I find that the Encyclopedia Brittanica has a different set of rules. It includes a correction for when the year is exactly divisible by 4000. If they are right, then the code you linked to is incorrect and we will have a problem on March 1, 4000 - the code will insist that it is still February.
That surprised me because as far as I know the information on the page I provided the link to is correct. So I searched Encyclopedia Brittanica's web site and found this page, which say, among other things:
In the Gregorian calendar now in general use, the discrepancy is adjusted by adding the extra day to only those century years exactly divisible by 400 (e.g., 1600, 2000). For still more precise reckoning, every year evenly divisible by 4,000 (i.e., 16,000, 24,000, etc.) may be a common (not leap) year.
My interpretation of that is that the Gregorian calendar is not completely accurate, and that a 4 millenium correction would be needed to bring it in line with the day length that we have been able to measure with modern equipment. Thus, 4000 will be a leap year on the Gregorian calendar, but shouldn't be. For what it's worth, the Emacs calendar code written by a couple of guys who have actually researched a variety of calendars says that 4000 is a leap year.
Re:(OT) Rant on rants, maybe flamebait
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Review: "Scream 3"
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· Score: 4
I have had it up the socket with people complaining about nearly every story on/., saying that it "doesn't belong" or isn't "news for nerds" or it isn't "stuff that matters". Last I checked, no one had defined those in a universally acceptable way.
Some things don't matter to some people. Some things do. Sometimes I care about a/. posting. Sometimes I don't. If I don't find it interesting, I can skip it, and I can even configure my account to filter out stuff I'm not interested in. WE'RE ALL DIFFERENT (tm) HERE. Why do some feel the need to decrease the s/n ratio by complaining about stories they don't feel are relevant to *their* beliefs on what's important? Imagine if the same thing happened everytime someone spammed a usenet group... <ugh>
When I saw the review pop up, I questioned (to myself) its relevance. Yes, it is only marginal. And I dug a little deeper about why I was questioning it at all. I certainly skip enough articles that don't interest me which are clearly within the charter of Slashdot. The bottom line is that I am feeling lousy today. I'm hungry for any interesting news and I'm hoping that the next Slashdot story will be it. I wasn't disappointed because it was a movie review, or because it was by Jon Katz. I rarely agreee with him completely, but his articles generate some good discussions here. I was disappointed because I want some Nerd News. Well it isn't Slashdot's fault and it isn't Jon's fault that this story came up first.
There is a fine line that the guys at Slashdot are walking. It would be easy enough to expand Slashdot to report every open source software announcement, every new SF movie, every cool piece of new hardware, etc. Instead of a manageable number of stories that everyone can scan any time they're here, we would start to get people missing stories, people filtering heavily and so forth. Slashdot would die from lack of any definition. The community here, contentious as it is, would fragment.
I have a copy of the Hacker Test sitting in my briefcase. Among the many questions, it asks:
0490 Do you read news?
0491... More than 32 newsgroups?
0492... More than 256 newsgroups?
0493... All the newsgroups?
When was the last time you considered reading all of Usenet? It is huge, largely unmoderated, and ill-defined. I still enjoy some newsgroups occasionally, but it has lost most of the feeling that a newsgroup was a community with some common interests. Achieving that requires some boundaries. There are some things that are simply off-topic. But is requires some acceptance of diversity in the group. And it requires a small enough body of shared information that we are all exposed to a significant portion of it. We are creating, on an ongoing basis, a community here. We are creating the shared experience.
Questioning the boundaries of the group comes with the territory. If this article was ovr the boundaries, by consensus, or by reflection after the fact by the Slashdot Gods, so be it. They can step back from the edge. If this is part of what Slashdot is and will be, I can accept that it is not so far from the other interests that draw me here that it will undermine the benefits I get from what I read here.
CNBC reported on the air just a few minutes ago that ATMs were shut down for a while in Japan because of a leap day bug. They also said that although "officials were on the alert" (I didn't write te copy for them) no similar bugs had surfaced in the US.
Between DOS and windows that company we all love to hate decided to change character sets. Suddenly three letters in the swedish alphabet have a new character code. One and a half decades later (count that in internet time...) we are still struggling with documents with mixed encoding.
That means every damn application has to provide a way to recode OEM to Ansi. AND deal with users who tries to do this conversion on files already converted.
The recode program from the GNU Project may be able to do the conversion for you. Take a look at the manual for it to see if it already has the support for the character sets that are troubling you. That doesn't change the fact that changing the encoding out from under people is a dirty trick.
In looking for Y2K bugs earlier this year I stumbled across a faulty C implementation of the Zeller algorithm, which looks plausible and works fine for days late in any century, but breaks starting in March early in the century.
I went looking as well, in part hoping to find either code or a description of the algorithm to find where the bug might be found. I haven't found either, but I did track down a page that uses Zeller's Algorithm to calculate the day of the week for you. I tested it for tomorrow and March 2nd. It seems to have already been fixed if it ever had a problem.
Leap years occur when the year is divisible by 4, except when the year is divisible by 100, unless the year is also divisible by *400* (not 1,000).
Your correction is right, but this is a large part of the problem. There are quite a few people who think they know the correct rules. Here's a link to use for future reference. We need to be aware of the limits of our knowledge. If you aren't sure, look it up.
