Seems like on Unix, Xine has pretty much become the official backend for KDE. It might be via Phonon, maybe not, but I seriously doubt this is "another player" in the sense that you mean.
But each of those 100 ko apps depends on a different version of the 10 Mo library. In short, no they don't.
Using one version of a library with an application designed for one version often results in framework hell. You linked to "dependency hell", which is a solved problem -- see package managers. It is not only possible, but easy, to install multiple versions of the same library. And if the library is reasonably high-quality (like Qt), you're not going to need ten versions of it. On a bad day, you might need two (3 and 4).
I haven't been on Redhat in awhile, so maybe it's still an issue there. I remember RPM being a bitch, but I haven't used RPM since 2002. On Ubuntu, I have exactly one version of libqt-mt installed, and it weighs in at about 11 megs. And because this is Kubuntu, it's installed already.
I think a search for the word "fuck" would prove far more enlightening.
In fact, I remember doing that on the kernel code awhile back. My favorite result was "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw..." at the beginning of a gigantic header file full of mappings of PCI ids to product names.
I remember looking at the thousands of #define statements and reflecting on how accurate it was. You really had to see it...
Fortunately for all of us, it's long gone, and that mapping now lives in the userspace pciutils.
The unfortunate thing is that it's a complete loss of a word.
"Gay" doesn't bother me so much, because it has synonyms. I can still call myself "happy", "merry", "gleeful", "cheerful", etc, depending which is appropriate.
"Hacker", or "hack", in the proper usage, really has no synonyms. "Codemonkey" doesn't fit, because hacking isn't limited to programming -- there are hardware hacks. "Modder" doesn't fit, because a hack can be an entirely original creation. And neither of those give the sense of slapdash/genius, mad science connotation that a hack is.
That is, I think, why we fight so hard against it -- there is no word we could replace "hacker" with in "just another perl hacker". But there are many words we could replace "hacker" with in the "breaks into systems" sense -- cracker, script kiddie, phreak, social engineer...
But it's not going to happen. I think I finally gave up correcting people when I saw a PBS show called "Cyberchase" -- the villain is "The Hacker", and is an absolutely stereotypical villain in every sense. Which means that kids are now growing up with the new definition of "hacker", and there's not really anything I can do about it.
I have to say, this was the first I actually heard about the company -- they sent a takedown notice, and then they apologized.
I'm impressed.
Granted, after reading the comments and hearing about crappy activation for a codec, I'm not sure, but other companies should take note -- when you make a dick move, do the following steps, in order:
1: STOP what you're doing. 2: Apologize.
Most companies never manage step 1. But if you're going to stop anyway, admitting that you were wrong will buy you a lot of goodwill.
This is very true, for the prototype, because half of them will be thrown away.
That said, the kind of mechanic they were talking about really doesn't seem like it'd make something polished. If you already have a solid prototype, take some time to go back and do it right.
The bad news is, of course, that it's very likely not a patent troll -- that is, it's very likely that VeriSign actually intends to encourage this behavior.
You actually need zero time to build physical capital, thanks to things like Amazon EC2 -- or, just to be ironic, Google App Engine. So the problem is getting funding.
Even then, how much needs to be spent indexing? Because for just about every application except search, you need an amonut of hardware proportionate to how many users you actually have. So the only real hurdle is that initial indexing.
It's possible to write a compiler against a published standard that won't change for ten or so years but much harder to write against a format that might change every few years whenever the sole developer decides to extend the platform. Which C did, quite a bit...
You're right, but it seems like this is more an argument of stable vs unstable, rather than VM vs non-VM. That said, gcc does seem to break binary compatibility every 5-10 years.
Once Microsoft gives up its sole control over.NET and hands it over to ISO I think that's the essential problem -- is there any chance Microsoft will do this?
