OK, since apparently Java is great and C# is not because it is not innovative. Tell me, oh wise one, what features are in Java that were not done "somewhere else first"? (Be sure to look very hard)
Does this lack make Java bad (no) Does this lack make Java non-innovative (nope) Does this make C#/.net innovative (I don't know, I have not decided yet)
In software, innovation comes from the combination of known things, not something completely new (software patents bad, copyright good). Java was innovative because it combined a lot of features into a well-conceived whole. Even though Java started off as C++, it was developed into something much more interesting.
C# steals most heavily from Java, Delphi, C++, big deal. Java stole most heavily from C++, big deal. Everything OO steals from SmallTalk, Simula. All of these stole from Algol and FORTRAN.
For Gosling, C# is crufty because it allows you to break the rules (pointers, defeat the default garbage collection). For me C# is good because GC is the default, and you have to declare your intention to break the normal rules. Great poets break the rules of good English, but they learned the rules first, and then decided to break them for effect.
For me, I've broken the rules when standard techniques don't work well. If you are a good programmer (a reasonable assumption) then you have probably broken the rules too. Elegance is often sacrificed on the alter of necessity.
Seems to me that I recall Java allowing you to make calls to native code (JNI), mostly for the same reasons (flexibility & legacy code). I believe Gosling was being just a touch biased. I believe we are both smart enough to see that. And I'm certain we are both smart enough to see bias when one of the MS minions says something.
AFAIK, there is something innovative in C#, feel free to correct me, I'm probably wrong. In that C# gives you the declaritive ability for unsafe coding techniques. Sounds wierd when I say it, but this seems innovative to me. I don't have to switch from Java to C (2nd language, somewhat clunky) in order to break the rules, yet I don't have a language (C/C++) where unsafe coding is in abundance.
You might even note bias in what I have said. I prefer to think of myself as biased towards the truth -- an objective observer. You may perceive me to be a sycophant for MS.
Really, it's OK by me. My self-perception does depend on your viewpoint. But, as we try to develop our own self-perception, it generally makes sense to listen to the viewpoints of others. Occasionally, someone else is right. Maybe even Microsoft -- even if so, good software does not imply righteous company.
Based on what you said, why would asp.net, using one a Java based.net product be a problem in your environment? Especially considering that your actual alternative is to crank out more VB code.
You stated ".net is dead... and I mean to keep it that way", ok so why? You're stated reason is to paraphrase: too new / too risky. If that is case, why not.net in the long run. Don't trust MS. Don't trust the code. Cross/platform issues. Too expensive. Current investment/strategic plan in J2EE. Something else?
I'm agnostic about such issues (made money, slept well at night, and helped customers programming for Apple, MS-DOS, Windows16/32, various Unix platforms). But assuming you have a good reason, what is it?
Short term, stated reasons are obviously valid (compared to VB6), but for the future, why not (again, compared to VB6 which apparently has little future)?
Actually, if the handheld trickle charged from a PV coating, it would extend battery life significantly, if not indefinitely. Most people don't use their handheld anywhere near 8 hours a day. Next generation combination gameboy, handheld, cellphone, wireless web, etc. may have a much higher duty cycle and the trickle charging effect may not be enough to help significantly.
Cheap PV is not even close for the rest of the world to tell the oil-producing nations to stuff it. Breakthroughs in energy storage are also essential. The tranportation sector used 26.6 percent of the total USA energy demand in 2000. But consumed 68% of the petroleum used. Why? -- primarily storage density, convenience, and portability. Coal is messy for end-consumers, nuclear & hydro are not portable (as are non-solar renewables). This leaves petroleum as a practical transportation energy source.
Duty cycle is very important for PV charged devices. Daily commute on PV charged electric vehicles, no problem. Driving from Chicago to Disneyland for vacation, big problem. Hybrid vehicle with PV charging, and gasoline burner to charge system when duty cycle is extended sounds great. Problem is energy storage density in the batteries
The Honda Insight hybrid is a good consumer design hybrid because it does not attempt to store a significant amount of power -- only 6.5 amp hours (144 volt). This is enough to run the 10 KW electric motor at full power for 5.6 minutes. To make PV trickle charged vehicles useful for the typical consumer, energy storage must be improved, and that has been only slowly getting better.
Cheap PV charging for long-haul trucking, etc. does not help significantly because the duty cycle is simply insurmountable, but could be useful for running the refrigeration units, or reducing energy costs, but these types of vehicles will still need a means to quickly take of fuel / recharge while in use.
Finally, the energy storage mechanism is just as big of a problem for distributed grid power. Electricity is produced on demand, and only rarely stored becaused there is not an economical method to store/retrieve large amounts of energy. Due to large differences in peak/nighttime energy cost off the grid, there are some systems in place that work, but none of them are really economical for large scale deployment, and they also lose a large fraction of the energy. Energy trasnmission losses are generally under 5%, mostly much lower. Store/release energy loses are sometimes higher than 30% (pump water uphill at night, flow downhill through a turbine at peak -- one of the more successful methods BTW). Possible energy storage methods include : better batteries, rechargable fuel-cell (aka battery), synthetic hydrocarbons, hydrogen, or other substitute for petroleum.
