False, if you generate a personal identity cert using a service like Thawte or Verisign (which do this over a web interface) then the private key is generated as a request from their webserver on your machine, and ONLY stored in Keychain. Try it yourself, use Safari and go to Thawte's page and create a personal cert. The cert is downloaded in whatever format you desire, but the key is generated locally and there is NO way to get it out of Keychain (despite the permanently grayed out "export" menu option).
I don't know about Verisign, but Thawte at least keeeps your keys on file on their web server. If you need to transfer them to another system, just log into their site and retrieve the keyset again.
I don't see how simply having a centralized 'This app needs Admin access' form makes it any harder to write malware for a system, any app could trigger that function and make the request.
It is my understanding that on OS X, the authorization dialog pops up because a request to a protected reqource/API has been made, as opposed to an application being able to just randomly tell the OS to pop up an authorization dialog.
The dialog itself always displays the name (and if available icon) of the application making the request, as well as the name of the right being requested. As this is put together only by the OS, you can't substitute one right name when you really want to do something different. And getting one right doesn't automatically permit a process to use any other right on the system -- each right needs authorization.
It's actually quite a good system, and has been very well thought out. It does, of course, rely on some vigilence by the end user -- if they're entering their password anytime it's being requested without quickly checking to see what is making the request and why, obviously they're going to get into trouble.
Then again, if I e-mail a bunch of Linux admins and ask them for their passwords, and they send them to me, you wind up with the same end result.
to be honest, as a master student about to graduate in EE, i have not much of a clue as in to how i'm going to find a decent career-related job anywhere (in canada or US)
Well, if you're in decent shape, I happen to know for a fact that the Canadian Forces are looking for engineering officers, particularily within the Navy.
(Although if you want my opinion, join the Reserves first as a MARS officer, and get your commission, then switch to the reg force. If you jump right into the reg force as a Direct Entry Officer you're going to be shipped out to Quebec for a minimum of 4 months of basic officer training -- and the school is so badly under-funded and mismanaged that it's a mess).
Yaz.
(Former Marine Engineering (MARE) Officer).
Re:USA/Canada not that bad...
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Press freedom
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· Score: 1
(On Canada)
...the national regulatory authority's stand against the pan-Arab radio station Al-Jazeera and the local station CHOI FM downgraded the country to 18th place.
As for CHOI FM, the CRTC refused to renew their license due to CHOI's violation of their own Code of Ethics, and because they "failed to comply with the Radio Regulations 1986 (the Regulations) as well as CHOI-FM's Code of Ethics, adherence to which is required by one of its conditions of licence." (ref: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/NEWS/RELEASES/2004/r0407 13.htm). And even then, only after repeated warnings. And in the end, the radio station did get its license anyhow, and remains on the air to this day.
In the end, like you said -- it's minor stuff. If you collapse all of the tied scores, Canada ranks at 8th and the US at 11th -- pretty damned good if you ask me. Not perfect, but pretty damned good.
Okay as an US citizen I will say that I know that Canada has a democratic system. I will also say that I am guilty as charged about not knowing when Canada holds there elections. I can not vote there so... It really does not matter to me.
But perhaps it should, seeing as how Canada is the US's largest trading partner, and how the US has a major trade deficit with Canada.
Whether or not it matters to you is ultimately up to you. Personally, it doesn't bother me a whole lot if Americans don't know when Canada is in election time, what the issues are, or whether or not any of those issues would positively or negatively affect the US. I've come to expect that the US populance is ambivilent towards Canada for the most part -- and that's okay.
It's because this ambivilence doesn't bother me (for the most part) that I'd be suprised if suddenly the US media started heavily promoting one candidate over another in a Canadian election, as the previous poster suggested. And then I'd get over it, shrug, and go on with my life.
Note, however, that if Americans (through their elected government) are going to continue to self-proclaim themselves as a superpower, and wield that power whenever and wherever they want to in this world, disregarding international law (and even the spirit of US dosmestic law) in the process, then all of those people who are affected by this are going to be interested in and influenced by the outcome of the election.
I'm somewhat ambivilent about this election myself. As a Canadian, I'm angered over the US government breaking treaties, both international and bilateral, which have harmed the Canadian economy and ordinary Canadians, who have lost their jobs because of such actions (and here, I refer specifically to insane softwood lumber tarrifs -- the bilateral FTA panel has ruled the US tarrifs illegal, as has the WTO on numerous occassions (ref: http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2004/06/11/soft040611.html).
At the same time, the current US administrations continuing increase of the national debt and their virtual complete ignoring of economic issues has been pushing the Canadian dollar higher these past few years, all while the Canadian dollar has been soaring. This has both its up and downsides, but in the end Canada has become a more popular place for foreign investment due to the declining US economy and sagging employment rates.
Most Canadians would seem to side with Kerry, although to my mind I'm having a hard time telling him apart from Bush. About the only benefit I can see of Kerry over Bush for Canada is that Kerry seems more willing to work with his friends, rather than against them.
The US has become a vastly more insular place these past four years in a world that, thanks in no small part to the Internet, is becoming ever more international in scope. As a nation, I consider the US a bad friend -- they seem to have no qualms about screwing us, and their own house seems to be a mess, but at the same time I remember all the good times when we worked together to make North America (and the world) a better place by being an example to them. I, for one, hope the US gets itself together again so we can put our strained friendship back on a solid footing.
You bet France, the UK, or Canada would scream BLOODY MURDER if the US press tried to rally support for one candidate or another in an election in one of their countries.
Not exactly the same (but similar): Michael Moore released Fahrenheit 911 earlier than originally scheduled to coincide with the Canadian Federal Election this past spring, and then spent a good portion of his time up here to tell people not to vote for the Conservative Party while he pushed his movie (which I do have to say I rather enjoyed).
