Don't allow a brand-new account to send out more than a few (20?) emails a day.
And when I set up 200 brand-new accounts?
Make sure that most of the email varies.
By what metric? And doesn't this have a fair chance of affecting legitimate mail? Example: I have my servers send mail through GMail, because Amazon EC2 is blacklisted by many spamfilters. This is auto-generated -- error messages, logs, etc -- even the email confirmation for new users (our own captcha, I suppose) is going to be a lot of similar messages.
Make sure the account gets and reads email as well as sends it, and that the email is accessed.
Trivial to counter, and a pain for users -- after all, why should I be forced to receive email?
The trick is, you keep rotating these measures and don't tell anyone just what they are.
Fair enough. I suspect they do that somewhat already.
You don't automatically disable anyone who breaks the rules, you just hold on to any large number of similar messages until a human reviews them--possibly through some mechanism similar to the "picture matching game" where multiple people identify a message as spam.
So you're going to show my own personal, private email to multiple people to make sure it's not spam? Remind me never to trust you with anything I care about.
If it's determined to be spam, never tell them you caught on, just stop email from that account from being sent, silently.
Great, so now they can waste my bandwidth. At least tarpit them.
Log the ip addresses and use them to help you identify other accounts from the same computer if possible.
IP address -- great. You realize some ISPs do NAT? As in, NAT at the ISP level -- that's one externally-visible IPv4 address for all of their customers?
worst case failure isn't bad at all--just one time when you go to search google you get a warning page back instead of your search results.
Which would very likely piss me off enough to pick up another search engine. There are always a few wannabe Google competitors, and they always have more features than Google anyway. Only advantage Google has is convenience, and if they start nagging me about spyware, they've lost that advantage.
We just rolled out something simple -- I think it was even a FOSS library -- which sends some sort of challenge in JavaScript. Someone would either have to be automating a real web browser, or targeting our site specifically -- which might eventually force them to at least run a JavaScript engine.
That pretty much killed our comment spam overnight.
Obviously, it can't last -- as I said before, they could use a real browser (or use Mechanical Turk and use real people) -- or they could specifically target our platform (SpiderMonkey would pretty much take care of it).
Just to be clear, you can shut off the swap file if you like. It's a usually a bad idea but you can do it.
Out of curiosity, why is it a bad idea? Or, in particular, why does it actually break things, when there's still plenty of RAM available?
For the record, Linux will run just fine without a swap partition -- no programs will even notice unless you run out of RAM. On Windows, some programs seem to notice and crash. WTF?
Also, if the poster is running Linux, obviously without any fine tuning, then they are using a swap file whether they realize it or not.
First, it's a swap partition, not a swap file.
Second, having one reserved and ready to use is not the same as being forced to use one just to boot. I have 2 gigs of swap available, and 0 used. If Vista reserves only 500 megs, but is swapping constantly, that's certainly worse for performance.
You could make the argument that it's better for disk usage that it's a file, which can grow and shrink. But Vista already loses that by using, what, 10 gigs in the default install?
Therefore the posted argument that Linux runs better than Windows because it doesn't use a swap file fails.
Well, you can buy an HD-DVD addon for the Xbox 360. Probably dirt-cheap now, and it'll work on a computer, also -- I use it on Linux, on my laptop (which has a broken optical drive).
I think that for a long time, DVD will be the new DVD. The studios are trying hard to make Blu-Ray look better -- Superbit is gone, and even standard DVDs seem almost deliberately worse in their encoding than they were a few years ago.
The strangest part was that your $99 HD-DVD player had persistent storage, networking, picture-in-picture support, and a script engine built-in, with decent menu animations. Base Blu-Ray players had none of these -- if they had the "script engine" (Java, actually), it'd be much slower (weird, huh?), and the PS3 had neither persistent storage nor network support (for HD-DVD) early on, when it was relevant to the format war.
It really seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with technical merit and everything to do with who was fellating which studio execs, and (possibly) the "extra protection" of the DRM. The same DRM which is so successful at stopping piracy so far.
Yes, but the royalties are negotiated among both partners.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case -- that it's allowable to pick up any song, play it, and deliver royalties to the SoundExchange people, who will get it back to the artist -- without asking the artist.
I'm using weasel words because I always find it hard to believe, but every time I look it up, I come to the same conclusion.
nothing irks me more than a 13 year old LOLn00b script kiddie running mods cheating in games.
