Since you bring up binary and DNA, let me ask a question. We use a binary systems for our computers because it is easy,efficient, and fast to express things in terms of combinations of on and off. Furthermore we haven't run into any large problems using binary in bigger faster systems so it seems that binary is nearly infinately scalable.
If binary makes so much sense for representing information and doing useful work with it, why is it that the fundamental building block in our body uses four base pairs? Is there some advantage to a quadary system that we might be able to learn from? If not, why didn't nature choose a binary system?
I hate statistics. They say whatever you want them to say. Yes, the top 1% will keep tens of thousands of dollars more per year, but you forget that the top 1% pays vastly more taxes than eveybody else and in effect fund programs like welfare. A person earing 2 million dollars a year will get 25k even on a one percent reduction in tax rate.
Are rich americans not entitled to tax cuts? They did, after all, earn their money. They will, in turn go out and spend that money further stimulating the economy.
I'm not saying I agree with the cut, because I don't, but there is solid economic theory behind it. I just don't agree with the notion that rich people don't deserve tax breaks. Everybody deserves tax breaks. And because rich people earn more money left wing radicals will always be able to spin numbers that say that the tax cut benefits mostly the rich.
The fact that the bottom 60% will recieve under $100 dollars a years is a statisical evquivocation. People on the very bottom pay almost no tax at all and thus can't recieve much back, this will in effect throw the curve off. Averages are falicies unless you have the numbers also. There is no average american.
People earning 50k will recieve substaintially more than $100 back per year (probably closer to $500 which is not chump change).
I totally agree that GOTOs are a poison best left extinct but the fact remains that
10 print "Hello world" 20 GOTO 10
is still more readable to the uninitiated than
void main(){ while(1){ printf("Hello world"); } }
Now, there are much better beginers languages than c, but the whole if-then, while, for loop structure is confusing for beginers. GOTO does exactly what it says, anybody can read a hello world qbasic program.
I've heard of this before as well, but only in the cast of lying and non-work related insults. If you performed poorly at a previous job, then the person you worked for, AFAIK, has every right to tell anybody about your performance, including prospective employers. Your prospective employer in return has every right not to hire you for that reason.
It's hard to sue and win against somebody who was only telling the truth. In any case, burning bridges will hurt you in the long run.
Next time I see a resume like yours I'll be sure to hire you, make you do manual janitorial work and make sure to lower your pay to minimum wage the day after you accept the offer.
While you're lounging, your former teammates are cleaning up after your mess. Oh yeah, and remind me to blacklist you as broadly as possible."
... and from anonymous coward in reply to same grandparent: " That's just asking for Trollbait moderation. The rest of the country pays taxes so you can sit around and have a "good time"? Asshole."
Two things, if he's collecting unenployment, it means he didn't leave under his own accord. Secondly, it often happens that a person can't find a job that pays as much as unenployment. Why work a meanial job when you look for a better one and get paid as much or more doing it?
In responce to the cleaning up the mess crap, most contract jobs last only six months. Also, if he did bad work at previous jobs, the next employer would hear about it while checking backround. Idiots.
Why did someone mod this a troll? Because, you all all envious of not working 1000 hour years? Take a look at contract jobs. Most start at six months of employment. These days most do not go longer than that.
Employers, however don't have to pay extras for contract workers and thus they usually get almost twice as much more per hour, thus it is perfect resonable that you could live an entire year off of a six month employment, especially if that employment time has you working crazy hours.
Americans work more hours at work than any other industrialized first world country. This shows off in our accomplishments: technology, military supierority. But this comes at a price: americans define themselves by their work. I agree with the parent and choose to define myself by the life I live, not the job I have.
Just because parent figured out an arguably better way to live shouldn't mean he should lose karma. In fact parent probably has more real karma than workaholics who do little else than work. And for what gain? Money? At the end of the day what does that get you?
I used to think that Ultraedit was the best thing in the world, but that was before I knew *nix editors and java based editors. I mean come on, whatever your need for an editor you can have it for free better than Ultraedit. If you want clean simple and fast use vim or if your more into macros use emacs.
If you want fully featured (some call it bloatware) jedit performs good and has more plugins and functionality than ultraedit ever will. Why people still use ultraEdit, crisp, slickedit (though slickedit wins out there) is beyond me. This is one area where open source and freely avaiable programs beat commerical options just about every time.
Plus it makes you free like more of a hacker and you don't have to worry about those pesky licenses.
Why did somebody mod this as offtopic? Just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean it's off topic. How can an article related to open source in the work place be off topic here?
That said the article missed an important benefit: I call it open source framework. The idea is to use open source in your project wherever possible to save on man time then compartmentalize your proprietary code so that it isn't in violation of whatever license the open source used.
