Laws should be a help to life, should support the overall situation, should regulate but not rule our lifes. If we continue these old laws, our children grow up as law-breakers, but that's not their fault.
Either the Western Sphere adopt their laws to the modern pace of development or the really interesting software development and distribution in 2020+ will happen in countries without these wrotten old concepts of intellectual property.
If truth is something which needs discussion, then the whole relationship is untrue from the very beginning.
Next time you are asked, wether the software you wrote ws really tested against suchandsuch situation and you again have to think it over wether to confess that you've forgotten it or lie straight into your coordinator's face. And so on and so forth.
Of course, if your boss is that unaware, that she/he doesn't recognise when you lie, she/he deserves it. But on the other hand, if you are a liar you deserve the same kind of persons to peer with.
That's simply not a matter of morale, it's a matter of intelligence: you will attract persons and situations of the same attitude. That's a law of nature.
So simply decide on the basis of how you'd like to be treated - because in the long run you will be treated alike - wherever it may be: in the job, at home or abroad.
- like the first DOS operating system marked the beginning of the software aera, where software started to dominate hardware.
What we are now part of is the swing from money to attention. Instead of paying in dollars the internet currency is becoming attention.
Teoma tries to become one of the bigger players here, but I doubt it's success. Anyway it's interesting that the fight is clearly about the new currency - and the new currency they are after is attention.
A far way:
personal satisfaction
--> goods
--> services
--> money
--> attention
...it doesn't flicker, I can get closer and at the same time the eye (actually it's only one good eye left who has to do the work now) has less stress.
When I have the money, I'll go for an 18 inch TFT monitor and adjust the font sizes to my needs. The monitors btw come in slightly different dot sizes - try out the different brands which yuite your eyes best, It's anyway important to pick the individual monitor yourself, a high contrast ratio is certainly important (should have at least 1:300) as well as the possible viewing angle plays a role. Hence I wouldn't buy the monitor just according to the technical specs, but have a 'close' look myself. And then I buy the very same monitor I found satisfying, because a monitor out of the box might have annoying broken pixels and still conform to the spec:(
If you have not done so, I'd also recommend to learn typing with ten fingers (i.e. so called 'blindly'). Having to look to the monitor and then to the keyboard and then back to the monitor again etc. places additional stress on the eye muscles (including the little muscles which adjust for the viewing distance).
Perhaps one of the X86-gurus is reading this also - may I ask you to implement different mouse cursor sizes, shapes and color/contrast layouts, which can be configured in one central place? That's certainly one of the points where Windows is better than Linux - although the X-Window system still needs to learn those tricks.
Let's use the technology for us - using it against us we've done long enough, I think.
About some things we cannot do anything - like pouring wine an inch behind the glass, when you have only one eye and no stereoscopic view.o)
...and being accepted by the industry as a partner of equal rights. A win - not against the strongest Sun we have ever seen, but anyway a good starting point for the "IE, Apache clash on web standards" recently discussed her at slashdot. Microsoft might not be as easy as Sun was, but strong sparring partners are good for the muscles.o)
Seen from the Europen side of the Atlantic this is the old story of American women societies dominating the countries official morale since the wild west. A French prime minister for example would never be considered uncapable of doing politics just because he had a girl friend after office hours. Everybody would just say "Gee, he's still a man of power, our prime minister, isn't he?".
The porno sites would not be there, if nobody would ever click on their links. Where are these clicks coming from, from dirty ol' men overseas only? And the interest in pornography would not be that great, if normal sex life was accepted and more freely available.
Double morale, politicians fear the influence of the old womens societies and that's it. On the surface - while underneath Big Brother is watching you. The result will be less money for organisations who really need it - public libraries. My god! Who has ever though about viewing porno sites in a public library? Must be pretty twisted brains who think that an imminent thread the government should be concerned with.
This great guy (I'm not going to use his name, no M'am) tells a Linux readership that RPMs should be used, that directories for binfiles, configfiles, data and logs help acceptance of your software - huh? And at the same time he is not able to apply his great separation of content from configuration to his own paper?
And what's the content? A paper how to package Linux-applications - for mainframers who just have their second day of "introduction to Linux for programmers who did up to now think, that CPU-speed is measured in kilo-tons".
What might be good for business solutions is not neccessaryly acceptable at home. Or else all the games would be written in COBOL.
