Repeat after me: Sobig is *NOT* a worm, it requires the user to execute the attachment. It relies on somewhat crude social engineering, absolutely not a self-replicating worm.
It is a nice technological way to force spammers into illegal activity however. It is hard to outlaw spam, systematic cracking of peoples computers already is illegal however. Since the certificates will be withdrawn within the hour of the machine starting to spew spams it also requires very large-scale cracking. Also it is a bit hard to be anonymous, for one the crack will be revealed very quickly since you are mailing around so much, also you kinda have to give correct contact information in the spam for it to be worth anything:)
Sensei's Library, a very useful and complete WIKI-site for information related to Go (the boardgame) also has such a patent-law protest as its frontpage currently.
Problem is that there is no distinction between Java the language and what would be called the Java standards libraries (if it weren't mixed up in the language). The spec also defines things like object formats and linking systems and so on and so forth. Thanks to the well specified system the Java runtime and platform can be used from a quite huge number of languages of course (I agree that it isnt as well tuned for this as the.NET runtime, but it is mostly a design question rather than an overall design issue).
No one in their right mind thinks Java is a language, Java is a computing platform. (a language howevere is a set of technologies typically. Actually almost everything is:)
I think the real reason why the lawsuit is going to help Linux is because it demonstrates the depth of IBM's commitment. Ever since IBM started talking Linux it has been the most effective argument for Linux in business. Problem is that it is not obvious that IBM isn't just talk, while they spend a lot of money on Linux they have a lot of money, they could afford to lose their spendings on Linux no problem.
Enter SCO, threatening IBM's core business through its crow-jewels AIX if IBM don't drop Linux like a hot potato. One could have no greater example to point business-heads to than that IBM stands up for Linux when faced with lawsuits affecting its beloved AIX.
Yeah, but have you actually pulled any of those machines out recently? In college, my roommates and I dug up one of our old NES machines, but it would routinely take us 15 minutes of fiddling with it (Read: blowing on the cartridge, and other ineffectual methods we learned in our childhood) to get a game running.
Just like a NES has always worked, historically correct and everything:)
Posting this without +2 and everything probably won't do much good but; Check out that links, it is a great story really. Best links I have seen today, or this week for that matter.
Oh, and mod parent up:)
Was a bit quick posting above, I do not consider SSE2 and such vector instruction sets, that was however beside the point. My real point is that such features in processors really aren't anywhere near the same thing as a Cray vector processor.
Strictly speaking I admit that your position probably is the much more common one when it comes to the terminology though:)
One has to draw the line somewhere, sure they are vectors but a 32 bit word is a vector of bits as far as a binary and instruction is concerned, no one could imagine calling a binary and a vector instruction though.
No, SSE2 are SIMD instructions, hardly vector instructions. Not of the scale one should be able to expect from vector processors. When you can at least apply an operation over a pair of 128-256 double precision floating point arrays with a single instruction you can talk.
Lot of people playing down vector processors here today without having read up on what they are, don't lump vector-processors in with general purpose mainframes and such.
What you are missing is that Cray really does have a niche that PC processors cannot at this time touch, vector processors. Having insane performance at vector tasks with a somewhat specialised vector processor is a lot easier than with a general purpose mips-descendant. It is not an all that highly competitive niche but is highly profitable (if you have a vector-heavy task a modern Cray vector-processor is not only extremely fast, it is even price efficient at that speed). Lets not forget either that Cray holds a lot of neat patents (most interesting are their compilation technique patents) for vector-processing problems.
Other things interesting to note is that old Cray is not only keeping the company "Cray" afloat, to some part it is a division from Cray that is making Sun the most money these days too. The extreme SMP machines from Sun (think 106 processor Fire 15K) is created by a division of the company that Sun bought from SGI when SGI bought Cray, Cray toyed with Sparc SMP's back in that day and SGI felt a bit uncomfortable dealing with sparcs so they sold it off cheap. The best purchase Sun has made in the last decade.
All in all I am sure that Cray has a lot to offer, they have shown off their technical skills many times in the past and the technology has aged quite well for this business.
Ah, but the fun part here is that despite all the happy bloating most stuff is plenty fast anyway, thanks to neat hardware and so on. The real problem with software is bugs; stability and security. One of the better ways to fix a lot of bug problems has been around since the fifties, climb to higher level in program design and implementation. It tends to have a bit of a cost in performance (mostly memory-wise), but we have plenty of performance (especially memory, anyone complaining about their OS not running in 1 megabyte is just insane, RAM is insanely cheap).
