I agree with Qbertino & DaMattster.
Using a version control system for every config file & script is important. Testing a similar config at home is important. Learning all the basic Unix stuff is important.
In addition, implement a backup strategy and test it regularily.
Interestingly, the difference is not far from the percentage of people who are in prison.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4481261.stm
More than 2% in the US, and about ten times lower in Europe.
Sorry, a $45 millions budget is not huge.
In France, 300 km of a TGV lines cost exceed the 3 billion euros.
(See that in French; remember that 'milliard' in French = 1E9 = billion in English).
And the LGV line is doing well.
And I am not ashamed that it is funded by French taxpayers money.
I wish -for American people- that the next USA administration will actually fund (with dozens of billions of US$, not dozens of millions) a better transport system in the US.
I wish I could be so lucky. My boss won't let FOSS anywhere near the system with the exception of one lonely PC set up as a webserver. He knows commercial software has its problems--his biggest problem with FOSS is "lack of support." I've tried showing him that there is support available, but when he wants support, he wants to be able to pick up a phone and get an answer the same business day.
He can buy that kind of support. Of course, it is probably expensive!
Last but not least: this is not the first French
judgement I read which is set up as a single sentence. You would not believe the wooden crap language they use. This is a custom (or perhaps some rule) on many (perhaps all?) French court rulings. Grammatically, they are always "one" sentence....
(usually like: Considering that... and that... and that... the court...) even if it is more than a dozen pages. And the punctuation is also specific.
But don't forget that since trials have a long history (in many cultures), their language is quite specific. I probably have the same difficulties reading English rulings than you have reading french ones. In addition, I am not a lawyer, and have almost no ideas (except very crude ones) on the principles of laws & trials (which are different in USA and in France).
No, the point is that a French customer should be able to buy a hardware without any software. There should be no obligation to buy any software when a French consumer is buying hardware.
It is not about buying a PC with Linux, it is about the right to be able to buy a PC without software!
I am French (and I glanced the ruling).
However, the 130Euros cost for the software is somehow realistic (100Euros for Windows, 30Euros for extras). It is even a bit more than that.
A "laptop sold with "Windows Vista Edition Familiale Premium" on http://materiel.net/ (some home version of Vista, without any extra software) has a price tag of 1000Euros and exactly the same laptop without any OS is sold 870Euros. So the customer price tag for this Windows is 130Euros. (it is quite difficult to buy a laptop without OS, but there are some few offers).
So the 100 euros estimate by the French judge is probably a bit too small but not far from the reality.
And the judgment is based upon consumer laws. The price tag should be what the consumer has to pay, not what the seller paid.
I watched the video - ordinary (in the worst sense of the word) "playing" with real war weapons.
Maybe what scare me even more is the american law permitting that (yes, I do know it is a hot debate in the USA; from an European perspective, this kind of playing is nearly insane, and I hope they will never in my lifetime be laws in Europe permitting this.).
Back to the subject: while I agree the video is frightning, there is something specific with unmanned vehicules (or aircrafts): who is bearing the legal responsability?
This will not happen until the Linux Kernel has native support for an install mechanism where by I can double click on a single file This will hopefully never be the role of the Linux kernel. Installation mechanisms (such as package managers like aptitude) are in user land (they are ordinary programs doing system calls).
Also, the kernel does not manage mouse clicks. It manage only peripherals (like USB mouses) which are sending bytes. Some application (like the X11 server and toolkits) has to understand these as meaningful clicks.
I tend to believe that the code which is written today will last much less longer than code which was written 30 years ago. And this is somehow strange, since 30 years ago the computer costed much more than the human programmer (while the opposite is true today).
On the other hand, some embedded code surely will last for long (as the space examples above).
The Concorde was extremely fuel hungry, even if supersonic.
IIRC, Concorde is one of the few civilian aircrafts (I am not talking of military aircraft) whose take-off mass was more than 50% kerosene - so a Concorde was at take-off a huge amount of kerosene with some metal and human flesh...
BTW, most of the time in my trips (only in Europe - I'm French) is not spent flying. It is spent to reach (or go away from) the airport and waiting. Supersonic flights (that are much too expensive for me) do not help here.
So subsonic flights do make sense, and even more non aircraft traveling, e.g. high speed trains like TGV (traveling quite fast, without much waiting, from center of cities to center of cities) or ICE. And my feeling is that TGV trains are more friendly to environment (In France, the electric power is mostly nuclear) and much more comfortable.
