Exceptions in C. You can get quite natural-looking exception handling in C, with some convoluted macros. I'm sure most hardcore C coders have come up with their own implementations.
The best exceptions-in-C implementation I've ever used is buried in SIOD by George Carrette. Despite using setjmp/longjmp, it's portable as all hell.
Common Lisp vendors, including Franz missed the window of opportunity during the impressionable years from 1983 to 1998.
You may call those years the "window of opportunity" - another name for them in the Lisp marketplace is "AI Winter". You know, the period when AI overpromised and underdelivered, and Lisp took a lot of the blame for it.
If there's any justice in the world, we'll see "XML Winter" in a few years, when the Semantic Web fails to solve the exchange-any-data problem, and Java will take a lot of the blame for that. It would only be fair, after all...
One can second-guess Franz's business model, but they're still in business selling a high-quality product. It's hard to argue with longevity.
... Lisp development environments in 1980? If Visual Studio is an example of progress in the last 20 years, I'm impressed... NOT. Every one of those features was in every commercial Lisp development system of the era (Symbolics, LMI, Xerox), along with lots more. And, they live on in the ilisp development environment, which gives them to many Common Lisp and Scheme implementations.
Yes, this is flamebait. Yes, I'm bitter and curmudgeonly. Perceptive of you to notice...
The response rate is the key to the whole operation, said Ralsky. These days, it's about one-quarter of 1 percent.
Ralsky has other ways to monitor the success of his campaigns. Buried in every e-mail he sends is a hidden code that sends back a message every time the e-mail is opened. About three-quarters of 1 percent of all the messages are opened by their recipients, he said. The rest are deleted.
He's claiming that one out of three spams that are opened in something that renders HTML get a response. I always knew the unwashed web-browser-email masses were dumb, but not that dumb...
A little further down in the EPA article, you could have found this:
Beta particles travel several feet in open air and are easily stopped by solid materials. When a beta particle has lost its energy, it is like any other loose electron.
which means beta particles are easily stopped by metal casings, like the metal can surrounding a battery. Beta emitters are dangerous if you bring them into direct contact with flesh, so you are advised not to open the power source and eat the contents. A similar statement could be made about the heavy metals inside conventional batteries. The difference between heavy metals and radioactive materials is that radioactive materials eventually decay - heavy metals have a half-life of forever.
I haven't used a PC laptop since about 1994 - that was a 33 MHz Pentium with 16 MB of RAM and a monochrome screen which would run for a little over an hour on its battery, and that was with every screen-dimming, hard-disk unspinning, power-saving option I could find turned on.
Every Mac laptop I've used since then would run for at least two hours on one battery. My current 500 MHz iBook runs for just under three hours on a charge, will sleep for over a week unplugged, has a wake-from-sleep time of two seconds, and can be safely run completely to battery exhaustion - with its last gasp it dumps the whole processor state to disk, so if you then plug it in and hit the boot button, you come up exactly where you left off.
I knew things were bad in the PC universe regarding power consumption, sleep and wake, and state preservation, but is it really that bad? Has battery life really not improved for PC laptops since 1993?
If I were Apple, I'd sell this as a "free switcher kit" - free as in 100% rebate when purchased along with a new Mac. Apple does rebate programs like this all the time, so the support structures are already in place.
Bad news: the rates charged per byte/cycle/whatever ought to drop by 50% every generation (12-18 months these days).
More bad news: typical supercomputer code is usually bummed (at least a little) for the particular hardware it runs on, to get the last factor of two or so for performance. If you rent crunchons, can you afford to rent generic crunchons and give up that last bit of optimization?
Good news: if you can get around the bad news above, this could turn supercomputing into a lease-vs-buy situation, and when the computer you buy essentially depreciates 50% every generation, leasing might be a win.
The right way to deregulate a "natural monopoly" industry like cable is:
First add a bunch of regulations that add up to "you may not use your current monopoly to stomp on potential competitors". Add enough monitoring to ensure this is enforced.