I don't mean to point the finger at anyone here on Slashdot. Over the years I have seen not just code embodying incorrect information, but in many cases the design documents that originated that incorrect information. I wonder if there aren't a lot of people out there who believe that sticking a computer into a system makes it all new and means that we are writing all of the rules from scratch. In many cases that would be wonderful, but it just isn't the case. We're stuck with leap years, seven day weeks that don't evenly divide years, natural languages that refuse to share a single common alphabet and icy roads in the winter.
I remember watching a number programs displaying the date 29 FEB 1990 to me a decade ago. That wasn't a leap year. Fortunately for the vendor, who responded quite quickly, the dates were stored internally in Julian format and converted for display, so no data was corrupted. The bug was introduced during some maintenance on some old software. I suspect that they were among the first to start Y2K fixes.
This particular problem arose from the fact that far few programmers completely understand the leap year rules, and the code that does the calculations is rarely touched, usually for some reason not directly related to leap year calculations, such as Y2K remediation. It is all wound up in the reasons why software maintenance gets expensive in nearly every case. The specs were either never written down to the level of individual functions, or they are out-of-date. Comments are incomplete or misleading. There's no automated regression tests to give assurance that nothing has been broken.
Why should we care about this? This particular instance was probably due either to Y2K work or a latent bug from some programmer who over-applied the century portion of the leap year rules. Once it gets fixed, this code won't need to be touched for ages. First of all, Y2K was just a single instance of a justification for going through bodies of code making huge numbers of small changes. Porting is another one. And any programmer with a bit of experience can name at least one or two others.
Earlier, I provided a link to the description of the Extreme Programming practice of automated unit tests. Doing that might not have caught these bugs before they got loose. Testing generally only catches the bugs you know to look for, and the tests can be wrong too. But I'm lobbying here to try to overcome the natural resistance many programmers feel toward testing. I know I'd certainly rather be writing code. The reason I've started automating it is because I have no such aversion to building tools to take that dull task away from me. Larry Wall pointed out that laziness is a virtue for programmers. Use it.
Since I was one of the first in to read the article, I went to the GNU Cash site and grabbed the text of the announcement. Here's the feature list:
Now for the details. This release signifies the switch from Motif to Gnome as our GUI toolkit. The build process should also be a lot easier.
Key Features:
Gnome/Gtk based
Canvas based register
New reporting engine based on scheme
Lots of options are now configurable
Ability to reparent accounts
A really slick/polished interface
Their ftp server is already having some trouble keeping up. Somebody, please mirror them quick or post a list of known mirror sites. They don't have a list on their site from what I could find.
So let's bypass all the people who have usability opinions just because they have opinions
Well, that rules out a substantial portion of the people here, me included. Will there be a Jon Katz interview at some point, dedicated to people to have opinions just because they have opinions. (It is a matter of opinion whether I am referring to Jon or his detractors.)
And for people who didn't catch the implied tag at the beginning:
Current copyright law says that if a book goes out of print, the author can reclaim the copyright, and take it to another publisher. With these newer forms of publishing, all a corporate publisher has to do is sell one copy occasionally -- printed on demand -- for the book to be legally be considered not "out of print" indefinitely.
Yes, this is a thorny issue, and I hadn't thought about that implication. To a certain extent the authors who are really in demand are likely to be able to exert some control. New authors still face the issue that they are dealing with large corporations who don't need them, individually, as much as the authors need publishers. Electronic publishing may actually change this. It lowers the cost of publishing a work. The monetary compensation to the author may turn out lower is some cases, but if it can get a new author's work into the hands of readers when he would not otherwise have had that chance, it is probably worth it. There are already a number of cases of people whose work, self-published on the web, has shown up in print.
(Somewhat related side note: I think that the Sonny Bono extensions to the period of time a copyright is issued for are wrong, BTW. And that corporations shouldn't be able to pass around (sell) their collection of copyrights like stocks unless the original contributors are somehow compensated, but that is even further off-topic).
This will certainly increase the time it takes for classic works to become available online. And there will be a period for most of them, when they aren't in print in any meaningful sense, but are not in the public domain. Regrettably, that has the effect of reducing the exposure of many worthwhile older works without increasing the revenue to anyone. If they aren't getting sold, nobody makes money.
Is command line vs. GUI a false dichotomy?
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Middle Media
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· Score: 3
Kind of like the zealous group of people who refuse to go from console based operating systems from the 60's (or 70's?) and leap into todays pool of graphical user interfaces?
As much as this sounds like flamebait, I'm asking a serious question. Are we Linux users trying to initiate change in todays markets and practices, or are we just clinging to old technology with few new drivers?
Certainly, this discussion will generate some heat, but I wouldn't call it flamebait. I don't believe that CLIs and GUIs are mutually exclusive. It is certainly possible to have systems without one or the other, but it isn't necessary. The tension between the proponents of each side come from a firm insistence that their own preferrence not be abandoned. So let's examine the merits of each and consider the implications for the print vs. electronic media issue. I think that the way I am going to twist this analogy will be counterintuitive at first, but it may shed some light.
CLIs are not inherently more flexible than GUIs. There is no reason that they necessarily must have a richer set of options than a GUI can provide. However, that is often the case. Don't flame me if your favorite GUI is easily as flexible as my favorite CLI. I not only concede that it is possible, but that it has been done. The biggest hurdle in presenting a flexible GUI is to not sacrifice the benefits that GUIs provide. The biggest one is that GUIs allow users to leverage the power of recognition over the burden of remembering.
