slashdot -did- run the story... as soon as zdnet did.
The story was mentioned on NTK on the 24th. I know that CmdrTaco reads NTK, probably Roblimo does too. Then the ZDNet story ran on the 27th. The Slashdot article was published on the 28th, and Roblimo said that loads of people had been submitting it. I think that was the reason why it was featured - lots of people suggesting it - rather than any idea of 'keeping up with the zdnets'.
Let me just repeat that - Slashdot keeping up with ZDNet? Surely it hasn't sunk that low!
If you're going to take to the streets demanding one measurement system, you might as well demand one language while you're at it.
But learning a new measurement system is much, much easier than learning a new language. Especially if you are already roughly familiar with what a metre is.
When will people start using the SI unit for information, the bit, instead of octets? There really isn't any reason to measure things in 8-bit 'bytes', now that 32-bit computers are widespread, and characters are moving away from 7-bit ASCII towards Unicode and other encodings.
OTOH, everyone is so used to 'bytes', and on systems like Unix, there is still normally a one-to-one correspondence between characters and bytes. And unlike going between imperial / US and metric, it's not difficult to convert. So maybe bytes will be with us for a while yet.
(BTW, bit = 'b', byte = 'B'. Some people claim that a 'byte' should mean how much data the CPU can fetch from memory in one cycle, ie the width of the data bus. That's why 'octets' is used, to be unambiguous.)
Since a good portion of Solaris code is licensed from AT&T, Sun couldn't Free it without AT&T's permission.
I thought that Sun paid SCO lots of money for the right to do whatever they want with the code they licensed. This Usenet article talks about this, although the author also thinks that Sun would be prohibited from freeing the code for some reason. I don't know the terms of Sun's agreement, but I'd guess that they have rights to do whatever they want with the code. Otherwise, what would be the point of paying all that money?
No, Perl is interpreted, so it's not possible for it to interpret itself. How would the interpreter run, if it were in Perl? (Actually, Perl compiles to bytecode - but that needs interpreting by a C program.)
When Sun came out with Java they had a simple threading model that they wanted people to use. You want to wait for some IO? Spawn a thread to make a blocking call for the IO. In some ways good, for instance this architecture removes the possibility of writing a lot of possible race conditions. However was it coincidence that it also uses lots of threads, and all of the other forms of Unix out there at the time could not handle large numbers of threads efficiently?
So Sun are evil, because other Unixes are incapable of handling threading well? Come on, it's not Sun's fault if Solaris is better than other Unixes!
This would be evil only if Sun had some obnoxious patent or closed API stopping others from making a good threads implementation.
Chip listed a couple other contenders (ObjC, Eiffel, Ada) but decided not to choose them because of various issues ranging from implementation to the availability of compilers on many platforms.
They could have used JPython, which is a Python implementation that compiles to Java bytecode. Can't get much more portable than that, and GCC will compile Java class files into native executables if you want more speed.
In the US, I could challenge such a bill on a number of constitutional grounds. I could claim that it violated due process, unreasonable search and ceisure, freedom of speech, and unnenumerated rights such as privacy. It wouldn't last six months (much like the late CDA did not). However, my understanding is that in Britain their are no such consitutional protections -- don't I remember hearing that they don't even have a formal consitution?
The British constitution isn't written down in one place as a big document. It's an accumulated mess of laws, conventions, legal precedents and so on. I am not a lawyer, but I'd guess that a judge might decide that a prosecution brought under the Bill was not valid, because of the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty'. This is just a guess of course, and if Parliament wanted to pass a law stating explicitly that everyone is guilty until proven innocent, they could do so.
There is the European Convention on Human Rights, which is due to be incorporated into British law. Until then, cases get taken to the European Court of Human Rights (I think) who will rule on things, which requires (in practice, if not legally) the law to be changed. For example, the recent ruling over homosexuals in the armed forces.
AFAIK most people living in the UK are British citizens. A subject is someone governed by Britain, but not entitled to a UK passport. This mostly means people in the leftover bits of Empire which are too tiny to govern themselves. I believe there are moves to grant these people citizenship, or at least the right to live in the UK.