So I hope that the future brings better and easier to use tools and languages,.NET is clearly a step in the right direction (though I don't agree with the design of the system in all aspects it is nice and safe and has some basics to aid modular design).
All in all what I feel is the point to be made; Programming is way too hard a task for almost all humans and also almost all programmers. Making software more robust is a lot more important than saving half a buck worth of RAM when running the program.
Come on, you know the world would be a better place if all software was written in lisp/prolog/ml/smalltalk (ok, with a bit of C thrown in for a critical loop or two:)
Prolog. Insanely expressive. Especially GNU Prolog which has a numerical constraint facility bolted on too. Largely all programs end up dead slow but an insanely large class of problems kind of solve themselves in prolog. Plus that writing a solution in prolog the simplest solution tends to become extremely general.
If one could find a technique to efficiently compile Prolog-code into efficient machine-code you can bet you would hear a lot more about it.
Other languages that deserve mention are; * Lazy functional languages - so sweeeeet, incredibly many problems can be solved by building an inifinite data-structure and walking it in the right way. Not terribly inefficient either. * Lisp - Powerful macro-facility and otherwise nicely expressive language. Has nice compilers to get decent performance too. * Smalltalk, Forth, Ruby etc. All languages that are powerful enough to be able to define classic control-structures in the base language should be mentioned when discussing expressive languages.
Re:That is the STUPIDEST solution I have ever seen
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
·
· Score: 1
Nah, you are mistaken, it does not matter if more data arrives, it will happily be placed at the back of the buffer where it should be. That solution is guaranteed not to cause a buffer overrun. It is unfortunately not guaranteed to work as expected in general anyway, POSIX only specifies that you can ungetc 1 character of input. Therefore the only completely safe use of gets is to set a char to '\n'.
char c; c = '\n'; if(untegc(&c, stdin) != EOF) {
c = 0;
gets(&c); }
will set c to '\n' and cannot in any way overrun any buffers. Wonderful isnt it? And it is all POSIX too:) Oh, and get a sense of humor, calling actually funny people retarded is not good social style.
It is obvious why we need 128 bit adressing, you remember the way it sounds on slashdot whenever an article about x86-64 or any other 64-bit architecture gets posted? Lots of whine about not needing it and so on and replies that explain that it is nice because one can unify the adress-space and adress harddrives and such in the same space as ram.
What I propose is that we with IPv6 go with really unified adress-spaces, lets give every bit of storage on earth a IPv6 adress, then we can freely adress anything we please in the same adress-space. Will be just wonderful for all of mankind. Or something like that.
Uhm, Windows CE is a state-of-the-art realtime operating system small and is well aimed at the embedded and small devices market, probably one of Microsofts most obviously decent products. It is not terribly suprising either, the place where Linux is really starting to look competitive to Microsoft is in the embedded market where it looks like Linux has a head start despite being later to market than Microsoft solutions.
It is a small subset of matlab for palm, complete with the basic plotting commands and differential equation solvers and everything.
Far from a complete matlab clone but it comes as close as one could possibly need to have in your pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
Repeat after me: Sobig is *NOT* a worm, it requires the user to execute the attachment. It relies on somewhat crude social engineering, absolutely not a self-replicating worm.
It is a nice technological way to force spammers into illegal activity however. It is hard to outlaw spam, systematic cracking of peoples computers already is illegal however. Since the certificates will be withdrawn within the hour of the machine starting to spew spams it also requires very large-scale cracking. Also it is a bit hard to be anonymous, for one the crack will be revealed very quickly since you are mailing around so much, also you kinda have to give correct contact information in the spam for it to be worth anything :)
You are thinking of 9.0a. It did have a critical security update. Refer to an earlier slashdot story on the topic.
I distinctly remember seeing posts like this one a few years back, only it was "2.4" instead of "2.6". Funny how these things work.
Well, microsoft wasn't first with anything, maybe the thing is that they did a lot of things best? Which would somewhat explain the market dominance?
Well. That was a tad anti-socialistic.
Sensei's Library, a very useful and complete WIKI-site for information related to Go (the boardgame) also has such a patent-law protest as its frontpage currently.
Problem is that there is no distinction between Java the language and what would be called the Java standards libraries (if it weren't mixed up in the language). The spec also defines things like object formats and linking systems and so on and so forth. Thanks to the well specified system the Java runtime and platform can be used from a quite huge number of languages of course (I agree that it isnt as well tuned for this as the .NET runtime, but it is mostly a design question rather than an overall design issue).