Okay, with that out of the way, what are the benefits of a CLI interface? I'm going to talk about the Unix shell functionality as one of th best examples of a truly rich set. Primarily, a CLI puts a rich set of functionality into a form simple, flexible commands and a mechanism for combining them. The power of the Unix/Linux shell model is the ability to combine commands in useful ways, and also to script those combinations. Once scripted, they essentially become powerful new commands. I haven't seen a GUI that privdes this mechanism to script repeated operations and build up complex combinations with conditional logic. Is there one?
Now, how does this related to print versus electronic media. I would say that the scripting capability is related to the direct accessibility of electronic texts to be manipulated in various forms. E-text can be cut and pasted for quoting. I personally find it easier to translate because I can search through it for similar phrases that I have translated elsewhere. It can be transmitted faster and more flexibly than a printed book.
Printed formats are analogous to a GUI. They are designed around a set of intuitive operations. It is obvious how to determine your position in the text, how to move forward and backward, etc. They are easy to look at and read. They hide the details of how graphics were included.
Yes, I turned the analogy on its head and equated the new, electronic text, with the old, command line interfaces, and vice versa (print and GUIs). Does this possibly hint at who I think falls most naturally on each side of the two debates? I think that those of us who are used to taking control of our computers through a CLI, who are so used to data being a live thing and building filters to put it in whatever form we want, are also likely to want our text that way. I could be wrong, but if I have erred, I suspect it is in not including some people who use GUIs as flexibly. I think the reasons for choosing electronic over printed text are still present in the analogy.
I am a frequent violator of the admonition to not start new threads, but to reply to old ones. The reason is that I hate to just say, "Me too." In this case, I really want to. Foogle has brought up the valid point that people are slow to change. The same transition happened between LPs and CDs. There was an entrenched market. There was an investment in the old technology. That kept the old medium alive and widely available for longer.
Today, you can still find new LPs, but not for ever album. Their market is mostly audiophiles who can hear and understand the difference. It is a limited market. CDs have advantages in size and durability (at least short term durability). There are also people who never replaced their turntables with CD players because they had ceased to embrace change (the grandma market, although that is a stereotype).
The same thing is happening with print media. There are people who will take electronic over print text whenever they have the choice. All it would take to push me into that camp is the right technology for reading the text. I'd want a full general purpose computer, running Linux, FreeBSD or Hurd with connectivity to my desktop machine. But I might settle for electronic text that is portable between a lesser handheld machine and a desktop with those capabilities. However, there continues to exist a market for print text. Even if it is losing market share as a percentage, the growth in the market for text in all forms may compensate for that (I haven't seen the numbers).
Eventually, when there is an established model for selling electronic text to a mass market, and a large enough portion of the market will buy them some texts will cease to be sold in printed form, at least initially. That will be the steep portion of the curve of the decline of the Old Media. That will be the one period in which it will be suicide to be in the Old Media business exclusively. I wish I knew how far off the start of that stage of the decline is. We might already be there for all I know, but I doubt it.
VA Linux aquired by Klingons, Rob bows down to new alien masters Posted by emmett on Sunday February 27, @10:32AM from the star-shit-enterprise dept VA Linux Systems, owner of Andover.net, owner of Slashdot.org, owner of Rob's ass, was officially aquired by the Klingon Empire earlier this morning. The Klingons, who have recently taken over Kellogs, GM, and Disney, are looking forward to absorbing more major corporations in the near future. The US Government is discussing investigating the Klingons for holding a monopoly over "every aspect of our lives", to which the Klingons responded, "Puny human scum! I will crush you like a bug and feast upon your steaming entrails." Finally, some competition for Microsoft!
A related story just in. The Slashcode 1.0 tarball has just been announced. The press release in its entirety read, "It's a good day to die." There has already been considerable speculation on the meaning of the announcement, but no one at Slashdot could be reached for comment.
The true power of this "information revolution" is not for the consumer, but for the worker. Why do you need a manager if you can easily communicate with other workers and coordinate your tasks. Aren't you the one writing the code? Then who's a more competent judge of your progress, you and your peers, or some 50 year old MBA in dacron socks? I think the answer is obvious.
For those who aren't entirely convinced by the rather brief argument above, I suggest reading the Cluetrain Manifesto. Whether or not you agree with it, it is economic suicide not to at least consider the points that it brings up. You either need to accept them and live by them, or refute them intelligently and thoroughly.
It not only goes into the fact that the net is making it possible for employees to talk with one another as never before, but customers as well. The only real secrets are the ones that are kept by a single person, or that no one feels are worth posting to the net. If it is interesting, and known, it can show up online.
Yes, but compare it to Unicode, that wastes *nine* bits when used by all right-thinking people of the world.
<sarcasm> Oh yeah, all right thinking people speak languages that can be represented by the letters available in ASCII. Yes, Unicode was invented for all the wrong thinking people who insist on using those funny looking letters with lines or dots around them or arcane characters that no right thinking person can understand anyway. </sarcasm>
If you use the UTF-8 encoding and you restrict your text to the characters available in ASCII, the resulting text is ASCII. Besides, do you have any idea how hard it is to write the credits for a big free software project these days in anything other than Unicode without mangling somebody's name?
