What we need is a better architecture which would allow for a better implementation of algorithms. Will we ever have an MMIX-like processor with 256 general-purpose 64-bit registers that each can hold either fixed-point or floating-point numbers? That is what I am waiting for, not more "power," whatever that means.
The problem isn't language designers its us developers, we don't want to spend a week learning a new syntax for a loop, we want to use what we used before. In other words we are luddites.
I strongly disagree. Not all of us are a bunch lazy idiots as you imply. If I didn't want to spend a week learning a new syntax for a loop I wouldn't have finished reading a second Perl 6 book yesterday, now would I? I have already spent man-months learning the language that is not even fully designed yet, so I would appreciate if you kindly exclude me--and most of Slashdotters--from your hasty generalization, for even though I would tend to agree with you that most of people in general are incompetent idiots, I believe that Slashdot community is a rare exception to this sad rule, or otherwise we wouldn't be so enthusiastically discussing the possibility of designing a Heraclitean programming language with its roots in the philosophy of ancient Greece--which nota bene would be an interesting addition to postmodern languages we already have. But even though I disagree with your premiss, I fully agree with your conclusion that Java and C# are rubbish, that of course is undeniable. But this conclusion by itself is quite useless unless we answer the question why they are the way they are. Why does the competence of your proverbial marketing department is nearly without exception reversely proportional to the technical advantages of the technology in question? When we answer this question, a lot of other answers will become clear.
Notwithstanding the grammar mistake--I hope editors will have corrected it before I finish writing this comment--it is not "How [Would] Heraclitus... Design a Programming Language" but rather "What Programming Language Would Heraclitus Design." On the other hand if you are wondering how should you desing and implement a programming language, I would suggest targetting Parrot which makes implementing compilers 1000 times easier than ever before, not to even mention future interoperability and e.g. access to the entire CPAN from the level of your own brand new language, effectively solving the most important problem of new languages: there are no libraries so people don't write anything, and people don't write anything so there are no libraries. Good luck.
I swear I was just about to write about Zero Wing being the most linguistically innovative game ever and at that very moment I saw--and I still see--a banner saying: "Roses are #ff0000, violets are #0000ff, All my base are belong to you" and it really scared me. Amazing, is it not?
If Gartner says it's a 2-browser world then either Gartner lies or I am living in my own world. Or both. I mean there is a place for every browser. I regularly use Mozilla, Firefox and Galeon. I often use Lynx. I also use Dildo. I may have slightly different needs than most of people but come on, it cannot be that unusual.
I should have been more specific in my previous post. What I mean is that this is good:
In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
Cats: How are you gentlemen !!
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Cats: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Cats: Ha Ha Ha Ha....
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every 'Zig'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'Zig'.
Captain: For great justice.
While this is not:
A.D. 2101
The war has begun.
Captain: What was that?!
Chief Engineer: It appears someone has planted bombs.
Operator: Captain! We have an incoming transmission!
Captain: What? Who?
Operator: I'll put it on the main screen.
Captain: You! You're...
CATS [with sarcasm]: You seem to be preoccupied, gentlemen.
CATS: With the kind cooperation of the Federation forces, all of your bases now belong to us.
CATS: Your ship, too, will soon meet its end.
Captain: That's... impossible!
CATS: Thanks for coming out this far. You have made it too easy.
CATS: Make the most of these last moments of your lives.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha ha...
Operator: Captain...
Captain: Operator, give a launch order to all ZIG fighters, now!
Captain: We have no time to lose. It's up to them.
Captain: All our hope for the future is in their hands.
Captain: Godspeed, ZIG fighters!
"With the kind cooperation"? Can you imagine the text "With the kind cooperation of the Federation forces, all of your bases now belong to us." being used all over the signs and buildings and vehicles and even advertisments and repeated by literally millions of people with almost religious admiration? Neither do I. But sadly, this is how Japanese-English translation looks today, and Doukutsu Monogatari is no different. Sad. Very sad. Where are the old translators with just the right balance between the sense of humour and--let's face it--brilliance? Are there any new games with similar narrative style as the original version of Zero Wing? Will there ever be?