Sun is still dreaming it's Java dream and at the same time putting down the Open Source Software development. Looks like Sun is in desperate search for market share and money but without any new idea in stock.
Anonymous Coward, with your idea, that "This is a novel approach to images - until now they were always thought of as continuous."
Back in 1987 I've allready participated in a project, were we applied this concept - first extract features, then decode it. It was part a character recognition program. Great idea, no font face learning needed any longer (in theory). For example recognise a 'X' by the central crossing and open space above and below it, while an '8' has top and bottom horizontal lines in addition to the central crossing.
The results were about 90% recognition rates - simply not good enough for text recognition, nearly any simple neural network can do better.
The very first commercially used character recognition (IBMs scanner for handwriting numbers) also used the same technique. And what a fuss it was to draw the digits correctly! Any interrupted line or little dirt caused false reads.
I also know from the published scientific papers, that similiar approaches have been tried on face recognitions. Financed by (no wonder:) government funds, since the early 90ies there must have been some work done on face recognition using the feature-approach. To overcome situations, where the person tried deliberatedly to hide (had grown a beard, shaved the head, put on some makeup, a wig or making faces) the scientists tried to extract unchanging features of the human face. The dimension of the bones, the proportions of the scull, the distance of the eyes are used for that.
The publication of these works later stopped in the mid 1990ies. So either the goals could not be accomplished, or - that's my personal feeling - they could be accomplished, but the resulting technology was not used commercially.
I bet a Munich beer, that there are projects going on (or even allready realized) to apply the results of that old and by now matured techniques to situations where they are useful today.
So better don't do your side leaps under they eyes of airport cameras, if your spouse is working for one of the interested government agencies, Anonymous Coward..o)
I see your point and the added security and separate administration possibilties may be worth the additional development and maintenance costs IMO. E.g. using separate firewall rules and different means of authentication is appealing.
And then such a (say) sftp-deamon should have it's separate port and PAM-entry. While using the same protocol (with functionality of limiting everything to file-access only), so that existing sftp-clients can be used without software changes - just entering a different port number.
The idea looks interesting enough to discuss it in the openssh development list and try to set up a prototype implementation.
I don't have the time for that, but I'll donate my birthday (the 26th) as port number for the project..o)
Given the test-setup of Clark Williams the natural way to measure the impact of those kernel patches IMO would be to summarize the results of the different tests for each kind of test independantly.
The differences between the unpatched kernel and the patched versions than would give an estimate how the patches influence the overall system behaviour.
The CPU-intensive tests are then an indication what influences the patches have on pure OS overhead, while the IO-intensive tests show the (hopefully positive) effects of latency reduction.
A rough and unscientific measurement method, but easy to implement (e.g. just counting the number of times each particular test was run during the test-period). Of course all the tests would influence each other, but that's not in opposition to the heuristic/stochastic test-setup and well in tune with the goal to improve the real-time behavour without changing the overall effiency of linux negatively.
Just a dummies way to measure immeasurable things.
I misinterpreted some comment I read about the proposal of the European commitee. So here in Europa we might get the same situation regarding patentability of software. And of course, we created them for ourselves as well:-(
Everyone trying to track down a spam-source probably allready had the same problem:
How to tell the complaining enduser to forward you the spam-email with all email headers intact? "What are email-headers?" is the number one question you hear. After two minutes explanation the next question will probably be "Where do I have to click to do that?". And another five minutes explanation later you know that you will never get that spam-email intact because you hear a phone ringing or the boss asking "Is that report ready?" in the background.
Why not adding one button to each mail-client labelled "This is SPAM"? So the user simply has to click this button, is asked a confirmation question like "Do you really want to send the messaged titled blah..blah to your anti-spam department and erase it?" and then whoosh the mail is send with all headers (as an attachment) and with the propper legal text in in "user thisandthat declared the attached email a being UCE blah..blah". And the configurable antispam-address defaults to - say - spam@users_main_email_domain where you or your script is ready to handle it.
Then depending on your policy you can check it and report it to the spammers ISP, or have an automatic script behind it, which updates your block-lists (e.g. after a number of complaints about the same sender or depending on the trustworthyness of the enduser). You could even implement scripts, which automatically delete this email (or all emails from the same source) from the POP accounts of your server and send them back to where they came from - with the propper RFC-compliant messages. Or send them to spamcop or whatever your agreed-on anti-spam policy says.