What you are calling "text format" some of us choose to call 7-bit ASCII. And 7-bit ASCII wastes approximately 1/8 of the storage channel with the redundant eight bit that's always zero.
Okay, you are right about that. I used ASCII as my example for three reasons. First, Slashdot is in English. Second, many if not most of the common character sets today are supersets of ASCII for compatibility. Finally, the primary but not sole input character set for TeX, which I mentioned, is ASCII.
As for wasted space, the amount of redundant information in every written language that I am aware of is very high. The actual information content of a single character is only a bit or two in context. That can be demonstrated with any good compression program. So, I would suggest that for saving space, either we all need to abandon our human languages for one with no redundancy (not a likely proposition) or compress everything we want to save and document the compression algorithm in uncompressed files, preferrably with source code.
I'm sorry, but "The Unix Philosophy" all boils down to trying to force all information metaphors to ultimately equate to an old crofty teletype.
Force all information to flow through a 'tty' and you've already filtered out most of the digital content people use in the present time.
I disagree about your premise, although your conclusion would follow from it. The idea is to have human readable streams of data that can be treated as if they are simply being set to a tty. HTML is an excellent example. With a browser, it is enormously powerful and useful. Yet at the core, it is a sequence of characters that I can type and read. I can edit it without special tools. Admittedly, those tools can make achieving just the look I want easier. They can speed my writing and make the results more reliable, but they aren't necessary.
This is something that is going to be more of a concern for those of us who conduct a significant portion of our lives online already. Ask yourselves, have you ever had a moment of unusual brilliance in which you posted something to Slashdot or Usenet which was truly worth saving? Can you find it now?
Personally, I encountered the issue of software obsolescence well over a decade ago. I migrated my resume to TeX because it had already been through four other formats and I no longer had access to the tools to read them. I picked TeX because I firmly believed that a tool that I had the source for was likely to continue to be useful to me for a longer period. And the source for the document is ASCII text, which I was able to convert to HTML a couple of years ago with little trouble. I will not rely on the future availability of any tool that I have no control over.
This is one of the reasons that The Unix Philosophy, a fine book, recommends text formats for data. You can manipulate it with a wide variety of tools including text editors. It is unlikely that we will abandon those completely in our lifetimes. It also suggests, if memory serves, keeping notes online in text form. They are more portable and more accessible that way.
One worthwhile source of literature preserved as plain text files is Project Gutenburg. It is probably also the oldest such project around. It is to text in some senses what Free Software is to code. Although they aren't doing collaborative authoring projects, they are collaborating on getting old books whose copyrights have expired into electronic form. If you haven't ever visited their site, take a look.
And if Slashdot ever tackles that "slow under load" problem, that'll really be news!:)
I consider degraded performance under a heavy load to be quite preferrable to failure under that load. I've seen systems that do both. Hey, I've worked on a couple of systems that have gracefully degraded under loads well outside their specs, so I'm biased. Honestly, while Slashdot being slow is noticable, I have not seen it reach the point of being unusable. I do hope the guys can throw some additional hardware at the problem, but for now I'll muddle through.
Software is supposed to HELP you. vi (which is basically what you are looking for) is not friendly, or smart enough for most people. Word is.
Word has an annoying habit of capitalizing the first word in a sentence for me. That's fine, unless the word is the name of a command that is not capitalized. At least when it flags fsck as a spelling error, it is polite enough not to suggest an alterative spelling. But, more to the point for me is the issue of support for languages for which the version I got doesn't already have support. Nearly every word is flagged as a typo.
I didn't claim that my needs are those of the majority of Microsoft customers. They clearly aren't. I was just explaining why certain "features" bother me.
Okay, which part of "It is not unusual for me to be typing in hand-written notes for a coworker's review of my design documents" failed to indicate that I am looking at the hand-written notes while typing? If I'm not looking at the keyboard while I'm typing, the term for what I'm doing is touch-typing.
When their server couldn't talk to be, it gave me the following list of mirror sites. Typos introduced into the list in converting it to HTML are mostly my fault. However, Slashdot is fighting me on the lists a little bit, introducing spaces in my end tags.
There have been some comments here about the lack of coverage of some of the options here, for example Wordperfect and FrameMaker. One of the keys to the success of open source projects has been continuous improvement. Another has been suggestions from a large community of users. So, I would like to propose that while a review does benefit from the consistency that a single writer can bring to it, there is no reason why it can't go on a web site to be updated periodically. The updates can include reviews of other word processors that weren't covered in the first cut and consideration of features that weren't discussed.
As far as features that I would like to see listed in the table:
Native format (I like standard formats)
Formats for import or export
Languages supported and whether localization into other languages can be done by a user (such as translating menus and messages and adding a spell checker dictionary)
I type at least as much as many of my friends and coworkers who have experienced wrist pain, yet I remain pain free. I have given some consideration to why this might be the case, and I have come up with several differences between my style and theirs. Some of these probably aren't relevant. Perhaps none of them are. For what it is worth, here's my list:
I am a heavy Emacs user. Because of that, I use a huge variety of different keystrokes, and I also use the mouse less than most people. Mice are believed to be a big contributor to repetative motion injuries.