I'm with you there, but those will always exist. Killing this particular Glider is pretty much like chopping the head off a hydra -- there will be a dozen copies on The Pirate Bay, and twice that being developed in the strange and wonderful world of underground open source projects.
Let me put it another way: Freedom of speech goes both ways. We have that old saying -- "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to my death your right to say it." The price of free speech is that you have to hear opinions you don't like.
Well, if LOLn00bs are the price of a sane legal system, fine.
Blizzard authorizes you to load it into ram using the standard operating system methods only. Not glider.
And what do you suppose Glider uses to load it into RAM? I think it's what it does after it's loaded that's more interesting...
I can see the argument that using it with Glider is unauthorized, if you assume that shrinkwrap licenses are valid -- that is, you assume the user owns a license (to use in a particular way), and not a copy.
But in that case, RAM and OSes are completely irrelevant. In that case, if the EULA said that you are only to play while standing on your head and shouting "Leeroy Jenkins!" into your mike, any other use would be unauthorized.
If a case ever comes up explicitly claiming this "infringement" (Microsoft suing you for loading Windows into memory), it will be struck down in an instant.
I'm more worried about the precedent for, say, music or movies. If copying into RAM can be an unauthorized copy, what about copying to a portable media device? Could an artist insist that a particular song only work on the iPod, or only on the Zune?
if a game is loaded into RAM, that can be considered an unauthorized copy of the game and as such a breach of copyright
Since the game must be loaded into RAM in order to play, how is it determined that this particular copy is unauthorized?
selling Glider was interfering with Blizzard's contractual relationship with its customers.
This one I could buy, but honestly, isn't that between the customers and Blizzard?
Ah, well. Expect a "Generic MMO Glider" in the near future, that will in theory work with any MMO, but just so happens to be perfectly matched to WoW. Just like the "Generic MMO Servers", which, when given a particular (contraband!) MySQL dump, and a few files off the install disks, just so happen to make an excellent WoW server.
Re:Is Linux kernel 2.6.26 == Linux 2.6.26 ?
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Linux 2.6.26 Out
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Unless you count the initial compiler, I'd dispute that. Granted, I don't know of any Linux distros without a GNU userspace, but I believe it's possible. Busybox would be a good starting point.
Because most popular FPSes these days don't allow custom avatars, as that would make it trivial to cheat (create an avatar of a flea, say, or an invisible man).
Because, a VoyagerRadio says, you'd have griefers blowing you off a platform every five seconds.
Because the interactions in SecondLife are not limited to "Shoot", "Punch", "Cheer", and "Pelvic Thrust".
Because games don't generally allow completely custom scripts to run, especially server-side.
Because SecondLife is open source, which, again, would be an invitation for cheaters.
Because currency in FPSes has, to date, been more annoying than fun -- and it's even worse when it's some sort of pseudo-global-economy. (Ever played Counter-Strike on a server which left dynamic pricing on? Compare that to, say, gungame mod. Tell me which is more fun.)
Need I go on?
I actually don't play Second Life at all -- never have. It has, so far, been entirely too closed for my tastes -- I'd much rather use IRC, which at least has many mature open source clients, servers, and bots, and pretty much no commercialization attempted (so far). Or, if I'm going to play a game, I'd rather play a game.
For instance: If I buy clothing in Second Life, or pets in World of Warcraft, why not allow them to cross over? (Subject, of course, to filters/censorship of the target server -- giant walking penises are generally frowned upon.)
Simple solution: OpenID and friends (XFN, etc). Allow a person to store their avatar, possessions, etc, on their own server (or on a free one, or a paid-for Linden one). If you want to allow commerce (selling clothing), require a signature.
I suspect that for some time, it would function the way nations do today -- there would be import/export restrictions, but it would still be possible to bring more than just a username from one server to another. Eventually, it would flatten into something more like the Internet, with too many sites for all of them to arrange explicit deals with each other -- maybe moderation would play a larger role...
Ah, well. Pure speculation and wishful thinking. I wonder if they'll even use OpenID for logins...
By default all versions of Windows since 3.0 use swapping. You can shut it off if you don't like it.
First: Can you? Really? Last I tried, it broke things. Give it a swapfile of a few megs, and it's fine, but no swapfile, and it's not happy.
