I thought about moderating this poster up, but decided that there's a fair chance I'll participate, so I'll back up this.
I do research in programming languages (almost more "program analysis" at this point). The two top conferences in our area are POPL (Principles of Programming Languages) and PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation). At least in my area, MSR (Microsoft Research) publishes at least on par with a top-tier research university, and judging by the program for POPL 2010, even more so.
Between MSR Redmond, MSR Bangalore, and MSR Cambridge, there are MSR people who are coauthors on eight of the 41 papers accepted. The next runner up: Cambridge University, with authors on "only" 3 papers. Most of those papers are collaborations between MSR people and professors at other universities. Even so, two papers are co-authored entirely by MSR employees. That ties Cambridge, Harvard, Tohoku University, UCSD, and U Penn.
MSR has also done much of the work over the last decade that's been pretty groundbreaking in software model checking (the SLAM work, and more recently, Yogi).
I can't speak to how dominant they are in other subfields, but they're at least well-respected all-around.
"Unsolved" can mean a ton of things. I'd wager the vast majority of those are cases where they don't know who the culprit is, not where the suspect can't be found.
and more broken usb ports from someone tripping over usb cable
I haven't had that, but I have had something fall on the USB connector sticking out of the front of my case and break one of the front two USB ports. Seeing as I spent a fair bit of money on an Antec P180 not too terribly long ago, and was hoping to use it even for my next computer, I'm kinda pissed about that.
Thanks for the response. Still may not be so bad; I bet you can get common dependencies out of the way without much space. Though I'm not sure how much space stuff like Gnome and KDE program dependences have.
Wow, that totally is news to me that this adaption of Portage exists.
If you know more about it, perhaps you can answer a concern: if I am using it on a non-Gentoo (non-Portage as the main package manager) system, will it need to go and install all the base libraries and such that it would if it were on a clean system, or would it be able to use the system libraries? I didn't see an answer to that question.
I know that, technically, hard-coded paths are bad style, but I can see how sometimes they just can't be avoided.
Like when? Few (at least semi-professional) Windows programs behave that way. (Visual Studio is a pretty notable exception; it demands to install a couple hundred megs of stuff on your system drive.)
I bet Gentoo's portage has an option, though, seeing as it compiles everything from scratch anyways. If it doesn't, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to hack into it, being Gentoo and all. Of course, you'd also have to put up with Gentoo...
Emerge has a ROOT variable you can set; presumably this gets passed to configure --prefix. However, I don't know of any way to run Portage without root, and can't find anything about running it on systems that aren't Gentoo.
One of my friends has even more stuff installed locally than I do; he gave GoboLinux a try a while (few months?) ago but found the rootless mode "fragile:"
(4:38:11 PM) me: what were your objections to gobolinux's package manager? remember? (4:38:36 PM) him: oh (4:38:53 PM) him: The environment it set up was really fragile (4:39:00 PM) him: I broke it several times (4:39:09 PM) me: environment variables you mean? (4:39:11 PM) him: Lots of the pkg config stuff didn't end up being found properly (4:39:29 PM) him: yeah - rootless mode just isn't tested enough and not quite robust (4:39:34 PM) him: like you couldn't change PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH much or what? (4:40:53 PM) him: It wasn't picking up libraries that you installed with it properly because it broke pkgconfig files (4:41:57 PM) him: More specifically, the directory structure they use is cool but they never patched the pkgconfig files, so pkgconfig was always wrong and not much works
I can't speak from personal experience, and I suppose things could have changed since then, but he did drop back to manual compilation.
Great for developers of programs, but from what I can tell, useless if I want to install something that someone wrote, which usually use the autotools.
Applications have to be modified to specifically support $HOME installation (or, to be more exact, installation to arbitrary locations), and most Unix apps right now don't support this without hardcoding paths during compilation time.
That's fine... whatever. I'd be perfectly happy with something like a userland emerge that compiled everything on demand.
So basically, what does it do to solve my problem?