The reaction of most Canadians? We just shrugged and went about our business. A few Conservatives got their shorts in a knot over it, and tried to cause trouble for Mr. Moore for interfering as a foriegn national in our federal election, and for bypassing various election finance and advertising laws (all of which fizzled and went nowhere).
Would Canadians scream bloody murder if Americans told us who to vote for? I doubt it. More likely we'd be completely taken by suprise that any American actually realized that we had democratic elections, knew when they were occuring, and know who are main political parties and their leaders are:).
Does anyone else think that this a bit overkill. 60Gb is a LOT when you are just talking about music and pictures.
Except that the iPod isn't just for music (and now photos). It's a portable hard drive, allowing you to store all sorts of data on it.
I bought my 15GB iPod about six months ago, and I'm only using about 20% of its space for music. Of the remaining space which isn't empty, I'm using it to store important documents (encrypted, of course) and other data I might need "on the go".
What's more, on the Mac, the iPod is a bootable device. My iPod also has a pared-down copy of Mac OS X v10.3.5 installed on it (primarily to ensure I have some sort of bootable and usuable system if something were to go wrong with my PowerBook's hard drive.
Coupled with my laptop, I could see having a bigger iPod and using the space, albeit not for music or photos. 60GB could store a lot of DivX movies which I could play back on my PowerBook (or any other Mac I might encounter in my travels), without having to sacrifice any of the space on the built-in hard drive, or having to carry around a bunch of DVDs (or some other portable hard drive).
However, the most successful applications were built upon other applications that, in essence, worked.
I agree -- but this is different from what Linus said in the interview.
Projects that get bogged down in committee without anything (or very little) to show for their work (OpenDoc anyone?) are pretty much doomed to fail, Open Source or not.
Projects that produce something usuable, albeit imperfect, and which release early, release often, can do very well, regardless of their size.
Too many projects that started big have fizzled, and small applications that work tend to grow and morph into ground-shaking applications as they mature.
A quick search of the web -- or heck, just SourceForge -- will show a plethora of projects that "started small" which have also completely fizzled.
There is nothing wrong with thinking big when starting a project - there are some types of project that simply can't be done on a small scale. Mozilla is pretty damned big, for example, and while it started off with Netscape source code, much of it was discarded. Eclipse is likewise a big project.
The key to doing a big project is you have to really put your nose to the grindstone and work your butt off to get something online in a reasonable timeframe. The biggest problem I see with large scale projects that fail is they get bogged down in minutae, which slows down their release cycles so much that they don't achieve any developer or user attention. We all forget with Firefox 1.0 imminent how the press used to claim that the Mozilla project has failed a few years back because it had taken them a few years from the time Netscape Open Sourced their browser code, to the point where it was usuable. And yet now we're celebrating the release of a world-class Open Source browser.
That's a big project which didn't start off small which is going to be a rousing success. Yes, projects which fail to gain traction because of lofty ideas and infrequent releases to tend to fail in the long run. However, there are an order of magnitude more small projects which similarily fail. The only difference between the two is we tend to hear about the "big" ones, but nobody cares one whit about the tens of thousands of small projects which come and go.
If you want to be able to su to root, you give root a password by "sudo passwd root" or something similar. That command is not documented by Apple.
It isn't documented because Apple provides a tool in OS X to do just this, and that tool is documented.
In your Utilities folder, open the NetInfo Manager. From there, select Security -> Enable Root User. You may neeed to authenticate first to be able to create the root user, but Apple certainly does provide a documented mechanism for doing so if you need it.
also, tried getting support on your Vaio recently?
No, but that would only be because I don't own one. My laptop is an Apple PowerBook G4.
sony look nice, but unlike apple *absolutely suck ass* when it comes to any sort of aftersales or support.
Well, I don't own any Sony computer hardware (unless you want to count their Linux kit for the PlayStation 2, which I do own -- but that comes from a different division from the rest of their computing hardware), so I wouldn't know. All of my Sony gear is consumer electronics stuff, primarily my TV, DVD player, VCR, and car stereo. And none of it has ever needed any form of service and support -- it has always just worked.
For computer hardware and parts, for example, you're much better off going to one of the shops downtown on College Street (around Chinatown) than you are buying from Future Shop or Best Buy
Or about half a million places in Markham:).
You'll get no argument from me -- I was thinking more along the lines of their consumer electronics when I mentioned prices. When I bought my Wega and a DVD player several years ago, The Sony Stores prices were the same as virtually everywhere else (for Sony gear).
The one nice thing about the Sony store is you can haggle with them somewhat if you're buying multiple items. I was able to do this when buying my TV and DVD player -- I not only saved a few hundred dollars off the sticker price buying them together, but I also got them to throw in the extended warantee and a bunch of DVD movies as well.
Sure, other places do this as well -- but in the end I got quite a good deal (better than I could get anywhere else at the time), and some nice free extras. The key is not to go in and pay the sticker price if you're buying a few major items at once -- talk to the sales person, hum and haw a bit, mention to them you might buy the other item "down the road", and talk them down and get them to throw a few things in for free.
They'll be the most expensive place to buy Sony products, only carry home electronics (no computers or parts)
Where do you live? I used to frequent the Sony Store at the Scarborough Town Centre (Toronto), and not only were there prices competitive with places like Future Shop, but they also had Viao laptops, Clies, and a selection of computer parts (CD/DVD drives, Viao acccessories, etc.).
...and Toronto has as many stores as the entire US when you factor in the two new stores this article mentions:
Bramalea City Centre
Toronto Eaton Centre
Erin Mills Town Centre
Fairview Mall
Hillcrest Mall
Markville Shopping Centre
Pickering Town Centre
Scarborough Town Centre
Sherway Gardens
Square One
Upper Canada Mall
Yorkdale Shopping Centre
Ontario has, according to Sony Canada's website, 29 Sony Stores in total.
