I actually work on this project, an application called Choose and Book.
I suspect it was probably this system which caused my wife to
fail to get two X-Ray appointments earlier this year. First time the
booking went through but when she took a day off work and turned
up at the hospital they had no record of the appointment. Second
time her GP told her the system was "down" and she should try coming
back later. In the end we gave up (she got better without treatment).
Do you have an example of a 27 year old program that can run on a current install of Ubuntu, without having to do anything else? I'm looking at Visicalc on Windows XP Professional right now.
Linux (and indeed Windows) can run quite a lot of old software
through emulation, including tons of 27 year old games, Visicalc
(using something like dosemu+freedos), CP/M programs under
Z80 emulators, and Windows programs under
Wine (not that any of those are 27 years old).
In fact emulation is possibly a better way to run old software
because you can keep your operating system shiny and new but
still run the old stuff. I think this is one thing that the
Mac OS 9 -> Mac OS X did absolutely right.
Those are patent applications. You can write any old nonsense in a patent application.
Please read carefully what I said in my posting above before bothering to reply.
It wasn't about whether Microsoft had patent applications, or has even managed to
hoodwink the USPTO in granted some faulty patents, but whether they are ever going
to specify what patents they allege that Mono infringes. At that point pubpat or
a similar organisation can make a serious effort to get the invalid patents
overturned. Until then it's all just FUD.
My understanding is the core libraries/packages/whatever-the-buzzword-of-the-we ek-is and the syntax of C# are specified by the ECMA standard. This is analagous to the ANSI specs that cover C++ syntax as well as core libraries and STL.
Well, your "understanding" is wrong. It is not possible to patent a programming language,
library, package or API. You may be able to patent tiny parts of a standard if those parts are
innovative and non-obvious, but I seriously doubt that anything in C#,.Net or its libraries is
in any way new. People have been doing this stuff since the 70s.
What actual patents does Microsoft allege Mono infringes? Patent numbers, not FUD
and vague assertions as you have made above.
That just gives loads of strange irrelevant patents on electronic ink and the link. What actual patents are infringing?
The point here is that Microsoft hasn't actually specified any patents. Maybe they exist, maybe they don't. Maybe they're valid, or maybe they're overbroad rubbish which are worth challenging. Compare and contrast
Adobe's PDF license which
is very clear about precisely which patents are being infringed.
Microsoft is FUDding like mad, and we're being taken in by it.
Sorry, but if you'd read the End User License Agreement (EULA) for my
product you would know that (section 5.2) Benchmarking and Criticism of the Product
are not permitted without prior written agreement from
Timber Research &
Environmental Engineering (T.R.E.E.) Corp. You will be
hearing from my lawyers.
Actually, I invented a much better air purification system a while back.
It consists of a structure which waves in the air on large beams
rising from the ground,
on which are placed what are known as
Local Environmental Air Filters ("LEAF"s).
The best thing is it uses an innovative self-assembly technique which
just requires placing a single capsule in the ground, so installation
is pretty simple.
After use, it can be disassembled using hand tools and
the parts reused for many other uses, so it's ideal for use in
both developed and developing countries.
I think a better example is can you buy a car without the engine control software installed? Let the manufacturer know that you're going to write your own.
Microsoft gains the capability to run Linux better in a virtualized environment (or vice versa)
Microsoft pays three-hundred oodle squillion dollars for this when they
could have just downloaded Xen (works for us)?
Come on, Microsoft is not stupid. This is really part
of their FUD campaign to convince people that their worthless overbroad
software patents are worth something. And that's all about
stopping the free software community from trying to
interoperate or clone things like.Net and OpenXML. And
guess what, that plan is working really well.
Usually these articles are spotted when the author
in question links them to an existing article. See
for example this
piece of nonsense which is working its way through AfD at
the moment. I spotted it when it was linked to the
existing Penal Colony article which is on my watchlist.
which would of course be true, and the fix would be to simple not load the session at startup.
And then lose the hundred or so other windows I've got open. Great idea! This
is why I had to edit sessionsaver.js if you'd actually bothered
to read my posting.
Firefox 2.0 on Linux - yup, it crashes. Even worse the session save feature causes it
to crash when it starts up next time. I had to hand-edit sessionsaver.js to stop it reopening
the URL.
In the future, all browsers will be a webapps! Then, the Internet will collapse because of the resulting paradox.
No no no, it's simple. You'll only need a desktop browser to bootstrap the
web app browser. Once it's running, you won't need the desktop browser
any more!
AMD64 has more registers available. Reducing register pressure makes
software go faster (in some circumstances).