BTW, I never understood why there are so few high speed trains in the USA.
More precisely, the Police Nationale is in charge of cities, and the Gendarmerie Nationale is in charge of rural zones (at least in principle) See french wikipedia: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmerie_nationale_(France)
And the Gendarmerie has also specialized units.
More to the point, the Gendarmerie did pay several contractors (and also internal IT) to do the migration. AFAIK, the military status of the personel did help: they had to obey (and didn't complain that much).
I was not assuming that more code means better performance.
However, I am still surprised that a team of a dozen produced in one year a poorly written 10KLOC. It is poorly written because it did not achieve their goal: to win the race.
I'm guessing is that even in these student teams, it is as everywhere else: One or two passionate developers, and all the others waiting & criticizing.
And yes, I do know Brook's law (it doesn't take one month to 9 women to make a child).
What surprises me most is the small size of their software, only 10 thousands lines of source code (I think that the average car processor already have these for today's cars -ignition & braking systems-). Given a team of a dozen programmers working for a year, I was expecting at least 50KLOC, or maybe 200KLOC (for example, the GCC compiler is 3MLOC, and the linux kernel has comparable size.)
Of course memory leaks can happen with garbage collected languages, but these leaks are a little easier to find....
Maybe they should have coded in a higher level language like Ocaml, Haskell.
And yes, I'm sure most of an autonomous vehicle software is not low-level drivers, but in the planification & perception tasks. On such tasks, higher-level languages definitely make sense.
I also did not understood what kind of libraries these teams are using.
I'm also surprised that it is apparently so easy to get funded to have only 10KLOC inside a car!
Apparently, Microsoft cares more about the Gphone (i.e. Android) than about the Openmoko probably because Google is behind (not just some obscure company).
It could happen that Android is just an announcement to impress future stockholders or clients.
But it is more probable that it is a real threat to Microsoft phones' OS. Maybe there is some alpha code already?
What I don't understand is the relation between Gphone/Android and Openmoko. I hope Openmoko will succeed still!
Again, the fact that Microsoft reacted to Gphone/Android but not to Openmoko (AFAIK) is significant.
Yes, but a (maybe minor) feature of GCJ is its ability to build self-contained Java applications, i.e. to compile some Java source code into an executable which does not require any previous JVM installed, etc...
I admit that there are few Java applications (at least on Debian) which are compiled by GCJ and packaged as plain old binary executables. Of course, this means avoiding some fancy Java tricks (the dynamic class loader, some reflection abilities, etc...).
Still, I believe GCJ does have at least such a niche market (for those few applications which don't want to depend on a JVM being installed).
Besides, GCJ is GCC based, and GCC is still a nice project (even if it is old).
The good point of this is that it could show to some (non-technophile) people that 1. Windows exist, and 2. their PC can be used without Windows.
Later on, some (small) fraction of these users might consider switching to some other operating system (which could be good for Linux & opensource).
At last, I think it opens a very interesting can of worms: finally the BIOS is evolving (yes I do know about EFI for Apple, OpenFirmware for some old Suns, OpenBIOS or LinuxBIOS for some happy few motherboards).
What surprises me is that the BIOS are not evolving these days (with the exception of useless gadgets). In particular (even if Microsoft don't care yet) a better BIOS with a better loading procedure (imagine a BIOS containing the GRUB loader!) could be welcome.
AFAIK, current BIOSes are not something of importance when choosing hardware (e.g. a motherboard), except perhaps for overclocking.
The interesting point is that Microsoft cared to reply to Mandriva.
I thought that such a huge mastodonte as Microsoft don't care about small businesses like Mandriva.
I find that the mere fact that Microsoft replied something is interesting.
I just hope that the next generation of battery technolgy is inherently less likely to explode.
I tend to believe it is impossible, since the trend is to pack more energy in batteries (in J/kg -massic energy- or J/m^3 -energy density-. The more energy a stuff contains, the more it can explode (which is the failure when all the energy is released at once) IMHO (but I am not a chemist).
There is also active dvi or advi. It provide animations, ability to include any X11 program (ie an xterm) inside a slide to make a demo, etc...
http://pauillac.inria.fr/advi/ for more
No, I suggest learning several languages (possibly non-mainstream) and read many books. C++ is very hard to master, and IMHO painful to learn (you'll need several years to master it, and C++ popularity is already declining). It won't learn you the best practices.
