I'm going to reply to your subject line, not your message...
By coincidence, my iBook also died 2 months ago. It was 18 months old (6 months out of warranty), and I was informed that it would cost £500 (about $900) to repair, for which money, obviously, I could buy a whole new laptop.
The "solution" to this, apparently, was for me to have bought AppleCare insurance. This adds an extra £200 to the cost of their laptops, making them very uncompetitive with PC hardware, particularly since I'd spent about another £150 on upgrading the memory to a reasonable size and installing WiFi.
I mean to say,
on Debian I can do 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' and that updates everything on my system to the latest version and/or fully security patched version (depending on which branch of Debian I'm in).
I used to run a FreeBSD desktop and I was impressed at the speed and reliability over what I'd been using before (Red Hat Linux), but the package systems on Red Hat and Debian are (or seem) far superior.
We had the opposite experience with Adsense.
We set up a site (j-london.com)
with an agreement that we'd develop the
back end (discussion, place for people to
put adverts, etc.) in return for taking revenue
from Adsense adverts on the site.
Well, I think we earned about $600 last
year from that one:-(
It's not helped by the abysmal state of
the dollar-pound, nor by the fact that Google
pays with dollar checks and the bank takes
a huge cut along the way.
Adsense gives us hardly any guidance as
to what fees we get. It seems like Google
takes a large cut. We're looking at replacing
it with a commission
junction advert slot.
Darcs is an SCM written in Haskell, which is pretty cool. So, in order to build darcs, you need a haskell compiler, which is written in haskell! GHC needs a bootstrapped compiler in order to be able to compile itself.
Or you type apt-get install darcs
Installing a C compiler from source is really
no easier than installing a Haskell compiler
from source (think: what if you don't have a C
compiler to compile gcc with?). For most people,
it'll be a non-issue since they'll be using
a binary package.
It's true that OCaml's runtime has an efficient, lightweight garbage collector. C's runtime has a thing called malloc which is also bundled, and of nearly equivalent complexity - take a look at the source to it some time.
It is also possible to call OCaml code from C. Don't believe me? Have a look at mod_caml
- that's Apache (C) calling into OCaml CGI
scripts.
My original call was for people to start using
sensible languages which have support for bounds checking. You can write daemons and applications in OCaml perfectly well, and they will run as fast as C programs, using similar amounts of memory.
The technology to exceed C in many areas has been around since the 1970s - for goodness sake, let's start using it!
Find a type-safe language where the generated code is standalone and has an easy mechanism for importing and exporting data, and you'll get some traction.
That would be OCaml then.
It compiles to native executables which require
no outside support, and it's relatively easy
to integrate with C code.
Automatic buffer overflow protection only covers the straightforward buffer overflow problems, i.e. array index overflows. In the case of more complex pointer arithmetic, where most of these problems occur, automatic protection is not possible (at least not without losing the option of pointer arithmetic).
Actually, automatic checking is very much
possible, and has been for years. For
example, Bounds checking gcc (that website is down right now,
so try my
page on the subject). That
was written in 1994, and there are
newer systems available now
which don't have such a serious
performance penalty.
The real solution is to stop writing
critical code in C. Other languages
provide bounds checking, and are faster
and safer than C: for example
OCaml
which I prefer nowadays.
In a sense the software industry went through
this phase back in the 80s. Remember strangely formatted "uncopyable" disks and parallel
port dongles? At one point in about 1991, my
colleagues at work built a special parallel port
expander which could take 5 dongles at the
same time.
To a certain extent, shareware and
free (as in freedom) software is now
the new model. Don't prevent copying -
instead encourage copying - and have a
business plan which makes copying an
asset, not a liability.
Will this happen in film and music?
Not soon, but there are models which
could spring up. For example, imagine
software which allowed many people to
collaborate on a piece of music over
the Internet - they wouldn't need to
be in the same place, or even at the
same time. Or how about software
which generates film-quality movies
from a script and simple director
commands? Not possible now, but
surely in the future. If this software
became widely available it would turn
everyone with a script into a director,
and dramatically reduce the cost of making
films. Of course, most films produced
this way would be crap, but that just
means that a reputation system could be
used to filter out the diamonds.
but why can't there be legislation that FORCES pornographic websites to use such a suffix from now on?
[...]
it's a win-win situation according to me... what am i not getting?
There's been a perfectly good W3C standard
for voluntarily classifying the content
of your own site for years (not just for
pornography, but for plenty of other
criteria too): It's called
PICS,
you can classify your own site, and
lots of sites do so, and lots of
software reads the PICS classification.