Second: How is this relevant? If it was swapping in the first place, this suggests that either Windows has a retarded swapping policy (which it does anyway), or that Vista was using more than that 1 gig of RAM just to show the desktop.
I have a couple gigs of swap space reserved on this machine, and I'm using none of it -- and I'm using less than a gig of RAM to run this browser and another (each with a few tabs), plus a half dozen terminals, IM client, IDE, etc, all on dual monitors... If GP is to be believed, Vista takes more RAM than this just to show a single desktop.
I'd hate to see what your Linux installation looks like if you can't be bothered to change the default settings.
Well, the taskbar is big and ugly (Kubuntu). It's uncomfortable, because it defaults to a QWERTY layout, and I use Dvorak. But it boots and runs fine, and doesn't need 2 gigs of RAM and a dual-core CPU to do that.
Now, I'm all for tricking out the default install. I have custom hibernate scripts, nearly-full-disk-encryption, an alternate filesystem, and all kinds of tweaks to my GUI. But I shouldn't have to start customizing it just to make it boot in less than five minutes.
That's like a movie theater making an illegal print of a movie, showing it in their theaters, then sending a token $1 for each showing back to the theater. And when the studios complain, they say, "Shaddup. What are you complaining about? You're making money, aren't you?"
Oddly enough, this is exactly how radio works. As I understand it, anyone is allowed to play any song on any radio, so long as they pay their royalties through a system which has been established for this purpose.
I'm not going to say whether that's a good thing, just interesting.
Re:Is Linux kernel 2.6.26 == Linux 2.6.26 ?
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In that case, since the OS is useful without a kernel, it's fair to just call it Linux.
That is a myth, yes. However, it is your own fault that this misconception exists.
2. "Releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake"
Entirely subjective. I believe it was truly a PR disaster -- will anyone ever trust a KDE release again, after this? I'll go so far as to say it reflects badly on the FOSS community as a whole -- once upon a time, we were like Gmail in our versioning; alphas were as usable as others' betas, betas were as usable as others' releases, and releases were rock solid.
In particular:
The big question that should come up is: couldn't we have released what will now be KDE 4.1 as KDE 4.0? If that would have been possible, it would surely have been the right choice.
Glad we agree on that.
But it was not possible, because of several reasons.... Release early, release often.
I call bullshit. "Release early and often" refers to any release -- that is why most open source projects provide a public mirror of the latest code in version control.
There were many opportunities to name this properly. It could have been called "KDElibs 4.0", for example, to reflect the maturity of the underlying tech -- the reason most often cited for releasing now is to put it in the hands of developers, who are apparently too stupid to start developing before a dot-oh release.
Or it could have been called "KDE 3.9", or "KDE 4.0 Alpha". Or any number of other things.
Nobody has ever promised that KDE 4.0 would be functionally equivalent to KDE 3.5.
However, it is common convention in every piece of software I have ever used, or heard of, for successive stable releases to be at least as feature-complete as the previous stable release. This is not always done, but when it is not done, it is universally seen as a bad thing.
A less common convention is for even numbers to be stable, and odd numbers to be unstable -- for example, the 2.5 kernel was the development version, and 2.6 is stable. Sometimes, it's the minor verisions. But this was KDE 4 (even) dot 0 (even) -- with no "beta" or "rc" tacked on.
If the version number does not convey information about relative stability and featureset, what is it good for? You may as well release by git revision tags.
5. "Plasma lacks functionality"
Calling this a myth implies that the missing functionality exists somewhere. As I understand it, that functionality is merely scheduled to be implemented at some point in the future.
So the statement "Plasma lacks functionality" is, indeed, accurate. No one is implying that it will always lack functionality.
10. "KDE 4 vs 4.0 is confusing"
I'm sorry, this is confusing. Explaining what they mean doesn't make it any less confusing, any more than loudly proclaiming that 4.0 isn't complete will help the fact that you have ignored the meaning of a dot-oh release.
I love KDE. I love some of the stuff I'm seeing with KDE4, and I can't wait for it to be done. But enough of this charade -- the fact that 99% of your users are confused by "kde4 vs 4.0" should be some indication that you fucked up. Admit you made a mistake, then shut up and get back to work.
Ever play Gungame? It's 30 minutes of that. Start with a knife round, for practice (doesn't count) -- then level up from pistols, through each gun in sequence. The final levels are grenade and knife, though, to make the win difficult.