And/. is getting excited because Sony is expanding in the US from 10 to 12 stores???;).
(Admittedly, I'll be excited when Canada has one Apple Store).
Yaz.
Re:Is it an open protocol?
on
Replacing TCP?
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· Score: 1
When they say "free, non-commercial use", and they talk about the GPL, they are making sense.
No they aren't. "Non-commercial use" means it can't be used in a commercial setting. The GPL doesn't forbid use in commercial settings, only how you have to release any code based on the licensed sources.
Just look at all of the corporations using Linux. If the GPL enforced (or permitted) "non-commercial use", then there are tens of thousands of corporations out there breaking the GPL just by using the software. IBM, RedHat, Novell, and lots of others would be in violation, as they are commercial entities.
What the GPL doesn't permit is an entity (corporation OR individual) from taking the licensed sources, and incorporating them into a closed-source project. However, corporations are still allowed to use the code.
The literal meaning of "non-commercial use" is "if you're a corporate entity, you can't use this at all". And that's not what the GPL is about.
Careful, you might cause a coding style preference flame war here;-)
A bit late for the warning, don't you think?:).
One additional practice that I have learned the hard way to use is to always use braces with statement where they are optional.
Typically if an if, while, or for statement only has one line of code to process, I'll leave the whole line inline, such as:
// Straight from the jSyncManager /** Export this database to a File. * @param s path and name of file to export to. */ public void exportDatabase(String s) { java.io.File file=new java.io.File(s); if (file.isFile()) file.delete(); if(!file.exists()) file.mkdirs();
I find that keeping exceedingly simple one-line statements such as the above in very specific cases removes the problems you describe, and enhances readability. Take the last if...else block for example: there are only two possibilities, and as the actual processing for each is fairly lengthy, they're broken into their own methods. As such, no extra processing will ever be added or necessary to this statement, making it safe to keep these two simple items as inline statements.
But otherwise, I find myself in agreement with you, and would work with you on a development project any day:).
Acrobat Reader 6.0.2 on WinXP SP1 reports an error #140...:-(
You might want to check that...
Thanks. Acrobat Reader 6 on Mac OS X reports the same error, but the file opens and views without error on Acrobat Reader 5 on OS X, Preview on OS X, and Adobe Acrobat Reader 3 on OS/2.
When I get a chance, I'll regenerate it and will see if the fault goes away.
The thread started because of a developer who recently wasted a whole bunch of time because he was using the syntax you're advocating, but had put a semi-colon at the end of the condition, causing it to not be connected to the block (ie: the block become a free-standing block which would execute regardless of the result of the conditional statement). Such code doesn't (generally) result in a compilation error, but will result in runtime errors, and is very, very difficult to see using that syntax.
My syntax makes it completely obvious which statement a block belongs to, and makes it vastly easier to detect such errors (and makes it harder to make them in the first place IMO).
Instead of presenting the arguments as to why your syntax is problematic all over again, please iterate back to the top of the loop using this link.
(Posted in "Code" so as to get the formatting right).
"Since modern code editors force tabs or spacing in these scenarios, I find comments like "// end if" to create more noise overall."
It's additional meta-information. And if you're working in a group where each developer gets to choose their own editor (such as in virtually any Open Source project on the web), if one user sets their tabstops to something different from the rest of the group, and/or someone starts using spaces instead of tabs (or vice-versa), you wind up with indentation problems.
For example, you're using tabstops every 3 characters, insterted as tab characters. Some guy working with your file is using 4-space tabs, inserted as spaces. They need to add a line of code below an existing line starting at column 12 on their display (ie: three tab stops in your editor). So they hit tab three times. Looks correct to them, and the editor permits it, so they save the file and fire it back to you.
/You/ look at the newly added line, and see that where the previous line starts at column 9 on your display, their newly added line starts at column 12, one whole tab-stop extra.
Or how about if you're always working with only spaces (ie: tab is set to insert three spaces, and not a tab character)./All/ of your sources are using this. Someone comes along and uses an editor which inserts a tab character instead of spaces, with a 3-character tab stop. They work on a file, and check it back in.
Developer number 3 checks out the file, and for whatever reason always uses the space bar instead of the tab button for indentation. Because of this, they never bothered to change their editors default tab stop of 8. They load up the file, and suddenly it's a mess: the space-stopped lines are still indented in multiples of threes, but the lines containing tab characters as inserted by developer number 2 are now indented in/multiples of eights/! If developer number 2 didn't just add new functions/methods/etc. to the end of the file, and they added lines inside existing blocks, the code readability is now totally fubar.
And yes, I see this happen all the time, both inside and outside commercial development. You can mitigate this through education and enforcement, but anyone who does any real development work has seen this happen.
Adding what you call/noise/ provides structure, and allows you to determine which close braces go with what statements. It is due to this sort of potential confusion that many non-C derived languages actually use specific close statements for each different type of open statement (ie: Pascal, Modula-2/3, Ada83/95, shell script (although for a somewhat different reason).
And in some environment, it can be exceedingly important if you're nesting a large number of blocks. Take this simple Java example, for example:
// A fragment of Java class MyClass { method someMethod() { for(int i=0;i<100;i++) { if(i<50) { synchronized(this) { try { ... } catch (Exception e) { ... } } } } } }
Here there are six closing tags in sequence, in short, concise, and valid code. It doesn't take much to scroll the top few lines off the top of the screen (I'll get to why your refactoring comment is invalid in a second). It is exceedingly easy to introduce errors here, such as inserting code in the wrong place, such as:
class MyClass { method someMethod() { for(int i=0;i<100;i++) { if(i<50) { synchronized(this) { try { ... } catch (Exception e) { ... } } } doSomethingElse();// Oops -- not supposed to be inside the for statement } } }
This is very easily mitigated through the mechanism I've already demonstrated:
I don't know, but now that you know, feel free to use it in your own projects:).