As far as I know, HTML 4.0 is pretty precise. The page can be rendered only in one way correctly.
Not really - it specifies how to render tables, for example, but it's entirely up to the user what font to choose for headings. This is what style sheets are for.
Whenever I create web pages for some of my sites, I am usually in state of horror when I see how different can the pages be rendered in IE 4/5 and Netscape 4.5/4.6.
I think you are missing the point. HTML is meant to look different in different browsers, or with different style sheets. It specifies the structure of the document, and then it's up to the browser to display it. Hence the name, Hypertext Markup Language rather than Hypertext Display Language.
If you want pages to look exactly the same everywhere, use PDF or some other display language.
software can be free without coming with source, surely.
Not really. The term 'free software', in places like Slashdot, refers to freedom, not price. You might pay money for the software, but it would still be free if you have freedom to use, distribute and change the software. You can't make changes without having source code, so all free software must include source.
So there is a difference between free and 'FREE!!!'.
I was very excited when I heard from you that Sun would be making almost all their software Open Source. But what they have done isn't OSS, it's just releasing proprietary / semi-free software but letting people look at the code. In many ways, this is a bad thing, because it 'taints' developers who might otherwise develop Open Source alternatives (for example, trying to clone Java).
Do you think that we will see companies such as Sun release products as _real_ Open Source, or will they just be content with halfway houses like the SCSL?
I don't know many places where the Kernel would benefit from XML - except for the one configuration file the code itself wouldn't need XML.
You could have things like/proc/cpuinfo in an XML format. I can also imagine that in five years' time, things like the wire protocol for distributed filesystems will be in XML. Yes, it would be less efficient, but probably easier to code, more robust and more forward-compatible (discard elements you don't recognize). If you just had the 'header' or metadata in XML, and not the file data itself, the performance loss would be small.
The internet will eventually be taxed, barring a constitutional amendment to stop it. The reasons are simple - if all commerce occurs online, then where will state governments get their funding from?
I think you misunderstand. AFAIK the Bill would outlaw discriminatory 'net taxes, meaning taxes that apply only because goods were sold over the net. All the usual sales taxes, excise duties, business rates and so on apply just as much for, say, Amazon as for any 'physical' retailer.
It may become more difficult to raise taxes, but this Bill isn't about abolishing them altogether.
Yes, the beta versions had strange primate nicknames. But they were mainly intended for developers or 'early adopters' who are comfortable keeping up with the latest releases and can remember what all the different nicknames stand for. Once you have a stable release which everyone is using, it makes the ordinary user's life easier to have meaningful version numbers.
Of course, you can still have nicknames as well as version numbers.
There is a school of thought which contends that if your code requires that many comments, it hasn't been very well-written. Good code should be almost self-documenting - an excess of comments can swamp the code and make it just as difficult to understand, if not more so, than the same code with no comments at all.
I think it is much more important to have comments outside a function, method or class, explaining what it is and how to use it, than inside the code itself. This is for two reasons: firstly, if the comment is outside (say, just before the function definition), it doesn't clutter the code. But more importantly, somebody who wants to use a function shouldn't have to read the code to see what it does. You should put a comment at the top explaining the interface and what the code does, and any 'gotchas' in using it. Below that, you can optionally comment on how it does it, for the benefit of those trying to debug or improve the implementation.
Of course, having comments doesn't excuse you from choosing meaningful method names, variable names, and so on. But in most cases, a name like get_user() isn't sufficiently descriptive in itself.
I've been waiting for the local grocery store to start delivery through its website. Sheesh. I don't want to walk a mile carrying a 24 pack of Mountain Dew.
Clearly, what you need is a fat pipe from the grocery store to your house (possibly via a local exchange or hub). Why stick to the old 'sneakernet' method of transporting beverages when you can just download them over a direct link?
Probably, an asymmetrical link would be best, since you won't want to upload Mountain Dew at the same speed as you drink it.
W3C has long passed out of the time when it was useful to web development. Today, it's a closed group of industry execs who meet to find ways to make the WWW more profitable, not more useful or more informative or better.