I'm not knocking cheap PV, but don't think this solves all of our energy problems. You want to be as rich as Bill G, solve the energy storage problem. If you would be happy just being as rich as your average billionare, solve the problem with converting all the cheap PV direct current into alternating current (with small loss in a low-cost, low-maint device, able to sync with the grid)
An old kids games, hide & seek is kind of ruined by this.
I was playing hide & seek about 35 years ago at my grandparents house. I was hiding in the walk-in closet, and fell asleep. My grandparents, parents, & silblings spent about two hours looking for me while I napped.
Today, the parents would have been on the phone with the police within 30 minutes. Had I been wearing such a device, my family would have been able to find a 7 yr old boy, and not worried about where I was.
To tell the truth, with respect to abduction, a perimiter alarm that goes off loudly if the kid leaves the transmitter base range (which the parent could carry with him) is probably a more useful deterent.
We've discussed this at work before (we are contracting software for a competitor to Lojack) and thought that this kind of device was fairly useless (against bad-guys) with the current technology because as soon as it becomes popular the first this the kidnapper will do is cut the wrist strap, etc. as required to disable the device. Encouraging hand/foot removal is a possible downside to such a device. BTW, bad guy can also defeat simply by leaving coverage area.
To be useful against the bad guy, they device will have to be anonymous (too small to locate, or surgically implanted in a manner difficult to locate). But this is simply beyond current tech.
Useful for the small child that can get lost, as well as those that are mentally incompetant for various reasons.
Useful for law enforcement (house arrest), as long as you have decided that the convicted individual has forfeited their normal rights -- certainly better lighter sentence than actual confinement for non-violent offenders.
Subject to abuse by overcontrolling parent obviously, but so it a 50' rope.
I think that part-time use of MS-Office by Linux desktop users will be the primary market of software like this for some time.
As an existing Windows user, this is not a good reason to switch. When buying new systems, the MS OEM license is about $50, so not much reason to switch.
But if you want/need to run MS occasionally, this is a good thing.
In the long term, the rules change. Windows XP is much too restrictive in licensing policies, and a Wine based solution makes much more sense in the long run. But it won't happen in the large until the WINE based solutions have fewer problems than those coming from Redmond.
It's called Stream of consciousness Hemmingway liked to use it; he was also good at it.
Actually the article says, "But what hampers Linux the most, according to analysts, is a lack of applications that can run on the open source operating system."
I agree. Before I get flamed, I know there is wads of software for Linux, much of it ported from earlier Solaris and other big-Iron Unix. But it's not the software the analysts are talking about. The missing software is the software that Businesses are using that is missing. MS Office, Visual Basic (for millions of in-house apps), thousands of small to large vertical applications that business use, and other stuff that just happens to run on Windows.
BTW, Windows NT Server has the same problem as a server; it's missing the thousands of Unix applications that are not available (nor easily ported to a native NT)
The lack of Linux apps is often decried as red-herring on Slashdot. It's not red-herring; it's just that the missing apps are not the ones dear to the Slashdot crowd -- it's the ones dear to the other guys. These same applications are also the ones that won't get ported to Linux quickly, because they were written for profit, and Linux market size is considerably smaller.
So, despite the original posters comment it is a problem, not for the original poster, but for the people that want to be freed from the MS tryanny, but don't know it yet.
Favorite algorithms
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Deep Algorithms?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hashing algorithms. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
On basis of frequency, it's obvious that simple algorithms are the most common. Linear search of an array, bubble sorts (no matter how bad they are), and linked lists are so common that its hard to believe that anything could be more popular (or frequently abused)
When the IBM-PC was introduced there were 3 operating systems available. PC-DOS was about $50 and got the vast majority of the installs. UCSD P-System and a updated CP/M knockoff from Digital reseach were also available, but they both cost over twice as much, not surprisingly PC-DOS won. I used the CP/M variant once, but never saw the UCSD version other than in a bundled runtime with the game Wizardry.
IBM did not make a random decision. MS had established itself as viable in their minds with their CP/M BASIC and AppleSoft products. They made the right promises (and fulfilled them), offered IBM the right price & customer service. At this point in time, IBM was widely regarded as evil incarnate, not MS. MS was a scrappy bit-player, no more. IBM thought that the IBM-PC would sell at most a few-hundred thousand machines over its lifetime, so they did not see it as worth their time to make the system or the O/S propriatary, which is also why they did not bind Microsoft from selling MS-DOS to competitors.
DR-DOS was an eventual competitive MS-DOS clone, and yes, many people ignored it because it was not standard. However, MS also torpedoed it by releasing "fixes" to windows that gave warnings, or actual problems if you were not using the one true DOS.
Sorry, unless you subscribe to NTBugTrack you probably missed a remote email exploit that affects Eudora. Without going into details, if you use the html presentation to read emails your system can be made to run an arbitrary program of the attackers choice included as an attachment to your incoming email.