It *does* solve a different problem I have with the Linux way of setting up packages, but I can just change '--prefix=/usr/local/stow/[PACKAGENAME-VERSION]' to '--prefix=$HOME/root' and then everything gets put in ~/root/bin, ~/root/lib, etc. as if ~/root were/usr. That's mostly how I have things set up, so it's a tiny problem in comparison to dependency resolution.
What I want is a package manager that will do installation to my own home directory -- basically the same as downloading the source and running './configure --prefix=$HOME/whatever && make install' but without the complete bitchness of dependency hell -- without any root privileges at all. Anyone know of one?
Malice aforethought doesn't have to be much "afore"; even just a moment is enough.
As to the original claim, most self defense statutes in the US provide that you can take any force that is "immediately necessary" to protect yourself (deadly force being justified if you reasonably feel you are in danger of being killed or suffering a serious bodily injury). If it ceases to be immediately necessary -- e.g. if you disable the attacker and either know or a reasonable person should have known they are no longer a threat -- your right to use such force ceases.
(IANAL, but reading about law and such was a hobby of mine back as an undergrad.)
1) You don't necessarily need to do this. 2) It isn't (at least always) very hard to do that. A couple years ago I wrote a quick utility and decided to play around with C#. For command line parsing I used Mono's GetOptions (which, by the way, is awesome; definitely one of my favorite libraries for that purpose), and it was pretty easy to get that working under VS, and I don't know all that much about.Net stuff like assemblies.
They're not *that* limited. Like I've definitely run into a couple things that I've wanted to do with them (64-bit compilers aren't supported officially, and I think you can't set it to be a JIT debugger), but at the same time it is sufficient for a lot of things. I personally worked for a company where the express editions were a primary development platform for some projects.
Lots of people have corrected you, but I'm going to correct you in a different manner: not only is SourceSafe not required, but MS has basically been trying to phase it out in favor of Team Foundation Server (part of VS Enterprise I think) for a while now.
MS knows SourceSafe is crap; it's one of the few products that no one dogfoods internally.
But when people say they 'google' something, how often are they actually using Google versus some other search engine? Does anyone say 'let me google that' and then head over to Bing? If I say I'm going to google something, I mean that I'm going to use Google.
To some extent, you're right, but think about using "Google" as a suggestion/command -- "just Google it if you want more information". While it's very probable that the person will actually use Google because of it's popularity, if I say something like that, I'm not actually telling you you have to use Google specifically, just search for it online somewhere.
It's really only when I say something like "Google this particular search query" that I'm really saying anything about Google itself.
(That being said, that was one of the worst episodes in a pretty terrible season (I say that as a big fan of TNG too), so forgetting it is entirely understandable.)
- ran the first spreadsheet program ever - ran the first MS Excel ever - ran the first MS Word with a GUI ever - ran the first mass marketed GUI word processor
None of those are revolutionary on Apple's part, unless perhaps it was Apple that actually produced the first spreadsheet, the first MS Excel, the first GUI-based MS Word, or the first mass-marketed GUI word processor.
Also I would argue that mass-marketed doesn't mean anything in terms of innovation, just business sense. (To be a bit more kind, it could be a business revolution, and Apple certainly has made many of those. However, I interpret the GP as saying that Apple hasn't made many tech revolutions.)
I've already said I think "mass-marketed" is irrelevant, and Xerox Star beat Apple to the technology.
first popular consumer OS to be based on Unix
A revolutionary business decision... not a revolutionary tech development.
first to offer a successful online music store first online phone store with 100,000 apps first phone vendor to inspect 3rd party apps
Again, there are a couple very good business decisions, but nothing innovative tech-wise.
first phone to include desktop OS+framework
AFAIK this is blatently false; the.Net Compact Framework was first released in 2002, and programs developed on that run on WinMo. I haven't actually used it myself, but I hear it is reasonably similar to programming for the desktop environment with.Net.
first OS to be safer w/o antivirus than with
Linux? BSD? Unix? Multics?
first OS to give away free IDE to programmers
Business decision. (I'd suggest it's not even that much of a business revolution. There were IDEs available for free before, and there were compliers+build systems available from (propriatary) OS vendors before, so Apple "just" combined those ideas.
first phone web browser w/ an open source core
There were phone web browsers, and there were open source browsers; it was a business decision to base their former instance on one of the latter instances.
first OS to do dropdown menus ever only GUI OS to do overlapping windows in early 80s first to offer drag-and-drop GUI design for apps
I can't speak to the first and last one, and the second one in that list looks like something Apple was possibly the first to the party. These would be tech revolutions.