Now you are getting free updates to a certain part of your product. Software managers know that maintence can be upwards of 75% of lifecycle costs. You can offload a significant portion of that cost to open source and still maintain the rights to sell your closed software.
The best open source stuff here would be the general utilities and not specific programs. If you use the framework and are careful about the license you reduce development time and cost, reduce maintenance time and cost, and and receive free advice from other developers that are working on the open source code.
This I believe is the open source model that applies to most companies.
Yes, but its in your best interest to release your changes back to the communtiy so you won't have to manually merge code in later versions.
When our company needed to use some open source, we had a meeting with the legal department. Basically what they said is that if it didn't contain any proprietary information relating to our line of business then we could release it. Since the project just converted xsl to rtf then we didn't have to worry about it and got a green light.
Since we've put it into production and release the changes we made back to the community there have been 3 releases that we don't have to maintain ourselves. The whole thing probably saved us about a man year.
Who modded this up? Just because you are running linux doesn't mean you have to GPL software running on it. Microsoft has planted the seed of viral licensing, and it continues to grow through ignorance.
Repeat after me, you don't have to GPL code unless it contains GPLed code or you just want it to be. There is no reason a well organized software developer would ever have to unwillingly GPL their software.
Ooh, someone mod this up. This is probably one of the most intellegent responces I've ever gotten. An installer would be a great addition to BitTorrent.
Also you bring up another good fact "I'd rather spend an extra $500 on hardware upgrades if more power is needed than an extra $5000 later on additional maintenance, debugging and testing." Many managers I've worked with have no idea how cheap hardware is compared to manpower. If can save just fifteen minutes a day with a faster computer or bigger monitor, a $1000 CPU will be paid off in five months. I really hate it when secerataries get machines as fast as the developers, and often before because there is a secretaries union.
" You have no idea what you're talking about do you? Java runs on a VM just like python. They are both "compiled" languages; more to the point, Python using C extentions is *WAY* faster than Java."
I like your idea about slashdot distribution, but again its only good enough for static pages which I guess is most of slashdot links anyway
As for CPU usage, I was refering to the server side trackers, which have already seen slashdottings. While that's probably also a network issue, if was thinking about when you are running dozens and dozens of trackers. A snowflake wieghs next to nothing but snow can collapse a house.
Despite its advantages (I like Python alot) I'm not sure it will ever be a mainstream high volume server language. Yes for client side its fine, and the benefits far outwiegh the disadvantages, but if BitTorrent becomes as popular as Bram wants it to be, a server side interpreted language seems dubious at best.
Right now it's fine because there is still alot of development to do, but eventually performance will take a big hit and it will have to be ported.
I even think the oncoming java version will be significantly more scalable than python but we'll see.
Also, another thing about Python is that it requires Python and third party GUI libraries (at least it did on my linux build) and not every one has Python and the GUI libraries caused some conflicts on my machine. Python marketshare would be the only reason in my mind to move the client to java or c.
The question I missed the most was when someone asked why he wrote in python, or more importantly why he has sayed with Python. Bram states that python is his favorite language, but I don't remember him saying if he thought it was the most appropriate one.
If bittorrent ever get modified to server much smaller objects, like html pages and gif and jpegs, then the ton of trakers needed would see a big improvement if written in a compiled lanuage or even java (though I hear a java version is in the works). It would have been interesting to hear from his point of view though.
Those funky java guys like to avoid keywords because they will possibly invalidate older code that uses the keywords as identifiers. The goal with this release was to make sure that old code will still compile with the new version and class files will still run on older jvms.
Introducing keywords generates lots of flack from companies that support java because then they will have to go back into their older code to make sure everything works right. It's a decision that would have cost millions of dollars. Why add foreach when 'for' will do?
Maybe, but only if the website wanted to distribute static content. Sharing dynamic sessions between individuals would be next to impossible and session traking would be taken out as well.
Also BitTorrent would have to be integrated into the web browser for this to work. Furthermore, BitTorrent was designed for transfering large quantities of information, not relatively small things like html.
The best solution I would see is to have an http service for all of the html, and have torrents serving all of the larger things like pictures and downloads, which take up the vast majority of downloads anyway.
The downfall to this is that you would have to be running a tracker for each piece that you wanted to serve out. It may be that the overhead for running the trackers for all of your pictures/downloads causes too much CPU strain to be useful as a bandwidth reduction mechanism.
Or keiretsu. Maybe even more fitting, though not english.
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
You are right, I'm sure the solution will require some sort of encryption. But what about mass mailings that I want to get, such as daily digests of my favorite mailing lists? Also this would put a big strain on the public key repositories.