So CSS isn't useful? What about HTTP-1.1, or XML? How would you suggest that new standards are worked out, if not by the W3C? Should we go back to the days of incompatible proprietary crap from Netscape and Microsoft?
They're responsible for the most dangerous threat to free speech, PICS, and the most dangerous threat to privacy, P3P.
Er... how can a standard be 'dangerous'? You might as well say that HTTP is 'dangerous' because it allows children to view pornography.
If you don't want to use PICS, you can turn it off in your browser. If you're worried that this won't be possible, remember that you have the source to Mozilla and if necessary could comment out all PICS support.
The same goes for P3P. Nobody is forcing you to visit all these evil moneygrabbing sites - if you don't want to give out your personal details, you don't have to. I suppose that HTTP authentication is dangerous because it allows sites like the New York Times to force people to register?
Slashdot Mirror
The story was mentioned on NTK on the 24th. I know that CmdrTaco reads NTK, probably Roblimo does too. Then the ZDNet story ran on the 27th. The Slashdot article was published on the 28th, and Roblimo said that loads of people had been submitting it. I think that was the reason why it was featured - lots of people suggesting it - rather than any idea of 'keeping up with the zdnets'.
Let me just repeat that - Slashdot keeping up with ZDNet? Surely it hasn't sunk that low!
But learning a new measurement system is much, much easier than learning a new language. Especially if you are already roughly familiar with what a metre is.
When will people start using the SI unit for information, the bit, instead of octets? There really isn't any reason to measure things in 8-bit 'bytes', now that 32-bit computers are widespread, and characters are moving away from 7-bit ASCII towards Unicode and other encodings.
OTOH, everyone is so used to 'bytes', and on systems like Unix, there is still normally a one-to-one correspondence between characters and bytes. And unlike going between imperial / US and metric, it's not difficult to convert. So maybe bytes will be with us for a while yet.
(BTW, bit = 'b', byte = 'B'. Some people claim that a 'byte' should mean how much data the CPU can fetch from memory in one cycle, ie the width of the data bus. That's why 'octets' is used, to be unambiguous.)
I thought that Sun paid SCO lots of money for the right to do whatever they want with the code they licensed. This Usenet article talks about this, although the author also thinks that Sun would be prohibited from freeing the code for some reason. I don't know the terms of Sun's agreement, but I'd guess that they have rights to do whatever they want with the code. Otherwise, what would be the point of paying all that money?
No, Perl is interpreted, so it's not possible for it to interpret itself. How would the interpreter run, if it were in Perl? (Actually, Perl compiles to bytecode - but that needs interpreting by a C program.)
As perlfaq1(1) says:
So Sun are evil, because other Unixes are incapable of handling threading well? Come on, it's not Sun's fault if Solaris is better than other Unixes!
This would be evil only if Sun had some obnoxious patent or closed API stopping others from making a good threads implementation.
They could have used JPython, which is a Python implementation that compiles to Java bytecode. Can't get much more portable than that, and GCC will compile Java class files into native executables if you want more speed.
What?
What?
WHAT?
I think that's what caffeine is for.
Clearly, the probes are slowing down because of the load on their systems caused by the Slashdot Effect.
The British constitution isn't written down in one place as a big document. It's an accumulated mess of laws, conventions, legal precedents and so on. I am not a lawyer, but I'd guess that a judge might decide that a prosecution brought under the Bill was not valid, because of the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty'. This is just a guess of course, and if Parliament wanted to pass a law stating explicitly that everyone is guilty until proven innocent, they could do so.
There is the European Convention on Human Rights, which is due to be incorporated into British law. Until then, cases get taken to the European Court of Human Rights (I think) who will rule on things, which requires (in practice, if not legally) the law to be changed. For example, the recent ruling over homosexuals in the armed forces.
AFAIK most people living in the UK are British citizens. A subject is someone governed by Britain, but not entitled to a UK passport. This mostly means people in the leftover bits of Empire which are too tiny to govern themselves. I believe there are moves to grant these people citizenship, or at least the right to live in the UK.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Not really - it specifies how to render tables, for example, but it's entirely up to the user what font to choose for headings. This is what style sheets are for.