Those are areas where MS is threatened, but I don't think they feel threatened by OS X in the sense we're talking about here. I'm a Windows fan*, and I would go out and pick up OS X if I could install it on my home box. Would I use it much, or would I stick with Windows? I don't know. But I'd give it a shot for a few weeks.
Most people aren't going to say "I want OS X, so I'm going to buy a completely new computer to run it on", especially people like me for whom Apple doesn't even sell anything we would or could buy (at least in the desktop arena). But if OS X were available for purchase for your home PC, or as an alternative to Windows when you buy a Dell... you can bet you'd see Windows's share drop quite a bit.
* By "fan" I mean I hate it slightly less than the alternatives overall.
Office 2007 still recognizes keyboard shortcuts from the menus of the earlier versions of Office. If you do something like "Alt, F" it will display a message that tells you to continue with the keyboard shortcut; "a" would then save-as. This is so people who had muscle memory of old shortcuts wouldn't be hampered in their use of the latest version, but at the same time they were still free to muck around with the interface.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought about moderating this poster up, but decided that there's a fair chance I'll participate, so I'll back up this.
I do research in programming languages (almost more "program analysis" at this point). The two top conferences in our area are POPL (Principles of Programming Languages) and PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation). At least in my area, MSR (Microsoft Research) publishes at least on par with a top-tier research university, and judging by the program for POPL 2010, even more so.
Between MSR Redmond, MSR Bangalore, and MSR Cambridge, there are MSR people who are coauthors on eight of the 41 papers accepted. The next runner up: Cambridge University, with authors on "only" 3 papers. Most of those papers are collaborations between MSR people and professors at other universities. Even so, two papers are co-authored entirely by MSR employees. That ties Cambridge, Harvard, Tohoku University, UCSD, and U Penn.
MSR has also done much of the work over the last decade that's been pretty groundbreaking in software model checking (the SLAM work, and more recently, Yogi).
I can't speak to how dominant they are in other subfields, but they're at least well-respected all-around.
Yeah, because that wouldn't suck for the 24,999,995 non-terrorists using these phones.
"Unsolved" can mean a ton of things. I'd wager the vast majority of those are cases where they don't know who the culprit is, not where the suspect can't be found.
"Congress has mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the US be inspected overseas."
Eh, what'll it matter. It'll only be in effect for a few months.
and more broken usb ports from someone tripping over usb cable
I haven't had that, but I have had something fall on the USB connector sticking out of the front of my case and break one of the front two USB ports. Seeing as I spent a fair bit of money on an Antec P180 not too terribly long ago, and was hoping to use it even for my next computer, I'm kinda pissed about that.
Thanks for the response. Still may not be so bad; I bet you can get common dependencies out of the way without much space. Though I'm not sure how much space stuff like Gnome and KDE program dependences have.
Wow, that totally is news to me that this adaption of Portage exists.
If you know more about it, perhaps you can answer a concern: if I am using it on a non-Gentoo (non-Portage as the main package manager) system, will it need to go and install all the base libraries and such that it would if it were on a clean system, or would it be able to use the system libraries? I didn't see an answer to that question.
I know that, technically, hard-coded paths are bad style, but I can see how sometimes they just can't be avoided.
Like when? Few (at least semi-professional) Windows programs behave that way. (Visual Studio is a pretty notable exception; it demands to install a couple hundred megs of stuff on your system drive.)
I bet Gentoo's portage has an option, though, seeing as it compiles everything from scratch anyways. If it doesn't, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to hack into it, being Gentoo and all. Of course, you'd also have to put up with Gentoo...