It's also a lose-lose situation, much like with OOXML -- if Microsoft doesn't turn it over, then it'll essentially be Microsoft's defacto standard, rather than a true industry standard. If Microsoft does turn it over, then there's a very good chance their implementation will be broken in many subtle ways, as they do with every standard they try to implement -- and because they're Microsoft, everyone else will have to adapt to them, even if it's not quite the standard.
With repsect Somehow, I don't feel very repsected.
.NET and Java are really just about as far from the minimalist approach of C as one can get..NET and Java and virtual machine languages are all about abstraction while in C there really was no abstraction, it was and is designed to run as close to the hardware as possible. And you don't seem to know anything about the history of C. It was designed, and was regarded for its time, as a high level language. People had to be tricked into using it -- they thought all those function calls would be incredibly slow.
And they were right, but by then, there was no way anyone wanted to go back to an entire OS written in asm, even if the new OS spent half its cycles doing nothing but the mechanics behind function calls.
As for distributing your own version of the standard.NET libraries that really doesn't make much sense. Yeah, it'd be like distributing C without the standard C library, or with a custom version of it.
And by the way, people are doing this for.NET, too. Mono tries to provide as many of the APIs as they can, I think, but they also provide enough native bindings that it's possible to treat C# as just another language for Linux. Beagle, for example, is written in C#.
Looking at.NET as the 'new C' is, at least IMHO, the wrong view. Both.NET and Java are descended from the C branch of languages, but they really are moving well beyond that You're missing the point. It's not that I think they are at all related to C, as a language or a platform, beyond the very simple fact that Microsoft is trying to build a platform on top of.NET, the way Unix is a platform on top of C. They may be failing in that sense, but it does seem to be a goal -- right now, most high-level languages have compilers/interpreters written in C, at least to bootstrap the effort. Is it so hard to imagine a world where the same is true of some common bytecode VM?
I agree. It sounds to me like this guy used.NET for a year or so around 2002 when it was brand new and then left and hasn't looked again for the last six (6) years. Well, certainly, one argument he makes seems to be both dated and out of touch:
the last group could use C++ or whatever beret-wearing funky scripting language was à la mode at the time. This all worked out fine, because one of the few nice things about Win32 is that it was designed for C. C is in many ways a very simple language, and it's also a ubiquitous language. As a consequence of this, pretty much every other programming language created in the last couple of decades can, one way or another, call C APIs.....NET isn't like that. Although.NET can call C APIs (just like everything else can), the real objective is for all programming to reside in the.NET world..NET is meant to be the entire platform, with all the different languages that people use living inside the.NET environment.... It's still possible to use different languages with.NET (in fact, it's easier than it was in the pre-.NET days). Just now, the different languages all use the common set of.NET APIs for drawing windows on screen, or saving files, or querying databases, and so on. Here's my take, as someone who pretty much hates MS, and would rather avoid.NET if possible....NET is trying to be the new C.
All his support for C could apply to.NET, and all his criticisms of.NET as a platform for people to run whatever they want could easily have applied to C. The one difference is that C simply has more adoption now.
Certainly, because it's so trivial to call out to C from.NET, there's nothing to stop you from creating and distributing your own.NET library, just as people distribute C libraries now. If your library needs to talk to the system in a way you can't from within.NET, you call out to C -- just as, in a C program, if you need to do something you can't in C, you use ASM.
This frustration is exacerbated when it's compared to.NET's big competitor, Java. Java is no panacea; it too is aiming roughly at the middle kind of developer, which is understandable, as they're the most numerous. But Java's much more high-minded. It's much stronger on concepts, making it easier to learn. .NET can call to C absurdly more easily than Java can. And C# supports things like closures -- at least, that's what they look like -- I know of nothing similar for Java.
I can't speak to the criticisms of the actual API itself. But that would seem to be more a criticism of.NET as implemented on Windows -- as the successor to Win32 -- rather than a criticism of.NET vs Java, or of.NET vs win32.
Although, glancing over at some of these, like the passing of two ints for the size of a file -- even on 32-bit Windows, that's kind of stupid. 64-bit integers may not have been fast, but they were certainly possible.