The bug depends on the fact that Eudora uses the MS html engine (huge surpise there).
Man I can't believe most slashdotters are so stupid. This is not a problem, it's a business opportunity!
Set up an new email server with special features needed by your clients.
1. Non-logging fetch option. 2. Forced bounce for individual emails on request 3. Forced bounce based on filters (customer per account) 4. Forced bounce based on spam filters (opt out per account in case someone wants spam)
Customers will be glad to pay for premium service. You can add virus-filtering, etc. once you get enough base to pay for the add-ons. You can be rich.
Looks like someone has way too much free time on their hands. But the 32 processors and 60 GB RAM, maybe I would have more free time too.
I like the CPU utilization of 2200% for the compile. At 22:1 my 10 hour day would only take 27 minutes. With time out for checking email, reading Slashdot, and scoring the occassional doughnut I could still be done in a hour.
Sun is hotter, but shrinking (mass energy conversion, you know).
Maybe we should realize that perhaps some of the global warming hype is just hype. Everytime there is a heat wave on the news coasts, there a new round of global warming stories. Normal climate variability is large, and modern winters are not the warmest ever (or even in modern history). Check out Minnesota 1877. The observed long-term warming trend since 1900 is not unusual in terms of climate history.
BTW, risk of Kyoto protocol is followed in 100% of the expected cost, because it is certain damage to world economy.
Then I thought about it for minute, and said to myself -- that just means the spammers will learn to test for honeypotness, and the technology based war just has another exchange, but the war is still ongoing.
My father was a businessman, and he first exposed to the Internetet email concept about 6 years ago when I explained it all to him. His first non-technical question was, "Who pays for the email?" I should have listened to him. Instead, I said that it was basically too cheap to meter, whereas he saw it as a potential for abusive business practices because he remembered history where the first postal service made the recipient of the mail pay for the delivery, but was changed to the sender fairly quicker because of the abuse.
The war on spam is the good war of our generation, but I'm afraid it may be the war of our kids generation too unless we get serious about nuking the spammers.
It was free (downloadable from the Internet, on a public directory) when 95 was released. It was on the a CD (the plus pak, which was extra cost), but since I used the developers net, I did not notice the difference.
You are correct, it was not on the std release CD, but the point I was making (though it lacked precision) is that IE 1.0 was released by MS when 95 was released, it was free (for download), and it is difficult to argue legally that it was added solely for the purpose of killing Netscape.
File date, 7/11/95 -- I had to blow the dust off of my CD's to check. BTW, Microsoft was also trying to sell MSN at the same time as well.
Indiana is "The Crossroads of America", sounds like drive-through country to me. Oh, wait I'm one of those hypothetical Hoosiers.
It is drive through country in the minds of many. Thats OK by me. It's a free country (sort of at least). Besides, we don't want their kind around here anyway as any stereotypical hick knows.
Maybe some kind soul in Indianapolis have some old issues of the Indianapolis Star that they can mail to some legislators in Georgia. And this would prevent them from upping the ante in the race to stupidity in legislation.
The Georgia law is even stupider than the Indy one. The Indy law only wanted you to divide your public arcade into violent and non-violent sections, post a warning sign, etc. because parents may not be able to be around their kids at all times (the little buggers need to grow up eventually you know). But the the Georgian geniuses decided that a kid buying a video can and taking it home cannot be dealt with by parents at home who would (if they had any interest in their kids) apply appropriate disciplinary response.
IANAL (praise the Lord), but AFAIK it not illegal for theatres to allow a 16 yr old to see a voluntarily rated MPAA R movie, nor rent it from BlockBusters. They simply don't do this because of public relations and the fear of losing business if they violate the ratings system. Feel free to correct me in that it is a law.
Even so, these standards would have they effective force of law because the community supports it, and if you want your 16-yr old to see the Terminator 3, just go with him to the movie or rent it a blockbuster for him.
As an Indy taxpayer, I am most annoyed that they spent time on their taxpayer supported day job to write the law when then had been advised that it was unconstitutional. Then they spent large sums of taxpayer money defending it in court after being advised that they would lose.
And if I was a $2 hooker in Indy, I would be annoyed that my customers had that much less money to spend for entertainment.
If mayor Bart Peterson had actually wanted to make a difference in kids violent entertainment, he could spent 10% of the money by running a Kids First arcade campaign, saying that if you comply with the recommendations, you can post a sign at your arcade. This would allow public relations and community response to guide whether or not the arcade would separate the violent games.
It would not have been unconstitutional, it would not be government intrusion, it would simply be an informed marketplace making decisions. Even though I personally could not care less (kids should be watched closed, until you start giving them responsibility like young adults and I don't need the government to help me with that). At least I would not have seen this as an incredibly stupid and wasteful path to follow, maybe even a reasonable function of government
BTW, the arcade owners would be wise to adopt such a code for themselves for PR and avoiding having to waste time fighting stupid laws.
Re:I honestly can't figure out
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What is .NET?