Even if that weren't the case, my desktop is used for
memory-heavy analytics programs as well, so it needs to be
64 bit because we map huge files into memory.
Nothing to do with Linux. It's 64 bit processors & Macromedia/Adobe's refusal
to pull their fingers out of their arses and get a working
version of Flash for them - that's the problem.
GMail was a brilliant play by Google. They restricted it so that they
had relatively few users, but gave them all 2 GB which made headlines.
Microsoft et al rushed to react, but of course Hotmail has hundreds of
millions of users and giving them all 2 GB must have scared the hell
out of Microsoft. In the end Microsoft still seems to be scrambling
to update Hotmail accounts.
Don't be retarded. Parsing HTML into a DOM, parsing CSS and applying that to the DOM, then actually computing all of the page's layout takes considerably longer than just pulling a pre-computed DOM out of memory. Caching pre-computed values in memory is hardly a rare thing, most software does it in one way or another.
This is a typical example of an inexperienced programmer not taking
the whole situation into account.
You are probably right on one level: Take a single web page on an otherwise
idle single-user computer with plenty of RAM. It is indeed faster to cache
the parsed DOM & layout than to recompute it.
Now consider the actual situation: Firefox with dozens of tabs open, each
having up to 5 pages cached like this, in a low memory situation, with
plenty of other processes running. Firefox is consuming a gigabyte of RAM.
It's forcing the machine into swap. Other processes could rightfully
use physical RAM. There is false sharing going on between parts of
Firefox's fragmented memory[1]. Now this caching is a huge liability.
The machine is thrashing into the ground. Written in C++ and
hence suffering memory fragmentation, Firefox
cannot fully recover freed memory even if the tabs are closed.
Rich.
[1]Unused web pages are not cleanly
swapped out because malloc itself has memory structures spread
out through these complex structures, which must be iterated over
whenever there is an allocation/free.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually work on this project, an application called Choose and Book.
I suspect it was probably this system which caused my wife to fail to get two X-Ray appointments earlier this year. First time the booking went through but when she took a day off work and turned up at the hospital they had no record of the appointment. Second time her GP told her the system was "down" and she should try coming back later. In the end we gave up (she got better without treatment).
Thanks!
Rich.
Do you have an example of a 27 year old program that can run on a current install of Ubuntu, without having to do anything else? I'm looking at Visicalc on Windows XP Professional right now.
Linux (and indeed Windows) can run quite a lot of old software through emulation, including tons of 27 year old games, Visicalc (using something like dosemu+freedos), CP/M programs under Z80 emulators, and Windows programs under Wine (not that any of those are 27 years old).
In fact emulation is possibly a better way to run old software because you can keep your operating system shiny and new but still run the old stuff. I think this is one thing that the Mac OS 9 -> Mac OS X did absolutely right.
Rich.
Rich.
Those are patent applications. You can write any old nonsense in a patent application.
Please read carefully what I said in my posting above before bothering to reply. It wasn't about whether Microsoft had patent applications, or has even managed to hoodwink the USPTO in granted some faulty patents, but whether they are ever going to specify what patents they allege that Mono infringes. At that point pubpat or a similar organisation can make a serious effort to get the invalid patents overturned. Until then it's all just FUD.
Rich.
My understanding is the core libraries/packages/whatever-the-buzzword-of-the-we ek-is and the syntax of C# are specified by the ECMA standard. This is analagous to the ANSI specs that cover C++ syntax as well as core libraries and STL.
Well, your "understanding" is wrong. It is not possible to patent a programming language, library, package or API. You may be able to patent tiny parts of a standard if those parts are innovative and non-obvious, but I seriously doubt that anything in C#, .Net or its libraries is
in any way new. People have been doing this stuff since the 70s.
What actual patents does Microsoft allege Mono infringes? Patent numbers, not FUD and vague assertions as you have made above.
Rich.
That just gives loads of strange irrelevant patents on electronic ink and the link. What actual patents are infringing?
The point here is that Microsoft hasn't actually specified any patents. Maybe they exist, maybe they don't. Maybe they're valid, or maybe they're overbroad rubbish which are worth challenging. Compare and contrast Adobe's PDF license which is very clear about precisely which patents are being infringed.
Microsoft is FUDding like mad, and we're being taken in by it.
Rich.
Rich.
Sorry, but if you'd read the End User License Agreement (EULA) for my product you would know that (section 5.2) Benchmarking and Criticism of the Product are not permitted without prior written agreement from Timber Research & Environmental Engineering (T.R.E.E.) Corp. You will be hearing from my lawyers.
Rich.
Actually, I invented a much better air purification system a while back.
It consists of a structure which waves in the air on large beams rising from the ground, on which are placed what are known as Local Environmental Air Filters ("LEAF"s).