I suggest learning powerful languages like Ocaml and lisp or Smalltalk (or even Prolog). With such languages, you'll learn to think better.
Once you master different languages of various families, learning a new language will be much easier.
learning to think correctly about programming is more important IMHO than learning the currently popular languages.
And I suggest using only open-source language implementations. At some point, you'll learn a lot by diving into their source code (so better use Linux).
At some point, you probably will want to follow a college or university degree.
Regards.
This is trivial, but with open source software, there is nothing special for multi-core chips. So Oracle's position indirectly favors opensource software use on multi-processors. This is good for opensource developers.
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I agree with Qbertino & DaMattster. Using a version control system for every config file & script is important. Testing a similar config at home is important. Learning all the basic Unix stuff is important. In addition, implement a backup strategy and test it regularily.
Does each country/ jurisdiction in the Eurozone have the same labor laws?
Not exactly, but most European nations share the idea of some kind of social economy, and welfare.
Comparative unemployment rates:
United States -- 5.5% Eurozone -- 7.1%
Interestingly, the difference is not far from the percentage of people who are in prison. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4481261.stm More than 2% in the US, and about ten times lower in Europe.
Get him good introductory math books. Get him the SICP book. Show him high order languages like Ocaml, Haskell, CommonLisp.
Sorry, a $45 millions budget is not huge. In France, 300 km of a TGV lines cost exceed the 3 billion euros. (See that in French; remember that 'milliard' in French = 1E9 = billion in English). And the LGV line is doing well. And I am not ashamed that it is funded by French taxpayers money. I wish -for American people- that the next USA administration will actually fund (with dozens of billions of US$, not dozens of millions) a better transport system in the US.
I wish I could be so lucky. My boss won't let FOSS anywhere near the system with the exception of one lonely PC set up as a webserver. He knows commercial software has its problems--his biggest problem with FOSS is "lack of support." I've tried showing him that there is support available, but when he wants support, he wants to be able to pick up a phone and get an answer the same business day.
He can buy that kind of support. Of course, it is probably expensive!No, the point is that a French customer should be able to buy a hardware without any software. There should be no obligation to buy any software when a French consumer is buying hardware. It is not about buying a PC with Linux, it is about the right to be able to buy a PC without software!
I am French (and I glanced the ruling). However, the 130Euros cost for the software is somehow realistic (100Euros for Windows, 30Euros for extras). It is even a bit more than that. A "laptop sold with "Windows Vista Edition Familiale Premium" on http://materiel.net/ (some home version of Vista, without any extra software) has a price tag of 1000Euros and exactly the same laptop without any OS is sold 870Euros. So the customer price tag for this Windows is 130Euros. (it is quite difficult to buy a laptop without OS, but there are some few offers). So the 100 euros estimate by the French judge is probably a bit too small but not far from the reality. And the judgment is based upon consumer laws. The price tag should be what the consumer has to pay, not what the seller paid.
I watched the video - ordinary (in the worst sense of the word) "playing" with real war weapons. Maybe what scare me even more is the american law permitting that (yes, I do know it is a hot debate in the USA; from an European perspective, this kind of playing is nearly insane, and I hope they will never in my lifetime be laws in Europe permitting this.). Back to the subject: while I agree the video is frightning, there is something specific with unmanned vehicules (or aircrafts): who is bearing the legal responsability?
I tend to believe that the code which is written today will last much less longer than code which was written 30 years ago. And this is somehow strange, since 30 years ago the computer costed much more than the human programmer (while the opposite is true today). On the other hand, some embedded code surely will last for long (as the space examples above).
The Concorde was extremely fuel hungry, even if supersonic. IIRC, Concorde is one of the few civilian aircrafts (I am not talking of military aircraft) whose take-off mass was more than 50% kerosene - so a Concorde was at take-off a huge amount of kerosene with some metal and human flesh... BTW, most of the time in my trips (only in Europe - I'm French) is not spent flying. It is spent to reach (or go away from) the airport and waiting. Supersonic flights (that are much too expensive for me) do not help here. So subsonic flights do make sense, and even more non aircraft traveling, e.g. high speed trains like TGV (traveling quite fast, without much waiting, from center of cities to center of cities) or ICE. And my feeling is that TGV trains are more friendly to environment (In France, the electric power is mostly nuclear) and much more comfortable. BTW, I never understood why there are so few high speed trains in the USA.