Technically, processes. I've also heard them called "actors".
objects come from classes and classes are data types
Erlang supports neither objects nor classes, in the sense you're thinking.
you need locks inside an object to ensure two simultaneous calls (or message passes) to it do not ruin each other.
At a very low level, possibly. But those message passes, in Erlang, are actually being sent to a "process", not an object -- and events within a process are entirely single-threaded. That is, messages will pile up in a "mailbox", and the process is usually in a loop processing messages out of its mailbox.
I've modeled something similar in Ruby. I use objects, but each object has one Ruby Thread associated with it. If I dig deep enough, I find that the Queue structure I'm using to send messages does, in fact, use locks -- but that's an implementation detail.
What I think is vastly more important than having no locks, anywhere (which, as you suggest, may not be possible) is to hide the locks from the programmer. Think of them as GOTOs -- sure, on a fundamental level, there are jump commands being executed by the CPU all the time, and I'd almost argue that understanding GOTO is fundamental to understanding programming. But we don't use GOTO -- we use higher-level structures like loops, functions, even objects. I say we shouldn't use locks (or thinly-veiled hacks like synchronize()); we should use higher-level structures like message-passing, map/reduce, etc.
That said, the Erlang runtime is pretty impressive.
That explains immutable data structures (though I still wish they could be copy-on-write), but not bind-once variables.
Erlang is a functional language.
Sort of. Not really. In the half-functional state it's in now, I'd much rather have a rich imperative language with the same pervasive share-nothing message-passing.
Unicode is currently in the works.
Lemme know when it's done. Until then, it doesn't really count. From other comments I've read here, it doesn't look particularly promising, and certainly not backwards compatible.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I don't know many people who still use phone numbers, directly. Every cell phone has a contact list built in.
Blech. This should be:
the PS3 had neither persistent storage nor network support (for Blu-Ray) early on, when it was relevant to the format war.
Don't allow a brand-new account to send out more than a few (20?) emails a day.
And when I set up 200 brand-new accounts?
Make sure that most of the email varies.
By what metric? And doesn't this have a fair chance of affecting legitimate mail? Example: I have my servers send mail through GMail, because Amazon EC2 is blacklisted by many spamfilters. This is auto-generated -- error messages, logs, etc -- even the email confirmation for new users (our own captcha, I suppose) is going to be a lot of similar messages.
Make sure the account gets and reads email as well as sends it, and that the email is accessed.
Trivial to counter, and a pain for users -- after all, why should I be forced to receive email?
The trick is, you keep rotating these measures and don't tell anyone just what they are.
Fair enough. I suspect they do that somewhat already.
You don't automatically disable anyone who breaks the rules, you just hold on to any large number of similar messages until a human reviews them--possibly through some mechanism similar to the "picture matching game" where multiple people identify a message as spam.
So you're going to show my own personal, private email to multiple people to make sure it's not spam? Remind me never to trust you with anything I care about.
If it's determined to be spam, never tell them you caught on, just stop email from that account from being sent, silently.
Great, so now they can waste my bandwidth. At least tarpit them.
Log the ip addresses and use them to help you identify other accounts from the same computer if possible.
IP address -- great. You realize some ISPs do NAT? As in, NAT at the ISP level -- that's one externally-visible IPv4 address for all of their customers?
worst case failure isn't bad at all--just one time when you go to search google you get a warning page back instead of your search results.
Which would very likely piss me off enough to pick up another search engine. There are always a few wannabe Google competitors, and they always have more features than Google anyway. Only advantage Google has is convenience, and if they start nagging me about spyware, they've lost that advantage.
This can be brute-forced. Are you going to type simple question-answer pairs?
And if you start using patterns, so will the spammers -- "third" and "fourty-second" can be parsed easily enough.
It's also vulnerable to Mechanical Turk and similar attacks.
Fairly easy to implement? Sure. But trivial to overcome, if you're large enough for them to attack you directly.
You actually have a shot if you're small, though.
We just rolled out something simple -- I think it was even a FOSS library -- which sends some sort of challenge in JavaScript. Someone would either have to be automating a real web browser, or targeting our site specifically -- which might eventually force them to at least run a JavaScript engine.
That pretty much killed our comment spam overnight.
Obviously, it can't last -- as I said before, they could use a real browser (or use Mechanical Turk and use real people) -- or they could specifically target our platform (SpiderMonkey would pretty much take care of it).
Oh, it's much worse. He makes Jack Thompson look sane.