Unpacking the archive takes time. Really, not much.
Now, your scenario of a remote server, with an illicit account, makes a bit more sense -- downloading, unraring, and then uploading, may take too much time. At the same time, I'd think it would be a lot less bandwidth to notice if they simply download the rars once, and then seed the torrent from home.
But unpacking the archive alone is only going to be a few minutes, and that's not going to be the deciding factor.
Except a blacklist is the opposite of what they'd want to use. D'oh! It seems like it would be simple to patch it for the converse, though.
Also, distribution within the Scene is based on a credit system. It might be possible to retrofit such things into something like BT without having a centralised server *cough* TRACKER *cough*
Yes, there is a centralized server. Private trackers operate on a credit system -- you can pull up a list of torrents you've contributed, and the tracker will track everyone's total bandwidth up and down, and ratio. Most of them will ban people who have too low of a ratio.
All this is available to the tracker itself -- including your IP address, etc. But that would be just as true of SFTP -- if you can't trust at least one central server with that information, it's game over anyway.
It may be possible to game the system, but I haven't really seen that done even in large communities, and this is going to be a much smaller, much more technically-inclined community. (Look at what they have to put up now with SFTP.)
it's an awful lot of work for little gain. I'd have to know more about how the actual members are distributed, but I suspect that it'd get rid of their reliance on a few centralized, high-performance SFTP systems. BitTorrent requires a lot less in the way of dedicated hardware, while not giving up that much control.
And then there are things like WASTE, and a few other systems I could point to. Thinking of developing my own. It just seems ironic and slightly infuriating that they're relying on perhaps the strangest technology as a whole.
Yes, multi-part RARs in torrents annoys me as well, but the people making them aren't doing it for us. Most (all?) Scene members would much prefer their releases never ever made it onto BT or USENET. If that's the case, then why aren't the people who actually do put them onto BT bother to unrar the fucking file?
So you're left trying to convince the people who do upload to more public services to unrar before they upload. Are you assuming that the people who do upload also never actually watch the stuff? Even to verify it?
Seems to me they'd have already unrared it, so at that point, it makes much more sense to simply ditch the rar and make a torrent from the unrared file.
But I think the mob has largely spoken on this matter I think the mob really hasn't said anything.
I would think BT would make it harder to keep "safe" and maybe easier to infiltrate. No more so than any other technology they're using. They probably just don't know how to do it with BT yet.
Password-protecting the servers (assuming most BT clients and trackers even support such) is probably insufficient; you'd likely want a local firewall to ensure only other Scene members can connect to your client. Private trackers exist.
Keeping such a list updated in a secure manner would be somewhat tricky, I think Not particularly. Every decent BitTorrent client includes PeerGuardian-like functionality now. All you'd need to do is point its blacklist at some obfuscated https URL. Problem solved.
Assuming you even had to do that in the first place.
SFV is not related to BitTorrent, it was used a extensively with DC++, which had no means to verify file integrity. What I'm saying is that many torrents include SFV files, which, as you've just demonstrated, is pretty pointless.
It's much easier to re-download one 50.000.000 bytes file rather than downloading a 4 GB iso again. Irrelevant to BitTorrent. It's no more difficult to re-download one 50 meg file than re-download the 2 megs out of that 4 gig ISO that happened to be corrupted.
You can't always rely on RAR's error recovery to repair something, there are lots of cases when it doesn't work, because the recovery information is usually about 2-4% of the archive, so in lots of cases the error may not be recoverable. It's not error recovery I'm interested in, it's error detection.
Hmm, should I pull out the "your idea will not work" items?
In this case, it means that there's both confirmation that you actually read the email -- and that it's actually a valid address -- and there's the fact that they don't care. (How many emails contain URLs in them?)
This would make pump'n'dump schemes slightly harder. That's about it.
I wonder where this "original story" lives? Now I'm curious...