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· Score: 1
I hate to post in response to myself, but...
Should have added -- language neutral (assuming that it works for you), issues such as multiple inheritence, static typing, etc. may get in the way for your legacy code. Still, probably easier than rewriting everything in Java, assuming you can't get your compiler to generate Jave bytecode.
Re:I honestly can't figure out
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What is .NET?
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· Score: 1
Sorry, Wrong answer.
What's more important is "What's more important to the developer"
To you, apparently O/S neutrality. Got no problem with that, have designed and maintained cross platform code since 1983. Great fun.
However, to someone with a bunch of legacy code in C/C++/COBOL/FORTRAN etc. language neutrality is likely to be more important because the Native methods under Java are less convenient than that promised by the.NET environment.
In an ideal world, I would have both of the above, a 7 figure income, and a trophy spouse. Sometimes you just have to settle for what works today.
On windows, if you want VB-like development, but don't like the junk that comes with it, most developers that work with both find the Borland solution superior.
In addition to the inherent technical advantages,
one of the big reasons to use CPPB/Delphi is the active 3rd-party components environment -- nearly all available with (if not including) source code. This is a huge plus and any open source fan would agree (Even if the source is licensed)
Biggest problem in moving the apps written in Delphi today to Linux is the lack of those same components under Kylix. Many real world Delphi apps (and presumably CPPB soon) will be slow to port because of these dependencies.
Components are the biggest porting challenge (VCL to CLX) and is at least partly why the components are slow in coming. Changes in the GUI and messaging models are the biggest factors.
Of course, many existing Delphi/CPPB apps make calls to native Windows API, but usually there is either a simple equivalent under Linux, or the equivalent does not make sense under Linux. So, these don't impede the Linux port as much.
Delphi 6 does have CLX, so a Delphi 6 CLX app and a Kylix app are very compatible.
Delphi and CPPB builder are not about the compiler. It's the environment, visual programming, and component based programming that appeals to the developer.
Sounds like the next 50 years might involve a little belt tightening, even with investments on the cash.
Can IBM develop improve Linux? Yes
Should IBM improve Linux? Probably a good business decision (and non-evil too)
Will IBM improve Linux? IANAProphet, but I think the answer is yes.
Will IBM kick back to the community? Mostly indirect effects. As Linux improves, Linux skills become more useful & popular. Of course, stockholders may see a more direct kickback.
Although the news item does not justify saying that the ISP was going out of business because of DOS attacks (they were still financially solvent), perhaps the owner decided he had had enough of the problems from vandals. A well-run business will shut down and leave the neighboorhood when windows get broken repeatedly before they loose all of their money.
Computer vandalism -- This will not decrease until we (as the technical community -- including management) decide to make some changes. Without changes, it will only get worse.
1) Although technological solutions are useful and necessary, they are not enough. The trusted network model does not work in the real world. There must be rules, accountabilty and penalties (without penalties, nothing stops me from continuing to break the rules).
2) Many network rules exist, some are poorly enforced.
3) Because of packet-spoofing. Some (D)DOS attacks can be nearly impossible to shutdown. We need to make sure only legitimate packets can Internet at large. Without this rule, tracking down the vandal and applying the penalty is not practical. If packet spoofing were eliminated, it would be possible to identify culprits at a modest cost.
4) Accoutability needs to be improved by everybody. If Nimba2002 is released tomorrow, Microsoft should be expected to make it well known, and supply a fix. Network servers should be patched. People running compromised server should be cut-off until they get fixed. These things happen by and large in a haphazard fashion today. The problem needs to be addressed at the source whenever possible.
4) Penalties need to be commensurate with violation. A hand-slap for vandalism does not deter, a death-sentence for jaywalking deters, but it not justice either.
5) Then maybe we should get rid of junk email for an encore.
I was making up missing data for lab reports twenty years ago. It filled in the gaps well enough to fool the teachers:)
News article was, as usual, totally lacking in technical details. But they did link to technical articles at the bottom of the story.
NON-UNIFORM SAMPLING AND RECONSTRUCTION IN SHIFT-INVARIANT SPACES.
I skimmed the technical article (heavy math alert), and the results seem to be along the lines that: given an irregular (and possibly noisy) sample of data, reconstruct a
function that gives smoothed (continuous, not discrete) approximation for entire data set.
There is some nice mathematics that make it suitable for such purposes. The algorithms are selected to limit number of terms and guarantee convergance, and are computationally efficient. If you think of it as fancy interpolation, you are not far off the mark from what I saw.
This is not to disparage the efforts here (it looks to be quite useful in several domains), but it is a technique for generate a smooth, continuous function to represent a set of non-uniform samples. It cannot magically find missing results not were not evident in the limited sample data.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called disclosure. Repsonsible journalists are supposed to reveal commercial ties that may influence their journalistic impartiality.