Just to be clear, you can shut off the swap file if you like. It's a usually a bad idea but you can do it.
Out of curiosity, why is it a bad idea? Or, in particular, why does it actually break things, when there's still plenty of RAM available?
For the record, Linux will run just fine without a swap partition -- no programs will even notice unless you run out of RAM. On Windows, some programs seem to notice and crash. WTF?
Also, if the poster is running Linux, obviously without any fine tuning, then they are using a swap file whether they realize it or not.
First, it's a swap partition, not a swap file.
Second, having one reserved and ready to use is not the same as being forced to use one just to boot. I have 2 gigs of swap available, and 0 used. If Vista reserves only 500 megs, but is swapping constantly, that's certainly worse for performance.
You could make the argument that it's better for disk usage that it's a file, which can grow and shrink. But Vista already loses that by using, what, 10 gigs in the default install?
Therefore the posted argument that Linux runs better than Windows because it doesn't use a swap file fails.
I don't believe that was the posted argument.
Well, you can buy an HD-DVD addon for the Xbox 360. Probably dirt-cheap now, and it'll work on a computer, also -- I use it on Linux, on my laptop (which has a broken optical drive).
I think that for a long time, DVD will be the new DVD. The studios are trying hard to make Blu-Ray look better -- Superbit is gone, and even standard DVDs seem almost deliberately worse in their encoding than they were a few years ago.
The strangest part was that your $99 HD-DVD player had persistent storage, networking, picture-in-picture support, and a script engine built-in, with decent menu animations. Base Blu-Ray players had none of these -- if they had the "script engine" (Java, actually), it'd be much slower (weird, huh?), and the PS3 had neither persistent storage nor network support (for HD-DVD) early on, when it was relevant to the format war.
It really seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with technical merit and everything to do with who was fellating which studio execs, and (possibly) the "extra protection" of the DRM. The same DRM which is so successful at stopping piracy so far.
Yes, but the royalties are negotiated among both partners.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case -- that it's allowable to pick up any song, play it, and deliver royalties to the SoundExchange people, who will get it back to the artist -- without asking the artist.
I'm using weasel words because I always find it hard to believe, but every time I look it up, I come to the same conclusion.
nothing irks me more than a 13 year old LOLn00b script kiddie running mods cheating in games.
I'm with you there, but those will always exist. Killing this particular Glider is pretty much like chopping the head off a hydra -- there will be a dozen copies on The Pirate Bay, and twice that being developed in the strange and wonderful world of underground open source projects.
Let me put it another way: Freedom of speech goes both ways. We have that old saying -- "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to my death your right to say it." The price of free speech is that you have to hear opinions you don't like.
Well, if LOLn00bs are the price of a sane legal system, fine.
Blizzard authorizes you to load it into ram using the standard operating system methods only. Not glider.
And what do you suppose Glider uses to load it into RAM? I think it's what it does after it's loaded that's more interesting...
I can see the argument that using it with Glider is unauthorized, if you assume that shrinkwrap licenses are valid -- that is, you assume the user owns a license (to use in a particular way), and not a copy.
But in that case, RAM and OSes are completely irrelevant. In that case, if the EULA said that you are only to play while standing on your head and shouting "Leeroy Jenkins!" into your mike, any other use would be unauthorized.
If a case ever comes up explicitly claiming this "infringement" (Microsoft suing you for loading Windows into memory), it will be struck down in an instant.
I'm more worried about the precedent for, say, music or movies. If copying into RAM can be an unauthorized copy, what about copying to a portable media device? Could an artist insist that a particular song only work on the iPod, or only on the Zune?
if a game is loaded into RAM, that can be considered an unauthorized copy of the game and as such a breach of copyright
Since the game must be loaded into RAM in order to play, how is it determined that this particular copy is unauthorized?
selling Glider was interfering with Blizzard's contractual relationship with its customers.
This one I could buy, but honestly, isn't that between the customers and Blizzard?
Ah, well. Expect a "Generic MMO Glider" in the near future, that will in theory work with any MMO, but just so happens to be perfectly matched to WoW. Just like the "Generic MMO Servers", which, when given a particular (contraband!) MySQL dump, and a few files off the install disks, just so happen to make an excellent WoW server.
Unless you count the initial compiler, I'd dispute that. Granted, I don't know of any Linux distros without a GNU userspace, but I believe it's possible. Busybox would be a good starting point.