Perhaps you know a friend who is writing Email-Clients or Plugins for these beasts (or you yourself can you that).
If it's time to fight back, let's use automatic weapons!
Slashdot Mirror
The cars have doubled their speed and (guess) tripelled their complexity during the last fifty years. Computers and software do that within 14 months. Most books take longer to be printed than the information in them takes to become 50% worthless.
If you want to get exact reliable figures, you can have them. Sure! But only for projects we did 5 years ago - no ploblem, mistel, new calbulatol needed. Will be leady tomollow evening and cost 350 dollals!
You didn't get it that he is simply doing what he wants to do, doing it good and trying to motivate others to do good reliable work also?
Mastery is when you know (and not only guess), that you can only search.
Illusion is when you think you got it.
"When I first wrote about this topic, nobody took a blind bit of notice."
No, sir, I did and many collegues who were also interested in good timely work. We lent your books to each other with the notion "that's something you should read".
Great to hear that you are still alife and enjoying to give programmers and their managers something to look at and something worth to read and think about.
Youngsters, better pay respect to this old software camel with the hole in the sole of his shoe (and probably also in his all-too British pullover), or I DDOS your toilet!
The law is an ass? Well, if it comes to my freedom to write good software using prooven algorithms I can be a pain in any ...
No chance Mr. President and Mr. Gates - I'm on the keyboard, not you.
... the economy is still not really growing - only able to level even.
Rising is never as fast as falling. And the mergers are not going to reduce the over-capacities. OK the memory was really too cheap, I think. But the rest? Flatscreens are not _that_ cheap.
So all comes down to wishfull thinking for my opinion. We have ample time to compare prices and bargain. I don't need a Dell or HP - on the inside they are pretty much the same anyway.
If anybody needs dollars to act responseably he is not the politician who gets my vote. If the dirty old $$-politicians are continuing their copyright-extensions they kill their own political base of the future - the young people.
A better tactic would be to inform the youngsters of what is going on. Let's better support a FreeCopy movement with free webspace and bandwidth.
Today it's MP3, tomorrow it's our freedom which is at stake.
This fight between old and new society is going on all over the planet - be it copyright or patentability of software.
The current usage of copyrighting software (and even more patenting it) will create a lot of the so called 'illegal' activities. Pretty much like the prohibition created 'illegal' deeds.
Laws should be a help to life, should support the overall situation, should regulate but not rule our lifes. If we continue these old laws, our children grow up as law-breakers, but that's not their fault.
Either the Western Sphere adopt their laws to the modern pace of development or the really interesting software development and distribution in 2020+ will happen in countries without these wrotten old concepts of intellectual property.
If that was really our standpoint, there would be nothing to discuss about.
Fact is: we lie. Often.
Excuse is: others do it also.
Who is continuing this dance around the golden calf, if not me? Who should stop that, if not me? When should it stop, if not now?
If truth is something which needs discussion, then the whole relationship is untrue from the very beginning.
Next time you are asked, wether the software you wrote ws really tested against suchandsuch situation and you again have to think it over wether to confess that you've forgotten it or lie straight into your coordinator's face. And so on and so forth.
Of course, if your boss is that unaware, that she/he doesn't recognise when you lie, she/he deserves it. But on the other hand, if you are a liar you deserve the same kind of persons to peer with.
That's simply not a matter of morale, it's a matter of intelligence: you will attract persons and situations of the same attitude. That's a law of nature.
So simply decide on the basis of how you'd like to be treated - because in the long run you will be treated alike - wherever it may be: in the job, at home or abroad.
The faster food runs away the better is it's taste - or the more difficult is is to proove the opposite.
Hyopothesis: Easter hare tastes better than St. Claus. Anybody here to confirm that?
- like the first DOS operating system marked the beginning of the software aera, where software started to dominate hardware.
What we are now part of is the swing from money to attention. Instead of paying in dollars the internet currency is becoming attention.
Teoma tries to become one of the bigger players here, but I doubt it's success. Anyway it's interesting that the fight is clearly about the new currency - and the new currency they are after is attention.
