I don't have to abide all the specifications, just ones in my area of work. If I am going to write device drivers, my grammer is only relevant as far as making myself understood.
What's up with the dash in likewise and period before the parentesis anyway?
...with tips on how Vietnam vets are more likely to get noticed then ones from Korean war. Because job search these days really came to begging.
I got hired with a resume that had only basic formating (boldface and 3 part titles using nroff), had quite a few grammer errors and only listed part time jobs I worked in high school of another country. Since then I interviewed and hired many candidates whose resumes contained every blunder possible.
The only change recently is that the last candidate is willing to work from India. Lower your salary range and all of a sudden you don't need perfect grammer or 10 years experience for a senior engineering job. Oh the irony from when INS was harassing us for taking jobs from US workers after coming here one-by-one and completing a college degree.
Resumes and inteviews are not supposed to be an experience in humiliation and arbitary bullying. Spacing around a comma says nothing about engineering skills. If it came to that, fresh college graduates should look into taking a second major. While people already in too deep like me can duke it out and hope for the best.
Is there a decent computer professionals union in Bay Area yet? I know about outsourcing, but it's already happening anyway without any unions and perhaps jobs that have to stay local can be used as a leverage.
I guess you didn't have the "pleasure" of using near, far and huge pointers in DOS compilers. In your model, every library function would have to have two versions - one that takes 32 bit pointers and one that takes 64 bit.
I suspect that compilers are doing just fine - optimization algorithms shouldn't change much just because you double the maximum integer size. The problem is that programmers don't write code that takes full advantage of 64 bit.
Take OpenSSL, the first library benchmarked, for example. We all know RSA involves some arithmetics with large numbers. I am sure it would benefit nicely from higher-precision integers if the code didn't always just use 32 bit.
Or consider an application that manipulates a complex data structure stored in a 10GB file. With 32 bit, it would have to use file offsets to represent pointers, implement it's own page cache and worry about elements crossing page boundaries. Under a 64 bit OS, it can just mmap the whole file at a fixed address, use regular pointers and let the OS do the caching taking all the running processes into account.
Of course it makes sense to write code for the most common machines in use today. But then don't say 64 bit applications are larger or slower - it's just 32 bit applications compiled for 64 bit instruction set.
I haven't encountered many companies that value their employees time so much to not want them to save a couple of thousand dollars.
No? Then why do companies get Windows and MS Office when they could obviously save money with Linux/OpenOffice? Why won't they invest on ease of use (real or percieved) in other areas then - like Apple servers or for that matter desktops?
assumes you've had to do make each box one at a time with no copied config files or installers and no knowledge retention.
Well, first of all a small business might only have one server. The bigger problem is that someone with the knowledge needs to work for the company in the first place and needs to stay around to maintain the stuff. With XServe, it's conceivable that one of the existing employees can manage the server without taking too much time off his/her primary job.
Most people would agree it's far better to hire somebody to install the right server solution than to buy special hardware/software for the sole purpose of making it easier for yourself to do it.
You just hit the problem on the head. G5 XServe is $2,610.00, IT person's salary is how much? I don't think you will get your IBM box for 3K, or will be able to manage it by itself. PC - well let's just not mention all the "management" software that will install itself unless you keep patching the box.
Even if you already have an IT department, their time is better spent on supporting users and installing more software rather than mundane tasks like configuring a VPN.
Me, I don't see who wouldn't want to go with XServe, provided that their application is ported to MacOSX. Maybe companies like Google that have thousands of nodes and calculated that Intel hardware will be cheaper.
Businesses do in fact often sell at a loss - to gain market share, because competition is selling for that price or because they overestimated the demand of the item and have to lower the price to sell the surplus. Think about it, once you already produced the item, it's better to sell it for any price and minimize the loss than have it sitting on the shelf.
In competitive environment, not every business survives and those that do only turn profit some of the time. If this is not the case for music industry, it's bad news for the customers who pay for the cozy profits.
If record companies were really competitive, CD prices would be close to the cost of production (including salary of musician and others, not just pressing plastic of course). In fact, they would often sell below cost, hoping to make it up with some especially popular albums later and we should see a big label go bankrupt once in a while.
