"It deemed to hard to do true engineering on software. Thats bunk, coders just want to be "artistic" and forget engineering."
Yeah , and how many times have I heard that before. Software is the most complex thing ever created by man. Your AVERAGE program is FAR more complex in respect of the number of variable conditions that can occur and actions that can happen either internally or externally as viewed by the user than could EVER occur in a car. If you truly want to compare "real" engineering to software I suggest you ditch the Ford example and think Space Shuttle instead because thats about as close as you will get in hardware to the complexity of an average application , never mind an entire operating system. And we all know how reliable the space shuttle is don't we?
"Sure, the Os could be better written, but I doubt if you'd want to pay for the product then, or it could have less functionality, in which case I doubt you'd be happy with it"
What a load of bullshit. Are you for real? Do you honestly think companies and individuals wouldn't pay an extra few $ for a few days more testing so that they don't have to have their ENTIRE networks shutdown to clean out a virus written by some teenage loser?? And your port 80 example is a straw man , DoS is down tto the way IP and the internet works , no OS vendor can control that , what the CAN control is their own lousy software and in house testing!!
While you can formally verify software , this doesn't prevent potential bit flips in memory or CPU faults due to radiation etc or even just faulty components finally giving out modifying the code or its operation in some way that you cannot predict. This is why in the UK anyway , computers CANNOT have completely automated control over safety system , there have to me some sort of electromechanical or manual backups.
Welsh isn't the only language the nouns change in, Russian is notorious for it. In fact sometimes almost the entire word can change depending on case , plurality etc. Of course all the verbs , adjectives and adverbs change too just to make it really fun and natural russian speakers have a tendency to slur words together making it impossible sometimes to understand what they're saying. I know how a voice recognition system feels now when you
say "I see you" and it comes out with "Icy ewe".
Given the possibly sensative nature of the data stored on them and the risk of viruses etc
why oh why are these airline checkin systems connected to the internet anyway??? Why don't they at least use VPN?? Sorry , but this smacks of utter stupidity to me. You wouldn't expect your bank to have all its client account computers connected , why don't airlines follow their example??
"To paraphrase the immortal Inigo Montoya, you keep claiming that continuous operation is a bad thing. I do not think computers draw as much power as you think they do."
They use about 200W. Now multiply that by a factor of say 10 million. Thats the output of a decent sized power station required just to
keep on a load of computers doing nothing.
"Uhmm...So you claim it would cause environmental damage to keep your personal system on all the time, but universities are different in some aspect? Please, feel free to explain."
Theres no point switching off a machine if someone is going to come and use it again in 5 minutes because being powered on/off dozens of times a day would wreck it. HOwever if the labs are not used at night theres no reason why they can't all be powered off , same goes for non essential desktop machines at companies.
By "typical" user I assume you mean some adolesecent friends of yours who's mum and dad pay his electric bills? For those of us who have to pay for what we use why the f*ck would I leave a machine on 24/7 when I only use it maybe an hour a day??? If nothing else its hardly enviromentally responsible is it?? Universities are different , public labs are in more of less constant use.
Compared to peer-to-peer mp3 etc traffic and lots of other types its probably small beer. It might hit a companys
intranet that hasn't disabled the feature on its PCs but for the internet as a whole its a non-issue.
Agreed. A lot of people forget that not everyone (in fact the vast majority of people still) do not connect to the internet via some fancy
umpteen mb/s broadband connection. It would be nice if occasionally marketing types (and some geeks for that matter) would remember this simple fact.
Since when did the original System V code contain SMP code?? Any SMP unix code will have come from enhancements made over and above the code from the original SysV release by a specific vendor , eg IBM , Sun etc (SCO SMP , don't make me laugh!) so go back under your bridge you ignorant troll.
Really? Do how come I used to be able to run
20fps mpegs on my old 486 under X11 when windows had never even heard of the word? X is slow these days because of kludgy "toolkits" , people such as myself who code at the Xlib level know how it can fly!
"Larry DeMar, once the co-creator of classic arcade "
I don't know about Robotron or Stargate but calling DeMar a "co-creator" for Defender is pushing it a bit. All he did was help out Eugene Jarvis iron out the bugs towards the end of Defenders development along with a lot of other people at
Williams. It was Jarvis and sound man Sam Dicker who did all the hard work pushing the concept through and writing the code!