How do I cool processors? Simple: I underclock them. Even a 10-20% less MHzs is usually enough to get rid of a noisy fan, i.e. the most stupid idea in the history of personal computers. Most of today's computers are I/O-bound anyway (Moore's law) so there is no performance loss whatsoever. Seems like an obvious solution.
I read it as "Saturn Has a Worm Hole" and I was like "Dear God!" Not that a warm pole is a bad news, but discovering a worm hole (a theoretical distortion of space-time in a region of the universe that would link one location or time with another, through a path that is shorter in distance or duration than would otherwise be expected) would be an outsnadning breakthrough. For anyone interested, more info here.
I was assisting in installing KazaA once. It was like: "What do you think," the librarian asked me. "According to this EULA they could log our downloads," I said. "So? Is it good or is it bad?" (She's so cute!) "Bad. I do not authorise it. Remove it, add to the black list, never bother me again." Now, if anyone is screaming bloody murder because a program does something that was explained explicite or implicite during the installation, one is not the brightest individual under the Sun if you ask me.
According to this story, Poland seems to have the second largest population of communist spies in the world, right after China. Suddenly
someoftherecentnewsstories
about an unusual resistance of certain people against the introduction of
capitalism in Europe which would be obviously harmful to the communistic status quo start to look much less surprising.
Perhaps linux is somewhat unreliable because of the speed the patches are being integrated? This is not an app, this is a kernel and kernels require rigorous testing and full security audits. Take a look at the kernel changelogs.Things are moving very fast in the linux world, so fast that merges of unstable/unsecure code are frequent.
If there are indeed any stability and security issues caused by rapid development, they might be caused by the fundamental design decisions rather than the size of the project and development speed per se. I couldn't agree with you more on this point: "This is not an app, this is a kernel and kernels require rigorous testing and full security audits." What I am trying to say is that if the kernel was not monolithic then 99.9% of it would be an app for all practical purposes, and only the small part running in the kernel space would require said rigorous testing and full security audits. Monolithic design is not an issue when you have a small kernel, but today Linux is starting to get so large that it slowly causes problems. There are a lot of third party binary drivers and they all run in the kernel space, just like in Windows, and in effect any bug in such a driver is indeed a bug in the kernel, with all of the consequences security- and stability-wise. Linux per se may be rock solid, but buy a new graphics card, install drivers and suddenly Linux is only as stable as the least stable kernel module. This is what what Andrew Tanenbaum was talking about in 1992 and if Linus Torvalds hadn't overreacted so furiously when Linux was only one year old, today, 13 years later, we might not face many of the problems you are talking about. Unfortunately, when it comes to advanced projects like this, the ego often plays a much more important role than technical merits. Today it is much to late to fix that design. You have pointed out a very important issue but it was not a secret that we had it coming for over a decade now.
Wow. This is horrible. Almost every post here has been a take off BSD is dying.
This is very sad that most of posts in BSD stories these days are nothing more than the reposts of old and boring BSD-dying trolls. So when I saw this story I decided to post something at least slightly more interesting, i.e. an information about the little known Debian GNU/NetBSD project and links to webpages describing countless platforms supported by NetBSD. I also expressed my sincere admiration towards the NetBSD team for developing such an amazingly portable system. If you take a look at the entire thread you'll see that it was the only post that didn't say that (1) BSD is dying, (2) NetBSD store is a bad idea (BSD mall is better), or (3) those t-shirts are ugly. Unfortunately, utterly incompetent moderators blinded by their pathetic fervor of down-moderation madness have moderated this post all the way down to -1, Troll in a matter of minutes. You can see for yourself. Needless to say, because of such a childish behaviour I am very unlikely to post anything informative about BSD in the future. BSD may not be dying, but thanks to such infantile and dumb moderators any even remotely interesting discussions about BSD on Slashdot surely are. Very sad.