OK, since apparently Java is great and C# is not because it is not innovative. Tell me, oh wise one, what features are in Java that were not done "somewhere else first"? (Be sure to look very hard)
Does this lack make Java bad (no)
Does this lack make Java non-innovative (nope)
Does this make C#/.net innovative (I don't know, I have not decided yet)
In software, innovation comes from the combination of known things, not something completely new (software patents bad, copyright good). Java was innovative because it combined a lot of features into a well-conceived whole. Even though Java started off as C++, it was developed into something much more interesting.
C# steals most heavily from Java, Delphi, C++, big deal. Java stole most heavily from C++, big deal. Everything OO steals from SmallTalk, Simula. All of these stole from Algol and FORTRAN.
For Gosling, C# is crufty because it allows you to break the rules (pointers, defeat the default garbage collection). For me C# is good because GC is the default, and you have to declare your intention to break the normal rules. Great poets break the rules of good English, but they learned the rules first, and then decided to break them for effect.
For me, I've broken the rules when standard techniques don't work well. If you are a good programmer (a reasonable assumption) then you have probably broken the rules too. Elegance is often sacrificed on the alter of necessity.
Seems to me that I recall Java allowing you to make calls to native code (JNI), mostly for the same reasons (flexibility & legacy code). I believe Gosling was being just a touch biased. I believe we are both smart enough to see that. And I'm certain we are both smart enough to see bias when one of the MS minions says something.
AFAIK, there is something innovative in C#, feel free to correct me, I'm probably wrong. In that C# gives you the declaritive ability for unsafe coding techniques. Sounds wierd when I say it, but this seems innovative to me. I don't have to switch from Java to C (2nd language, somewhat clunky) in order to break the rules, yet I don't have a language (C/C++) where unsafe coding is in abundance.
You might even note bias in what I have said. I prefer to think of myself as biased towards the truth -- an objective observer. You may perceive me to be a sycophant for MS.
Really, it's OK by me. My self-perception does depend on your viewpoint. But, as we try to develop our own self-perception, it generally makes sense to listen to the viewpoints of others. Occasionally, someone else is right. Maybe even Microsoft -- even if so, good software does not imply righteous company.
Would like your opinion.
.net product be a problem in your environment? Especially considering that your actual alternative is to crank out more VB code.
... and I mean to keep it that way", ok so why? You're stated reason is to paraphrase: too new / too risky. If that is case, why not .net in the long run. Don't trust MS. Don't trust the code. Cross/platform issues. Too expensive. Current investment/strategic plan in J2EE. Something else?
Based on what you said, why would asp.net, using one a Java based
You stated ".net is dead
I'm agnostic about such issues (made money, slept well at night, and helped customers programming for Apple, MS-DOS, Windows16/32, various Unix platforms). But assuming you have a good reason, what is it?
Short term, stated reasons are obviously valid (compared to VB6), but for the future, why not (again, compared to VB6 which apparently has little future)?
Minor correction to myself. Grid losses are generally less than 15%, not 5%. IIRC, national average is 8%
Actually, if the handheld trickle charged from a PV coating, it would extend battery life significantly, if not indefinitely. Most people don't use their handheld anywhere near 8 hours a day. Next generation combination gameboy, handheld, cellphone, wireless web, etc. may have a much higher duty cycle and the trickle charging effect may not be enough to help significantly.
Cheap PV is not even close for the rest of the world to tell the oil-producing nations to stuff it. Breakthroughs in energy storage are also essential. The tranportation sector used 26.6 percent of the total USA energy demand in 2000. But consumed 68% of the petroleum used. Why? -- primarily storage density, convenience, and portability. Coal is messy for end-consumers, nuclear & hydro are not portable (as are non-solar renewables). This leaves petroleum as a practical transportation energy source.
Duty cycle is very important for PV charged devices. Daily commute on PV charged electric vehicles, no problem. Driving from Chicago to Disneyland for vacation, big problem. Hybrid vehicle with PV charging, and gasoline burner to charge system when duty cycle is extended sounds great. Problem is energy storage density in the batteries
The Honda Insight hybrid is a good consumer design hybrid because it does not attempt to store a significant amount of power -- only 6.5 amp hours (144 volt). This is enough to run the 10 KW electric motor at full power for 5.6 minutes. To make PV trickle charged vehicles useful for the typical consumer, energy storage must be improved, and that has been only slowly getting better.
Cheap PV charging for long-haul trucking, etc. does not help significantly because the duty cycle is simply insurmountable, but could be useful for running the refrigeration units, or reducing energy costs, but these types of vehicles will still need a means to quickly take of fuel / recharge while in use.
Finally, the energy storage mechanism is just as big of a problem for distributed grid power. Electricity is produced on demand, and only rarely stored becaused there is not an economical method to store/retrieve large amounts of energy. Due to large differences in peak/nighttime energy cost off the grid, there are some systems in place that work, but none of them are really economical for large scale deployment, and they also lose a large fraction of the energy. Energy trasnmission losses are generally under 5%, mostly much lower. Store/release energy loses are sometimes higher than 30% (pump water uphill at night, flow downhill through a turbine at peak -- one of the more successful methods BTW). Possible energy storage methods include : better batteries, rechargable fuel-cell (aka battery), synthetic hydrocarbons, hydrogen, or other substitute for petroleum.