I use several different keyboards. The keyboard on my laptop is different from the docking station. Neither of those is like the ergo keyboard I use at home. Thus, my typing positions vary.
I write in two different human languages and a variety of programming languages. The patterns of characters vary between them and so do my typing patterns.
My positions vary. Sometimes to keyboard is in my lap, sometimes it is on the desk in front of me.
I learned to play the piano at an early age. While I am not scrupulous about keeping my wrists up, I usually do. Piano teachers knew about wrist pain long before the computing world discovered it.
If you see a pattern of varied positions and patterns of use, that is exactly what I am driving at. It is the limited range of motions that are repeated so often which are believed to be the cause of carpal tunnel and related injuries. And the therapy that is recommended for the early stages, and to prevent it, is exercising the hands and wrists through a range of motions that are unrelated to typing and mouse-clicking. Your keyboard or pointing device may only be a part of the problem.
Fallows pointed out the customers that MS focuses on:
What these two big categories have in common is that individuals are not the significant customers.
This distinction is often characterized as the difference between users and choosers. First, there is nothing wrong with Microsoft's strategy. It is not even unique. Think about how many products there are that are used by children and marketted to their parents. If the children made the purchases, I guarantee that some types of children's clothing would disappear from the market forever, along with a number of foods.
But, I've heard the comment a number of times from Linux users. They say that they have no objection to some of Microsoft's applications. The problem they have is that Windows is not a programmer's environment. It doesn't have a powerful, scriptable shell. It doesn't have a text editor with powerful enough programming capabilities that every routine editing task potentially can be automated. My own objection is that I must interact with the GUI even when executing frequent routine tasks that should be scripted and forgotten.
The perception among open source advocates is that Microsoft doesn't care and doesn't even feel it has to care. From Fallows' observation, that is literally true, and not because Microsoft has marginalized us out of any malice. They simply never lose sight of who is really buying their products. Any competitor who can threaten Microsoft's hold on that market segment is a true threat to them. Anyone who can't isn't.
There is even a person who created the "It looks like you're writing a letter" auto-annoyance feature in Word. I had to sign a separate confidentiality clause promising not to name him.
I have a rule at home. The only people who are allowed to feel helpful without being helpful are children too young to understand the distinction. It is a good rule for judging features in software. Usually when I apply this rule it is to features that make a list of bullets in a glossy ad or review and are never used. But this particular feature is a pet peave of mine. Useless features that clutter the menu and are never touched can be ignored. But software that automatically guesses what I want is a problem.
I'm perhaps a somewhat unusual programmer. I am a competent, although not blindingly fast, touch-typist. It is not unusual for me to be typing in hand-written notes for a coworker's review of my design documents. When I am doing that, I am certainly not looking at the monitor continuously. And I don't want the software to ever react in an unexpected way to my keystrokes. I don't want dialog boxes popping up and capturing keystrokes. I don't want names of programs corrected to a similarly spelled word.
Don't get me wrong. I am sure that these features please someone. I can't imagine that the programmer(s) who implemented them are completely unique. But the default setting for them should be off. There's nothing wrong with having a dialog box pop up the first time you run a program asking if you'd like to have the program look over your shoulder and try to guess what you really want. But it should allow you to say no once and get out of the way.
Slashdot Mirror
That surprised me because as far as I know the information on the page I provided the link to is correct. So I searched Encyclopedia Brittanica's web site and found this page, which say, among other things:
My interpretation of that is that the Gregorian calendar is not completely accurate, and that a 4 millenium correction would be needed to bring it in line with the day length that we have been able to measure with modern equipment. Thus, 4000 will be a leap year on the Gregorian calendar, but shouldn't be. For what it's worth, the Emacs calendar code written by a couple of guys who have actually researched a variety of calendars says that 4000 is a leap year.
When I saw the review pop up, I questioned (to myself) its relevance. Yes, it is only marginal. And I dug a little deeper about why I was questioning it at all. I certainly skip enough articles that don't interest me which are clearly within the charter of Slashdot. The bottom line is that I am feeling lousy today. I'm hungry for any interesting news and I'm hoping that the next Slashdot story will be it. I wasn't disappointed because it was a movie review, or because it was by Jon Katz. I rarely agreee with him completely, but his articles generate some good discussions here. I was disappointed because I want some Nerd News. Well it isn't Slashdot's fault and it isn't Jon's fault that this story came up first.
There is a fine line that the guys at Slashdot are walking. It would be easy enough to expand Slashdot to report every open source software announcement, every new SF movie, every cool piece of new hardware, etc. Instead of a manageable number of stories that everyone can scan any time they're here, we would start to get people missing stories, people filtering heavily and so forth. Slashdot would die from lack of any definition. The community here, contentious as it is, would fragment.
I have a copy of the Hacker Test sitting in my briefcase. Among the many questions, it asks:
When was the last time you considered reading all of Usenet? It is huge, largely unmoderated, and ill-defined. I still enjoy some newsgroups occasionally, but it has lost most of the feeling that a newsgroup was a community with some common interests. Achieving that requires some boundaries. There are some things that are simply off-topic. But is requires some acceptance of diversity in the group. And it requires a small enough body of shared information that we are all exposed to a significant portion of it. We are creating, on an ongoing basis, a community here. We are creating the shared experience.