In that case, if a label can make ends meet by charging $0.99CDN, they wouldn't charge a euro for the same song in UK, lest the competitors beat them on price. We would also see $0.10 loss leaders with decent music who hope to grab the market share and then somehow raise the price and/or lower costs.
Nothing more to say except hope that smaller labels take hold and make some music that is worth itds price.
Even if the first mission is very dangerous and has no scientific significance. I doubt Columbus got much practical benefits from his trip either. I think it's pretty clear what the humanity wants to do in space for long term, and it's more than snapping pretty pictures.
Do you think it would be a good idea to allow poor nations to manufacture any patented drug they want without compensating the inventor at all?
Yes, absolutely. It's not like AIDS only exists in poor countries. Although it's certainly more widespread, research was mostly done with richer patients in mind. The inventor can still collect money in US.
What they shouldn't be able to do is export those drugs to richer nations. There will be some illegal export to combat, but what else is new?
300 replies and nobody looked at the "Java utilities" that the author is so protective about?
Base64 - Encode and decode base 64.
Browser - Open a browser from an application on Windows, Unix, or Macintosh.
CGI Query String Parser - Libraries to to parse the query data supplied by HTTP GET or POST requests.
... the list goes on
Sorry, but for such trivial items, we are talking about fair use rather than copyright violation. Just like I can quote a paragraph without permission of the author, I should be able to copy a small section of the code that someone decided to let me read.
In some places, the law could be different now. Just look at SCO and errno.h. But it really shouldn't be. GPL is for significant projects like gcc. I really shudder when someone thinks of patenting, copyrighting, trademarking or applying any kind of IP to a Base64 implementation.
So if you catch some kids in your house, just snooping around, but not stealing anything (they ate a few of your cookies though, and watched one or two Pay-per-view movies), and they came in through a window while you were on vacation.. it's okay because they are "Just kids, just exploring?"
Well, I sure wouldn't want them to go to prison. Grounded (house arrest for a month) or without allowance (a few K fine), yes.
Now, if they look for unlocked houses because they know a notorious thief is touring the neighborhood and fix my windows before they leave - why, I will say thanks and send them lots of cookies/DVDs.
Should be applaud RIAA for stopping violations of the law when everyone said they couldn't? Or should we contribute to projects that develop encrypted P2P untracable through plausible deniability? I think this is separate from the question weather CDs are too expensive or singers are too poor.
On one hand, giving some data to other people is a form of free speech and once people can accept its illegal, they can also accept a pretty scary society. On the other hand, most of us spend the day writting programs that other people find useful and need food, shelter and entertainment in exhange. Hopefully some alternative way to provide those is found first, before the intellectual property is abolished. Go figure.
4. Driver contains code bought from several different companies. Getting permission to open source is inconvinient and expensive.
5. The driver itself is innovative, like for ATI and NVidia and the company doesn't want to give away its secrets.
6. The driver is open sourced, but not popular enough to be included in the kernel. The company wants to provide one pre-compiled binary that works on all Linux distributions.
It used to be that systems on the Internet started out pretty open. If some students figured out how to get in, but kept their practical jokes clean and fun, nobody cared much. If people got out of line, things generally got patched. Like adding salt to UNIX passwords so that people don't just encrypt the whole dictionary and look for matches. Worked pretty well given CPU speeds and hackers' skills at the time it was introduced.
Whatever happened now? SMTP started out pretty open. Obviously things got out of control. So, fix it already. A group of ISPs can gang up and require all SMTP users to sign up with their username/password, which is already supported by all e-mail clients. Limit each user to 1000 e-mails a day (allowing for rather large mailing lists, but still 1000 times too low to make spam attractive for the subscription price). Then only accept e-mail from cooperating hosts over SSL pipes with a correct certificate. Prepend BORK: to the subject lines from other domains so that users can filter them to another mailbox.
If yahoo participates, I can always ask people to sign up for a free account if they really want to reach me. Smaller ISPs will jump on the chance to de-bork their e-mails and make customers happier. Once enough of them do, bigger ISPs will have an incentive as well. Problem solved!