Yes. The Hurd-on-L4 bases all its communication on a capability system. Programs running on it may or may not explicitly make use of it (it's all wrapped for the POSIX interface, so they obviously don't see it), but they will use it underneath anyway.
That is really great to hear. Now I have no doubts that Debian GNU/Hurd will be my future system of choice. Today I use Debian GNU/Linux and my main problems are drivers running in the kernel space causing security and stability issues and the lack of real capability system. I'm glad that there is going to be a perfect system for my needs hopefully in not too distant future.
A good thing about this is of course that things like chroot are very easily implemented (there are many more good things, as I'm sure you know), but there is one problem: Any program which uses it is not portable to other systems. That means most programs will not want to use it. Which is a pity, of course, as it is a great system.
I'm sure I will use it even for the price of nonportability because I have already hit the wall of user-based privilege control system's limitations too many times, which is quite frustrating as no one else seems to see any problem with them. I suppose that there will be some convenient way similar to chroot and ulimit to run programs with restricted privileges even if they are themselves not aware and dependent on capabilities. Also I hope that it will be possible to use capabilities where available from managed environments like Parrot or maybe even directly in places like Apache configuration to give specific and limited rights to individual scripts. The possibilities are very promising.
Longhorn will be the first release of Windows authored completely after Microsoft began their Trusted Computing Initiative and released.NET. Longhorn will reimplement and convert major Windows subsystems to managed code.
This really starts to get boring. I have already written about it countless times only to get completely ignored every time I dare to point out that the emperor is naked.
I find it truly amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using "trusted" computing and Palladium-like platforms usually talk with great enthusiasm and excitement about the new and innovative security features that have already been implemented in the 1970s for crying out loud, only better and with no strings attached. All TCPA zealots are usually completely ignorant of the existance of such operating systems as KeyKOS or EROS with formal proofs of correctness for God's sake and without all of the silliness of "trusted" computing.
And no, this is not only my opinion that we don't need DRM to get security. I am not the only one who says that everything that TCPA can possibly do to security can also be done in software, with the only exception of DRM, and in fact it has already been done, decades ago.
I am not really surprised at all why it is completely ignored by the TCPA and TCI pushing industry. I am only outraged that there are so many naïve people who once again will gladly do anything no matter how dumb it is, if only their good uncle Bill Gates says that it's good for them.
Please, people, if you want to learn about real systems security, then read some old papers by Jerome Saltzer, Michael Schroeder, Norman Hardy and Jonathan Shapiro. If you want to learn about cryptography, read texts by Bruce Schneier.
Microsoft is not a reliable source of knowledge in that field.
People always ask me where are the real innovations in systems security and I always say them that they are in the seventies, and have been being ingnored since then by major software vendors because people don't demand using them.
This story and this thread is a great example: "Yeah, this version of Windows may suck, but still I am looking forward to buy the next one."
This will dramatically lessen the exploitation potential of code flaws in the Windows application libraries. Microsoft has to maintain support for legacy application, but that doesn't mean they can't get a fresh start on the underlying code, and doesn't mean that existing Microsoft applications can't be converted to managed code as well.
Wait, I've already heard it... In 1995, 1998, 2000, 2003... Oh, you mean that this time they really mean it?
Anybody with DSL or Cable without a router between them and the internet is also pretty stupid too.
That's true. Fortunately, every time they want to do anything on the Internet they get "no route to host" message, so it's fairly easy to notice this common mistake.
When the first programs run, it is just a matter of time before there is a functional L4 port of Debian GNU/Hurd (or just Debian GNU?). I really like the design of the Hurd, but what I'd like to see the most are not the "POSIX capabilities" but the real capabilities as described in the 1975 paper by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. (For those who don't know what am I talking about, I recommend starting from the excellent essay What is a Capability, Anyway? by Jonathan Shapiro, and then reading the capability theory essays by Norman Hardy. As a sidenone I might add that I find it amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using TCPA/Palladium-like platforms usually quote security features, which have already been implemented in the 1970s, only better and with no strings attached. Those TCPA zealots are usually completely ignorant of the existance of such operating systems as KeyKOS or EROS with formal proofs of correctness without all of the silliness.) Are there any plans to have a real capability-based security model available in the Hurd?