Questioning the boundaries of the group comes with the territory. If this article was ovr the boundaries, by consensus, or by reflection after the fact by the Slashdot Gods, so be it. They can step back from the edge. If this is part of what Slashdot is and will be, I can accept that it is not so far from the other interests that draw me here that it will undermine the benefits I get from what I read here.
CNBC reported on the air just a few minutes ago that ATMs were shut down for a while in Japan because of a leap day bug. They also said that although "officials were on the alert" (I didn't write te copy for them) no similar bugs had surfaced in the US.
The recode program from the GNU Project may be able to do the conversion for you. Take a look at the manual for it to see if it already has the support for the character sets that are troubling you. That doesn't change the fact that changing the encoding out from under people is a dirty trick.
I went looking as well, in part hoping to find either code or a description of the algorithm to find where the bug might be found. I haven't found either, but I did track down a page that uses Zeller's Algorithm to calculate the day of the week for you. I tested it for tomorrow and March 2nd. It seems to have already been fixed if it ever had a problem.
Your correction is right, but this is a large part of the problem. There are quite a few people who think they know the correct rules. Here's a link to use for future reference. We need to be aware of the limits of our knowledge. If you aren't sure, look it up.
I don't mean to point the finger at anyone here on Slashdot. Over the years I have seen not just code embodying incorrect information, but in many cases the design documents that originated that incorrect information. I wonder if there aren't a lot of people out there who believe that sticking a computer into a system makes it all new and means that we are writing all of the rules from scratch. In many cases that would be wonderful, but it just isn't the case. We're stuck with leap years, seven day weeks that don't evenly divide years, natural languages that refuse to share a single common alphabet and icy roads in the winter.
I remember watching a number programs displaying the date 29 FEB 1990 to me a decade ago. That wasn't a leap year. Fortunately for the vendor, who responded quite quickly, the dates were stored internally in Julian format and converted for display, so no data was corrupted. The bug was introduced during some maintenance on some old software. I suspect that they were among the first to start Y2K fixes.
This particular problem arose from the fact that far few programmers completely understand the leap year rules, and the code that does the calculations is rarely touched, usually for some reason not directly related to leap year calculations, such as Y2K remediation. It is all wound up in the reasons why software maintenance gets expensive in nearly every case. The specs were either never written down to the level of individual functions, or they are out-of-date. Comments are incomplete or misleading. There's no automated regression tests to give assurance that nothing has been broken.
Why should we care about this? This particular instance was probably due either to Y2K work or a latent bug from some programmer who over-applied the century portion of the leap year rules. Once it gets fixed, this code won't need to be touched for ages. First of all, Y2K was just a single instance of a justification for going through bodies of code making huge numbers of small changes. Porting is another one. And any programmer with a bit of experience can name at least one or two others.
Earlier, I provided a link to the description of the Extreme Programming practice of automated unit tests. Doing that might not have caught these bugs before they got loose. Testing generally only catches the bugs you know to look for, and the tests can be wrong too. But I'm lobbying here to try to overcome the natural resistance many programmers feel toward testing. I know I'd certainly rather be writing code. The reason I've started automating it is because I have no such aversion to building tools to take that dull task away from me. Larry Wall pointed out that laziness is a virtue for programmers. Use it.
Their ftp server is already having some trouble keeping up. Somebody, please mirror them quick or post a list of known mirror sites. They don't have a list on their site from what I could find.
Well, that rules out a substantial portion of the people here, me included. Will there be a Jon Katz interview at some point, dedicated to people to have opinions just because they have opinions. (It is a matter of opinion whether I am referring to Jon or his detractors.)
And for people who didn't catch the implied tag at the beginning:
</irony>
Yes, this is a thorny issue, and I hadn't thought about that implication. To a certain extent the authors who are really in demand are likely to be able to exert some control. New authors still face the issue that they are dealing with large corporations who don't need them, individually, as much as the authors need publishers. Electronic publishing may actually change this. It lowers the cost of publishing a work. The monetary compensation to the author may turn out lower is some cases, but if it can get a new author's work into the hands of readers when he would not otherwise have had that chance, it is probably worth it. There are already a number of cases of people whose work, self-published on the web, has shown up in print.
This will certainly increase the time it takes for classic works to become available online. And there will be a period for most of them, when they aren't in print in any meaningful sense, but are not in the public domain. Regrettably, that has the effect of reducing the exposure of many worthwhile older works without increasing the revenue to anyone. If they aren't getting sold, nobody makes money.
Certainly, this discussion will generate some heat, but I wouldn't call it flamebait. I don't believe that CLIs and GUIs are mutually exclusive. It is certainly possible to have systems without one or the other, but it isn't necessary. The tension between the proponents of each side come from a firm insistence that their own preferrence not be abandoned. So let's examine the merits of each and consider the implications for the print vs. electronic media issue. I think that the way I am going to twist this analogy will be counterintuitive at first, but it may shed some light.
CLIs are not inherently more flexible than GUIs. There is no reason that they necessarily must have a richer set of options than a GUI can provide. However, that is often the case. Don't flame me if your favorite GUI is easily as flexible as my favorite CLI. I not only concede that it is possible, but that it has been done. The biggest hurdle in presenting a flexible GUI is to not sacrifice the benefits that GUIs provide. The biggest one is that GUIs allow users to leverage the power of recognition over the burden of remembering.