It does clear up a few things, like how purely mental techniques and "training" could lead one to "bend the rules" -- and why the Machines couldn't effectively implement some basic security measures. It's impossible to fly in, say, WoW unless Blizzard lets you, but it would be downright easy if they, say, offloaded a bit of the physics computation to the clients.
Why wouldn't they just wipe out the humans and use all of that space for a massive computer? Silicon CPUs would be trillions of times faster and more efficient than human brains. In short: No, they wouldn't. At least today, human brains are about as much faster than any computer. They're just not designed to do raw computation, at least not on math -- math has to be emulated in consciousness. But they are doing differential calculus all the time.
For the same reasons we have both CPUs and GPUs, and the Cell processor seems like a good idea, it's possible to imagine that the human brain can do certain things much faster and better than any silicon entity. It may not be every task, but it's not inconceivable that it would be simpler to keep the humans around, and continue to study them, until they can properly duplicate it with inorganic components, or with an organic construction of their own, so they don't have to keep all the bodies around.
And even if not, there's another one: What if the Machines are studying the nature of consciousness?
I'm sorry, the Matrix films were nothing but action flicks. If you saw a deep story or philosophical message in it, Then you saw exactly what was intended. If you didn't see any philosophical message, you weren't paying attention.
Call it derivative, call it a crappy William Gibson ripoff, but to deny it's there just makes you sound stupid.
It just seemed to drag along without actually conveying anything that the average teenager wouldn't have pondered on their own. "What is 'real'? How do you define 'real'? If 'real' is what you can see, touch, taste, and smell, then 'real' is nothing more than electrical impulses interpreted by your brain."
I'm sorry, but the average teenager isn't studying Heidegger. There is a reason it had such an appeal, and why people continue to talk about "matrix-like" virtual reality, even though they hardly invented it -- most teenagers did not ask themselves about the nature of their reality, and consider that it could be entirely artificial.
I liked the second and third Matrix films because they all but dropped the pretense and pseudo-intellectual crap and focused on what I wanted to see it for, the action. Seriously? The second and third films had way more philosophical ranting than the first one. I thought that dragged quite a lot -- "Why, why, why, Mr. Anderson, why do you persist?" And after several separate 1-2 minute rants, we get "Because I choose to." Or take the "Purpose" rant...
Slashdot Mirror
Question: Is this actively developed at all? I don't see any updates since 2005 or so.
And if not, shouldn't it be incorporated into Wine? Or at least available as a package that Wine can optionally depend on?
Seems like on Unix, Xine has pretty much become the official backend for KDE. It might be via Phonon, maybe not, but I seriously doubt this is "another player" in the sense that you mean.
I haven't been on Redhat in awhile, so maybe it's still an issue there. I remember RPM being a bitch, but I haven't used RPM since 2002. On Ubuntu, I have exactly one version of libqt-mt installed, and it weighs in at about 11 megs. And because this is Kubuntu, it's installed already.
I'd probably have written it as: (f[u#\*s]|s[u#\*])ck(ing)?
Buy him a bumper sticker: "I wish I was coding Python."
I think a search for the word "fuck" would prove far more enlightening.
In fact, I remember doing that on the kernel code awhile back. My favorite result was "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw..." at the beginning of a gigantic header file full of mappings of PCI ids to product names.
I remember looking at the thousands of #define statements and reflecting on how accurate it was. You really had to see it...
Fortunately for all of us, it's long gone, and that mapping now lives in the userspace pciutils.
The unfortunate thing is that it's a complete loss of a word.
"Gay" doesn't bother me so much, because it has synonyms. I can still call myself "happy", "merry", "gleeful", "cheerful", etc, depending which is appropriate.
"Hacker", or "hack", in the proper usage, really has no synonyms. "Codemonkey" doesn't fit, because hacking isn't limited to programming -- there are hardware hacks. "Modder" doesn't fit, because a hack can be an entirely original creation. And neither of those give the sense of slapdash/genius, mad science connotation that a hack is.