More precisely, the Police Nationale is in charge of cities, and the Gendarmerie Nationale is in charge of rural zones (at least in principle) See french wikipedia: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmerie_nationale_(France) And the Gendarmerie has also specialized units. More to the point, the Gendarmerie did pay several contractors (and also internal IT) to do the migration. AFAIK, the military status of the personel did help: they had to obey (and didn't complain that much).
Read the classical SICP http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
I was not assuming that more code means better performance.
However, I am still surprised that a team of a dozen produced in one year a poorly written 10KLOC. It is poorly written because it did not achieve their goal: to win the race.
I'm guessing is that even in these student teams, it is as everywhere else: One or two passionate developers, and all the others waiting & criticizing.
And yes, I do know Brook's law (it doesn't take one month to 9 women to make a child).
What surprises me most is the small size of their software, only 10 thousands lines of source code (I think that the average car processor already have these for today's cars -ignition & braking systems-). Given a team of a dozen programmers working for a year, I was expecting at least 50KLOC, or maybe 200KLOC (for example, the GCC compiler is 3MLOC, and the linux kernel has comparable size.)
Of course memory leaks can happen with garbage collected languages, but these leaks are a little easier to find....
Maybe they should have coded in a higher level language like Ocaml, Haskell.
And yes, I'm sure most of an autonomous vehicle software is not low-level drivers, but in the planification & perception tasks. On such tasks, higher-level languages definitely make sense.
I also did not understood what kind of libraries these teams are using.
I'm also surprised that it is apparently so easy to get funded to have only 10KLOC inside a car!
Apparently, Microsoft cares more about the Gphone (i.e. Android) than about the Openmoko probably because Google is behind (not just some obscure company). It could happen that Android is just an announcement to impress future stockholders or clients. But it is more probable that it is a real threat to Microsoft phones' OS. Maybe there is some alpha code already? What I don't understand is the relation between Gphone/Android and Openmoko. I hope Openmoko will succeed still! Again, the fact that Microsoft reacted to Gphone/Android but not to Openmoko (AFAIK) is significant.
Yes, but a (maybe minor) feature of GCJ is its ability to build self-contained Java applications, i.e. to compile some Java source code into an executable which does not require any previous JVM installed, etc...
I admit that there are few Java applications (at least on Debian) which are compiled by GCJ and packaged as plain old binary executables. Of course, this means avoiding some fancy Java tricks (the dynamic class loader, some reflection abilities, etc...).
Still, I believe GCJ does have at least such a niche market (for those few applications which don't want to depend on a JVM being installed).
Besides, GCJ is GCC based, and GCC is still a nice project (even if it is old).
The good point of this is that it could show to some (non-technophile) people that 1. Windows exist, and 2. their PC can be used without Windows.
Later on, some (small) fraction of these users might consider switching to some other operating system (which could be good for Linux & opensource).
At last, I think it opens a very interesting can of worms: finally the BIOS is evolving (yes I do know about EFI for Apple, OpenFirmware for some old Suns, OpenBIOS or LinuxBIOS for some happy few motherboards).
What surprises me is that the BIOS are not evolving these days (with the exception of useless gadgets). In particular (even if Microsoft don't care yet) a better BIOS with a better loading procedure (imagine a BIOS containing the GRUB loader!) could be welcome.
AFAIK, current BIOSes are not something of importance when choosing hardware (e.g. a motherboard), except perhaps for overclocking.
The interesting point is that Microsoft cared to reply to Mandriva. I thought that such a huge mastodonte as Microsoft don't care about small businesses like Mandriva. I find that the mere fact that Microsoft replied something is interesting.
There is also active dvi or advi. It provide animations, ability to include any X11 program (ie an xterm) inside a slide to make a demo, etc... http://pauillac.inria.fr/advi/ for more
I suggest learning powerful languages like Ocaml and lisp or Smalltalk (or even Prolog). With such languages, you'll learn to think better.
Once you master different languages of various families, learning a new language will be much easier.
learning to think correctly about programming is more important IMHO than learning the currently popular languages.
And I suggest using only open-source language implementations. At some point, you'll learn a lot by diving into their source code (so better use Linux).
At some point, you probably will want to follow a college or university degree. Regards.
This is trivial, but with open source software, there is nothing special for multi-core chips. So Oracle's position indirectly favors opensource software use on multi-processors. This is good for opensource developers.