Hopefully, just too many drinks for a New Year and not a troll. 2^16-1, which corresponds to unsigned 2 byte int, wouldn't even last for one day. INT_MAX assuming four byte integer is 2^31-1. When the variable reaches it's max value, it will change to a -2^31. Depending on how functions like ctime are implemented, this may work just fine until the start of 22nd century, set the date to 1902 or cause programs to display garbage data or even crash. It will definitely not set the date to 1970, which would correspond to 0, not INT_MIN.
Perfectly working code should definitely be refused if it's too complicated, breaks consistency, ignores development basics like code reuse, comments and proper class design or will cause lead developers to loose understanding of their project, without the author being willing/able to take over.
It's another question if XFree code team were no longer lead developers, or if another group of people can do the job better. But a project with a lot of contributers and without any moderators will degenerate to chaos before you can say Bazaar.
Nobody doubts that Linus did a lot of good to the world and still does to this day. But I do think he has a particular vision for Linux and his reputation keeps people who have some disagreement from forking or working on another OS.
Say, I want to contribute a USB kernel module for my webcam. So I read a nice doxygen reference about the virtual methods I need to override in LinVideoCapture class. Then I write my driver and put binary and optionally source on my website. I shouldn't have to update/recompile it for a couple of years, until the next major rewrite of the kernel that changes LinVideoCapture signatures.
Umm... Actually it's more like I need to read lots of uncommented C code for other drivers that access kernel data structure that seem to have nothing to do with video or USB. Then when I am done I need to make source code changes every couple of month and provide a separate binary for non-SMP, SMP and so on kernels Redhat ships.
I wrote many TSRs/drivers in ASM for DOS and it's a joy compared to ASM-like C for Linux. Yes, OSes are more complicated now. But they should also provide higher-level interfaces to compensate.
Or I can just run Windows (well, MacOSX in my case) and spend the same effort to write a nice Java video-editing app. I would love to have an OS that people really use and that makes contributing to the kernel pleasent though. Like a forked Linux distribution with kernel interfaces, libc, ld.so, threading model, gcc C++ ABI... thought though once and stabalized for long time.
Is there a prize for the first optimized encoder for some flavor of MPEG4? Imaging ripping a DVD in one hour. Hopefully ATI users on OSX are not left behind.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have to abide all the specifications, just ones in my area of work. If I am going to write device drivers, my grammer is only relevant as far as making myself understood.
What's up with the dash in likewise and period before the parentesis anyway?
...with tips on how Vietnam vets are more likely to get noticed then ones from Korean war. Because job search these days really came to begging.
I got hired with a resume that had only basic formating (boldface and 3 part titles using nroff), had quite a few grammer errors and only listed part time jobs I worked in high school of another country. Since then I interviewed and hired many candidates whose resumes contained every blunder possible.
The only change recently is that the last candidate is willing to work from India. Lower your salary range and all of a sudden you don't need perfect grammer or 10 years experience for a senior engineering job. Oh the irony from when INS was harassing us for taking jobs from US workers after coming here one-by-one and completing a college degree.
Resumes and inteviews are not supposed to be an experience in humiliation and arbitary bullying. Spacing around a comma says nothing about engineering skills. If it came to that, fresh college graduates should look into taking a second major. While people already in too deep like me can duke it out and hope for the best.
Is there a decent computer professionals union in Bay Area yet? I know about outsourcing, but it's already happening anyway without any unions and perhaps jobs that have to stay local can be used as a leverage.
I guess you didn't have the "pleasure" of using near, far and huge pointers in DOS compilers. In your model, every library function would have to have two versions - one that takes 32 bit pointers and one that takes 64 bit.
Uniform and simple is good...
I suspect that compilers are doing just fine - optimization algorithms shouldn't change much just because you double the maximum integer size. The problem is that programmers don't write code that takes full advantage of 64 bit.
Take OpenSSL, the first library benchmarked, for example. We all know RSA involves some arithmetics with large numbers. I am sure it would benefit nicely from higher-precision integers if the code didn't always just use 32 bit.
Or consider an application that manipulates a complex data structure stored in a 10GB file. With 32 bit, it would have to use file offsets to represent pointers, implement it's own page cache and worry about elements crossing page boundaries. Under a 64 bit OS, it can just mmap the whole file at a fixed address, use regular pointers and let the OS do the caching taking all the running processes into account.