Then set threshholds for competition and say that once sufficient competition exists, deregulation happens. Leave open the possibility of reregulation if competition fails.
In the cable and telecom industries, the first step above was generally skipped, allowing cable companies to arbitrarily raise rates and telecom companies to screw DSL providers.
Kmart said the sale included one server license and 25 desktop licenses it bought from Microsoft.
So, they're holding up an $8.4 million dollar transaction over a transfer of licenses worth, what, $10,000? Less?? Someone's priorities are screwed up here - KMart should just throw those licenses on the floor.
Considering it's based on a 2 GHz P4-M, I seriously doubt it.
TiBook sleep and wake behavior?
If it's running Windows or any Linux, I doubt it. One of the reasons I use an iBook is its wake from sleep time (two seconds) and its reliable sleep and wake behavior. I have NEVER lost work due to failure to wake from sleep, and my uptime is routinely in the multi-week range - I only reboot to install OS upgrades.
They can copy the chassis, but hardware/software fit and finish is MUCH harder to copy.
So, if I have, say, a laptop that I only reboot when I install system updates, and it almost never crashes, a journaling file system would not be very important for me?
We're homeschoolers, which is why my copy of Jaguar cost $69 when I bought it last August. Free would be better, of course, but Apple does give homeschoolers a break.
Anyone know if MS or {Dell/Gateway/HP} makes a similar effort?
I believe their website map understates their true coverage. What I was told when I got my VoiceStream phone is that "if the phone connects, no roaming charges". It appears to be true - I live in the Washington DC area, and I've taken my phone into the wilds of North Carolina (down I95, where the map says no coverage), connected to Cingular (well, that's what the phone's screen said), and successfully placed calls with no roaming fees. I had similar success recently all up and down the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco. They must have some sort of network swap arrangement with the other up-and-coming GSM providers in the US.
Surely they could have picked a better cover animal than a hunting dog (with the "this old dog won't hunt" association, maybe?).
I'm not sure what to propose as an alternative, though. Clarus is clearly old-school Mac OS, and a jaguar would be too specific to 10.2. Ideas, anyone?
And this differs from Windows98 in what way?
on
AOL's new Linux PC
·
· Score: 2
Maybe someday there will be a Lindows-equivalent for something Windows-esque with a better security model. For now, Lindows is an attempt to fill a need, and there is a chance they'll improve, but only if they have some degree of commercial success now.
I'll worry more about this when I hear of the first Trojan specifically aimed at Lindows - which will be evidence that there are enough Lindows boxes out in the wild.
Someone a little higher-profile than me should take up a collection to publish full-page ads in the big newspapers containing:
The code for DeCSS
Web links for downloading the code
The names of everyone who paid for the ad
Granted, this has been done to death on the Web, but remember that as far as the Government is concerned, nothing is real until it appears in the New York Times or Washington Post...
Could it be that the real reason Simonyi wants away from Microsoft is that he's interested in aspect-oriented programming? And the language that's getting the buzz in aspect-oriented programming is AspectJ, where J stands for Java? And promoting Java would be a career-limiting move at Microsoft for anyone these days?
Instead of the Times article, look at this one in the Washington Post which gets a little closer to this interpretation.
it's impossible to use a Zip drive, CD-ROM, and DVD-ROM together in the same machine with any G4 that Apple has ever shipped.
Good lord, haven't these people ever heard of FireWire? All of those devices have FireWire versions - hell, you could probably put all three of them on one port, run them all simultaneously, and see no performance hit over having them in the case.
... is accessibility. I have a friend who is blind, who is a perfectly competent user of Windows 98, as long as applications use controls understood by his screen reader of choice (Jaws). The moment an app writer gets creative and uses a non-standard control, he's flying blind (literally).