Actually, for anyone interested in how I typically write easy-to-read code, check out this PDF document (or the HTML version). These are the coding guidelines I wrote up (and follow) for the jSyncManager Project. And yes, they're enforced (albeit not in a draconian manner -- if another developer misses something, I usually just fix it for them as opposed to nailing them to the wall:) ).
Good Open Source code needs to be readable and easy to work with IMO. If you want to attract more developers to your project, and/or want third-party developers to use your Open Source APIs, you need to make sure when they grab your code they can get working with it with an absolute minimum of hassle, and as much information as they need. The last thing you want to make them do is go through all your code with a fine-toothed comb trying to figure out what it's doing. They want to write code, not try to figure out what the existing code is doing manually.
Just as nobody likes to read a novel with no paragraph breaks/indentation, no chapter breaks, and no formatting, nobody should have to read messy code. Writing elegant looking code with useful comments takes very little time (particularily if you're a fast typer), and is always worth the extra effort, especially in an Open Source project that is close to your heart.
Speaking of which, if anyone out there is interested in developing code for an Open Source, pure Java data synchronization solution for Palm OS-based handhelds, or using such code in one of their own projects, send me an e-mail:) ).
But do you really use comments like "// end-if"???
Yes, in fact I do. It makes it obvious what statement a close-brace goes with, in the event the indentation is screwed up, or if it's on a separate page from the block opening. Take this class, for example.
I'll give you an example of where this is useful:
(Note: I tried typing up this post using <ECODE> with spaces and non-breaking spaces, but/. appears to strip them all out. The code below was intended to be indented, but it doesn't look like/. is going to let me. The point is even more poignant without the indentation, but as very few people code without indentation, it doesn't make for as good an example IMO. So please imagine the code below as being indented).
// The same useless code, but with block-closing comments. int x=0; while(x<10) { if (x%2==0) { for(int i=0;i<x;i++) { doSomething(x, i); doSomethingElse(x); } }
This code is obviously incomplete, as it specifies more open braces than close braces. I coded it, but it's up to you to fix it.
However, without knowing the algorithm, where do you add the extra close brace? Note that the first close-brace isn't at the same indentation level of anything else (due to developer typo) -- was it intended to close the if statement (and thus it's the for statement that is missing its closure), or is it the closure for the for statement, and it's the closure of the if statement that is missing?
Using my syntax, this is brutally easy to fix without going through the algorithm to discover what was intended:
// The same useless code, but with block-closing comments. int x=0; while(x<10) { if (x%2==0) { for(int i=0;i<x;i++) { doSomething(x, i); doSomethingElse(x); }// end-for }// end-while
Thus, it's the if statement that is missing its close block. The code should look like:
// The same useless code, but at least it's syntatically correct. int x=0; while(x<10) { if (x%2==0) { for(int i=0;i<x;i++) { doSomething(x, i); doSomethingElse(x); }// end-for }// end-if }// end-while
You may think that looking at the indentation might tell you where the closing brace is missing -- but just try working in a development group sometime where some developer is using 2 or 4 character tabs instead of 3 character tabs, or where they're using spaces instead of tabs (or tabs instead of spaces). Indentation is easily munged in such a case, and it can creep into source very easily. Without close-brace comments, a missing close may be very difficult to insert in the correct position.
So yes, I do add such comments to every close tag. They're quick to type, but generally I set-up my code editors to either insert them automatically, or to at least assign a macro to insert them. It makes the code easier to maintain if someone accidentally forgets to close off a block, and makes it easy to determine what statement a given close goes with if the close is on a different page from the block opening statement.
As to why many people use it the other way, I honestly have no idea. But one thing is for certain, people who do so are completely, totally, and utterly wrong:).
Okay, I know that there are a lot of professional developers out there who follow some of the "rules" in the article, especially those involving ignoring warnings. I've been in professional programming environments, and I've seen this sort of thing excused all too often (personally, my code isn't done until it compiles 100% cleanly). However, for good or bad, this is typically hidden in closed-source projects -- how many compilation warnings does Microsoft get in its nightly Windows builds? I have no idea.
Unfortunately, in Open Source Software everyone gets to see where the developers ignore warnings, and IMO there isn't much excuse for it. Honestly, there are far too many Open Source projects which seem to do the things this article "advocates". And everyone gets to see it.
I remember all of the warning messages I get when building the Linux 2.4 series kernels. And I recently looked into forking the recently cancelled JPluck, but its near complete lack of code commenting makes the effort exceedingly difficult.
This has long bothered me. If you're going to release your code as Open Source so others can work with it, it should at least have some comments in it (even just simple things like the expected input.output values for procedures, functions, or methods, expected use for variables/fields, etc.), and it should generally build without a single warning [1], in order to make it easier for others to work with the code, and to ensure them that there aren't going to be any unexpected results due to ignored warnings.
Yaz.
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[1] Okay, I know someone is going to call me a hipocrite when they go and grab the sources for the Open Source project I administer (the jSyncManager), build it, and find well over 100 warnings. I just want to preempt this by stating that these deprecation warnings occur because I've specified parts of the jSyncManager API to be deprecated to ensure developers currently using these deprecated classes move their code over to their replacements.