Of course it makes sense to write code for the most common machines in use today. But then don't say 64 bit applications are larger or slower - it's just 32 bit applications compiled for 64 bit instruction set.
I haven't encountered many companies that value their employees time so much to not want them to save a couple of thousand dollars.
No? Then why do companies get Windows and MS Office when they could obviously save money with Linux/OpenOffice? Why won't they invest on ease of use (real or percieved) in other areas then - like Apple servers or for that matter desktops?
assumes you've had to do make each box one at a time with no copied config files or installers and no knowledge retention.
Well, first of all a small business might only have one server. The bigger problem is that someone with the knowledge needs to work for the company in the first place and needs to stay around to maintain the stuff. With XServe, it's conceivable that one of the existing employees can manage the server without taking too much time off his/her primary job.
Most people would agree it's far better to hire somebody to install the right server solution than to buy special hardware/software for the sole purpose of making it easier for yourself to do it.
You just hit the problem on the head. G5 XServe is $2,610.00, IT person's salary is how much? I don't think you will get your IBM box for 3K, or will be able to manage it by itself. PC - well let's just not mention all the "management" software that will install itself unless you keep patching the box.
Even if you already have an IT department, their time is better spent on supporting users and installing more software rather than mundane tasks like configuring a VPN.
Me, I don't see who wouldn't want to go with XServe, provided that their application is ported to MacOSX. Maybe companies like Google that have thousands of nodes and calculated that Intel hardware will be cheaper.
Businesses do in fact often sell at a loss - to gain market share, because competition is selling for that price or because they overestimated the demand of the item and have to lower the price to sell the surplus. Think about it, once you already produced the item, it's better to sell it for any price and minimize the loss than have it sitting on the shelf.
In competitive environment, not every business survives and those that do only turn profit some of the time. If this is not the case for music industry, it's bad news for the customers who pay for the cozy profits.
If record companies were really competitive, CD prices would be close to the cost of production (including salary of musician and others, not just pressing plastic of course). In fact, they would often sell below cost, hoping to make it up with some especially popular albums later and we should see a big label go bankrupt once in a while.
In that case, if a label can make ends meet by charging $0.99CDN, they wouldn't charge a euro for the same song in UK, lest the competitors beat them on price. We would also see $0.10 loss leaders with decent music who hope to grab the market share and then somehow raise the price and/or lower costs.
Nothing more to say except hope that smaller labels take hold and make some music that is worth itds price.
Even if the first mission is very dangerous and has no scientific significance. I doubt Columbus got much practical benefits from his trip either. I think it's pretty clear what the humanity wants to do in space for long term, and it's more than snapping pretty pictures.
Do you think it would be a good idea to allow poor nations to manufacture any patented drug they want without compensating the inventor at all?
Yes, absolutely. It's not like AIDS only exists in poor countries. Although it's certainly more widespread, research was mostly done with richer patients in mind. The inventor can still collect money in US.
What they shouldn't be able to do is export those drugs to richer nations. There will be some illegal export to combat, but what else is new?
Sorry, but for such trivial items, we are talking about fair use rather than copyright violation. Just like I can quote a paragraph without permission of the author, I should be able to copy a small section of the code that someone decided to let me read.
In some places, the law could be different now. Just look at SCO and errno.h. But it really shouldn't be. GPL is for significant projects like gcc. I really shudder when someone thinks of patenting, copyrighting, trademarking or applying any kind of IP to a Base64 implementation.
OMG, this line of thought makes me really scared of my insurance company.
I thought Steve Jobs was our hero?
So if you catch some kids in your house, just snooping around, but not stealing anything (they ate a few of your cookies though, and watched one or two Pay-per-view movies), and they came in through a window while you were on vacation.. it's okay because they are "Just kids, just exploring?"
Well, I sure wouldn't want them to go to prison. Grounded (house arrest for a month) or without allowance (a few K fine), yes.
Now, if they look for unlocked houses because they know a notorious thief is touring the neighborhood and fix my windows before they leave - why, I will say thanks and send them lots of cookies/DVDs.
Most of us don't have a subscription and will not subscribe just because of a slashdot link. Why post a story that most people will not read?
Should be applaud RIAA for stopping violations of the law when everyone said they couldn't? Or should we contribute to projects that develop encrypted P2P untracable through plausible deniability? I think this is separate from the question weather CDs are too expensive or singers are too poor.
