What assembler? The Programmer's Reference Manual for the CPU lists the mnemonics and opcodes, so you can do it all yourself.
This, by the way, is exactly how almost every single game for the ZX Spectrum was written. Towards the back of the BASIC book was a listing of the complete character set (the Spectrum had some highly non-standard extensions to ASCII, including the user-definable graphics characters and the one-touch-entry reserved words) which helpfully included the assembler mnemonics for each of the 256 values. Most programmers used nothing more than this table to convert their assembler mnemonics to code, though some photocopied and laminated the pages to save wear and tear!
Of course, when you have only 48kB of RAM and just under 8kB of that is reserved for the frame buffer and system status flags (meaning the biggest program you can write is unlikely to have more than about 15000 instructions), such a mammoth effort of manual translation is not the hard part of the operation.
Armed with the specification for the C programming language and the Programmer's Reference Manual for your CPU, you write a partial C interpreter in Assembler (it only has to be able to interpret the instructions that are actually used in the Source Code of the actual C Compiler). This is verifiable, because you wrote it. You run the C compiler source code (which is clean; the backdoors are all contained within the binary) through your homemade interpreter. Now you have a known clean compiler -- albeit a slow one because it's running under an interpreter -- which you can use to compile the compiler source code and know it isn't going to mung it with backdoors. This gives you a fast, known clean compiler.
The chemical turns from yellow to bright red when it comes into contact with urea nitrate, an explosive residue that may be left behind on the hands of someone who has handled an improvised device
..... or someone who has planted up some flower bulbs, smoked a cigarette, handled a pet, inserted or removed a white 13 amp plug, played a few games with a brand new pack of playing cards, been to the toilet and not washed their hands, touched a formica table top, or done any of a million and one other innocuous things.
Do the names Callaghan, Hill, Hunter, McKilkenny, Power and Walker mean anything to anyone?
The future of OpenOffice.org most probably lies in a straight-GPL fork (which is allowed, since one of the licences under which OO.o is distributed is the LGPL -- and the LGPL allows for any work covered by that licence to be relicenced under the full GPL).
As a consequence of a recent EU ruling, Microsoft will soon have to be releasing documentation of their proprietary file formats. If a library is written for properly parsing these, in good time, and released under the full GPL (not the craven "yoohoo-guys-here's-my-arse" LGPL with its attendant pandering to the closed-source brigade) then this will help true Free Software projects and thwart Open Source pretenders.
The only ones who have anything to lose are the StarOffice people with their proprietary, closed fork and I say good riddance to them.
I neither know nor care who pays for them, and if they were not there I am sure I could get used to living without them. But I know this: I will never watch an advertisement, much less will I ever buy a product which I have seen advertised.
There's one thing that really bugs me. Why the hell haven't any of the little broadband resellers started offering "ad-free browsing" (a Squid proxy with a blacklist?) as an extra-cost option? It's as simple as configuring a proxy server. And the big broadband companies already use transparent proxies anyway.
I aggressively block advertisements, including googlesyndication.com, without compunction. My screen, my rules and all that. (Since I had the Sky Plus put in, I don't even get adverts on TV anymore! I just wish I could get it to display the time in the VCR notation to which I have become accustomed, i.e. 20:30 as opposed to 8:30pm.)
However, I'm thinking of making a "next-generation" ad-blocker which will download (and discard unseen) the target pages of advertisements, in the background, deliberately just to cost advertisers money. Because maybe if everyone clicked on adverts but then didn't buy the products, the advertisers would twig that adverts don't work -- and maybe then, they might stop doing it.
Linux is based around the attitude "Deny everything that is not specifically allowed". This makes it hard to configure, because you have to configure it properly -- or else it won't work.
Windows is based around the attitude "Allow everything that is not specifically denied". This lets you misconfigure it outrageously and still have it work -- until someone else gets in and messes with it.
Whatever you think about limited government, this really is one area where we do need a bit of government intervention.