That is, I think, why we fight so hard against it -- there is no word we could replace "hacker" with in "just another perl hacker". But there are many words we could replace "hacker" with in the "breaks into systems" sense -- cracker, script kiddie, phreak, social engineer...
But it's not going to happen. I think I finally gave up correcting people when I saw a PBS show called "Cyberchase" -- the villain is "The Hacker", and is an absolutely stereotypical villain in every sense. Which means that kids are now growing up with the new definition of "hacker", and there's not really anything I can do about it.
Or the old, tried and true "cracker".
I have to say, this was the first I actually heard about the company -- they sent a takedown notice, and then they apologized.
I'm impressed.
Granted, after reading the comments and hearing about crappy activation for a codec, I'm not sure, but other companies should take note -- when you make a dick move, do the following steps, in order:
1: STOP what you're doing.
2: Apologize.
Most companies never manage step 1. But if you're going to stop anyway, admitting that you were wrong will buy you a lot of goodwill.
This is very true, for the prototype, because half of them will be thrown away.
That said, the kind of mechanic they were talking about really doesn't seem like it'd make something polished. If you already have a solid prototype, take some time to go back and do it right.
The bad news is, of course, that it's very likely not a patent troll -- that is, it's very likely that VeriSign actually intends to encourage this behavior.
You actually need zero time to build physical capital, thanks to things like Amazon EC2 -- or, just to be ironic, Google App Engine. So the problem is getting funding.
Even then, how much needs to be spent indexing? Because for just about every application except search, you need an amonut of hardware proportionate to how many users you actually have. So the only real hurdle is that initial indexing.
I guess no one remembers that, now that we have something worse -- Vista.
Be fair. Vista is a disaster for more reasons than just PR.
You're right, but it seems like this is more an argument of stable vs unstable, rather than VM vs non-VM. That said, gcc does seem to break binary compatibility every 5-10 years. Once Microsoft gives up its sole control over
It's also a lose-lose situation, much like with OOXML -- if Microsoft doesn't turn it over, then it'll essentially be Microsoft's defacto standard, rather than a true industry standard. If Microsoft does turn it over, then there's a very good chance their implementation will be broken in many subtle ways, as they do with every standard they try to implement -- and because they're Microsoft, everyone else will have to adapt to them, even if it's not quite the standard.
.NET and Java are really just about as far from the minimalist approach of C as one can get.And they were right, but by then, there was no way anyone wanted to go back to an entire OS written in asm, even if the new OS spent half its cycles doing nothing but the mechanics behind function calls. As for distributing your own version of the standard
Oh, wait...
And by the way, people are doing this for
Give MySQL and PostgreSQL a spin.
All his support for C could apply to
Certainly, because it's so trivial to call out to C from
I can't speak to the criticisms of the actual API itself. But that would seem to be more a criticism of
Although, glancing over at some of these, like the passing of two ints for the size of a file -- even on 32-bit Windows, that's kind of stupid. 64-bit integers may not have been fast, but they were certainly possible.
Now, your scenario of a remote server, with an illicit account, makes a bit more sense -- downloading, unraring, and then uploading, may take too much time. At the same time, I'd think it would be a lot less bandwidth to notice if they simply download the rars once, and then seed the torrent from home.
But unpacking the archive alone is only going to be a few minutes, and that's not going to be the deciding factor. Except a blacklist is the opposite of what they'd want to use. D'oh! It seems like it would be simple to patch it for the converse, though. Also, distribution within the Scene is based on a credit system. It might be possible to retrofit such things into something like BT without having a centralised server *cough* TRACKER *cough*
Yes, there is a centralized server. Private trackers operate on a credit system -- you can pull up a list of torrents you've contributed, and the tracker will track everyone's total bandwidth up and down, and ratio. Most of them will ban people who have too low of a ratio.
All this is available to the tracker itself -- including your IP address, etc. But that would be just as true of SFTP -- if you can't trust at least one central server with that information, it's game over anyway.