Okay, with that out of the way, what are the benefits of a CLI interface? I'm going to talk about the Unix shell functionality as one of th best examples of a truly rich set. Primarily, a CLI puts a rich set of functionality into a form simple, flexible commands and a mechanism for combining them. The power of the Unix/Linux shell model is the ability to combine commands in useful ways, and also to script those combinations. Once scripted, they essentially become powerful new commands. I haven't seen a GUI that privdes this mechanism to script repeated operations and build up complex combinations with conditional logic. Is there one?
Now, how does this related to print versus electronic media. I would say that the scripting capability is related to the direct accessibility of electronic texts to be manipulated in various forms. E-text can be cut and pasted for quoting. I personally find it easier to translate because I can search through it for similar phrases that I have translated elsewhere. It can be transmitted faster and more flexibly than a printed book.
Printed formats are analogous to a GUI. They are designed around a set of intuitive operations. It is obvious how to determine your position in the text, how to move forward and backward, etc. They are easy to look at and read. They hide the details of how graphics were included.
Yes, I turned the analogy on its head and equated the new, electronic text, with the old, command line interfaces, and vice versa (print and GUIs). Does this possibly hint at who I think falls most naturally on each side of the two debates? I think that those of us who are used to taking control of our computers through a CLI, who are so used to data being a live thing and building filters to put it in whatever form we want, are also likely to want our text that way. I could be wrong, but if I have erred, I suspect it is in not including some people who use GUIs as flexibly. I think the reasons for choosing electronic over printed text are still present in the analogy.
I am a frequent violator of the admonition to not start new threads, but to reply to old ones. The reason is that I hate to just say, "Me too." In this case, I really want to. Foogle has brought up the valid point that people are slow to change. The same transition happened between LPs and CDs. There was an entrenched market. There was an investment in the old technology. That kept the old medium alive and widely available for longer.
Today, you can still find new LPs, but not for ever album. Their market is mostly audiophiles who can hear and understand the difference. It is a limited market. CDs have advantages in size and durability (at least short term durability). There are also people who never replaced their turntables with CD players because they had ceased to embrace change (the grandma market, although that is a stereotype).
The same thing is happening with print media. There are people who will take electronic over print text whenever they have the choice. All it would take to push me into that camp is the right technology for reading the text. I'd want a full general purpose computer, running Linux, FreeBSD or Hurd with connectivity to my desktop machine. But I might settle for electronic text that is portable between a lesser handheld machine and a desktop with those capabilities. However, there continues to exist a market for print text. Even if it is losing market share as a percentage, the growth in the market for text in all forms may compensate for that (I haven't seen the numbers).
Eventually, when there is an established model for selling electronic text to a mass market, and a large enough portion of the market will buy them some texts will cease to be sold in printed form, at least initially. That will be the steep portion of the curve of the decline of the Old Media. That will be the one period in which it will be suicide to be in the Old Media business exclusively. I wish I knew how far off the start of that stage of the decline is. We might already be there for all I know, but I doubt it.
A related story just in. The Slashcode 1.0 tarball has just been announced. The press release in its entirety read, "It's a good day to die." There has already been considerable speculation on the meaning of the announcement, but no one at Slashdot could be reached for comment.
For those who aren't entirely convinced by the rather brief argument above, I suggest reading the Cluetrain Manifesto. Whether or not you agree with it, it is economic suicide not to at least consider the points that it brings up. You either need to accept them and live by them, or refute them intelligently and thoroughly.
It not only goes into the fact that the net is making it possible for employees to talk with one another as never before, but customers as well. The only real secrets are the ones that are kept by a single person, or that no one feels are worth posting to the net. If it is interesting, and known, it can show up online.
<sarcasm>
Oh yeah, all right thinking people speak languages that can be represented by the letters available in ASCII. Yes, Unicode was invented for all the wrong thinking people who insist on using those funny looking letters with lines or dots around them or arcane characters that no right thinking person can understand anyway.
</sarcasm>
If you use the UTF-8 encoding and you restrict your text to the characters available in ASCII, the resulting text is ASCII. Besides, do you have any idea how hard it is to write the credits for a big free software project these days in anything other than Unicode without mangling somebody's name?
Okay, you are right about that. I used ASCII as my example for three reasons. First, Slashdot is in English. Second, many if not most of the common character sets today are supersets of ASCII for compatibility. Finally, the primary but not sole input character set for TeX, which I mentioned, is ASCII.
As for wasted space, the amount of redundant information in every written language that I am aware of is very high. The actual information content of a single character is only a bit or two in context. That can be demonstrated with any good compression program. So, I would suggest that for saving space, either we all need to abandon our human languages for one with no redundancy (not a likely proposition) or compress everything we want to save and document the compression algorithm in uncompressed files, preferrably with source code.
I disagree about your premise, although your conclusion would follow from it. The idea is to have human readable streams of data that can be treated as if they are simply being set to a tty. HTML is an excellent example. With a browser, it is enormously powerful and useful. Yet at the core, it is a sequence of characters that I can type and read. I can edit it without special tools. Admittedly, those tools can make achieving just the look I want easier. They can speed my writing and make the results more reliable, but they aren't necessary.