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Still a problem. You can verify your list of emails, or write a brute force program that will keep track of all emails that are verified by the address. a@aol.com aa@aol.com ab@aol.com and see which ones are in the directory.
These verified email addys would then be sold from spammer to spammer and eventually most of the database will be cracked and valid email addresses known.
It just won't work until there is an enforcable penalty and since most get routed outside the US, a nospam list will never be a solution (unless ratified by the world, heh).
Better to scrap the current email protocols and develop a new one that enforces accountability. Don't ask me how this'll work, but I think it the best solution out there.
If you didn't mention nuclear reactor stuff, I would have. I worked at a large nuclear services company and we have many samples of fuel rod samples with lots of zirconium alloy.
It's pretty neat stuff to look at, though if you didn't know you couldn't tell it from stainless steel or aluminium.
Also I believe the aluminum tubes Bush was talking about were to be used in fuel refinement, not in a reactor. Still probably mostly bogus but possible considering the tubes the Iraqis were using for their "rocket" program were manufactured to a higher tolerance and precision than any of the leading makers (us,russia) of rocketry.
Ore refinement into fuel and weapons grade requires obscenely precise equipment.
A negro is still a negro, no matter what you call him...So instead we should call him/her: black (although they in reality are brown)
Um, negro=black in spanish thus contradicting at least some of your statement.
If people want to be called by something, call them that. It's called respect. Also it's not for you to decide. If everybody started calling you "the insensitive wonder" would that change your name? Nope. You would still insist on being called what you thought you should be called. Why should 'hackers' be any different?
Guess which definition is listed first over at Merriam Webster? In fact all the vast majority of all the 'hackers' I know are of the licit variety. If a population insists being called something else then its popular name then do it. We call eskimos Inuits. We call indians Native Americans.
If the majority of the population that considers themselves a hacker take the definition of "an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer", the popular defintion is wrong and should be changed.
What part don't you understand? even micro-cOS, one of the leading RTOS (or at least the one I've spent the most time working with) takes resources. Programs don't need OSes, and sometimes it makes sense not to use them at all. That was my point.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you bring up binary and DNA, let me ask a question. We use a binary systems for our computers because it is easy,efficient, and fast to express things in terms of combinations of on and off. Furthermore we haven't run into any large problems using binary in bigger faster systems so it seems that binary is nearly infinately scalable.
If binary makes so much sense for representing information and doing useful work with it, why is it that the fundamental building block in our body uses four base pairs? Is there some advantage to a quadary system that we might be able to learn from? If not, why didn't nature choose a binary system?
hell he even admitted he was an idiot.
From review:
"I am pretty much a Linux beginner, and know 'enough to be dangerous.'"
Admitting idiocy and ignorance are vastly diffent assertions.
I hate statistics. They say whatever you want them to say. Yes, the top 1% will keep tens of thousands of dollars more per year, but you forget that the top 1% pays vastly more taxes than eveybody else and in effect fund programs like welfare. A person earing 2 million dollars a year will get 25k even on a one percent reduction in tax rate.
Are rich americans not entitled to tax cuts? They did, after all, earn their money. They will, in turn go out and spend that money further stimulating the economy.
I'm not saying I agree with the cut, because I don't, but there is solid economic theory behind it. I just don't agree with the notion that rich people don't deserve tax breaks. Everybody deserves tax breaks. And because rich people earn more money left wing radicals will always be able to spin numbers that say that the tax cut benefits mostly the rich.
The fact that the bottom 60% will recieve under $100 dollars a years is a statisical evquivocation. People on the very bottom pay almost no tax at all and thus can't recieve much back, this will in effect throw the curve off. Averages are falicies unless you have the numbers also. There is no average american. People earning 50k will recieve substaintially more than $100 back per year (probably closer to $500 which is not chump change).
is still more readable to the uninitiated thanNow, there are much better beginers languages than c, but the whole if-then, while, for loop structure is confusing for beginers. GOTO does exactly what it says, anybody can read a hello world qbasic program.
I've heard of this before as well, but only in the cast of lying and non-work related insults. If you performed poorly at a previous job, then the person you worked for, AFAIK, has every right to tell anybody about your performance, including prospective employers. Your prospective employer in return has every right not to hire you for that reason.
It's hard to sue and win against somebody who was only telling the truth. In any case, burning bridges will hurt you in the long run.
Next time I see a resume like yours I'll be sure to hire you, make you do manual janitorial work and make sure to lower your pay to minimum wage the day after you accept the offer.