It may be possible to game the system, but I haven't really seen that done even in large communities, and this is going to be a much smaller, much more technically-inclined community. (Look at what they have to put up now with SFTP.) it's an awful lot of work for little gain. I'd have to know more about how the actual members are distributed, but I suspect that it'd get rid of their reliance on a few centralized, high-performance SFTP systems. BitTorrent requires a lot less in the way of dedicated hardware, while not giving up that much control.
And then there are things like WASTE, and a few other systems I could point to. Thinking of developing my own. It just seems ironic and slightly infuriating that they're relying on perhaps the strangest technology as a whole.
Seems to me they'd have already unrared it, so at that point, it makes much more sense to simply ditch the rar and make a torrent from the unrared file. But I think the mob has largely spoken on this matter I think the mob really hasn't said anything. I would think BT would make it harder to keep "safe" and maybe easier to infiltrate. No more so than any other technology they're using. They probably just don't know how to do it with BT yet. Password-protecting the servers (assuming most BT clients and trackers even support such) is probably insufficient; you'd likely want a local firewall to ensure only other Scene members can connect to your client. Private trackers exist. Keeping such a list updated in a secure manner would be somewhat tricky, I think Not particularly. Every decent BitTorrent client includes PeerGuardian-like functionality now. All you'd need to do is point its blacklist at some obfuscated https URL. Problem solved.
Assuming you even had to do that in the first place.
Hmm, should I pull out the "your idea will not work" items?
In this case, it means that there's both confirmation that you actually read the email -- and that it's actually a valid address -- and there's the fact that they don't care. (How many emails contain URLs in them?)
This would make pump'n'dump schemes slightly harder. That's about it.
I wonder where this "original story" lives? Now I'm curious...
It does clear up a few things, like how purely mental techniques and "training" could lead one to "bend the rules" -- and why the Machines couldn't effectively implement some basic security measures. It's impossible to fly in, say, WoW unless Blizzard lets you, but it would be downright easy if they, say, offloaded a bit of the physics computation to the clients.
Sigh.
Nanotech again. Whenever you need to have some pseudoscientific explanation in scifi, and you're fresh out of ideas, it was Nanotech.
I think we should all go read The Diamond Age, and then swear a solemn oath to never write the word "nanotech" in a science fiction show again.
For the same reasons we have both CPUs and GPUs, and the Cell processor seems like a good idea, it's possible to imagine that the human brain can do certain things much faster and better than any silicon entity. It may not be every task, but it's not inconceivable that it would be simpler to keep the humans around, and continue to study them, until they can properly duplicate it with inorganic components, or with an organic construction of their own, so they don't have to keep all the bodies around.
And even if not, there's another one: What if the Machines are studying the nature of consciousness? I'm sorry, the Matrix films were nothing but action flicks. If you saw a deep story or philosophical message in it, Then you saw exactly what was intended. If you didn't see any philosophical message, you weren't paying attention.
Call it derivative, call it a crappy William Gibson ripoff, but to deny it's there just makes you sound stupid. It just seemed to drag along without actually conveying anything that the average teenager wouldn't have pondered on their own. "What is 'real'? How do you define 'real'? If 'real' is what you can see, touch, taste, and smell, then 'real' is nothing more than electrical impulses interpreted by your brain."
I'm sorry, but the average teenager isn't studying Heidegger. There is a reason it had such an appeal, and why people continue to talk about "matrix-like" virtual reality, even though they hardly invented it -- most teenagers did not ask themselves about the nature of their reality, and consider that it could be entirely artificial. I liked the second and third Matrix films because they all but dropped the pretense and pseudo-intellectual crap and focused on what I wanted to see it for, the action. Seriously? The second and third films had way more philosophical ranting than the first one. I thought that dragged quite a lot -- "Why, why, why, Mr. Anderson, why do you persist?" And after several separate 1-2 minute rants, we get "Because I choose to." Or take the "Purpose" rant...