The most annoying thing about use of non-standard controls is that 99% of the time it's completely gratuitous eye-candy, and usually bad eye-candy at that - the new controls do exactly the same stuff as the standards, and typically badly. It's particularly galling when Microsoft themselves does this, in (say) a password-change dialog for MSN. which loads some funky ActiveX control that hoses the screen reader and forces my friend to make his changes by phoning customer support.
Slashdot Mirror
The best exceptions-in-C implementation I've ever used is buried in SIOD by George Carrette. Despite using setjmp/longjmp, it's portable as all hell.
... to correctly display the Blue Screen of Death.
Sorry, but someone had to say it!
You may call those years the "window of opportunity" - another name for them in the Lisp marketplace is "AI Winter". You know, the period when AI overpromised and underdelivered, and Lisp took a lot of the blame for it.
If there's any justice in the world, we'll see "XML Winter" in a few years, when the Semantic Web fails to solve the exchange-any-data problem, and Java will take a lot of the blame for that. It would only be fair, after all...
One can second-guess Franz's business model, but they're still in business selling a high-quality product. It's hard to argue with longevity.
... Lisp development environments in 1980? If Visual Studio is an example of progress in the last 20 years, I'm impressed... NOT. Every one of those features was in every commercial Lisp development system of the era (Symbolics, LMI, Xerox), along with lots more. And, they live on in the ilisp development environment, which gives them to many Common Lisp and Scheme implementations.
Yes, this is flamebait. Yes, I'm bitter and curmudgeonly. Perceptive of you to notice...
He's claiming that one out of three spams that are opened in something that renders HTML get a response. I always knew the unwashed web-browser-email masses were dumb, but not that dumb...
which means beta particles are easily stopped by metal casings, like the metal can surrounding a battery. Beta emitters are dangerous if you bring them into direct contact with flesh, so you are advised not to open the power source and eat the contents. A similar statement could be made about the heavy metals inside conventional batteries. The difference between heavy metals and radioactive materials is that radioactive materials eventually decay - heavy metals have a half-life of forever.
I haven't used a PC laptop since about 1994 - that was a 33 MHz Pentium with 16 MB of RAM and a monochrome screen which would run for a little over an hour on its battery, and that was with every screen-dimming, hard-disk unspinning, power-saving option I could find turned on.
Every Mac laptop I've used since then would run for at least two hours on one battery. My current 500 MHz iBook runs for just under three hours on a charge, will sleep for over a week unplugged, has a wake-from-sleep time of two seconds, and can be safely run completely to battery exhaustion - with its last gasp it dumps the whole processor state to disk, so if you then plug it in and hit the boot button, you come up exactly where you left off.
I knew things were bad in the PC universe regarding power consumption, sleep and wake, and state preservation, but is it really that bad? Has battery life really not improved for PC laptops since 1993?
If I were Apple, I'd sell this as a "free switcher kit" - free as in 100% rebate when purchased along with a new Mac. Apple does rebate programs like this all the time, so the support structures are already in place.
Finding Nemo
The Incredibles
Cars
Nothing about "Ray Gunn", nothing about "Toy Story 3". What's your source?
Bad news: the rates charged per byte/cycle/whatever ought to drop by 50% every generation (12-18 months these days).
More bad news: typical supercomputer code is usually bummed (at least a little) for the particular hardware it runs on, to get the last factor of two or so for performance. If you rent crunchons, can you afford to rent generic crunchons and give up that last bit of optimization?
Good news: if you can get around the bad news above, this could turn supercomputing into a lease-vs-buy situation, and when the computer you buy essentially depreciates 50% every generation, leasing might be a win.
First add a bunch of regulations that add up to "you may not use your current monopoly to stomp on potential competitors". Add enough monitoring to ensure this is enforced.
Then set threshholds for competition and say that once sufficient competition exists, deregulation happens. Leave open the possibility of reregulation if competition fails.
In the cable and telecom industries, the first step above was generally skipped, allowing cable companies to arbitrarily raise rates and telecom companies to screw DSL providers.