The.xxx suffix does the same but
less - less efficiently, only
one classification, only one
degree of classification.
Legislators haven't picked up on PICS,
so why should they support an even
worse system?
The next version of MS SQL Server has embedded.Net support. Want to write your stored procedures is C#? Go right ahead.
So? PostgreSQL can run Perl stored
procedures. Does this mean PostgreSQL is
written in Perl?
Does the fact that MS SQL Server finally
happens to run a CLR interpreter mean that
MS SQL Server is written in C#?
I'm using the so-called "star html"/"* html" hack
to make developing for IE slightly
more tolerable.
What I do is build the site in Firefox so
it renders perfectly. I know it'll likely render
fine in Mozilla (obviously), Safari
and Opera. But IE is likely to screw up positioning.
So I then add extra lines:
* html div#content {
top: 100px;/* hack for IE */
}
just after the correct code to move things
around on IE. IE is broken and interprets
the "* html", whereas other browsers correctly
ignore it.
In a very few cases I simply disable
features in the IE version until it
works - IE users get a slightly less
nice looking site, but that's their
problem.
The business plan of this decade:
1) Find something that is well known and patent it.
2) Sue some big company for using your patent.
Actually, the business plan for several
decades has been:
Get a patent of dubious merit.
Find lots and lots of companies who
are too small to defend themselves, but
large enough to pay out a few thousand $$,
and send them a demand for royalties.
Profit.
See
Patent
Nonsense for an example of
how this happened to Autodesk just
before they went public.
Yes, I remember that. But do you actually
know anyone who ever did it?
I did once see a BBC Model B with a Teletext adapter.
That would be around 1995, and by that point
it was an extremely rare artifact. Of course
by then it was too late to actually use it
to download software:-(
Software distribution using acetate
(very flexible, cheap and light)
records was very common in the UK around
the early 1980s. They were the original
"cover discs" on magazines!
I still have a few games, including an
Othello/Reversi game for the ZX81 from
"Your Computer" magazine.
The disadvantage was that you could play
the acetate about twice before it got
so damaged that it wouldn't play any more,
so we used to record the record to tape
first time.
Vinyl/acetate wasn't even the strangest
way that computer software was distributed.
I remember they used to broadcast games late
at night on TV. You had to (carefully!)
record the sound signal off the TV and onto
your tape machine. Madness!
Browsers should display non-ASCII characters in URLs / statusbar in a different colour, bold, flashing or some other distinctive way. eg. They could display p<font color="red">a</font>ypal.
well it is bill gates that donated the money, not the microsoft windows community.
Mr. Gates's wealth comes about because he
owns a large share of a company which repeatedly
abused its illegal monopoly position.
It's really a tax on business, except in this
case the taxes raised go not to a government,
but to a private company. Now it's nice that
a small amount of this money goes to a
very worthy cause, but it'd be a lot nicer
if the tax wasn't there in the first place.
That tax money could instead be spent
creating more wealth for everyone around the world.
A blog which uses this attibute on link tags is far less interesting to comment spammers, so chances are the moderaters have to delete less spam.
Sadly this is not really true. I wish it
were. In my experience - wiki spam - it
appears to come from humans in China who
simply cut and paste prepared text into the
page.
On my wiki, the usual [http://...] syntax
doesn't work - it doesn't generate a link
(you need to use [[http://...]] to see a
link), and my wiki even has an interactive
preview which shows you that you're
not making a link. Yet they submit the
broken, non-working spam, and move on.
My sandbox pages have, for a very long
time, been protected by a robots.txt
file which would prevent them from getting
pagerank anyway. There's even a huge
warning at the top of the page telling
them this.
We're not talking smart humans/bots here.
We're talking people working in sweatshops.
Have a look at this history page to see
multiple instances of Chinese spammers
getting it wrong. I think there's only
one case I can recall where the spammer
actually bothered to get the syntax
right, and it was still a waste of time
for them.
In fact, this would make sense right now. A heuristic could be used to highlight the '1' in paypa1.com.
This seems to be a popular post, so let me
expand on what the heuristic might be: If
the current domain to be displayed contains
a 0 (zero) or 1 (one) or one of several other
"sensitive" characters, then look through the
browser history for a domain which differs
only in having a o (letter oh) or l (letter el)
at the same position. Highlight the rogue
0/1/...
Rich.
Re:Has anyone seen alternate character domains?
on
Phishing In The Channel
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Browsers could be modified to highlight
characters outside the usual 7 bit ASCII
range. For example, those characters could
be displayed in red, or in reverse video.