Oh I just know I'm going to open up a huge bag of worms with this one, but this is why I vastly this sort of syntax:
if (condition) { myvar = 1; }// end-if
It makes it easier to identify which statement the block is intended to begin with, and makes it easier to spot if there are un-intended characters between the condition and the block-opening (besides reducing vertical space wastage).
Imagine that you're a 12-year-old, and have asked your parents for an iPod for Christmas (or Hanukkah or Quanza or Festivus or whatever other gift-giving celebration you might be celebrating this holiday season). Why? Because it's the accessory all of the cool kids at school are carrying around.
You wanted an iPod, only to get an iPod wanna-be. Maybe the sales guy told your parents this one was "better", or maybe your parents saw this one had a lower price tag and bought it to save a few bucks. Perfectly good reasons for an adult -- but not for our hypothetical 12 year-old who wanted an iPod like the cool kids at school.
Particularly if the wanna-be device is going to get you osteracized from your peer group for carrying around a poor fascimile of the iPod.
That's the real problem with most of these supposed "iPod killers" -- they try too hard to look like the iPod, but without the major items that make the iPod cool.
I can't forsee any of these devices "killing" the iPod. I can't even see any of them dealing a mortal wound. Or a minor flesh wound. Or even a nick. None of these devices has the cool of the iPod brand, and many of them look like poor, el-cheapo knockoffs.
(I mean come on guys -- if you want to take on the iPod, try designing something slick, sleek, and unique -- stop trying to copy the look and feel of the iPod).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about Verisign, but Thawte at least keeeps your keys on file on their web server. If you need to transfer them to another system, just log into their site and retrieve the keyset again.
Yaz.
It is my understanding that on OS X, the authorization dialog pops up because a request to a protected reqource/API has been made, as opposed to an application being able to just randomly tell the OS to pop up an authorization dialog.
The dialog itself always displays the name (and if available icon) of the application making the request, as well as the name of the right being requested. As this is put together only by the OS, you can't substitute one right name when you really want to do something different. And getting one right doesn't automatically permit a process to use any other right on the system -- each right needs authorization.
It's actually quite a good system, and has been very well thought out. It does, of course, rely on some vigilence by the end user -- if they're entering their password anytime it's being requested without quickly checking to see what is making the request and why, obviously they're going to get into trouble.
Then again, if I e-mail a bunch of Linux admins and ask them for their passwords, and they send them to me, you wind up with the same end result.
Yaz.
Well, if you're in decent shape, I happen to know for a fact that the Canadian Forces are looking for engineering officers, particularily within the Navy.
(Although if you want my opinion, join the Reserves first as a MARS officer, and get your commission, then switch to the reg force. If you jump right into the reg force as a Direct Entry Officer you're going to be shipped out to Quebec for a minimum of 4 months of basic officer training -- and the school is so badly under-funded and mismanaged that it's a mess).
Yaz.
(Former Marine Engineering (MARE) Officer).
First off, I'm not sure what they're talking about concerning Al-Jazeera, as the Canadian Radio Television Commission (CRTC -- the regulatory authority they're talking about) approved Al Jazeera for re-distribution in Canada on July 15 of this year.
As for CHOI FM, the CRTC refused to renew their license due to CHOI's violation of their own Code of Ethics, and because they "failed to comply with the Radio Regulations 1986 (the Regulations) as well as CHOI-FM's Code of Ethics, adherence to which is required by one of its conditions of licence." (ref: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/NEWS/RELEASES/2004/r0407 13.htm). And even then, only after repeated warnings. And in the end, the radio station did get its license anyhow, and remains on the air to this day.
In the end, like you said -- it's minor stuff. If you collapse all of the tied scores, Canada ranks at 8th and the US at 11th -- pretty damned good if you ask me. Not perfect, but pretty damned good.
Yaz.
But perhaps it should, seeing as how Canada is the US's largest trading partner, and how the US has a major trade deficit with Canada.
Whether or not it matters to you is ultimately up to you. Personally, it doesn't bother me a whole lot if Americans don't know when Canada is in election time, what the issues are, or whether or not any of those issues would positively or negatively affect the US. I've come to expect that the US populance is ambivilent towards Canada for the most part -- and that's okay.
It's because this ambivilence doesn't bother me (for the most part) that I'd be suprised if suddenly the US media started heavily promoting one candidate over another in a Canadian election, as the previous poster suggested. And then I'd get over it, shrug, and go on with my life.
Note, however, that if Americans (through their elected government) are going to continue to self-proclaim themselves as a superpower, and wield that power whenever and wherever they want to in this world, disregarding international law (and even the spirit of US dosmestic law) in the process, then all of those people who are affected by this are going to be interested in and influenced by the outcome of the election.
I'm somewhat ambivilent about this election myself. As a Canadian, I'm angered over the US government breaking treaties, both international and bilateral, which have harmed the Canadian economy and ordinary Canadians, who have lost their jobs because of such actions (and here, I refer specifically to insane softwood lumber tarrifs -- the bilateral FTA panel has ruled the US tarrifs illegal, as has the WTO on numerous occassions (ref: http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2004/06/11 /soft040611.html).
At the same time, the current US administrations continuing increase of the national debt and their virtual complete ignoring of economic issues has been pushing the Canadian dollar higher these past few years, all while the Canadian dollar has been soaring. This has both its up and downsides, but in the end Canada has become a more popular place for foreign investment due to the declining US economy and sagging employment rates.
Most Canadians would seem to side with Kerry, although to my mind I'm having a hard time telling him apart from Bush. About the only benefit I can see of Kerry over Bush for Canada is that Kerry seems more willing to work with his friends, rather than against them.
The US has become a vastly more insular place these past four years in a world that, thanks in no small part to the Internet, is becoming ever more international in scope. As a nation, I consider the US a bad friend -- they seem to have no qualms about screwing us, and their own house seems to be a mess, but at the same time I remember all the good times when we worked together to make North America (and the world) a better place by being an example to them. I, for one, hope the US gets itself together again so we can put our strained friendship back on a solid footing.