I don't know much about Plan 9 but that sounds a pretty dumb idea since what you would end up with is dozens if not hundreds of processes sitting idling on a system on the off chance that some application may require for example MIME parsing etc . Unless these apps kick off these processes themselves with all the overhead that would entail. Besides , IPC isn't as efficient as calling a libray function direct. This to me sounds like one of those nice aesthtically pleasing ideas that ivory tower types come up with periodically but in reality have more holes than a swiss cheese.
Not all problems can be solved efficiently by stringing a load of sub programs together in a batch file or on the command line using pipes! If you don't believe me try writing an editor or mail server program that way. I think you'll find it next to impossible.
I would agree , the only proviso being that with lots of applications you can tend to find the number of flat files spiralling out of control , whereas if they're database applications anyway they might as well have their static stored on the database too and have everything in one central repository. Unless of course part of the static data is which database they should connect to in the first place!:)
Why should XFree come with documentation about the API? Does linux come with a dummies guide to unix systems programming installed? No, you have to go and buy a book or readup somewhere else. Same with X windows and given how complex the X API is I can't see how you could expect otherwise.
Not all systems have the Xlib man pages installed by default. Certainly here none of our Solaris
systems do not. Also the appendices in the book are very useful.
Its not cruft you muppet, its designed to maintain process and data integrity. Desktop
OSs are a lousy compromise, don't have a go at Linux (and BSD too for that matter) because they don't have these appalling compromises built in. What do you think would happen if the CD being ejected was RW and some process was writing to it at the time??
Umm , 2 or more processes can happily write to/dev/audio or/dev/dsp at the same time (and produced mixed output) so whatever the problem flash has it isn't an OS one. Maybe its flash itself , maybe its nutscrape or maybe its some sound lib , but it aint Linux.
Reset buttons can be disabled. (Ok , you can't do much about the plug) However if a CD button is disabled no one can put a CD in! Effectively the OS does disable the CD button anyway , which is what it should do IMO and what this whole argument is about!
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"It deemed to hard to do true engineering on software. Thats bunk, coders just want to be "artistic" and forget engineering."
Yeah , and how many times have I heard that before. Software is the most complex thing ever created by man. Your AVERAGE program is FAR more complex
in respect of the number of variable conditions that can occur and actions that can happen either internally or externally as viewed by the user than could EVER occur in a car.
If you truly want to compare "real" engineering to software I suggest you ditch the Ford example and think Space Shuttle instead because thats about as close as you will get in
hardware to the complexity of an average application , never mind an entire operating system. And we all know how reliable the space shuttle is don't we?
"Sure, the Os could be better written, but I doubt if you'd want to pay for the product then, or it could have less functionality, in which case I doubt you'd be happy with it"
What a load of bullshit. Are you for real? Do you honestly think companies and individuals wouldn't
pay an extra few $ for a few days more testing so that they don't have to have their ENTIRE networks shutdown to clean out a virus
written by some teenage loser?? And your port 80 example is a straw man , DoS is down tto the way IP and the internet works , no OS vendor can control
that , what the CAN control is their own lousy software and in house testing!!
While you can formally verify software , this doesn't prevent potential bit flips in memory or CPU faults due to radiation etc or even just
faulty components finally giving out modifying the code or its operation in some way that you cannot predict. This is why in the UK anyway , computers CANNOT have completely
automated control over safety system , there have to me some sort of electromechanical or manual backups.
Welsh isn't the only language the nouns change in, Russian is notorious for it. In fact sometimes almost the entire word can change depending on case , plurality etc.
Of course all the verbs , adjectives and adverbs change too just to make it really fun and natural russian speakers have a tendency to slur words
together making it impossible sometimes to understand what they're saying. I know how a voice recognition system feels now when you
say "I see you" and it comes out with "Icy ewe".
Given the possibly sensative nature of the data stored on them and the risk of viruses etc
why oh why are these airline checkin systems connected to the internet anyway??? Why don't they at least use VPN?? Sorry , but this smacks of
utter stupidity to me. You wouldn't expect your bank to have all its client account computers connected , why don't airlines follow
their example??
"To paraphrase the immortal Inigo Montoya, you keep claiming that continuous operation is a bad thing. I do not think computers draw as much power as you think they do."
They use about 200W. Now multiply that by a factor of say 10 million. Thats the output of a decent sized power station required just to
keep on a load of computers doing nothing.
"Uhmm...So you claim it would cause environmental damage to keep your personal system on all the time, but universities are different in some aspect? Please, feel free to explain."