In fact, this would make sense right now.
A heuristic could be used to highlight the
'1' in paypa1.com.
Does the thing run well on 256 megabytes of RAM, or will it run like Windows XP on 256 megabytes of RAM?
I can't comment on Windows XP, having never even
used it. I have an iBook G4, which is similar
in spec to the Mac Mini (but the Mac Mini has
a 50% faster processor). My iBook G4 was usable
with 256 MB of RAM, but not exactly fast. When
two users were logged in simultaneously, it got
slow. I just upgraded the RAM on the machine
to 640 MB, which makes a small difference
in the single user case, but is obviously
faster when two users are logged in at the
same time.
It's probably worth, therefore, upgrading
the memory to 512 MB on the Mac Mini if you
can afford it, but if you can't afford to,
it's not the end of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that a PC will come with a 3 year warranty for free?
No, but it's my experience that PC (laptop) hardware has been much more reliable.
Rich.
By coincidence, my iBook also died 2 months ago. It was 18 months old (6 months out of warranty), and I was informed that it would cost £500 (about $900) to repair, for which money, obviously, I could buy a whole new laptop.
The "solution" to this, apparently, was for me to have bought AppleCare insurance. This adds an extra £200 to the cost of their laptops, making them very uncompetitive with PC hardware, particularly since I'd spent about another £150 on upgrading the memory to a reasonable size and installing WiFi.
Rich.
I mean to say, on Debian I can do 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' and that updates everything on my system to the latest version and/or fully security patched version (depending on which branch of Debian I'm in).
I used to run a FreeBSD desktop and I was impressed at the speed and reliability over what I'd been using before (Red Hat Linux), but the package systems on Red Hat and Debian are (or seem) far superior.
Rich.
Well, I think we earned about $600 last year from that one :-(
It's not helped by the abysmal state of the dollar-pound, nor by the fact that Google pays with dollar checks and the bank takes a huge cut along the way.
Adsense gives us hardly any guidance as to what fees we get. It seems like Google takes a large cut. We're looking at replacing it with a commission junction advert slot.
Rich.
Darcs is an SCM written in Haskell, which is pretty cool. So, in order to build darcs, you need a haskell compiler, which is written in haskell! GHC needs a bootstrapped compiler in order to be able to compile itself.
Or you type apt-get install darcs
Installing a C compiler from source is really no easier than installing a Haskell compiler from source (think: what if you don't have a C compiler to compile gcc with?). For most people, it'll be a non-issue since they'll be using a binary package.
Rich.
It is also possible to call OCaml code from C. Don't believe me? Have a look at mod_caml - that's Apache (C) calling into OCaml CGI scripts.
My original call was for people to start using sensible languages which have support for bounds checking. You can write daemons and applications in OCaml perfectly well, and they will run as fast as C programs, using similar amounts of memory. The technology to exceed C in many areas has been around since the 1970s - for goodness sake, let's start using it!
Rich.
That would be OCaml then. It compiles to native executables which require no outside support, and it's relatively easy to integrate with C code.
Rich.
Automatic buffer overflow protection only covers the straightforward buffer overflow problems, i.e. array index overflows. In the case of more complex pointer arithmetic, where most of these problems occur, automatic protection is not possible (at least not without losing the option of pointer arithmetic).
Actually, automatic checking is very much possible, and has been for years. For example, Bounds checking gcc (that website is down right now, so try my page on the subject). That was written in 1994, and there are newer systems available now which don't have such a serious performance penalty.
The real solution is to stop writing critical code in C. Other languages provide bounds checking, and are faster and safer than C: for example OCaml which I prefer nowadays.
Rich.
To a certain extent, shareware and free (as in freedom) software is now the new model. Don't prevent copying - instead encourage copying - and have a business plan which makes copying an asset, not a liability.
Will this happen in film and music? Not soon, but there are models which could spring up. For example, imagine software which allowed many people to collaborate on a piece of music over the Internet - they wouldn't need to be in the same place, or even at the same time. Or how about software which generates film-quality movies from a script and simple director commands? Not possible now, but surely in the future. If this software became widely available it would turn everyone with a script into a director, and dramatically reduce the cost of making films. Of course, most films produced this way would be crap, but that just means that a reputation system could be used to filter out the diamonds.
Rich.
There's been a perfectly good W3C standard for voluntarily classifying the content of your own site for years (not just for pornography, but for plenty of other criteria too): It's called PICS, you can classify your own site, and lots of sites do so, and lots of software reads the PICS classification.
The .xxx suffix does the same but
less - less efficiently, only
one classification, only one
degree of classification.