A far way:
personal satisfaction
--> goods
--> services
--> money
--> attention
...it doesn't flicker, I can get closer and at the same time the eye (actually it's only one good eye left who has to do the work now) has less stress.
:(
.o)
When I have the money, I'll go for an 18 inch TFT monitor and adjust the font sizes to my needs. The monitors btw come in slightly different dot sizes - try out the different brands which yuite your eyes best, It's anyway important to pick the individual monitor yourself, a high contrast ratio is certainly important (should have at least 1:300) as well as the possible viewing angle plays a role. Hence I wouldn't buy the monitor just according to the technical specs, but have a 'close' look myself. And then I buy the very same monitor I found satisfying, because a monitor out of the box might have annoying broken pixels and still conform to the spec
If you have not done so, I'd also recommend to learn typing with ten fingers (i.e. so called 'blindly'). Having to look to the monitor and then to the keyboard and then back to the monitor again etc. places additional stress on the eye muscles (including the little muscles which adjust for the viewing distance).
Perhaps one of the X86-gurus is reading this also - may I ask you to implement different mouse cursor sizes, shapes and color/contrast layouts, which can be configured in one central place? That's certainly one of the points where Windows is better than Linux - although the X-Window system still needs to learn those tricks.
Let's use the technology for us - using it against us we've done long enough, I think.
About some things we cannot do anything - like pouring wine an inch behind the glass, when you have only one eye and no stereoscopic view
...and being accepted by the industry as a partner of equal rights. A win - not against the strongest Sun we have ever seen, but anyway a good starting point for the "IE, Apache clash on web standards" recently discussed her at slashdot. Microsoft might not be as easy as Sun was, but strong sparring partners are good for the muscles .o)
Yes, in indeed, now all the good porn has to be reimported. Terrible.
But also has it's advantages: English has become the world language, it's no longer French.
Don't let anybody tell you, that the Playboy articels are only place-fillers. No, not at all: we Europeans need them for our kid's education.
"a serious threat to effectiveness of the government efforts..." - are the medieval Machiavellian ideas of the government itself.
The Open Source development was only proof, that the lag between reality and government is 10 years at least - and growing.
Seen from the Europen side of the Atlantic this is the old story of American women societies dominating the countries official morale since the wild west. A French prime minister for example would never be considered uncapable of doing politics just because he had a girl friend after office hours. Everybody would just say "Gee, he's still a man of power, our prime minister, isn't he?".
The porno sites would not be there, if nobody would ever click on their links. Where are these clicks coming from, from dirty ol' men overseas only? And the interest in pornography would not be that great, if normal sex life was accepted and more freely available.
Double morale, politicians fear the influence of the old womens societies and that's it. On the surface - while underneath Big Brother is watching you. The result will be less money for organisations who really need it - public libraries. My god! Who has ever though about viewing porno sites in a public library? Must be pretty twisted brains who think that an imminent thread the government should be concerned with.
Carrying guns is OK, but dicks - my god!
... the Best Investment Oscar?
Or is that the Meta-Oscar anyway?
I liked the LOTR, but I love to see Jacky Chan movies also, so that doesn't count too much.
Where is Amelie, where are all the good films done outside Hollywood?
A show of self-applauding with glycerin tears.
But why not? Have seen worse movies and shows during the last 12 months. Still shuddering from Bin Laden's "Lord of The Holy War".
This great guy (I'm not going to use his name, no M'am) tells a Linux readership that RPMs should be used, that directories for binfiles, configfiles, data and logs help acceptance of your software - huh? And at the same time he is not able to apply his great separation of content from configuration to his own paper?
.o)
And what's the content? A paper how to package Linux-applications - for mainframers who just have their second day of "introduction to Linux for programmers who did up to now think, that CPU-speed is measured in kilo-tons".
Instead of bogomips, of course
What might be good for business solutions is not neccessaryly acceptable at home. Or else all the games would be written in COBOL.
Sun is still dreaming it's Java dream and at the same time putting down the Open Source Software development. Looks like Sun is in desperate search for market share and money but without any new idea in stock.
Anonymous Coward, with your idea, that "This is a novel approach to images - until now they were always thought of as continuous."
Back in 1987 I've allready participated in a project, were we applied this concept - first extract features, then decode it. It was part a character recognition program. Great idea, no font face learning needed any longer (in theory). For example recognise a 'X' by the central crossing and open space above and below it, while an '8' has top and bottom horizontal lines in addition to the central crossing.