Theres no point switching off a machine if someone is going to come and use it again in 5 minutes because being powered on/off dozens of
times a day would wreck it. HOwever if the labs are not used at night theres no reason why they can't all be powered off , same goes for non essential desktop machines at companies.
By "typical" user I assume you mean some adolesecent friends of yours who's mum and dad pay his electric bills?
For those of us who have to pay for what we use why the f*ck would I leave a machine on 24/7 when I only use it maybe an hour a day???
If nothing else its hardly enviromentally responsible is it?? Universities are different , public labs are in more of less constant use.
Try reading what he wrote you dumb fuck.
Compared to peer-to-peer mp3 etc traffic and lots of other types its probably small beer. It might hit a companys
intranet that hasn't disabled the feature on its PCs but for the internet as a whole its a non-issue.
Agreed. A lot of people forget that not everyone (in fact the vast majority of people still) do not connect to the internet via some fancy
umpteen mb/s broadband connection. It would be nice if occasionally marketing types (and some geeks for that matter) would remember this
simple fact.
Since when did the original System V code contain SMP code?? Any SMP unix code will have come from enhancements made over and above the code
from the original SysV release by a specific vendor , eg IBM , Sun etc (SCO SMP , don't make me laugh!)
so go back under your bridge you ignorant troll.
Ah ok , didn't know about that. So why don't they ever advertise it?
Somehow I get the feeling that an interpreter for assembler rather defeats the whole point of writing :)
in assembler in the first place
Why isn't there MASM for .NET?? Oh , hold on....
Seriously though , it would be interesting if MS (or Sun for Java) released an assembler for the
intermediate language used in these VMs.
Really? Do how come I used to be able to run 20fps mpegs on my old 486 under X11 when windows
had never even heard of the word? X is slow these days because of kludgy "toolkits" , people such as myself who code at the Xlib
level know how it can fly!
"Larry DeMar, once the co-creator of classic arcade "
I don't know about Robotron or Stargate but calling DeMar a "co-creator" for Defender is pushing it a bit.
All he did was help out Eugene Jarvis iron out the bugs towards the end of Defenders development along with a lot of other people at
Williams. It was Jarvis and sound man Sam Dicker who did all the hard work pushing the concept through and writing the code!
OpenBSD might be secure but its not as stable as other BSDs. Different cause , same effect as far as any patients are concerned.
I don't know much about Plan 9 but that sounds a pretty dumb idea since what you would end up with
is dozens if not hundreds of processes sitting idling on a system on the off chance that some application may require for example MIME parsing etc
. Unless these apps kick off these processes themselves with all the overhead that would entail. Besides , IPC isn't as efficient as calling a libray function
direct. This to me sounds like one of those nice aesthtically pleasing ideas that ivory tower types come up with periodically but in reality have more holes
than a swiss cheese.
Not all problems can be solved efficiently by stringing a load of sub programs together in a batch file or on the command line using
pipes! If you don't believe me try writing an editor or mail server program that way. I think you'll find it next to impossible.
I would agree , the only proviso being that with lots of applications you can tend to find the :)
number of flat files spiralling out of control , whereas if they're database applications anyway they might as well
have their static stored on the database too and have everything in one central repository. Unless of course part of the static data
is which database they should connect to in the first place!
Why should XFree come with documentation about the API? Does linux come with a dummies guide to unix systems programming installed? No, you
have to go and buy a book or readup somewhere else. Same with X windows and given how complex the X API is
I can't see how you could expect otherwise.
Not all systems have the Xlib man pages installed by default. Certainly here none of our Solaris systems do not.
Also the appendices in the book are very useful.
Its not cruft you muppet, its designed to maintain process and data integrity. Desktop
OSs are a lousy compromise, don't have a go at Linux (and BSD too for that matter) because they don't have
these appalling compromises built in. What do you think would happen if the CD being ejected was RW and some process was writing to it at the time??
Umm , 2 or more processes can happily write to /dev/audio or /dev/dsp at the same time (and produced mixed output)
so whatever the problem flash has it isn't an OS one. Maybe its flash itself , maybe its nutscrape or maybe its some
sound lib , but it aint Linux.
Reset buttons can be disabled. (Ok , you can't do much about the plug) However if a CD button is disabled no one can put a CD in! Effectively the
OS does disable the CD button anyway , which is what it should do IMO and what this whole argument is about!