Legislators haven't picked up on PICS, so why should they support an even worse system?
Rich.
So? PostgreSQL can run Perl stored procedures. Does this mean PostgreSQL is written in Perl? Does the fact that MS SQL Server finally happens to run a CLR interpreter mean that MS SQL Server is written in C#?
Rich.
What I do is build the site in Firefox so it renders perfectly. I know it'll likely render fine in Mozilla (obviously), Safari and Opera. But IE is likely to screw up positioning.
So I then add extra lines: * html div#content { top: 100px; /* hack for IE */
}
just after the correct code to move things
around on IE. IE is broken and interprets
the "* html", whereas other browsers correctly
ignore it.
In a very few cases I simply disable features in the IE version until it works - IE users get a slightly less nice looking site, but that's their problem.
Rich.
http://www.annexia.org/tmp/multithreading.ps
Rich.
Rich.
One ticket to Hull now please ...
The business plan of this decade:
1) Find something that is well known and patent it.
2) Sue some big company for using your patent.
Actually, the business plan for several decades has been:
See Patent Nonsense for an example of how this happened to Autodesk just before they went public.
Rich.
I did once see a BBC Model B with a Teletext adapter. That would be around 1995, and by that point it was an extremely rare artifact. Of course by then it was too late to actually use it to download software :-(
Rich.
I still have a few games, including an Othello/Reversi game for the ZX81 from "Your Computer" magazine.
The disadvantage was that you could play the acetate about twice before it got so damaged that it wouldn't play any more, so we used to record the record to tape first time.
Vinyl/acetate wasn't even the strangest way that computer software was distributed. I remember they used to broadcast games late at night on TV. You had to (carefully!) record the sound signal off the TV and onto your tape machine. Madness!
Rich.
Rich.
*cough* Tom Ray's Tierra ...
Browsers should display non-ASCII characters
in URLs / statusbar in a different colour, bold,
flashing or some other distinctive way. eg.
They could display p<font color="red">a</font>ypal.
Rich.
well it is bill gates that donated the money, not the microsoft windows community.
Mr. Gates's wealth comes about because he owns a large share of a company which repeatedly abused its illegal monopoly position.
It's really a tax on business, except in this case the taxes raised go not to a government, but to a private company. Now it's nice that a small amount of this money goes to a very worthy cause, but it'd be a lot nicer if the tax wasn't there in the first place. That tax money could instead be spent creating more wealth for everyone around the world.
Rich.
A blog which uses this attibute on link tags is far less interesting to comment spammers, so chances are the moderaters have to delete less spam.
Sadly this is not really true. I wish it were. In my experience - wiki spam - it appears to come from humans in China who simply cut and paste prepared text into the page.
On my wiki, the usual [http://...] syntax doesn't work - it doesn't generate a link (you need to use [[http://...]] to see a link), and my wiki even has an interactive preview which shows you that you're not making a link. Yet they submit the broken, non-working spam, and move on.
My sandbox pages have, for a very long time, been protected by a robots.txt file which would prevent them from getting pagerank anyway. There's even a huge warning at the top of the page telling them this.
We're not talking smart humans/bots here. We're talking people working in sweatshops.
Have a look at this history page to see multiple instances of Chinese spammers getting it wrong. I think there's only one case I can recall where the spammer actually bothered to get the syntax right, and it was still a waste of time for them.
Rich.
In fact, this would make sense right now. A heuristic could be used to highlight the '1' in paypa1.com.
This seems to be a popular post, so let me expand on what the heuristic might be: If the current domain to be displayed contains a 0 (zero) or 1 (one) or one of several other "sensitive" characters, then look through the browser history for a domain which differs only in having a o (letter oh) or l (letter el) at the same position. Highlight the rogue 0/1/...Rich.
In fact, this would make sense right now. A heuristic could be used to highlight the '1' in paypa1.com.
Rich.
Does the thing run well on 256 megabytes of RAM, or will it run like Windows XP on 256 megabytes of RAM?
I can't comment on Windows XP, having never even used it. I have an iBook G4, which is similar in spec to the Mac Mini (but the Mac Mini has a 50% faster processor). My iBook G4 was usable with 256 MB of RAM, but not exactly fast. When two users were logged in simultaneously, it got slow. I just upgraded the RAM on the machine to 640 MB, which makes a small difference in the single user case, but is obviously faster when two users are logged in at the same time.It's probably worth, therefore, upgrading the memory to 512 MB on the Mac Mini if you can afford it, but if you can't afford to, it's not the end of the world.
Rich.