Once upon a time, when you bought the manual for a printer, it detailed all the escape codes for stuff like double width, bold, graphics &c. When you bought the manual for a modem, it had the AT command set and the RS232 pinout. It's only recently that hardware manufacturers have got into the habit of not releasing specifications. They rationalise this as "not wanting to give out information that could help their competitors" (as though their competitors aren't already reverse-engineering the f**k out of their products), but there are definite cases where false claims have been hidden behind such secrecy -- digital cameras with artificially-inflated pixel counts (which would be obvious from the RAW format, hence why it is so shrouded in secrecy) and graphics cards with only software differentiation between cheaper and more expensive models.
If it was law that the manufacturer of a piece of hardware must release specifications such that a competent person might write a driver enabling the use of that hardware on pain of being banned from selling it, then they would have to comply. Otherwise, the Windows monopoly will continue.
You're right -- the first and second persons are completely gender-neutral, and so is the third-person plural. Only the third-person singular is "special". But the traditional method of using the plural form as though it were singular removes the need to learn any new words; and in any case, people probably are already at least somewhat used to it. Sometimes it's possible to rephrase to avoid the 3s. altogether.
Got to vote for RON here. You missed mod_perl. Yeah, we know, perl is ugly and quirky and old-fashioned. So is a Class 47, but there's no denying it gets the job done.
If you already know PHP, you won't have a lot to learn with Perl and you'll probably think it's a bit cleaner: Perl doesn't insist for you to put round brackets around everything, and its regex syntax is built about the regular expressions first and foremost, with looking like "proper" programming language constructs a distant second. (cf. the horrible, kludgy regex syntax of Java or Python.) Once you get used to how $_ works, you probably won't even need as many variables as you thought.
Political Correctness gone mad. And the English Language lacking common-gender pronouns in the third-person singular. (Ironically, languages such as French which do not have the neuter gender for inanimate objects but arbitrarily assign masculine or feminine often have better support for the common gender.)
I still prefer using "they" &c. as though it were singular. It's correct in gender (both common and neuter) and in case (well, presumably..... they did something to themselves with their stuff), even if not in number..... and, to quote Meat Loaf, two out of three ain't bad. I think most people would prefer to be mistaken for more than one person than to be mistaken for a member of the opposite sex.
Um, no. The "freedom not to contribute changes" is rather like the freedom to own slaves (insofar as the state of having access only to a binary and not the corresponding source is comparable to a state of servitude). Please read this essay and learn the difference between freedom and power. Anybody who tries to lock up code written by you for everyone's benefit as closed-source (an exercise of power) is seeking to deny others their freedom; and if you don't try to stop that somehow, then you are to some extent complicit in that denial of freedom. Use of the GPL is one way to prevent denial of freedom. The BSD project teams have chosen a different approach (wait for someone to try to cage it up, then reproduce any improvements they made and incorporate them in a new free release) which is not less valid than using a licence which specifically forbids caging, but may turn out to be harder work in the long run. You could say that using the GPL to avoid potentially having to redo other people's work is laziness -- but surely using somebody else's code instead of writing your own from scratch is also laziness?
Fitness-for-purpose is mandated by the Law of the Land. Goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold. If they want to sell you a beermat, they can't portray it in advertising material &c. as anything other than a beermat (14.2D). If you mention before any money changes hands that you intend to use it for some particular purpose, then the seller is even obliged to warn you if they believe that it may not be fit for that purpose (14.3).
You do not have to accept the licence to use the program, even although such use requires the making of a copy, because you already have an implicit right to use your own property for its stated purpose -- precisely because it is your property.
And there are the subjects for the next two debates. Is there in fact a better way of "promoting the progress of Science and the Useful Arts" than by "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" ? And if there were such a method, would its adoption require a Constitutional amendment (since it achieves the end specified in the Constitution, but by a different and more effective means than specified?)
The trouble with your written constitution is you occasionally let a specification for a particular means slip in, which breaks the abstraction that ought to exist between means and ends. One should state one's intended ends without any reference to the means by which those ends are to be brought about; or, at the very least, one must restate the Principle of Equivalence ("all means to the same end are equally valid") prominently. Otherwise you end up with riduculous situations like the European requirement for all roadgoing vehicles to have catalytic converters, even although it is possible nowadays to build an engine with emissions too low for a catalyst actually to work; and until the bureaucracy is dealt with, car manufacturers are legally obliged to build vehicles which are more polluting than they technically could build.