Slashdot Mirror
What we need is a better architecture which would allow for a better implementation of algorithms. Will we ever have an MMIX-like processor with 256 general-purpose 64-bit registers that each can hold either fixed-point or floating-point numbers? That is what I am waiting for, not more "power," whatever that means.
I strongly disagree. Not all of us are a bunch lazy idiots as you imply. If I didn't want to spend a week learning a new syntax for a loop I wouldn't have finished reading a second Perl 6 book yesterday, now would I? I have already spent man-months learning the language that is not even fully designed yet, so I would appreciate if you kindly exclude me--and most of Slashdotters--from your hasty generalization, for even though I would tend to agree with you that most of people in general are incompetent idiots, I believe that Slashdot community is a rare exception to this sad rule, or otherwise we wouldn't be so enthusiastically discussing the possibility of designing a Heraclitean programming language with its roots in the philosophy of ancient Greece--which nota bene would be an interesting addition to postmodern languages we already have. But even though I disagree with your premiss, I fully agree with your conclusion that Java and C# are rubbish, that of course is undeniable. But this conclusion by itself is quite useless unless we answer the question why they are the way they are. Why does the competence of your proverbial marketing department is nearly without exception reversely proportional to the technical advantages of the technology in question? When we answer this question, a lot of other answers will become clear.
Notwithstanding the grammar mistake--I hope editors will have corrected it before I finish writing this comment--it is not "How [Would] Heraclitus ... Design a Programming Language" but rather "What Programming Language Would Heraclitus Design." On the other hand if you are wondering how should you desing and implement a programming language, I would suggest targetting Parrot which makes implementing compilers 1000 times easier than ever before, not to even mention future interoperability and e.g. access to the entire CPAN from the level of your own brand new language, effectively solving the most important problem of new languages: there are no libraries so people don't write anything, and people don't write anything so there are no libraries. Good luck.
I swear I was just about to write about Zero Wing being the most linguistically innovative game ever and at that very moment I saw--and I still see--a banner saying: "Roses are #ff0000, violets are #0000ff, All my base are belong to you" and it really scared me. Amazing, is it not?
While there is no one in space to hear my scream, I'll just stay with sex tourism, thank you very much.
It should be Dillo! Oh God, what a stupid typo... Please mod parent down.
If Gartner says it's a 2-browser world then either Gartner lies or I am living in my own world. Or both. I mean there is a place for every browser. I regularly use Mozilla, Firefox and Galeon. I often use Lynx. I also use Dildo. I may have slightly different needs than most of people but come on, it cannot be that unusual.
I should have been more specific in my previous post. What I mean is that this is good:
While this is not:
"With the kind cooperation"? Can you imagine the text "With the kind cooperation of the Federation forces, all of your bases now belong to us." being used all over the signs and buildings and vehicles and even advertisments and repeated by literally millions of people with almost religious admiration? Neither do I. But sadly, this is how Japanese-English translation looks today, and Doukutsu Monogatari is no different. Sad. Very sad. Where are the old translators with just the right balance between the sense of humour and--let's face it--brilliance? Are there any new games with similar narrative style as the original version of Zero Wing? Will there ever be?
Those were the days! Today, the Japanese-English translation is just boring.
How do I cool processors? Simple: I underclock them. Even a 10-20% less MHzs is usually enough to get rid of a noisy fan, i.e. the most stupid idea in the history of personal computers. Most of today's computers are I/O-bound anyway (Moore's law) so there is no performance loss whatsoever. Seems like an obvious solution.
Is it illegal? Probably not. It is an EULA, ergo it is not legally binding, but illegal? Overstatement.
devoted to aggregating other websites... Am I the only one who thinks that we have too many websites these days? What's wrong with kernel.org?