Because most popular FPSes these days don't allow custom avatars, as that would make it trivial to cheat (create an avatar of a flea, say, or an invisible man).
Because, a VoyagerRadio says, you'd have griefers blowing you off a platform every five seconds.
Because the interactions in SecondLife are not limited to "Shoot", "Punch", "Cheer", and "Pelvic Thrust".
Because games don't generally allow completely custom scripts to run, especially server-side.
Because SecondLife is open source, which, again, would be an invitation for cheaters.
Because currency in FPSes has, to date, been more annoying than fun -- and it's even worse when it's some sort of pseudo-global-economy. (Ever played Counter-Strike on a server which left dynamic pricing on? Compare that to, say, gungame mod. Tell me which is more fun.)
Need I go on?
I actually don't play Second Life at all -- never have. It has, so far, been entirely too closed for my tastes -- I'd much rather use IRC, which at least has many mature open source clients, servers, and bots, and pretty much no commercialization attempted (so far). Or, if I'm going to play a game, I'd rather play a game.
But I do get the appeal.
Could we make it a bit more portable, though?
For instance: If I buy clothing in Second Life, or pets in World of Warcraft, why not allow them to cross over? (Subject, of course, to filters/censorship of the target server -- giant walking penises are generally frowned upon.)
Simple solution: OpenID and friends (XFN, etc). Allow a person to store their avatar, possessions, etc, on their own server (or on a free one, or a paid-for Linden one). If you want to allow commerce (selling clothing), require a signature.
I suspect that for some time, it would function the way nations do today -- there would be import/export restrictions, but it would still be possible to bring more than just a username from one server to another. Eventually, it would flatten into something more like the Internet, with too many sites for all of them to arrange explicit deals with each other -- maybe moderation would play a larger role...
Ah, well. Pure speculation and wishful thinking. I wonder if they'll even use OpenID for logins...
By default all versions of Windows since 3.0 use swapping. You can shut it off if you don't like it.
First: Can you? Really? Last I tried, it broke things. Give it a swapfile of a few megs, and it's fine, but no swapfile, and it's not happy.
Second: How is this relevant? If it was swapping in the first place, this suggests that either Windows has a retarded swapping policy (which it does anyway), or that Vista was using more than that 1 gig of RAM just to show the desktop.
I have a couple gigs of swap space reserved on this machine, and I'm using none of it -- and I'm using less than a gig of RAM to run this browser and another (each with a few tabs), plus a half dozen terminals, IM client, IDE, etc, all on dual monitors... If GP is to be believed, Vista takes more RAM than this just to show a single desktop.
I'd hate to see what your Linux installation looks like if you can't be bothered to change the default settings.
Well, the taskbar is big and ugly (Kubuntu). It's uncomfortable, because it defaults to a QWERTY layout, and I use Dvorak. But it boots and runs fine, and doesn't need 2 gigs of RAM and a dual-core CPU to do that.
Now, I'm all for tricking out the default install. I have custom hibernate scripts, nearly-full-disk-encryption, an alternate filesystem, and all kinds of tweaks to my GUI. But I shouldn't have to start customizing it just to make it boot in less than five minutes.
That's like a movie theater making an illegal print of a movie, showing it in their theaters, then sending a token $1 for each showing back to the theater. And when the studios complain, they say, "Shaddup. What are you complaining about? You're making money, aren't you?"
Oddly enough, this is exactly how radio works. As I understand it, anyone is allowed to play any song on any radio, so long as they pay their royalties through a system which has been established for this purpose.
I'm not going to say whether that's a good thing, just interesting.
In that case, since the OS is useful without a kernel, it's fair to just call it Linux.
If you're primarily concerned with processing text, it's the wrong tool for the job.
Fair enough, but it seems likely that you would want both -- that is, both processing text, and scaling up to large clusters and core counts.
Simple (contrived) example: search engine.
That's my main frustration with Erlang -- "right tool for the job" inevitably forces you to use multiple "tools" to do anything really interesting.
1. "KDE4 is finished"
That is a myth, yes. However, it is your own fault that this misconception exists.
2. "Releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake"
Entirely subjective. I believe it was truly a PR disaster -- will anyone ever trust a KDE release again, after this? I'll go so far as to say it reflects badly on the FOSS community as a whole -- once upon a time, we were like Gmail in our versioning; alphas were as usable as others' betas, betas were as usable as others' releases, and releases were rock solid.