I'm not knocking cheap PV, but don't think this solves all of our energy problems. You want to be as rich as Bill G, solve the energy storage problem. If you would be happy just being as rich as your average billionare, solve the problem with converting all the cheap PV direct current into alternating current (with small loss in a low-cost, low-maint device, able to sync with the grid)
An old kids games, hide & seek is kind of ruined by this.
I was playing hide & seek about 35 years ago at my grandparents house. I was hiding in the walk-in closet, and fell asleep. My grandparents, parents, & silblings spent about two hours looking for me while I napped.
Today, the parents would have been on the phone with the police within 30 minutes. Had I been wearing such a device, my family would have been able to find a 7 yr old boy, and not worried about where I was.
To tell the truth, with respect to abduction, a perimiter alarm that goes off loudly if the kid leaves the transmitter base range (which the parent could carry with him) is probably a more useful deterent.
We've discussed this at work before (we are contracting software for a competitor to Lojack) and thought that this kind of device was fairly useless (against bad-guys) with the current technology because as soon as it becomes popular the first this the kidnapper will do is cut the wrist strap, etc. as required to disable the device. Encouraging hand/foot removal is a possible downside to such a device. BTW, bad guy can also defeat simply by leaving coverage area.
To be useful against the bad guy, they device will have to be anonymous (too small to locate, or surgically implanted in a manner difficult to locate). But this is simply beyond current tech.
Useful for the small child that can get lost, as well as those that are mentally incompetant for various reasons.
Useful for law enforcement (house arrest), as long as you have decided that the convicted individual has forfeited their normal rights -- certainly better lighter sentence than actual confinement for non-violent offenders.
Subject to abuse by overcontrolling parent obviously, but so it a 50' rope.
I think that part-time use of MS-Office by Linux desktop users will be the primary market of software like this for some time.
As an existing Windows user, this is not a good reason to switch. When buying new systems, the MS OEM license is about $50, so not much reason to switch.
But if you want/need to run MS occasionally, this is a good thing.
In the long term, the rules change. Windows XP is much too restrictive in licensing policies, and a Wine based solution makes much more sense in the long run. But it won't happen in the large until the WINE based solutions have fewer problems than those coming from Redmond.
It's called Stream of consciousness Hemmingway liked to use it; he was also good at it.
Actually the article says, "But what hampers Linux the most, according to analysts, is a lack of applications that can run on the open source operating system."
I agree. Before I get flamed, I know there is wads of software for Linux, much of it ported from earlier Solaris and other big-Iron Unix. But it's not the software the analysts are talking about. The missing software is the software that Businesses are using that is missing. MS Office, Visual Basic (for millions of in-house apps), thousands of small to large vertical applications that business use, and other stuff that just happens to run on Windows.
BTW, Windows NT Server has the same problem as a server; it's missing the thousands of Unix applications that are not available (nor easily ported to a native NT)
The lack of Linux apps is often decried as red-herring on Slashdot. It's not red-herring; it's just that the missing apps are not the ones dear to the Slashdot crowd -- it's the ones dear to the other guys. These same applications are also the ones that won't get ported to Linux quickly, because they were written for profit, and Linux market size is considerably smaller.
So, despite the original posters comment it is a problem, not for the original poster, but for the people that want to be freed from the MS tryanny, but don't know it yet.
Hashing algorithms. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
On basis of frequency, it's obvious that simple algorithms are the most common. Linear search of an array, bubble sorts (no matter how bad they are), and linked lists are so common that its hard to believe that anything could be more popular (or frequently abused)
Umm, not quite -- part 2
When the IBM-PC was introduced there were 3 operating systems available. PC-DOS was about $50 and got the vast majority of the installs. UCSD P-System and a updated CP/M knockoff from Digital reseach were also available, but they both cost over twice as much, not surprisingly PC-DOS won. I used the CP/M variant once, but never saw the UCSD version other than in a bundled runtime with the game Wizardry.
IBM did not make a random decision. MS had established itself as viable in their minds with their CP/M BASIC and AppleSoft products. They made the right promises (and fulfilled them), offered IBM the right price & customer service. At this point in time, IBM was widely regarded as evil incarnate, not MS. MS was a scrappy bit-player, no more. IBM thought that the IBM-PC would sell at most a few-hundred thousand machines over its lifetime, so they did not see it as worth their time to make the system or the O/S propriatary, which is also why they did not bind Microsoft from selling MS-DOS to competitors.
DR-DOS was an eventual competitive MS-DOS clone, and yes, many people ignored it because it was not standard. However, MS also torpedoed it by releasing "fixes" to windows that gave warnings, or actual problems if you were not using the one true DOS.
Sorry, unless you subscribe to NTBugTrack you probably missed a remote email exploit that affects Eudora. Without going into details, if you use the html presentation to read emails your system can be made to run an arbitrary program of the attackers choice included as an attachment to your incoming email.