This is something that is going to be more of a concern for those of us who conduct a significant portion of our lives online already. Ask yourselves, have you ever had a moment of unusual brilliance in which you posted something to Slashdot or Usenet which was truly worth saving? Can you find it now?
Personally, I encountered the issue of software obsolescence well over a decade ago. I migrated my resume to TeX because it had already been through four other formats and I no longer had access to the tools to read them. I picked TeX because I firmly believed that a tool that I had the source for was likely to continue to be useful to me for a longer period. And the source for the document is ASCII text, which I was able to convert to HTML a couple of years ago with little trouble. I will not rely on the future availability of any tool that I have no control over.
This is one of the reasons that The Unix Philosophy, a fine book, recommends text formats for data. You can manipulate it with a wide variety of tools including text editors. It is unlikely that we will abandon those completely in our lifetimes. It also suggests, if memory serves, keeping notes online in text form. They are more portable and more accessible that way.
One worthwhile source of literature preserved as plain text files is Project Gutenburg. It is probably also the oldest such project around. It is to text in some senses what Free Software is to code. Although they aren't doing collaborative authoring projects, they are collaborating on getting old books whose copyrights have expired into electronic form. If you haven't ever visited their site, take a look.
And if Slashdot ever tackles that "slow under load" problem, that'll really be news! :)
I consider degraded performance under a heavy load to be quite preferrable to failure under that load. I've seen systems that do both. Hey, I've worked on a couple of systems that have gracefully degraded under loads well outside their specs, so I'm biased. Honestly, while Slashdot being slow is noticable, I have not seen it reach the point of being unusable. I do hope the guys can throw some additional hardware at the problem, but for now I'll muddle through.
Software is supposed to HELP you. vi (which is basically what you are looking for) is not friendly, or smart enough for most people. Word is.
Word has an annoying habit of capitalizing the first word in a sentence for me. That's fine, unless the word is the name of a command that is not capitalized. At least when it flags fsck as a spelling error, it is polite enough not to suggest an alterative spelling. But, more to the point for me is the issue of support for languages for which the version I got doesn't already have support. Nearly every word is flagged as a typo.
I didn't claim that my needs are those of the majority of Microsoft customers. They clearly aren't. I was just explaining why certain "features" bother me.
Okay, which part of "It is not unusual for me to be typing in hand-written notes for a coworker's review of my design documents" failed to indicate that I am looking at the hand-written notes while typing? If I'm not looking at the keyboard while I'm typing, the term for what I'm doing is touch-typing.
US
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/mirrors/xfree86
Europe
As far as features that I would like to see listed in the table:
If you see a pattern of varied positions and patterns of use, that is exactly what I am driving at. It is the limited range of motions that are repeated so often which are believed to be the cause of carpal tunnel and related injuries. And the therapy that is recommended for the early stages, and to prevent it, is exercising the hands and wrists through a range of motions that are unrelated to typing and mouse-clicking. Your keyboard or pointing device may only be a part of the problem.
Fallows pointed out the customers that MS focuses on:
What these two big categories have in common is that individuals are not the significant customers.
This distinction is often characterized as the difference between users and choosers. First, there is nothing wrong with Microsoft's strategy. It is not even unique. Think about how many products there are that are used by children and marketted to their parents. If the children made the purchases, I guarantee that some types of children's clothing would disappear from the market forever, along with a number of foods.
But, I've heard the comment a number of times from Linux users. They say that they have no objection to some of Microsoft's applications. The problem they have is that Windows is not a programmer's environment. It doesn't have a powerful, scriptable shell. It doesn't have a text editor with powerful enough programming capabilities that every routine editing task potentially can be automated. My own objection is that I must interact with the GUI even when executing frequent routine tasks that should be scripted and forgotten.
The perception among open source advocates is that Microsoft doesn't care and doesn't even feel it has to care. From Fallows' observation, that is literally true, and not because Microsoft has marginalized us out of any malice. They simply never lose sight of who is really buying their products. Any competitor who can threaten Microsoft's hold on that market segment is a true threat to them. Anyone who can't isn't.
Fallows said in his article:
There is even a person who created the "It looks like you're writing a letter" auto-annoyance feature in Word. I had to sign a separate confidentiality clause promising not to name him.
I have a rule at home. The only people who are allowed to feel helpful without being helpful are children too young to understand the distinction. It is a good rule for judging features in software. Usually when I apply this rule it is to features that make a list of bullets in a glossy ad or review and are never used. But this particular feature is a pet peave of mine. Useless features that clutter the menu and are never touched can be ignored. But software that automatically guesses what I want is a problem.
I'm perhaps a somewhat unusual programmer. I am a competent, although not blindingly fast, touch-typist. It is not unusual for me to be typing in hand-written notes for a coworker's review of my design documents. When I am doing that, I am certainly not looking at the monitor continuously. And I don't want the software to ever react in an unexpected way to my keystrokes. I don't want dialog boxes popping up and capturing keystrokes. I don't want names of programs corrected to a similarly spelled word.
Don't get me wrong. I am sure that these features please someone. I can't imagine that the programmer(s) who implemented them are completely unique. But the default setting for them should be off. There's nothing wrong with having a dialog box pop up the first time you run a program asking if you'd like to have the program look over your shoulder and try to guess what you really want. But it should allow you to say no once and get out of the way.