The "license" bullshit comes from software, and was based on the following weasel reasoning: to use a program, you have to make a copy to RAM. Since you're making a copy, you need a license from the copyright holder. You need their permission to make copies. You know, Copyright.
And therein is the problem; because making a copy in RAM of a computer program, which is made as a necessary step in the execution of the program, constitutes Fair Dealing or otherwise does not infringe copyright. If you weren't allowed to make that copy in memory, then you wouldn't be able to use the program for its rightful purpose; and goods which are sold to consumers must by law be fit for purpose. By declaring that the intended purpose of the software is to be run on a computer, the vendor has given you permission to do anything necessary in pursuit of that purpose -- in this case, making a temporary copy in the computer -- under penalty of prosecution for selling substandard goods.
Even if you don't accept the terms of the licence, the Law of the Land (Sale of Goods Act 1979, as amended) gives you the right to use the software for its intended purpose. And a contract cannot take away a statutory right.
If you're going to theorise about things MS might do, imagine a computer security researcher and open-source migration strategist working out a deal with a medium-to-large-sized enterprise that will save them a few million a year in Windows and Office licences. Now suppose that this deal is celebrated with a party in town, and booze is flowing.
Suppose further that our security researcher happens to get caught short and has to relieve himself in an alleyway, and is unlucky enough to get hauled in. Bam, he just got his name on the Sex Offenders Register. Double bam, someone made an anonymous phone call to FAST and his computer equipment is being carted off down the local nick for investigation.
What's anyone who isn't intimately acquainted with the story going to think? Name on the SOR and computer equipment seized?
If the game vendors would actually put some sort of an OS on the same media as the game, then surely it wouldn't matter what was installed on your PC -- you could just boot up a game like a live CD? Or am I being too simplistic here?
..... I think I know what make my next graphics card might be.
(Although, to be perfectly honest, I've never actually had any trouble using nVidious graphics cards with the free nv driver. Yeah, I know, no 3d support; but as I've only got a 2D monitor, it hardly matters.)
True..... the times of the year when the most ice cream is sold, are also the times of the year when the most drownings occur. You can't conclude from that that eating ice cream makes you more likely to die by drowning, but you might sensibly hypothesise that there may be some causal factor in common; i.e., something that makes people want to eat ice cream might also make people put themselves at increased risk of drowning.
I would be 100% in favour of the abolition of islam and the levelling to the ground of every mosque in the world -- subject to the condition that judaism and christianity, and every synagogue and every church, must also suffer the same fate.
A world without monotheism will be a much nicer place.
Ah. Well, compilers generally tend to report errors like misnamed functions and variables when you try to compile the program.
Anyway, it's hardly worth getting your knickers in a twist over. Either the code is going to be open, and everyone will get the ability to change the variable and function names to whatever they want if they so desire; or it'll be caged up, and nobody in the real world will ever so much as see them. If I had enough mind left to pay to petty stuff like function names, I'd be wondering what big stuff I'd missed.....
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What assembler? The Programmer's Reference Manual for the CPU lists the mnemonics and opcodes, so you can do it all yourself.
This, by the way, is exactly how almost every single game for the ZX Spectrum was written. Towards the back of the BASIC book was a listing of the complete character set (the Spectrum had some highly non-standard extensions to ASCII, including the user-definable graphics characters and the one-touch-entry reserved words) which helpfully included the assembler mnemonics for each of the 256 values. Most programmers used nothing more than this table to convert their assembler mnemonics to code, though some photocopied and laminated the pages to save wear and tear!
Of course, when you have only 48kB of RAM and just under 8kB of that is reserved for the frame buffer and system status flags (meaning the biggest program you can write is unlikely to have more than about 15000 instructions), such a mammoth effort of manual translation is not the hard part of the operation.
Do the names Callaghan, Hill, Hunter, McKilkenny, Power and Walker mean anything to anyone?
The future of OpenOffice.org most probably lies in a straight-GPL fork (which is allowed, since one of the licences under which OO.o is distributed is the LGPL -- and the LGPL allows for any work covered by that licence to be relicenced under the full GPL).