Yaz.
Not exactly the same (but similar): Michael Moore released Fahrenheit 911 earlier than originally scheduled to coincide with the Canadian Federal Election this past spring, and then spent a good portion of his time up here to tell people not to vote for the Conservative Party while he pushed his movie (which I do have to say I rather enjoyed).
The reaction of most Canadians? We just shrugged and went about our business. A few Conservatives got their shorts in a knot over it, and tried to cause trouble for Mr. Moore for interfering as a foriegn national in our federal election, and for bypassing various election finance and advertising laws (all of which fizzled and went nowhere).
Would Canadians scream bloody murder if Americans told us who to vote for? I doubt it. More likely we'd be completely taken by suprise that any American actually realized that we had democratic elections, knew when they were occuring, and know who are main political parties and their leaders are :).
Yaz.
Except that the iPod isn't just for music (and now photos). It's a portable hard drive, allowing you to store all sorts of data on it.
I bought my 15GB iPod about six months ago, and I'm only using about 20% of its space for music. Of the remaining space which isn't empty, I'm using it to store important documents (encrypted, of course) and other data I might need "on the go".
What's more, on the Mac, the iPod is a bootable device. My iPod also has a pared-down copy of Mac OS X v10.3.5 installed on it (primarily to ensure I have some sort of bootable and usuable system if something were to go wrong with my PowerBook's hard drive.
Coupled with my laptop, I could see having a bigger iPod and using the space, albeit not for music or photos. 60GB could store a lot of DivX movies which I could play back on my PowerBook (or any other Mac I might encounter in my travels), without having to sacrifice any of the space on the built-in hard drive, or having to carry around a bunch of DVDs (or some other portable hard drive).
Yaz.
I agree -- but this is different from what Linus said in the interview.
Projects that get bogged down in committee without anything (or very little) to show for their work (OpenDoc anyone?) are pretty much doomed to fail, Open Source or not.
Projects that produce something usuable, albeit imperfect, and which release early, release often, can do very well, regardless of their size.
Yaz.
A quick search of the web -- or heck, just SourceForge -- will show a plethora of projects that "started small" which have also completely fizzled.
There is nothing wrong with thinking big when starting a project - there are some types of project that simply can't be done on a small scale. Mozilla is pretty damned big, for example, and while it started off with Netscape source code, much of it was discarded. Eclipse is likewise a big project.
The key to doing a big project is you have to really put your nose to the grindstone and work your butt off to get something online in a reasonable timeframe. The biggest problem I see with large scale projects that fail is they get bogged down in minutae, which slows down their release cycles so much that they don't achieve any developer or user attention. We all forget with Firefox 1.0 imminent how the press used to claim that the Mozilla project has failed a few years back because it had taken them a few years from the time Netscape Open Sourced their browser code, to the point where it was usuable. And yet now we're celebrating the release of a world-class Open Source browser.
That's a big project which didn't start off small which is going to be a rousing success. Yes, projects which fail to gain traction because of lofty ideas and infrequent releases to tend to fail in the long run. However, there are an order of magnitude more small projects which similarily fail. The only difference between the two is we tend to hear about the "big" ones, but nobody cares one whit about the tens of thousands of small projects which come and go.
Yaz.
It isn't documented because Apple provides a tool in OS X to do just this, and that tool is documented.
In your Utilities folder, open the NetInfo Manager. From there, select Security -> Enable Root User. You may neeed to authenticate first to be able to create the root user, but Apple certainly does provide a documented mechanism for doing so if you need it.
Yaz.
No, but that would only be because I don't own one. My laptop is an Apple PowerBook G4.
Well, I don't own any Sony computer hardware (unless you want to count their Linux kit for the PlayStation 2, which I do own -- but that comes from a different division from the rest of their computing hardware), so I wouldn't know. All of my Sony gear is consumer electronics stuff, primarily my TV, DVD player, VCR, and car stereo. And none of it has ever needed any form of service and support -- it has always just worked.
Yaz.
Or about half a million places in Markham :).
You'll get no argument from me -- I was thinking more along the lines of their consumer electronics when I mentioned prices. When I bought my Wega and a DVD player several years ago, The Sony Stores prices were the same as virtually everywhere else (for Sony gear).
The one nice thing about the Sony store is you can haggle with them somewhat if you're buying multiple items. I was able to do this when buying my TV and DVD player -- I not only saved a few hundred dollars off the sticker price buying them together, but I also got them to throw in the extended warantee and a bunch of DVD movies as well.
Sure, other places do this as well -- but in the end I got quite a good deal (better than I could get anywhere else at the time), and some nice free extras. The key is not to go in and pay the sticker price if you're buying a few major items at once -- talk to the sales person, hum and haw a bit, mention to them you might buy the other item "down the road", and talk them down and get them to throw a few things in for free.
Yaz.
Where do you live? I used to frequent the Sony Store at the Scarborough Town Centre (Toronto), and not only were there prices competitive with places like Future Shop, but they also had Viao laptops, Clies, and a selection of computer parts (CD/DVD drives, Viao acccessories, etc.).
Yaz.
...and Toronto has as many stores as the entire US when you factor in the two new stores this article mentions:
Ontario has, according to Sony Canada's website, 29 Sony Stores in total.
And /. is getting excited because Sony is expanding in the US from 10 to 12 stores??? ;).
(Admittedly, I'll be excited when Canada has one Apple Store).
Yaz.
No they aren't. "Non-commercial use" means it can't be used in a commercial setting. The GPL doesn't forbid use in commercial settings, only how you have to release any code based on the licensed sources.