The bug depends on the fact that Eudora uses the MS html engine (huge surpise there).
So, Eudora is not safe either.
Man I can't believe most slashdotters are so stupid. This is not a problem, it's a business opportunity!
Set up an new email server with special features needed by your clients.
1. Non-logging fetch option.
2. Forced bounce for individual emails on request
3. Forced bounce based on filters (customer per account)
4. Forced bounce based on spam filters (opt out per account in case someone wants spam)
Customers will be glad to pay for premium service. You can add virus-filtering, etc. once you get enough base to pay for the add-ons. You can be rich.
Looks like someone has way too much free time on their hands. But the 32 processors and 60 GB RAM, maybe I would have more free time too.
I like the CPU utilization of 2200% for the compile. At 22:1 my 10 hour day would only take 27 minutes. With time out for checking email, reading Slashdot, and scoring the occassional doughnut I could still be done in a hour.
According to most scientistics, the retreat in the West Antarctic ice sheet has been occuring for 10,000 years.
Also on BBC, Ice thickens in West Antarctica
Sun is hotter, but shrinking (mass energy conversion, you know).
Maybe we should realize that perhaps some of the global warming hype is just hype. Everytime there is a heat wave on the news coasts, there a new round of global warming stories. Normal climate variability is large, and modern winters are not the warmest ever (or even in modern history). Check out Minnesota 1877. The observed long-term warming trend since 1900 is not unusual in terms of climate history.
BTW, risk of Kyoto protocol is followed in 100% of the expected cost, because it is certain damage to world economy.
I think this sounds like a great idea.
Then I thought about it for minute, and said to myself -- that just means the spammers will learn to test for honeypotness, and the technology based war just has another exchange, but the war is still ongoing.
My father was a businessman, and he first exposed to the Internetet email concept about 6 years ago when I explained it all to him. His first non-technical question was, "Who pays for the email?" I should have listened to him. Instead, I said that it was basically too cheap to meter, whereas he saw it as a potential for abusive business practices because he remembered history where the first postal service made the recipient of the mail pay for the delivery, but was changed to the sender fairly quicker because of the abuse.
The war on spam is the good war of our generation, but I'm afraid it may be the war of our kids generation too unless we get serious about nuking the spammers.
Actually, we're both correct.
It was free (downloadable from the Internet, on a public directory) when 95 was released. It was on the a CD (the plus pak, which was extra cost), but since I used the developers net, I did not notice the difference.
You are correct, it was not on the std release CD, but the point I was making (though it lacked precision) is that IE 1.0 was released by MS when 95 was released, it was free (for download), and it is difficult to argue legally that it was added solely for the purpose of killing Netscape.
File date, 7/11/95 -- I had to blow the dust off of my CD's to check. BTW, Microsoft was also trying to sell MSN at the same time as well.
Indiana is "The Crossroads of America", sounds like drive-through country to me. Oh, wait I'm one of those hypothetical Hoosiers.
It is drive through country in the minds of many. Thats OK by me. It's a free country (sort of at least). Besides, we don't want their kind around here anyway as any stereotypical hick knows.
Maybe some kind soul in Indianapolis have some old issues of the Indianapolis Star that they can mail to some legislators in Georgia. And this would prevent them from upping the ante in the race to stupidity in legislation.
The Georgia law is even stupider than the Indy one. The Indy law only wanted you to divide your public arcade into violent and non-violent sections, post a warning sign, etc. because parents may not be able to be around their kids at all times (the little buggers need to grow up eventually you know). But the the Georgian geniuses decided that a kid buying a video can and taking it home cannot be dealt with by parents at home who would (if they had any interest in their kids) apply appropriate disciplinary response.
IANAL (praise the Lord), but AFAIK it not illegal for theatres to allow a 16 yr old to see a voluntarily rated MPAA R movie, nor rent it from BlockBusters. They simply don't do this because of public relations and the fear of losing business if they violate the ratings system. Feel free to correct me in that it is a law.
Even so, these standards would have they effective force of law because the community supports it, and if you want your 16-yr old to see the Terminator 3, just go with him to the movie or rent it a blockbuster for him.
As an Indy taxpayer, I am most annoyed that they spent time on their taxpayer supported day job to write the law when then had been advised that it was unconstitutional. Then they spent large sums of taxpayer money defending it in court after being advised that they would lose.
And if I was a $2 hooker in Indy, I would be annoyed that my customers had that much less money to spend for entertainment.
If mayor Bart Peterson had actually wanted to make a difference in kids violent entertainment, he could spent 10% of the money by running a Kids First arcade campaign, saying that if you comply with the recommendations, you can post a sign at your arcade. This would allow public relations and community response to guide whether or not the arcade would separate the violent games.
It would not have been unconstitutional, it would not be government intrusion, it would simply be an informed marketplace making decisions. Even though I personally could not care less (kids should be watched closed, until you start giving them responsibility like young adults and I don't need the government to help me with that). At least I would not have seen this as an incredibly stupid and wasteful path to follow, maybe even a reasonable function of government
BTW, the arcade owners would be wise to adopt such a code for themselves for PR and avoiding having to waste time fighting stupid laws.