As a consequence of a recent EU ruling, Microsoft will soon have to be releasing documentation of their proprietary file formats. If a library is written for properly parsing these, in good time, and released under the full GPL (not the craven "yoohoo-guys-here's-my-arse" LGPL with its attendant pandering to the closed-source brigade) then this will help true Free Software projects and thwart Open Source pretenders.
The only ones who have anything to lose are the StarOffice people with their proprietary, closed fork and I say good riddance to them.
I neither know nor care who pays for them, and if they were not there I am sure I could get used to living without them. But I know this: I will never watch an advertisement, much less will I ever buy a product which I have seen advertised.
Bravo!
There's one thing that really bugs me. Why the hell haven't any of the little broadband resellers started offering "ad-free browsing" (a Squid proxy with a blacklist?) as an extra-cost option? It's as simple as configuring a proxy server. And the big broadband companies already use transparent proxies anyway.
I aggressively block advertisements, including googlesyndication.com, without compunction. My screen, my rules and all that. (Since I had the Sky Plus put in, I don't even get adverts on TV anymore! I just wish I could get it to display the time in the VCR notation to which I have become accustomed, i.e. 20:30 as opposed to 8:30pm.)
However, I'm thinking of making a "next-generation" ad-blocker which will download (and discard unseen) the target pages of advertisements, in the background, deliberately just to cost advertisers money. Because maybe if everyone clicked on adverts but then didn't buy the products, the advertisers would twig that adverts don't work -- and maybe then, they might stop doing it.
Linux is based around the attitude "Deny everything that is not specifically allowed". This makes it hard to configure, because you have to configure it properly -- or else it won't work.
Windows is based around the attitude "Allow everything that is not specifically denied". This lets you misconfigure it outrageously and still have it work -- until someone else gets in and messes with it.
Whatever you think about limited government, this really is one area where we do need a bit of government intervention.
Once upon a time, when you bought the manual for a printer, it detailed all the escape codes for stuff like double width, bold, graphics &c. When you bought the manual for a modem, it had the AT command set and the RS232 pinout. It's only recently that hardware manufacturers have got into the habit of not releasing specifications. They rationalise this as "not wanting to give out information that could help their competitors" (as though their competitors aren't already reverse-engineering the f**k out of their products), but there are definite cases where false claims have been hidden behind such secrecy -- digital cameras with artificially-inflated pixel counts (which would be obvious from the RAW format, hence why it is so shrouded in secrecy) and graphics cards with only software differentiation between cheaper and more expensive models.
If it was law that the manufacturer of a piece of hardware must release specifications such that a competent person might write a driver enabling the use of that hardware on pain of being banned from selling it, then they would have to comply. Otherwise, the Windows monopoly will continue.
You're right -- the first and second persons are completely gender-neutral, and so is the third-person plural. Only the third-person singular is "special". But the traditional method of using the plural form as though it were singular removes the need to learn any new words; and in any case, people probably are already at least somewhat used to it. Sometimes it's possible to rephrase to avoid the 3s. altogether.
Got to vote for RON here. You missed mod_perl. Yeah, we know, perl is ugly and quirky and old-fashioned. So is a Class 47, but there's no denying it gets the job done.
If you already know PHP, you won't have a lot to learn with Perl and you'll probably think it's a bit cleaner: Perl doesn't insist for you to put round brackets around everything, and its regex syntax is built about the regular expressions first and foremost, with looking like "proper" programming language constructs a distant second. (cf. the horrible, kludgy regex syntax of Java or Python.) Once you get used to how $_ works, you probably won't even need as many variables as you thought.
Political Correctness gone mad. And the English Language lacking common-gender pronouns in the third-person singular. (Ironically, languages such as French which do not have the neuter gender for inanimate objects but arbitrarily assign masculine or feminine often have better support for the common gender.)
..... they did something to themselves with their stuff), even if not in number ..... and, to quote Meat Loaf, two out of three ain't bad. I think most people would prefer to be mistaken for more than one person than to be mistaken for a member of the opposite sex.