Just look at all of the corporations using Linux. If the GPL enforced (or permitted) "non-commercial use", then there are tens of thousands of corporations out there breaking the GPL just by using the software. IBM, RedHat, Novell, and lots of others would be in violation, as they are commercial entities.
What the GPL doesn't permit is an entity (corporation OR individual) from taking the licensed sources, and incorporating them into a closed-source project. However, corporations are still allowed to use the code.
The literal meaning of "non-commercial use" is "if you're a corporate entity, you can't use this at all". And that's not what the GPL is about.
Yaz.
A bit late for the warning, don't you think? :).
Typically if an if, while, or for statement only has one line of code to process, I'll leave the whole line inline, such as:
I find that keeping exceedingly simple one-line statements such as the above in very specific cases removes the problems you describe, and enhances readability. Take the last if...else block for example: there are only two possibilities, and as the actual processing for each is fairly lengthy, they're broken into their own methods. As such, no extra processing will ever be added or necessary to this statement, making it safe to keep these two simple items as inline statements.
But otherwise, I find myself in agreement with you, and would work with you on a development project any day :).
Yaz.
Thanks. Acrobat Reader 6 on Mac OS X reports the same error, but the file opens and views without error on Acrobat Reader 5 on OS X, Preview on OS X, and Adobe Acrobat Reader 3 on OS/2.
When I get a chance, I'll regenerate it and will see if the fault goes away.
Yaz.
Now we're going in a big circle :).
The thread started because of a developer who recently wasted a whole bunch of time because he was using the syntax you're advocating, but had put a semi-colon at the end of the condition, causing it to not be connected to the block (ie: the block become a free-standing block which would execute regardless of the result of the conditional statement). Such code doesn't (generally) result in a compilation error, but will result in runtime errors, and is very, very difficult to see using that syntax.
My syntax makes it completely obvious which statement a block belongs to, and makes it vastly easier to detect such errors (and makes it harder to make them in the first place IMO).
Instead of presenting the arguments as to why your syntax is problematic all over again, please iterate back to the top of the loop using this link.
Yaz.
(Posted in "Code" so as to get the formatting right).
/All/ of your sources are using this. Someone comes along and uses an editor which inserts a tab character instead of spaces, with a 3-character tab stop. They work on a file, and check it back in.
/multiples of eights/! If developer number 2 didn't just add new functions/methods/etc. to the end of the file, and they added lines inside existing blocks, the code readability is now totally fubar.
/noise/ provides structure, and allows you to determine which close braces go with what statements. It is due to this sort of potential confusion that many non-C derived languages actually use specific close statements for each different type of open statement (ie: Pascal, Modula-2/3, Ada83/95, shell script (although for a somewhat different reason).
...
...
...
... // Oops -- not supposed to be inside the for statement
"Since modern code editors force tabs or spacing in these scenarios, I find comments like "// end if" to create more noise overall."
It's additional meta-information. And if you're working in a group where each developer gets to choose their own editor (such as in virtually any Open Source project on the web), if one user sets their tabstops to something different from the rest of the group, and/or someone starts using spaces instead of tabs (or vice-versa), you wind up with indentation problems.
For example, you're using tabstops every 3 characters, insterted as tab characters. Some guy working with your file is using 4-space tabs, inserted as spaces. They need to add a line of code below an existing line starting at column 12 on their display (ie: three tab stops in your editor). So they hit tab three times. Looks correct to them, and the editor permits it, so they save the file and fire it back to you.
/You/ look at the newly added line, and see that where the previous line starts at column 9 on your display, their newly added line starts at column 12, one whole tab-stop extra.
Or how about if you're always working with only spaces (ie: tab is set to insert three spaces, and not a tab character).
Developer number 3 checks out the file, and for whatever reason always uses the space bar instead of the tab button for indentation. Because of this, they never bothered to change their editors default tab stop of 8. They load up the file, and suddenly it's a mess: the space-stopped lines are still indented in multiples of threes, but the lines containing tab characters as inserted by developer number 2 are now indented in
And yes, I see this happen all the time, both inside and outside commercial development. You can mitigate this through education and enforcement, but anyone who does any real development work has seen this happen.
Adding what you call
And in some environment, it can be exceedingly important if you're nesting a large number of blocks. Take this simple Java example, for example:
// A fragment of Java
class MyClass {
method someMethod() {
for(int i=0;i<100;i++) {
if(i<50) {
synchronized(this) {
try {
} catch (Exception e) {
}
}
}
}
}
}
Here there are six closing tags in sequence, in short, concise, and valid code. It doesn't take much to scroll the top few lines off the top of the screen (I'll get to why your refactoring comment is invalid in a second). It is exceedingly easy to introduce errors here, such as inserting code in the wrong place, such as:
class MyClass {
method someMethod() {
for(int i=0;i<100;i++) {
if(i<50) {
synchronized(this) {
try {
} catch (Exception e) {
}
}
}
doSomethingElse();
}
}
}
This is very easily mitigated through the mechanism I've already demonstrated:
class MyC
I don't know, but now that you know, feel free to use it in your own projects :).
Actually, for anyone interested in how I typically write easy-to-read code, check out this PDF document (or the HTML version). These are the coding guidelines I wrote up (and follow) for the jSyncManager Project. And yes, they're enforced (albeit not in a draconian manner -- if another developer misses something, I usually just fix it for them as opposed to nailing them to the wall :) ).
Good Open Source code needs to be readable and easy to work with IMO. If you want to attract more developers to your project, and/or want third-party developers to use your Open Source APIs, you need to make sure when they grab your code they can get working with it with an absolute minimum of hassle, and as much information as they need. The last thing you want to make them do is go through all your code with a fine-toothed comb trying to figure out what it's doing. They want to write code, not try to figure out what the existing code is doing manually.