I think you are missing the point. HTML is meant to look different in different browsers, or with different style sheets. It specifies the structure of the document, and then it's up to the browser to display it. Hence the name, Hypertext Markup Language rather than Hypertext Display Language.
If you want pages to look exactly the same everywhere, use PDF or some other display language.
A good style rule, for everybody but *especially* journalists, is:
Never, EVER, use the prefix 'cyber' for ANYTHING.
Not really. The term 'free software', in places like Slashdot, refers to freedom, not price. You might pay money for the software, but it would still be free if you have freedom to use, distribute and change the software. You can't make changes without having source code, so all free software must include source.
So there is a difference between free and 'FREE!!!'.
I was very excited when I heard from you that Sun would be making almost all their software Open Source. But what they have done isn't OSS, it's just releasing proprietary / semi-free software but letting people look at the code. In many ways, this is a bad thing, because it 'taints' developers who might otherwise develop Open Source alternatives (for example, trying to clone Java).
Do you think that we will see companies such as Sun release products as _real_ Open Source, or will they just be content with halfway houses like the SCSL?
You could have things like /proc/cpuinfo in an XML format. I can also imagine that in five years' time, things like the wire protocol for distributed filesystems will be in XML. Yes, it would be less efficient, but probably easier to code, more robust and more forward-compatible (discard elements you don't recognize). If you just had the 'header' or metadata in XML, and not the file data itself, the performance loss would be small.
I think the idea of having a project where one of the aims is 'make John C. Dvorak eat his words' is a really good idea.
Here are some more projects that might be worthwhile:
- The Bob Metcalfe Word-Eating Project
- The SCO Project
- The Mindcraft Project
I think you misunderstand. AFAIK the Bill would outlaw discriminatory 'net taxes, meaning taxes that apply only because goods were sold over the net. All the usual sales taxes, excise duties, business rates and so on apply just as much for, say, Amazon as for any 'physical' retailer.
It may become more difficult to raise taxes, but this Bill isn't about abolishing them altogether.
Yes, the beta versions had strange primate nicknames. But they were mainly intended for developers or 'early adopters' who are comfortable keeping up with the latest releases and can remember what all the different nicknames stand for. Once you have a stable release which everyone is using, it makes the ordinary user's life easier to have meaningful version numbers.
Of course, you can still have nicknames as well as version numbers.
I think it is much more important to have comments outside a function, method or class, explaining what it is and how to use it, than inside the code itself. This is for two reasons: firstly, if the comment is outside (say, just before the function definition), it doesn't clutter the code. But more importantly, somebody who wants to use a function shouldn't have to read the code to see what it does. You should put a comment at the top explaining the interface and what the code does, and any 'gotchas' in using it. Below that, you can optionally comment on how it does it, for the benefit of those trying to debug or improve the implementation.
Of course, having comments doesn't excuse you from choosing meaningful method names, variable names, and so on. But in most cases, a name like get_user() isn't sufficiently descriptive in itself.
Yes, take a look at tchrist's explanation, What's the Plural of `Virus'?.
Clearly, what you need is a fat pipe from the grocery store to your house (possibly via a local exchange or hub). Why stick to the old 'sneakernet' method of transporting beverages when you can just download them over a direct link?
Probably, an asymmetrical link would be best, since you won't want to upload Mountain Dew at the same speed as you drink it.
So CSS isn't useful? What about HTTP-1.1, or XML? How would you suggest that new standards are worked out, if not by the W3C? Should we go back to the days of incompatible proprietary crap from Netscape and Microsoft?
Er... how can a standard be 'dangerous'? You might as well say that HTTP is 'dangerous' because it allows children to view pornography.
If you don't want to use PICS, you can turn it off in your browser. If you're worried that this won't be possible, remember that you have the source to Mozilla and if necessary could comment out all PICS support.
The same goes for P3P. Nobody is forcing you to visit all these evil moneygrabbing sites - if you don't want to give out your personal details, you don't have to. I suppose that HTTP authentication is dangerous because it allows sites like the New York Times to force people to register?