While you're lounging, your former teammates are cleaning up after your mess. Oh yeah, and remind me to blacklist you as broadly as possible."
... and from anonymous coward in reply to same grandparent: " That's just asking for Trollbait moderation. The rest of the country pays taxes so you can sit around and have a "good time"? Asshole."
Two things, if he's collecting unenployment, it means he didn't leave under his own accord. Secondly, it often happens that a person can't find a job that pays as much as unenployment. Why work a meanial job when you look for a better one and get paid as much or more doing it?
In responce to the cleaning up the mess crap, most contract jobs last only six months. Also, if he did bad work at previous jobs, the next employer would hear about it while checking backround. Idiots.
Why did someone mod this a troll? Because, you all all envious of not working 1000 hour years? Take a look at contract jobs. Most start at six months of employment. These days most do not go longer than that.
Employers, however don't have to pay extras for contract workers and thus they usually get almost twice as much more per hour, thus it is perfect resonable that you could live an entire year off of a six month employment, especially if that employment time has you working crazy hours.
Americans work more hours at work than any other industrialized first world country. This shows off in our accomplishments: technology, military supierority. But this comes at a price: americans define themselves by their work. I agree with the parent and choose to define myself by the life I live, not the job I have.
Just because parent figured out an arguably better way to live shouldn't mean he should lose karma. In fact parent probably has more real karma than workaholics who do little else than work. And for what gain? Money? At the end of the day what does that get you?
Please mod parent back up.
Ultraedit etc
I used to think that Ultraedit was the best thing in the world, but that was before I knew *nix editors and java based editors. I mean come on, whatever your need for an editor you can have it for free better than Ultraedit. If you want clean simple and fast use vim or if your more into macros use emacs.
If you want fully featured (some call it bloatware) jedit performs good and has more plugins and functionality than ultraedit ever will. Why people still use ultraEdit, crisp, slickedit (though slickedit wins out there) is beyond me. This is one area where open source and freely avaiable programs beat commerical options just about every time.
Plus it makes you free like more of a hacker and you don't have to worry about those pesky licenses.
Why did somebody mod this as offtopic? Just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean it's off topic. How can an article related to open source in the work place be off topic here?
That said the article missed an important benefit: I call it open source framework. The idea is to use open source in your project wherever possible to save on man time then compartmentalize your proprietary code so that it isn't in violation of whatever license the open source used.
Now you are getting free updates to a certain part of your product. Software managers know that maintence can be upwards of 75% of lifecycle costs. You can offload a significant portion of that cost to open source and still maintain the rights to sell your closed software.
The best open source stuff here would be the general utilities and not specific programs. If you use the framework and are careful about the license you reduce development time and cost, reduce maintenance time and cost, and and receive free advice from other developers that are working on the open source code.
This I believe is the open source model that applies to most companies.
Yes, but its in your best interest to release your changes back to the communtiy so you won't have to manually merge code in later versions.
When our company needed to use some open source, we had a meeting with the legal department. Basically what they said is that if it didn't contain any proprietary information relating to our line of business then we could release it. Since the project just converted xsl to rtf then we didn't have to worry about it and got a green light.
Since we've put it into production and release the changes we made back to the community there have been 3 releases that we don't have to maintain ourselves. The whole thing probably saved us about a man year.
I'm not familiar with their build naming conventions, but when you go to winamp.com the first download link is for Winamp 3.
It may be that the most resent verion of winamp3 is called build 2.91 or that 2.91 is a maintenance release of the 2 series, but clearly 3 exists.
Who modded this up? Just because you are running linux doesn't mean you have to GPL software running on it. Microsoft has planted the seed of viral licensing, and it continues to grow through ignorance.
Repeat after me, you don't have to GPL code unless it contains GPLed code or you just want it to be. There is no reason a well organized software developer would ever have to unwillingly GPL their software.
Ooh, someone mod this up. This is probably one of the most intellegent responces I've ever gotten. An installer would be a great addition to BitTorrent.
Also you bring up another good fact "I'd rather spend an extra $500 on hardware upgrades if more power is needed than an extra $5000 later on additional maintenance, debugging and testing."
Many managers I've worked with have no idea how cheap hardware is compared to manpower. If can save just fifteen minutes a day with a faster computer or bigger monitor, a $1000 CPU will be paid off in five months. I really hate it when secerataries get machines as fast as the developers, and often before because there is a secretaries union.
" You have no idea what you're talking about do you? Java runs on a VM just like python. They are both "compiled" languages; more to the point, Python using C extentions is *WAY* faster than Java."
Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme or Java.