I still prefer using "they" &c. as though it were singular. It's correct in gender (both common and neuter) and in case (well, presumably
Um, no. The "freedom not to contribute changes" is rather like the freedom to own slaves (insofar as the state of having access only to a binary and not the corresponding source is comparable to a state of servitude). Please read this essay and learn the difference between freedom and power. Anybody who tries to lock up code written by you for everyone's benefit as closed-source (an exercise of power) is seeking to deny others their freedom; and if you don't try to stop that somehow, then you are to some extent complicit in that denial of freedom. Use of the GPL is one way to prevent denial of freedom. The BSD project teams have chosen a different approach (wait for someone to try to cage it up, then reproduce any improvements they made and incorporate them in a new free release) which is not less valid than using a licence which specifically forbids caging, but may turn out to be harder work in the long run. You could say that using the GPL to avoid potentially having to redo other people's work is laziness -- but surely using somebody else's code instead of writing your own from scratch is also laziness?
Fitness-for-purpose is mandated by the Law of the Land. Goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold. If they want to sell you a beermat, they can't portray it in advertising material &c. as anything other than a beermat (14.2D). If you mention before any money changes hands that you intend to use it for some particular purpose, then the seller is even obliged to warn you if they believe that it may not be fit for that purpose (14.3).
You do not have to accept the licence to use the program, even although such use requires the making of a copy, because you already have an implicit right to use your own property for its stated purpose -- precisely because it is your property.
And there are the subjects for the next two debates. Is there in fact a better way of "promoting the progress of Science and the Useful Arts" than by "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" ? And if there were such a method, would its adoption require a Constitutional amendment (since it achieves the end specified in the Constitution, but by a different and more effective means than specified?)
The trouble with your written constitution is you occasionally let a specification for a particular means slip in, which breaks the abstraction that ought to exist between means and ends. One should state one's intended ends without any reference to the means by which those ends are to be brought about; or, at the very least, one must restate the Principle of Equivalence ("all means to the same end are equally valid") prominently. Otherwise you end up with riduculous situations like the European requirement for all roadgoing vehicles to have catalytic converters, even although it is possible nowadays to build an engine with emissions too low for a catalyst actually to work; and until the bureaucracy is dealt with, car manufacturers are legally obliged to build vehicles which are more polluting than they technically could build.
Even if you don't accept the terms of the licence, the Law of the Land (Sale of Goods Act 1979, as amended) gives you the right to use the software for its intended purpose. And a contract cannot take away a statutory right.
What I've not had, I'm hardly likely to miss. I'll take a rain check on the dancing pigs, thank you.
If you're going to theorise about things MS might do, imagine a computer security researcher and open-source migration strategist working out a deal with a medium-to-large-sized enterprise that will save them a few million a year in Windows and Office licences. Now suppose that this deal is celebrated with a party in town, and booze is flowing.
Suppose further that our security researcher happens to get caught short and has to relieve himself in an alleyway, and is unlucky enough to get hauled in. Bam, he just got his name on the Sex Offenders Register. Double bam, someone made an anonymous phone call to FAST and his computer equipment is being carted off down the local nick for investigation.
What's anyone who isn't intimately acquainted with the story going to think? Name on the SOR and computer equipment seized?
If the game vendors would actually put some sort of an OS on the same media as the game, then surely it wouldn't matter what was installed on your PC -- you could just boot up a game like a live CD? Or am I being too simplistic here?
..... I think I know what make my next graphics card might be.
(Although, to be perfectly honest, I've never actually had any trouble using nVidious graphics cards with the free nv driver. Yeah, I know, no 3d support; but as I've only got a 2D monitor, it hardly matters.)
What's wrong with the i-tal "nv" driver? Never installed nVidious's closed-source crap, never likely to.
I would be 100% in favour of the abolition of islam and the levelling to the ground of every mosque in the world -- subject to the condition that judaism and christianity, and every synagogue and every church, must also suffer the same fate.
A world without monotheism will be a much nicer place.
Ah. Well, compilers generally tend to report errors like misnamed functions and variables when you try to compile the program.
.....
Anyway, it's hardly worth getting your knickers in a twist over. Either the code is going to be open, and everyone will get the ability to change the variable and function names to whatever they want if they so desire; or it'll be caged up, and nobody in the real world will ever so much as see them. If I had enough mind left to pay to petty stuff like function names, I'd be wondering what big stuff I'd missed