I read it as "Saturn Has a Worm Hole" and I was like "Dear God!" Not that a warm pole is a bad news, but discovering a worm hole (a theoretical distortion of space-time in a region of the universe that would link one location or time with another, through a path that is shorter in distance or duration than would otherwise be expected) would be an outsnadning breakthrough. For anyone interested, more info here.
I was assisting in installing KazaA once. It was like: "What do you think," the librarian asked me. "According to this EULA they could log our downloads," I said. "So? Is it good or is it bad?" (She's so cute!) "Bad. I do not authorise it. Remove it, add to the black list, never bother me again." Now, if anyone is screaming bloody murder because a program does something that was explained explicite or implicite during the installation, one is not the brightest individual under the Sun if you ask me.
According to this story, Poland seems to have the second largest population of communist spies in the world, right after China. Suddenly some of the recent news stories about an unusual resistance of certain people against the introduction of capitalism in Europe which would be obviously harmful to the communistic status quo start to look much less surprising.
Linux may not be a screw driver itself but we surely need one to use screw patents generously donated by IBM.
If there are indeed any stability and security issues caused by rapid development, they might be caused by the fundamental design decisions rather than the size of the project and development speed per se. I couldn't agree with you more on this point: "This is not an app, this is a kernel and kernels require rigorous testing and full security audits." What I am trying to say is that if the kernel was not monolithic then 99.9% of it would be an app for all practical purposes, and only the small part running in the kernel space would require said rigorous testing and full security audits. Monolithic design is not an issue when you have a small kernel, but today Linux is starting to get so large that it slowly causes problems. There are a lot of third party binary drivers and they all run in the kernel space, just like in Windows, and in effect any bug in such a driver is indeed a bug in the kernel, with all of the consequences security- and stability-wise. Linux per se may be rock solid, but buy a new graphics card, install drivers and suddenly Linux is only as stable as the least stable kernel module. This is what what Andrew Tanenbaum was talking about in 1992 and if Linus Torvalds hadn't overreacted so furiously when Linux was only one year old, today, 13 years later, we might not face many of the problems you are talking about. Unfortunately, when it comes to advanced projects like this, the ego often plays a much more important role than technical merits. Today it is much to late to fix that design. You have pointed out a very important issue but it was not a secret that we had it coming for over a decade now.
This is very sad that most of posts in BSD stories these days are nothing more than the reposts of old and boring BSD-dying trolls. So when I saw this story I decided to post something at least slightly more interesting, i.e. an information about the little known Debian GNU/NetBSD project and links to webpages describing countless platforms supported by NetBSD. I also expressed my sincere admiration towards the NetBSD team for developing such an amazingly portable system. If you take a look at the entire thread you'll see that it was the only post that didn't say that (1) BSD is dying, (2) NetBSD store is a bad idea (BSD mall is better), or (3) those t-shirts are ugly. Unfortunately, utterly incompetent moderators blinded by their pathetic fervor of down-moderation madness have moderated this post all the way down to -1, Troll in a matter of minutes. You can see for yourself. Needless to say, because of such a childish behaviour I am very unlikely to post anything informative about BSD in the future. BSD may not be dying, but thanks to such infantile and dumb moderators any even remotely interesting discussions about BSD on Slashdot surely are. Very sad.
That is really great to hear. Now I have no doubts that Debian GNU/Hurd will be my future system of choice. Today I use Debian GNU/Linux and my main problems are drivers running in the kernel space causing security and stability issues and the lack of real capability system. I'm glad that there is going to be a perfect system for my needs hopefully in not too distant future.
I'm sure I will use it even for the price of nonportability because I have already hit the wall of user-based privilege control system's limitations too many times, which is quite frustrating as no one else seems to see any problem with them. I suppose that there will be some convenient way similar to chroot and ulimit to run programs with restricted privileges even if they are themselves not aware and dependent on capabilities. Also I hope that it will be possible to use capabilities where available from managed environments like Parrot or maybe even directly in places like Apache configuration to give specific and limited rights to individual scripts. The possibilities are very promising.