I like your idea about slashdot distribution, but again its only good enough for static pages which I guess is most of slashdot links anyway
As for CPU usage, I was refering to the server side trackers, which have already seen slashdottings. While that's probably also a network issue, if was thinking about when you are running dozens and dozens of trackers. A snowflake wieghs next to nothing but snow can collapse a house.
Despite its advantages (I like Python alot) I'm not sure it will ever be a mainstream high volume server language. Yes for client side its fine, and the benefits far outwiegh the disadvantages, but if BitTorrent becomes as popular as Bram wants it to be, a server side interpreted language seems dubious at best.
Right now it's fine because there is still alot of development to do, but eventually performance will take a big hit and it will have to be ported.
I even think the oncoming java version will be significantly more scalable than python but we'll see.
Also, another thing about Python is that it requires Python and third party GUI libraries (at least it did on my linux build) and not every one has Python and the GUI libraries caused some conflicts on my machine. Python marketshare would be the only reason in my mind to move the client to java or c.
The question I missed the most was when someone asked why he wrote in python, or more importantly why he has sayed with Python. Bram states that python is his favorite language, but I don't remember him saying if he thought it was the most appropriate one.
If bittorrent ever get modified to server much smaller objects, like html pages and gif and jpegs, then the ton of trakers needed would see a big improvement if written in a compiled lanuage or even java (though I hear a java version is in the works). It would have been interesting to hear from his point of view though.
Those funky java guys like to avoid keywords because they will possibly invalidate older code that uses the keywords as identifiers. The goal with this release was to make sure that old code will still compile with the new version and class files will still run on older jvms.
Introducing keywords generates lots of flack from companies that support java because then they will have to go back into their older code to make sure everything works right. It's a decision that would have cost millions of dollars. Why add foreach when 'for' will do?
Maybe, but only if the website wanted to distribute static content. Sharing dynamic sessions between individuals would be next to impossible and session traking would be taken out as well.
Also BitTorrent would have to be integrated into the web browser for this to work. Furthermore, BitTorrent was designed for transfering large quantities of information, not relatively small things like html.
The best solution I would see is to have an http service for all of the html, and have torrents serving all of the larger things like pictures and downloads, which take up the vast majority of downloads anyway.
The downfall to this is that you would have to be running a tracker for each piece that you wanted to serve out. It may be that the overhead for running the trackers for all of your pictures/downloads causes too much CPU strain to be useful as a bandwidth reduction mechanism.
Or keiretsu. Maybe even more fitting, though not english.
You are right, I'm sure the solution will require some sort of encryption. But what about mass mailings that I want to get, such as daily digests of my favorite mailing lists? Also this would put a big strain on the public key repositories.
Still a problem. You can verify your list of emails, or write a brute force program that will keep track of all emails that are verified by the address. a@aol.com aa@aol.com ab@aol.com and see which ones are in the directory.
These verified email addys would then be sold from spammer to spammer and eventually most of the database will be cracked and valid email addresses known.
It just won't work until there is an enforcable penalty and since most get routed outside the US, a nospam list will never be a solution (unless ratified by the world, heh).
Better to scrap the current email protocols and develop a new one that enforces accountability. Don't ask me how this'll work, but I think it the best solution out there.
If you didn't mention nuclear reactor stuff, I would have. I worked at a large nuclear services company and we have many samples of fuel rod samples with lots of zirconium alloy.
It's pretty neat stuff to look at, though if you didn't know you couldn't tell it from stainless steel or aluminium.
Also I believe the aluminum tubes Bush was talking about were to be used in fuel refinement, not in a reactor. Still probably mostly bogus but possible considering the tubes the Iraqis were using for their "rocket" program were manufactured to a higher tolerance and precision than any of the leading makers (us,russia) of rocketry.
Ore refinement into fuel and weapons grade requires obscenely precise equipment.
A negro is still a negro, no matter what you call him...So instead we should call him/her: black (although they in reality are brown)
Um, negro=black in spanish thus contradicting at least some of your statement.
If people want to be called by something, call them that. It's called respect. Also it's not for you to decide. If everybody started calling you "the insensitive wonder" would that change your name? Nope. You would still insist on being called what you thought you should be called. Why should 'hackers' be any different?
Guess which definition is listed first over at Merriam Webster? In fact all the vast majority of all the 'hackers' I know are of the licit variety. If a population insists being called something else then its popular name then do it. We call eskimos Inuits. We call indians Native Americans.
If the majority of the population that considers themselves a hacker take the definition of "an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer", the popular defintion is wrong and should be changed.
What part don't you understand? even micro-cOS, one of the leading RTOS (or at least the one I've spent the most time working with) takes resources. Programs don't need OSes, and sometimes it makes sense not to use them at all. That was my point.