The results were about 90% recognition rates - simply not good enough for text recognition, nearly any simple neural network can do better.
The very first commercially used character recognition (IBMs scanner for handwriting numbers) also used the same technique. And what a fuss it was to draw the digits correctly! Any interrupted line or little dirt caused false reads.
I also know from the published scientific papers, that similiar approaches have been tried on face recognitions. Financed by (no wonder :) government funds, since the early 90ies there must have been some work done on face recognition using the feature-approach. To overcome situations, where the person tried deliberatedly to hide (had grown a beard, shaved the head, put on some makeup, a wig or making faces) the scientists tried to extract unchanging features of the human face. The dimension of the bones, the proportions of the scull, the distance of the eyes are used for that.
The publication of these works later stopped in the mid 1990ies. So either the goals could not be accomplished, or - that's my personal feeling - they could be accomplished, but the resulting technology was not used commercially.
I bet a Munich beer, that there are projects going on (or even allready realized) to apply the results of that old and by now matured techniques to situations where they are useful today.
So better don't do your side leaps under they eyes of airport cameras, if your spouse is working for one of the interested government agencies, Anonymous Coward. .o)
Yes, Polo,
.o)
I see your point and the added security and separate administration possibilties may be worth the additional development and maintenance costs IMO. E.g. using separate firewall rules and different means of authentication is appealing.
And then such a (say) sftp-deamon should have it's separate port and PAM-entry. While using the same protocol (with functionality of limiting everything to file-access only), so that existing sftp-clients can be used without software changes - just entering a different port number.
The idea looks interesting enough to discuss it in the openssh development list and try to set up a prototype implementation.
I don't have the time for that, but I'll donate my birthday (the 26th) as port number for the project.
Given the test-setup of Clark Williams the natural way to measure the impact of those kernel patches IMO would be to summarize the results of the different tests for each kind of test independantly.
The differences between the unpatched kernel and the patched versions than would give an estimate how the patches influence the overall system behaviour.
The CPU-intensive tests are then an indication what influences the patches have on pure OS overhead, while the IO-intensive tests show the (hopefully positive) effects of latency reduction.
A rough and unscientific measurement method, but easy to implement (e.g. just counting the number of times each particular test was run during the test-period). Of course all the tests would influence each other, but that's not in opposition to the heuristic/stochastic test-setup and well in tune with the goal to improve the real-time behavour without changing the overall effiency of linux negatively.
Just a dummies way to measure immeasurable things.
I misinterpreted some comment I read about the proposal of the European commitee. So here in Europa we might get the same situation regarding patentability of software. And of course, we created them for ourselves as well :-(
My apologies for the misinformation.
But see for yourself proposal to make all useful ideas patentable
I'm missing on Clark Williams' paper how the patches influenced the OS overhead.
Everyone trying to track down a spam-source probably allready had the same problem:
How to tell the complaining enduser to forward you the spam-email with all email headers intact? "What are email-headers?" is the number one question you hear. After two minutes explanation the next question will probably be "Where do I have to click to do that?". And another five minutes explanation later you know that you will never get that spam-email intact because you hear a phone ringing or the boss asking "Is that report ready?" in the background.
Why not adding one button to each mail-client labelled "This is SPAM"? So the user simply has to click this button, is asked a confirmation question like "Do you really want to send the messaged titled blah..blah to your anti-spam department and erase it?" and then whoosh the mail is send with all headers (as an attachment) and with the propper legal text in in "user thisandthat declared the attached email a being UCE blah..blah". And the configurable antispam-address defaults to - say - spam@users_main_email_domain where you or your script is ready to handle it.
Then depending on your policy you can check it and report it to the spammers ISP, or have an automatic script behind it, which updates your block-lists (e.g. after a number of complaints about the same sender or depending on the trustworthyness of the enduser). You could even implement scripts, which automatically delete this email (or all emails from the same source) from the POP accounts of your server and send them back to where they came from - with the propper RFC-compliant messages. Or send them to spamcop or whatever your agreed-on anti-spam policy says.
Perhaps you know a friend who is writing Email-Clients or Plugins for these beasts (or you yourself can you that).
If it's time to fight back, let's use automatic weapons!