First of all, don't panic. Here is what you should do. Good luck.
As someone who have been suggesting it for years, I am really glad that they have finally made the store. This is a much better way to support a project like this, because people are generally more likely to buy cool merchandise (like on Amazon) than to send money not getting anything in return (like lobbying). I hope a portion of the revenus stream will go towards the development of Debian GNU/NetBSD because there is a lot of platforms I want to have Debian on, and it doesn't seem that Linux--or even HURD--will be nearly as portable as NetBSD any time soon, and as a long-time GNU supporter I must admit that I say it with a great deal of jealousy and at least an equal amount of admiration. For those who are not familiar with NetBSD's exceptional portability, or those who think that their pathetic operating system (Micro$oft) is portable because it supports Intel and AMD, here is a list of platforms that a really portable operating system should support: acorn26, acorn32, algor, alpha, amd64, amiga, amigappc, arc, atari, bebox, cats, cesfic, cobalt, dreamcast, evbarm, evbmips, evbppc, walnut, evbsh3, evbsh5, hp300, hp700, hpcarm, hpcmips, hpcsh, i386, iyonix, luna68k, mac68k, macppc, mipsco, mmeye, mvme68k, mvmeppc, netwinder, news68k, newsmips, next68k, ofppc, pc532, playstation2, pmax, pmppc, prep, sandpoint, sbmips, sgimips, sh3, sh3eb,
This really starts to get boring. I have already written about it countless times only to get completely ignored every time I dare to point out that the emperor is naked.
I find it truly amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using "trusted" computing and Palladium-like platforms usually talk with great enthusiasm and excitement about the new and innovative security features that have already been implemented in the 1970s for crying out loud, only better and with no strings attached. All TCPA zealots are usually completely ignorant of the existance of such operating systems as KeyKOS or EROS with formal proofs of correctness for God's sake and without all of the silliness of "trusted" computing.
And no, this is not only my opinion that we don't need DRM to get security. I am not the only one who says that everything that TCPA can possibly do to security can also be done in software, with the only exception of DRM, and in fact it has already been done, decades ago. I am not really surprised at all why it is completely ignored by the TCPA and TCI pushing industry. I am only outraged that there are so many naïve people who once again will gladly do anything no matter how dumb it is, if only their good uncle Bill Gates says that it's good for them.
Please, people, if you want to learn about real systems security, then read some old papers by Jerome Saltzer, Michael Schroeder, Norman Hardy and Jonathan Shapiro. If you want to learn about cryptography, read texts by Bruce Schneier. Microsoft is not a reliable source of knowledge in that field.
People always ask me where are the real innovations in systems security and I always say them that they are in the seventies, and have been being ingnored since then by major software vendors because people don't demand using them. This story and this thread is a great example: "Yeah, this version of Windows may suck, but still I am looking forward to buy the next one."
Wait, I've already heard it... In 1995, 1998, 2000, 2003... Oh, you mean that this time they really mean it?
That's true. Fortunately, every time they want to do anything on the Internet they get "no route to host" message, so it's fairly easy to notice this common mistake.
It sounds almost as funny as Microsoft security.
When the first programs run, it is just a matter of time before there is a functional L4 port of Debian GNU/Hurd (or just Debian GNU?). I really like the design of the Hurd, but what I'd like to see the most are not the "POSIX capabilities" but the real capabilities as described in the 1975 paper by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. (For those who don't know what am I talking about, I recommend starting from the excellent essay What is a Capability, Anyway? by Jonathan Shapiro, and then reading the capability theory essays by Norman Hardy. As a sidenone I might add that I find it amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using TCPA/Palladium-like platforms usually quote security features, which have already been implemented in the 1970s, only better and with no strings attached. Those TCPA zealots are usually completely ignorant of the existance of such operating systems as KeyKOS or EROS with formal proofs of correctness without all of the silliness.) Are there any plans to have a real capability-based security model available in the Hurd?