Just as nobody likes to read a novel with no paragraph breaks/indentation, no chapter breaks, and no formatting, nobody should have to read messy code. Writing elegant looking code with useful comments takes very little time (particularily if you're a fast typer), and is always worth the extra effort, especially in an Open Source project that is close to your heart.
Speaking of which, if anyone out there is interested in developing code for an Open Source, pure Java data synchronization solution for Palm OS-based handhelds, or using such code in one of their own projects, send me an e-mail :) ).
Yaz.
Yes, in fact I do. It makes it obvious what statement a close-brace goes with, in the event the indentation is screwed up, or if it's on a separate page from the block opening. Take this class, for example.
I'll give you an example of where this is useful:
(Note: I tried typing up this post using <ECODE> with spaces and non-breaking spaces, but /. appears to strip them all out. The code below was intended to be indented, but it doesn't look like /. is going to let me. The point is even more poignant without the indentation, but as very few people code without indentation, it doesn't make for as good an example IMO. So please imagine the code below as being indented).
This code is obviously incomplete, as it specifies more open braces than close braces. I coded it, but it's up to you to fix it.
However, without knowing the algorithm, where do you add the extra close brace? Note that the first close-brace isn't at the same indentation level of anything else (due to developer typo) -- was it intended to close the if statement (and thus it's the for statement that is missing its closure), or is it the closure for the for statement, and it's the closure of the if statement that is missing?
Using my syntax, this is brutally easy to fix without going through the algorithm to discover what was intended:
Thus, it's the if statement that is missing its close block. The code should look like:
You may think that looking at the indentation might tell you where the closing brace is missing -- but just try working in a development group sometime where some developer is using 2 or 4 character tabs instead of 3 character tabs, or where they're using spaces instead of tabs (or tabs instead of spaces). Indentation is easily munged in such a case, and it can creep into source very easily. Without close-brace comments, a missing close may be very difficult to insert in the correct position.
So yes, I do add such comments to every close tag. They're quick to type, but generally I set-up my code editors to either insert them automatically, or to at least assign a macro to insert them. It makes the code easier to maintain if someone accidentally forgets to close off a block, and makes it easy to determine what statement a given close goes with if the close is on a different page from the block opening statement.
Yaz.
"Prefer" is the missing word. Sorry about that :).
As to why many people use it the other way, I honestly have no idea. But one thing is for certain, people who do so are completely, totally, and utterly wrong :).
Yaz.
Or, perhaps not read this...
Okay, I know that there are a lot of professional developers out there who follow some of the "rules" in the article, especially those involving ignoring warnings. I've been in professional programming environments, and I've seen this sort of thing excused all too often (personally, my code isn't done until it compiles 100% cleanly). However, for good or bad, this is typically hidden in closed-source projects -- how many compilation warnings does Microsoft get in its nightly Windows builds? I have no idea.
Unfortunately, in Open Source Software everyone gets to see where the developers ignore warnings, and IMO there isn't much excuse for it. Honestly, there are far too many Open Source projects which seem to do the things this article "advocates". And everyone gets to see it.
I remember all of the warning messages I get when building the Linux 2.4 series kernels. And I recently looked into forking the recently cancelled JPluck, but its near complete lack of code commenting makes the effort exceedingly difficult.
This has long bothered me. If you're going to release your code as Open Source so others can work with it, it should at least have some comments in it (even just simple things like the expected input.output values for procedures, functions, or methods, expected use for variables/fields, etc.), and it should generally build without a single warning [1], in order to make it easier for others to work with the code, and to ensure them that there aren't going to be any unexpected results due to ignored warnings.
Yaz.
------------
[1] Okay, I know someone is going to call me a hipocrite when they go and grab the sources for the Open Source project I administer (the jSyncManager), build it, and find well over 100 warnings. I just want to preempt this by stating that these deprecation warnings occur because I've specified parts of the jSyncManager API to be deprecated to ensure developers currently using these deprecated classes move their code over to their replacements.
Oh I just know I'm going to open up a huge bag of worms with this one, but this is why I vastly this sort of syntax:
It makes it easier to identify which statement the block is intended to begin with, and makes it easier to spot if there are un-intended characters between the condition and the block-opening (besides reducing vertical space wastage).
Yaz.
Imagine that you're a 12-year-old, and have asked your parents for an iPod for Christmas (or Hanukkah or Quanza or Festivus or whatever other gift-giving celebration you might be celebrating this holiday season). Why? Because it's the accessory all of the cool kids at school are carrying around.
The big day come around, and you eagerly start ripping the wrapping paper off a promising shaped/sized box, only to find one of these. Or one of these. Or one of these. Or even one of these. Or perhaps worst of all, one of these.
You wanted an iPod, only to get an iPod wanna-be. Maybe the sales guy told your parents this one was "better", or maybe your parents saw this one had a lower price tag and bought it to save a few bucks. Perfectly good reasons for an adult -- but not for our hypothetical 12 year-old who wanted an iPod like the cool kids at school.
Particularly if the wanna-be device is going to get you osteracized from your peer group for carrying around a poor fascimile of the iPod.
That's the real problem with most of these supposed "iPod killers" -- they try too hard to look like the iPod, but without the major items that make the iPod cool.
I can't forsee any of these devices "killing" the iPod. I can't even see any of them dealing a mortal wound. Or a minor flesh wound. Or even a nick. None of these devices has the cool of the iPod brand, and many of them look like poor, el-cheapo knockoffs.
(I mean come on guys -- if you want to take on the iPod, try designing something slick, sleek, and unique -- stop trying to copy the look and feel of the iPod).
Yaz.