So, they're holding up an $8.4 million dollar transaction over a transfer of licenses worth, what, $10,000? Less?? Someone's priorities are screwed up here - KMart should just throw those licenses on the floor.
TiBook battery life?
TiBook operating temperature?
Considering it's based on a 2 GHz P4-M, I seriously doubt it.
TiBook sleep and wake behavior?
If it's running Windows or any Linux, I doubt it. One of the reasons I use an iBook is its wake from sleep time (two seconds) and its reliable sleep and wake behavior. I have NEVER lost work due to failure to wake from sleep, and my uptime is routinely in the multi-week range - I only reboot to install OS upgrades.
They can copy the chassis, but hardware/software fit and finish is MUCH harder to copy.
Look up at this. Putting information in XML makes the first baby step of reverse engineering easier, nothing else.
XML helps only if the creator of the document wants the information to be easily accessible by programs other than their own.
So, if I have, say, a laptop that I only reboot when I install system updates, and it almost never crashes, a journaling file system would not be very important for me?
We're homeschoolers, which is why my copy of Jaguar cost $69 when I bought it last August. Free would be better, of course, but Apple does give homeschoolers a break.
Anyone know if MS or {Dell/Gateway/HP} makes a similar effort?
I believe their website map understates their true coverage. What I was told when I got my VoiceStream phone is that "if the phone connects, no roaming charges". It appears to be true - I live in the Washington DC area, and I've taken my phone into the wilds of North Carolina (down I95, where the map says no coverage), connected to Cingular (well, that's what the phone's screen said), and successfully placed calls with no roaming fees. I had similar success recently all up and down the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco. They must have some sort of network swap arrangement with the other up-and-coming GSM providers in the US.
Surely they could have picked a better cover animal than a hunting dog (with the "this old dog won't hunt" association, maybe?).
I'm not sure what to propose as an alternative, though. Clarus is clearly old-school Mac OS, and a jaguar would be too specific to 10.2. Ideas, anyone?
Maybe someday there will be a Lindows-equivalent for something Windows-esque with a better security model. For now, Lindows is an attempt to fill a need, and there is a chance they'll improve, but only if they have some degree of commercial success now.
I'll worry more about this when I hear of the first Trojan specifically aimed at Lindows - which will be evidence that there are enough Lindows boxes out in the wild.
The code for DeCSS
Web links for downloading the code
The names of everyone who paid for the ad
Granted, this has been done to death on the Web, but remember that as far as the Government is concerned, nothing is real until it appears in the New York Times or Washington Post...
Could it be that the real reason Simonyi wants away from Microsoft is that he's interested in aspect-oriented programming? And the language that's getting the buzz in aspect-oriented programming is AspectJ, where J stands for Java? And promoting Java would be a career-limiting move at Microsoft for anyone these days?
Instead of the Times article, look at this one in the Washington Post which gets a little closer to this interpretation.
Good lord, haven't these people ever heard of FireWire? All of those devices have FireWire versions - hell, you could probably put all three of them on one port, run them all simultaneously, and see no performance hit over having them in the case.
1. Open player with your favorite screwdriver/utility knife.
2. Remove CD. Rip, mix, burn.
3. Replace CD in player.
4. Back over player and headphones with your car.
5. Return electronic crumbs to Epic Records in plastic bag, claiming you "dropped it".
Problem solved...
... that says "IP on Everything".
... is accessibility. I have a friend who is blind, who is a perfectly competent user of Windows 98, as long as applications use controls understood by his screen reader of choice (Jaws). The moment an app writer gets creative and uses a non-standard control, he's flying blind (literally).
The most annoying thing about use of non-standard controls is that 99% of the time it's completely gratuitous eye-candy, and usually bad eye-candy at that - the new controls do exactly the same stuff as the standards, and typically badly. It's particularly galling when Microsoft themselves does this, in (say) a password-change dialog for MSN. which loads some funky ActiveX control that hoses the screen reader and forces my friend to make his changes by phoning customer support.