On one hand, giving some data to other people is a form of free speech and once people can accept its illegal, they can also accept a pretty scary society. On the other hand, most of us spend the day writting programs that other people find useful and need food, shelter and entertainment in exhange. Hopefully some alternative way to provide those is found first, before the intellectual property is abolished. Go figure.
4. Driver contains code bought from several different companies. Getting permission to open source is inconvinient and expensive.
5. The driver itself is innovative, like for ATI and NVidia and the company doesn't want to give away its secrets.
6. The driver is open sourced, but not popular enough to be included in the kernel. The company wants to provide one pre-compiled binary that works on all Linux distributions.
It used to be that systems on the Internet started out pretty open. If some students figured out how to get in, but kept their practical jokes clean and fun, nobody cared much. If people got out of line, things generally got patched. Like adding salt to UNIX passwords so that people don't just encrypt the whole dictionary and look for matches. Worked pretty well given CPU speeds and hackers' skills at the time it was introduced.
Whatever happened now? SMTP started out pretty open. Obviously things got out of control. So, fix it already. A group of ISPs can gang up and require all SMTP users to sign up with their username/password, which is already supported by all e-mail clients. Limit each user to 1000 e-mails a day (allowing for rather large mailing lists, but still 1000 times too low to make spam attractive for the subscription price). Then only accept e-mail from cooperating hosts over SSL pipes with a correct certificate. Prepend BORK: to the subject lines from other domains so that users can filter them to another mailbox.
If yahoo participates, I can always ask people to sign up for a free account if they really want to reach me. Smaller ISPs will jump on the chance to de-bork their e-mails and make customers happier. Once enough of them do, bigger ISPs will have an incentive as well. Problem solved!
I may be dating myself but it been a "long" time...
Wow. Condolenses. Reminds us there are things worse than outsourcing. You should really check out those OSDN personals.
Hopefully, just too many drinks for a New Year and not a troll. 2^16-1, which corresponds to unsigned 2 byte int, wouldn't even last for one day. INT_MAX assuming four byte integer is 2^31-1. When the variable reaches it's max value, it will change to a -2^31. Depending on how functions like ctime are implemented, this may work just fine until the start of 22nd century, set the date to 1902 or cause programs to display garbage data or even crash. It will definitely not set the date to 1970, which would correspond to 0, not INT_MIN.
Perfectly working code should definitely be refused if it's too complicated, breaks consistency, ignores development basics like code reuse, comments and proper class design or will cause lead developers to loose understanding of their project, without the author being willing/able to take over.
It's another question if XFree code team were no longer lead developers, or if another group of people can do the job better. But a project with a lot of contributers and without any moderators will degenerate to chaos before you can say Bazaar.
Nobody doubts that Linus did a lot of good to the world and still does to this day. But I do think he has a particular vision for Linux and his reputation keeps people who have some disagreement from forking or working on another OS.
Say, I want to contribute a USB kernel module for my webcam. So I read a nice doxygen reference about the virtual methods I need to override in LinVideoCapture class. Then I write my driver and put binary and optionally source on my website. I shouldn't have to update/recompile it for a couple of years, until the next major rewrite of the kernel that changes LinVideoCapture signatures.
Umm... Actually it's more like I need to read lots of uncommented C code for other drivers that access kernel data structure that seem to have nothing to do with video or USB. Then when I am done I need to make source code changes every couple of month and provide a separate binary for non-SMP, SMP and so on kernels Redhat ships.
I wrote many TSRs/drivers in ASM for DOS and it's a joy compared to ASM-like C for Linux. Yes, OSes are more complicated now. But they should also provide higher-level interfaces to compensate.
Or I can just run Windows (well, MacOSX in my case) and spend the same effort to write a nice Java video-editing app. I would love to have an OS that people really use and that makes contributing to the kernel pleasent though. Like a forked Linux distribution with kernel interfaces, libc, ld.so, threading model, gcc C++ ABI... thought though once and stabalized for long time.
http://fink.sourceforge.net/
Is there a prize for the first optimized encoder for some flavor of MPEG4? Imaging ripping a DVD in one hour. Hopefully ATI users on OSX are not left behind.