Emerge has a ROOT variable you can set; presumably this gets passed to configure --prefix. However, I don't know of any way to run Portage without root, and can't find anything about running it on systems that aren't Gentoo.
One of my friends has even more stuff installed locally than I do; he gave GoboLinux a try a while (few months?) ago but found the rootless mode "fragile:"
(4:38:11 PM) me: what were your objections to gobolinux's package manager? remember?
(4:38:36 PM) him: oh
(4:38:53 PM) him: The environment it set up was really fragile
(4:39:00 PM) him: I broke it several times
(4:39:09 PM) me: environment variables you mean?
(4:39:11 PM) him: Lots of the pkg config stuff didn't end up being found properly
(4:39:29 PM) him: yeah - rootless mode just isn't tested enough and not quite robust
(4:39:34 PM) him: like you couldn't change PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH much or what?
(4:40:53 PM) him: It wasn't picking up libraries that you installed with it properly because it broke pkgconfig files
(4:41:57 PM) him: More specifically, the directory structure they use is cool but they never patched the pkgconfig files, so pkgconfig was always wrong and not much works
I can't speak from personal experience, and I suppose things could have changed since then, but he did drop back to manual compilation.
You can make emerge to install stuff anywhere, don't forget to add yourself to the portage group.
Too bad this isn't Gentoo and I don't have root on it.
Autopackage.
Great for developers of programs, but from what I can tell, useless if I want to install something that someone wrote, which usually use the autotools.
Applications have to be modified to specifically support $HOME installation (or, to be more exact, installation to arbitrary locations), and most Unix apps right now don't support this without hardcoding paths during compilation time.
That's fine... whatever. I'd be perfectly happy with something like a userland emerge that compiled everything on demand.
It doesn't worry about dependencies at all...
So basically, what does it do to solve my problem?
It *does* solve a different problem I have with the Linux way of setting up packages, but I can just change '--prefix=/usr/local/stow/[PACKAGENAME-VERSION]' to '--prefix=$HOME/root' and then everything gets put in ~/root/bin, ~/root/lib, etc. as if ~/root were /usr. That's mostly how I have things set up, so it's a tiny problem in comparison to dependency resolution.
What I want is a package manager that will do installation to my own home directory -- basically the same as downloading the source and running './configure --prefix=$HOME/whatever && make install' but without the complete bitchness of dependency hell -- without any root privileges at all. Anyone know of one?
I presume you're posting from the library, that you may put the money you'd otherwise spend on an internet connection into feeding the poor?
Malice aforethought doesn't have to be much "afore"; even just a moment is enough.
As to the original claim, most self defense statutes in the US provide that you can take any force that is "immediately necessary" to protect yourself (deadly force being justified if you reasonably feel you are in danger of being killed or suffering a serious bodily injury). If it ceases to be immediately necessary -- e.g. if you disable the attacker and either know or a reasonable person should have known they are no longer a threat -- your right to use such force ceases.
(IANAL, but reading about law and such was a hobby of mine back as an undergrad.)
On the other hand:
1) You don't necessarily need to do this. .Net stuff like assemblies.
2) It isn't (at least always) very hard to do that. A couple years ago I wrote a quick utility and decided to play around with C#. For command line parsing I used Mono's GetOptions (which, by the way, is awesome; definitely one of my favorite libraries for that purpose), and it was pretty easy to get that working under VS, and I don't know all that much about
They're not *that* limited. Like I've definitely run into a couple things that I've wanted to do with them (64-bit compilers aren't supported officially, and I think you can't set it to be a JIT debugger), but at the same time it is sufficient for a lot of things. I personally worked for a company where the express editions were a primary development platform for some projects.
Lots of people have corrected you, but I'm going to correct you in a different manner: not only is SourceSafe not required, but MS has basically been trying to phase it out in favor of Team Foundation Server (part of VS Enterprise I think) for a while now.
MS knows SourceSafe is crap; it's one of the few products that no one dogfoods internally.