The best thing is it uses an innovative self-assembly technique which just requires placing a single capsule in the ground, so installation is pretty simple.
After use, it can be disassembled using hand tools and the parts reused for many other uses, so it's ideal for use in both developed and developing countries.
Rich.
To gain access to root on these machines, enter this code.
Surely: Democrat, Republican, Republican, Democrat, Democrat, Independent
Rich.
I think a better example is can you buy a car without the engine control software installed? Let the manufacturer know that you're going to write your own.
Rich.
Microsoft gains the capability to run Linux better in a virtualized environment (or vice versa)
Microsoft pays three-hundred oodle squillion dollars for this when they could have just downloaded Xen (works for us)?
Come on, Microsoft is not stupid. This is really part of their FUD campaign to convince people that their worthless overbroad software patents are worth something. And that's all about stopping the free software community from trying to interoperate or clone things like .Net and OpenXML. And
guess what, that plan is working really well.
Rich.
can you search for articles that link to your watchlist articles?
Not sure, but I don't think I've ever seen a feature like that. I'm sure it could be done with a bot though.
Rich.
Usually these articles are spotted when the author in question links them to an existing article. See for example this piece of nonsense which is working its way through AfD at the moment. I spotted it when it was linked to the existing Penal Colony article which is on my watchlist.
Rich.
which would of course be true, and the fix would be to simple not load the session at startup.
And then lose the hundred or so other windows I've got open. Great idea! This is why I had to edit sessionsaver.js if you'd actually bothered to read my posting.
Rich.
Firefox 2.0 on Linux - yup, it crashes. Even worse the session save feature causes it to crash when it starts up next time. I had to hand-edit sessionsaver.js to stop it reopening the URL.
Rich.
What's needed is some sort of captcha for telephone calls.
Answering machine: To connect to Mr Jones, please press keys one, six, three and nine now.
Auto-dialer: [Launches into pre-recorded message]
[Ten seconds later, answering machine hangs up]
Rich.
In the future, all browsers will be a webapps! Then, the Internet will collapse because of the resulting paradox.
No no no, it's simple. You'll only need a desktop browser to bootstrap the web app browser. Once it's running, you won't need the desktop browser any more!
Rich.
AMD64 has more registers available. Reducing register pressure makes software go faster (in some circumstances).
Even if that weren't the case, my desktop is used for memory-heavy analytics programs as well, so it needs to be 64 bit because we map huge files into memory.
Rich.
Nothing to do with Linux. It's 64 bit processors & Macromedia/Adobe's refusal to pull their fingers out of their arses and get a working version of Flash for them - that's the problem.
Rich.
GMail was a brilliant play by Google. They restricted it so that they had relatively few users, but gave them all 2 GB which made headlines. Microsoft et al rushed to react, but of course Hotmail has hundreds of millions of users and giving them all 2 GB must have scared the hell out of Microsoft. In the end Microsoft still seems to be scrambling to update Hotmail accounts.
Rich.
[Yahoo maps beta]
It requires Flash, which isn't available on my computer (Linux/AMD64 - and don't tell me I must cripple my web browser just to view a map please).
Complete non-starter.
Rich.
That's great - sorry for being sarcastic. Check out our OCaml tutorial ...
I used to use BASIC on a Z80-based home computer. Programming that really sucked! Hence all programming sucks!
Try the state of the art garbage collector in some modern functional languages - OCaml is our favorite over here.
Rich.
Don't be retarded. Parsing HTML into a DOM, parsing CSS and applying that to the DOM, then actually computing all of the page's layout takes considerably longer than just pulling a pre-computed DOM out of memory. Caching pre-computed values in memory is hardly a rare thing, most software does it in one way or another.
This is a typical example of an inexperienced programmer not taking the whole situation into account.
You are probably right on one level: Take a single web page on an otherwise idle single-user computer with plenty of RAM. It is indeed faster to cache the parsed DOM & layout than to recompute it.
Now consider the actual situation: Firefox with dozens of tabs open, each having up to 5 pages cached like this, in a low memory situation, with plenty of other processes running. Firefox is consuming a gigabyte of RAM. It's forcing the machine into swap. Other processes could rightfully use physical RAM. There is false sharing going on between parts of Firefox's fragmented memory[1]. Now this caching is a huge liability. The machine is thrashing into the ground. Written in C++ and hence suffering memory fragmentation, Firefox cannot fully recover freed memory even if the tabs are closed.
Rich.
[1]Unused web pages are not cleanly swapped out because malloc itself has memory structures spread out through these complex structures, which must be iterated over whenever there is an allocation/free.