I hate to post in response to myself, but ...
Should have added -- language neutral (assuming that it works for you), issues such as multiple inheritence, static typing, etc. may get in the way for your legacy code. Still, probably easier than rewriting everything in Java, assuming you can't get your compiler to generate Jave bytecode.
Sorry, Wrong answer.
.NET environment.
What's more important is "What's more important to the developer"
To you, apparently O/S neutrality. Got no problem with that, have designed and maintained cross platform code since 1983. Great fun.
However, to someone with a bunch of legacy code in C/C++/COBOL/FORTRAN etc. language neutrality is likely to be more important because the Native methods under Java are less convenient than that promised by the
In an ideal world, I would have both of the above, a 7 figure income, and a trophy spouse. Sometimes you just have to settle for what works today.
On windows, if you want VB-like development, but don't like the junk that comes with it, most developers that work with both find the Borland solution superior.
In addition to the inherent technical advantages,
one of the big reasons to use CPPB/Delphi is the active 3rd-party components environment -- nearly all available with (if not including) source code. This is a huge plus and any open source fan would agree (Even if the source is licensed)
Biggest problem in moving the apps written in Delphi today to Linux is the lack of those same components under Kylix. Many real world Delphi apps (and presumably CPPB soon) will be slow to port because of these dependencies.
Components are the biggest porting challenge (VCL to CLX) and is at least partly why the components are slow in coming. Changes in the GUI and messaging models are the biggest factors.
Of course, many existing Delphi/CPPB apps make calls to native Windows API, but usually there is either a simple equivalent under Linux, or the equivalent does not make sense under Linux. So, these don't impede the Linux port as much.
Delphi 6 does have CLX, so a Delphi 6 CLX app and a Kylix app are very compatible.
Delphi and CPPB builder are not about the compiler. It's the environment, visual programming, and component based programming that appeals to the developer.
50 years without revenues?
Cash 6.41 billion dollars.
# of employees 316,303
cash / employee = $20,265.38
Sounds like the next 50 years might involve a little belt tightening, even with investments on the cash.
Can IBM develop improve Linux? Yes
Should IBM improve Linux? Probably a good business decision (and non-evil too)
Will IBM improve Linux? IANAProphet, but I think the answer is yes.
Will IBM kick back to the community? Mostly indirect effects. As Linux improves, Linux skills become more useful & popular. Of course, stockholders may see a more direct kickback.
Although the news item does not justify saying that the ISP was going out of business because of DOS attacks (they were still financially solvent), perhaps the owner decided he had had enough of the problems from vandals. A well-run business will shut down and leave the neighboorhood when windows get broken repeatedly before they loose all of their money.
Computer vandalism -- This will not decrease until we (as the technical community -- including management) decide to make some changes. Without changes, it will only get worse.
1) Although technological solutions are useful and necessary, they are not enough. The trusted network model does not work in the real world. There must be rules, accountabilty and penalties (without penalties, nothing stops me from continuing to break the rules).
2) Many network rules exist, some are poorly enforced.
3) Because of packet-spoofing. Some (D)DOS attacks can be nearly impossible to shutdown. We need to make sure only legitimate packets can Internet at large. Without this rule, tracking down the vandal and applying the penalty is not practical. If packet spoofing were eliminated, it would be possible to identify culprits at a modest cost.
4) Accoutability needs to be improved by everybody. If Nimba2002 is released tomorrow, Microsoft should be expected to make it well known, and supply a fix. Network servers should be patched. People running compromised server should be cut-off until they get fixed. These things happen by and large in a haphazard fashion today. The problem needs to be addressed at the source whenever possible.
4) Penalties need to be commensurate with violation. A hand-slap for vandalism does not deter, a death-sentence for jaywalking deters, but it not justice either.
5) Then maybe we should get rid of junk email for an encore.
Programming is like prostitution ...
First you do it for love.
Then you do it friends.
Then you do it for money.
I was making up missing data for lab reports twenty years ago. It filled in the gaps well enough to fool the teachers :)
News article was, as usual, totally lacking in technical details. But they did link to technical articles at the bottom of the story.
NON-UNIFORM SAMPLING AND RECONSTRUCTION IN SHIFT-INVARIANT SPACES.
I skimmed the technical article (heavy math alert), and the results seem to be along the lines that: given an irregular (and possibly noisy) sample of data, reconstruct a
function that gives smoothed (continuous, not discrete) approximation for entire data set.
There is some nice mathematics that make it suitable for such purposes. The algorithms are selected to limit number of terms and guarantee convergance, and are computationally efficient. If you think of it as fancy interpolation, you are not far off the mark from what I saw.
This is not to disparage the efforts here (it looks to be quite useful in several domains), but it is a technique for generate a smooth, continuous function to represent a set of non-uniform samples. It cannot magically find missing results not were not evident in the limited sample data.
The author