No one in their right mind thinks Java is a language, Java is a computing platform. (a language howevere is a set of technologies typically. Actually almost everything is :)
Come *on*. It will be slashdotted because it is an ASP page? That is just plain stupid.
Because the point of Remote Procedure Calls is that they are remote, that is, from a different location.
Sure one doesn't need RPC all *that* often, but people suggest random firewalling for everything, one has to consider functionality a bit too.
Enter SCO, threatening IBM's core business through its crow-jewels AIX if IBM don't drop Linux like a hot potato. One could have no greater example to point business-heads to than that IBM stands up for Linux when faced with lawsuits affecting its beloved AIX.
Just like a NES has always worked, historically correct and everything :)
Posting this without +2 and everything probably won't do much good but; Check out that links, it is a great story really. Best links I have seen today, or this week for that matter. Oh, and mod parent up :)
Strictly speaking I admit that your position probably is the much more common one when it comes to the terminology though :)
One has to draw the line somewhere, sure they are vectors but a 32 bit word is a vector of bits as far as a binary and instruction is concerned, no one could imagine calling a binary and a vector instruction though.
Lot of people playing down vector processors here today without having read up on what they are, don't lump vector-processors in with general purpose mainframes and such.
Other things interesting to note is that old Cray is not only keeping the company "Cray" afloat, to some part it is a division from Cray that is making Sun the most money these days too. The extreme SMP machines from Sun (think 106 processor Fire 15K) is created by a division of the company that Sun bought from SGI when SGI bought Cray, Cray toyed with Sparc SMP's back in that day and SGI felt a bit uncomfortable dealing with sparcs so they sold it off cheap. The best purchase Sun has made in the last decade.
All in all I am sure that Cray has a lot to offer, they have shown off their technical skills many times in the past and the technology has aged quite well for this business.
So I hope that the future brings better and easier to use tools and languages, .NET is clearly a step in the right direction (though I don't agree with the design of the system in all aspects it is nice and safe and has some basics to aid modular design).
All in all what I feel is the point to be made; Programming is way too hard a task for almost all humans and also almost all programmers. Making software more robust is a lot more important than saving half a buck worth of RAM when running the program.
Come on, you know the world would be a better place if all software was written in lisp/prolog/ml/smalltalk (ok, with a bit of C thrown in for a critical loop or two :)
Prolog. Insanely expressive. Especially GNU Prolog which has a numerical constraint facility bolted on too. Largely all programs end up dead slow but an insanely large class of problems kind of solve themselves in prolog. Plus that writing a solution in prolog the simplest solution tends to become extremely general.
If one could find a technique to efficiently compile Prolog-code into efficient machine-code you can bet you would hear a lot more about it.
Other languages that deserve mention are;
* Lazy functional languages - so sweeeeet, incredibly many problems can be solved by building an inifinite data-structure and walking it in the right way. Not terribly inefficient either.
* Lisp - Powerful macro-facility and otherwise nicely expressive language. Has nice compilers to get decent performance too.
* Smalltalk, Forth, Ruby etc. All languages that are powerful enough to be able to define classic control-structures in the base language should be mentioned when discussing expressive languages.
Nah, you are mistaken, it does not matter if more data arrives, it will happily be placed at the back of the buffer where it should be. That solution is guaranteed not to cause a buffer overrun. It is unfortunately not guaranteed to work as expected in general anyway, POSIX only specifies that you can ungetc 1 character of input. Therefore the only completely safe use of gets is to set a char to '\n'.
:)
char c;
c = '\n';
if(untegc(&c, stdin) != EOF)
{
c = 0;
gets(&c);
}
will set c to '\n' and cannot in any way overrun any buffers. Wonderful isnt it? And it is all POSIX too
Oh, and get a sense of humor, calling actually funny people retarded is not good social style.
What I propose is that we with IPv6 go with really unified adress-spaces, lets give every bit of storage on earth a IPv6 adress, then we can freely adress anything we please in the same adress-space. Will be just wonderful for all of mankind. Or something like that.
Uhm, Windows CE is a state-of-the-art realtime operating system small and is well aimed at the embedded and small devices market, probably one of Microsofts most obviously decent products. It is not terribly suprising either, the place where Linux is really starting to look competitive to Microsoft is in the embedded market where it looks like Linux has a head start despite being later to market than Microsoft solutions.
LyME
It is a small subset of matlab for palm, complete with the basic plotting commands and differential equation solvers and everything. Far from a complete matlab clone but it comes as close as one could possibly need to have in your pocket.