In particular:
The big question that should come up is: couldn't we have released what will now be KDE 4.1 as KDE 4.0? If that would have been possible, it would surely have been the right choice.
Glad we agree on that.
But it was not possible, because of several reasons.... Release early, release often.
I call bullshit. "Release early and often" refers to any release -- that is why most open source projects provide a public mirror of the latest code in version control.
There were many opportunities to name this properly. It could have been called "KDElibs 4.0", for example, to reflect the maturity of the underlying tech -- the reason most often cited for releasing now is to put it in the hands of developers, who are apparently too stupid to start developing before a dot-oh release.
Or it could have been called "KDE 3.9", or "KDE 4.0 Alpha". Or any number of other things.
Nobody has ever promised that KDE 4.0 would be functionally equivalent to KDE 3.5.
However, it is common convention in every piece of software I have ever used, or heard of, for successive stable releases to be at least as feature-complete as the previous stable release. This is not always done, but when it is not done, it is universally seen as a bad thing.
A less common convention is for even numbers to be stable, and odd numbers to be unstable -- for example, the 2.5 kernel was the development version, and 2.6 is stable. Sometimes, it's the minor verisions. But this was KDE 4 (even) dot 0 (even) -- with no "beta" or "rc" tacked on.
If the version number does not convey information about relative stability and featureset, what is it good for? You may as well release by git revision tags.
5. "Plasma lacks functionality"
Calling this a myth implies that the missing functionality exists somewhere. As I understand it, that functionality is merely scheduled to be implemented at some point in the future.
So the statement "Plasma lacks functionality" is, indeed, accurate. No one is implying that it will always lack functionality.
10. "KDE 4 vs 4.0 is confusing"
I'm sorry, this is confusing. Explaining what they mean doesn't make it any less confusing, any more than loudly proclaiming that 4.0 isn't complete will help the fact that you have ignored the meaning of a dot-oh release.
I love KDE. I love some of the stuff I'm seeing with KDE4, and I can't wait for it to be done. But enough of this charade -- the fact that 99% of your users are confused by "kde4 vs 4.0" should be some indication that you fucked up. Admit you made a mistake, then shut up and get back to work.
There go my mod points...
Ever play Gungame? It's 30 minutes of that. Start with a knife round, for practice (doesn't count) -- then level up from pistols, through each gun in sequence. The final levels are grenade and knife, though, to make the win difficult.
Message passing occurs between objects
Technically, processes. I've also heard them called "actors".
objects come from classes and classes are data types
Erlang supports neither objects nor classes, in the sense you're thinking.
you need locks inside an object to ensure two simultaneous calls (or message passes) to it do not ruin each other.
At a very low level, possibly. But those message passes, in Erlang, are actually being sent to a "process", not an object -- and events within a process are entirely single-threaded. That is, messages will pile up in a "mailbox", and the process is usually in a loop processing messages out of its mailbox.
I've modeled something similar in Ruby. I use objects, but each object has one Ruby Thread associated with it. If I dig deep enough, I find that the Queue structure I'm using to send messages does, in fact, use locks -- but that's an implementation detail.
What I think is vastly more important than having no locks, anywhere (which, as you suggest, may not be possible) is to hide the locks from the programmer. Think of them as GOTOs -- sure, on a fundamental level, there are jump commands being executed by the CPU all the time, and I'd almost argue that understanding GOTO is fundamental to understanding programming. But we don't use GOTO -- we use higher-level structures like loops, functions, even objects. I say we shouldn't use locks (or thinly-veiled hacks like synchronize()); we should use higher-level structures like message-passing, map/reduce, etc.
That said, the Erlang runtime is pretty impressive.
What on earth are you talking about?
Apparently, my English syntax is sloppy here. I mean that they start in an unbound state, and can later be bound.
Is this unbound state detected at compiletime?
Matching and memory (gc) efficiency.
That explains immutable data structures (though I still wish they could be copy-on-write), but not bind-once variables.
Erlang is a functional language.
Sort of. Not really. In the half-functional state it's in now, I'd much rather have a rich imperative language with the same pervasive share-nothing message-passing.
Unicode is currently in the works.
Lemme know when it's done. Until then, it doesn't really count. From other comments I've read here, it doesn't look particularly promising, and certainly not backwards compatible.