But when people say they 'google' something, how often are they actually using Google versus some other search engine? Does anyone say 'let me google that' and then head over to Bing? If I say I'm going to google something, I mean that I'm going to use Google.
To some extent, you're right, but think about using "Google" as a suggestion/command -- "just Google it if you want more information". While it's very probable that the person will actually use Google because of it's popularity, if I say something like that, I'm not actually telling you you have to use Google specifically, just search for it online somewhere.
It's really only when I say something like "Google this particular search query" that I'm really saying anything about Google itself.
The textbooks aren't the maximum to be known, they are the base of exploration.
Hell, I've taken 6 graduate-numbered CS classes since arriving at grad school; not one of them has had a textbook.
In addition to what other people have said, it also happens in TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before".
(That being said, that was one of the worst episodes in a pretty terrible season (I say that as a big fan of TNG too), so forgetting it is entirely understandable.)
- ran the first spreadsheet program ever
- ran the first MS Excel ever
- ran the first MS Word with a GUI ever
- ran the first mass marketed GUI word processor
None of those are revolutionary on Apple's part, unless perhaps it was Apple that actually produced the first spreadsheet, the first MS Excel, the first GUI-based MS Word, or the first mass-marketed GUI word processor.
Also I would argue that mass-marketed doesn't mean anything in terms of innovation, just business sense. (To be a bit more kind, it could be a business revolution, and Apple certainly has made many of those. However, I interpret the GP as saying that Apple hasn't made many tech revolutions.)
first to offer RF modulator to use TV as monitor
Done by video game systems four years before Apple was founded.
first to come with hypertext
The On-Line System, created in the mid-60s.
first mass marketed OS to so windows+mice+icons
I've already said I think "mass-marketed" is irrelevant, and Xerox Star beat Apple to the technology.
first popular consumer OS to be based on Unix
A revolutionary business decision... not a revolutionary tech development.
first to offer a successful online music store
first online phone store with 100,000 apps
first phone vendor to inspect 3rd party apps
Again, there are a couple very good business decisions, but nothing innovative tech-wise.
first phone to include desktop OS+framework
AFAIK this is blatently false; the .Net Compact Framework was first released in 2002, and programs developed on that run on WinMo. I haven't actually used it myself, but I hear it is reasonably similar to programming for the desktop environment with .Net.
first OS to be safer w/o antivirus than with
Linux? BSD? Unix? Multics?
first OS to give away free IDE to programmers
Business decision. (I'd suggest it's not even that much of a business revolution. There were IDEs available for free before, and there were compliers+build systems available from (propriatary) OS vendors before, so Apple "just" combined those ideas.
first phone web browser w/ an open source core
There were phone web browsers, and there were open source browsers; it was a business decision to base their former instance on one of the latter instances.
first OS to do dropdown menus ever
only GUI OS to do overlapping windows in early 80s
first to offer drag-and-drop GUI design for apps
I can't speak to the first and last one, and the second one in that list looks like something Apple was possibly the first to the party. These would be tech revolutions.
It's too bad mabinogi wasn't being sarcastic or anything then.
Those are areas where MS is threatened, but I don't think they feel threatened by OS X in the sense we're talking about here. I'm a Windows fan*, and I would go out and pick up OS X if I could install it on my home box. Would I use it much, or would I stick with Windows? I don't know. But I'd give it a shot for a few weeks.
Most people aren't going to say "I want OS X, so I'm going to buy a completely new computer to run it on", especially people like me for whom Apple doesn't even sell anything we would or could buy (at least in the desktop arena). But if OS X were available for purchase for your home PC, or as an alternative to Windows when you buy a Dell... you can bet you'd see Windows's share drop quite a bit.
* By "fan" I mean I hate it slightly less than the alternatives overall.
Office 2007 still recognizes keyboard shortcuts from the menus of the earlier versions of Office. If you do something like "Alt, F" it will display a message that tells you to continue with the keyboard shortcut; "a" would then save-as. This is so people who had muscle memory of old shortcuts wouldn't be hampered in their use of the latest version, but at the same time they were still free to muck around with the interface.