I don't see the advantages to standardizing these languages. One of the things that makes them useful is that they are designed to perform a smallish set of tasks efficiently and with little effort for the programmer. Standardizing them seems like it would move them all away from their problem domains making them less useful.
You have to admit, no matter how much you like Linux, that both windows and mac have done a much better job with their installers. I can whip up an installer in a few minutes on windows that I am confident will work on everyone's machine, but this is unfortunately not true in Linux.
From skimming the language spec I saw a couple cool features. One is support for multiple return values, which I love. I also liked the fobid clause, which throws an unchecked exception on certain conditions. Forbid, along with several other run-time checks in the language spec. will give fortress developers an easier time debugging code. The downside to this language however is that it tries to imitate java. Constantly the language spec compares fortress to java. I don't think Java is a bad language, however we only need one language. It would have been better if Fortress had tried to be different than Java, and explore problem domains that Java is weak in solving.
I try to "convert" my friends to open-source projects because I want them to be using the best and most secure software. However I don't really care about advertising to the masses.
How do his kids remember their passwords, especially since i assume they are random and are changed weekly? I assume they don't write them down. Why doesn't he just give his kids limited accounts and let them have easy passwords, that way even if they are broken into they can't do much damage.
The last word in documenting your code is doxygen. Especially the @author tag so you know who to yell at. I find that keeping individual functions short and then documenting what each one is supposed to do / take as parameters / return is better than comments within large blocks of code. What I hate though are large blocks of commented code. I guess sometimes the developers is too timid to remove old code, but seeing them always makes me wonder if the new code really works, and if so why is the old code still there.
huh huh huh huh huh - hyperventilates.
Good thing I have the series on DVD to hold me until the movie. I didn't see Shepard Book in the preview. I hope we learn more of his back story.
In reality there is no way MS will open up the.doc format. Lock-in for office file formats and the office products are central to MS's revenue scheme. The way to beat them is not to beg for them to open up their standard, but to create a better open standard backed by the community, one that is not layered in junk like the.doc standard is (why would you need to embed a video in a text document?). Then this standard could be supported by as many open source, and maybe even commercial projects as possible. With enough momentum we might be able to pull an adobe and create a format that is able to coexist popularly with the.doc format. It would be wonderful if MS would play nice; they don't have too, but we don't have to play their game either.
I think this is the fault of the command not asking for confirmation. I mean Format C: will at least ask you if you are sure. It's not like you have to clear the root directory that often that this would be a pain.
BitKeeper, the proprietary source management tool used by Linus Torvalds and other Linux kernel hackers to apply patches to their versions of the kernel, is once again at the center of controversy. This time it looks as if the relationship between BitKeeper and the poster-child project for free software is going to come to an end as the result of irreconcilable differences. We spoke with the three primary figures involved in the dispute -- Larry McVoy, Linus Torvalds, and Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell -- to learn what happened and whether it could have been avoided.
Click Here
We asked Larry McVoy, BitKeeper's primary author, to tell us what happened to cause him to end the relationship by giving Torvalds and the Linux kernel developers using BitKeeper three months to move to another tool for their source code management. He explained:
Back on February 23 I learned from Linus that Tridge was reverse-engineering BK so that he could pull stuff out of BK trees without agreeing to the BK license. As you might expect, we were less than thrilled and began having talks with Linus, Tridge, and Stuart Cohen, the CEO of OSDL. These talks didn't go anywhere. Tridge believes strongly enough in free software that he thinks anyone using non-free software is living in sin.
Linus worked very hard to get Tridge to stop. He and I spent a significant amount of time on this issue and Linus understands my position very well He summarized it nicely:
Larry is perfectly fine with somebody writing a free replacement. He's told me so, and I believe him, because I actually do believe that he has a strong moral back-bone.
What Larry is _not_ fine with, is somebody writing a free replacement by just reverse-engineering what _he_ did.
Larry has a very clear moral standpoint: "You can compete with me, but you can't do so by riding on my coat-tails. Solve the problems on your own, and compete _honestly_. Don't compete by looking at my solution."
And that is what the BK license boils down to. It says: "Get off my coat-tails, you free-loader". And I can't really argue against that.
This position seemed to be lost on Tridge.
Concurrently we were working with OSDL's management. In this area I pulled in calmer heads than mine and our VP of sales got involved. He negotiates all of our enterprise level agreements, (his strength is finding common ground) so you can imagine he's a pretty reasonable guy. He was unsuccessful in getting anywhere with OSDL's CEO. Stuart's position was that this was not their problem and this is the sort of activity you expect in the open source world. We did get a verbal promise from OSDL that Tridge had discontinued his work and would not begin again as long as we were trying to work things out. We believed we had an uneasy truce, but it ends up Tridge was still working.
We ended up in a no-win situation. OSDL didn't appear to care and we couldn't trust what we were being told. With that we were fairly confident that Tridge was going to release his code. That was a problem for us for two reasons:
a) Corruption. BK is a complicated system, there are >10,000 replicas of the BK database holding Linux floating around. If a problem starts moving through those there is no way to fix them all by hand. This happened once before, a user tweaked the ChangeSet file, and it costs $35,000 plus a custom release to fix it.
If Tridge's tool is out there we are now supporting our code and his code. We couldn't do that.
b) IP loss. If we sat back and did nothing about Tridge then we are implicitly condoning reverse engineering.
Internally, we were looking at ways to best handle this. One option was to have two versions of BK, one that we gave away and another that was commercial only. This had been our course for some time and it wasn't working out. The difficulty with that solution is we couldn't just stop all work on the free version because of future compatibility issues. Trying to maintain compatibility between a free product and commercial version was grinding our
Although I don't like reality tv it doesn't bother me that it exists. Its not like I am exceptionally happy with the other kinds of tv out there. All I want is my battlestar galactica, and if some people out there like reality tv, more power to them. Dropping reality tv will not make good shows appear.
I agree with this (why did you get modded down i wonder?). I know that in my high school students who were destined to become good computer professionals had already begun to explore the technical world. Those students are the ones who would benefit from these classes, but by the time that they take them they will already have mastered the simple knowledge that this class will cover, and yes it will have to stay simple since not everyone will come into it being technically aware.
How many teachers do you think are going to hear about this and react as following: "hacker highshool? why would we want to teach our kids to be hackers (computer criminals)". Perhaps they could have called it something involving the word security or protection.
I am a testament to that. I have never bothered with understanding RSS, but live book marks are really great for me. For example I have slashdot's feed always open, which lets me see what it new in the news and go to it without any hastle. Combining a list of headlines in the same application that you will use to view them is brilliant.
Doesn't seem like many slashdot users are intersted in 2nd life, i bet because reading slashdot and EQ/WOW take up all their free time. Plus as a subscription service 2nd life doesn't seem to offer much in the way of "fun" (in my opinion). Anyways it seems hard to get people interested in developing for something they probably won't be able to enjoy, as only the winning team gets a free subsrciption. It seems more likely that any developers who could be doing this would find it much more rewarding to do Open Source work, after all they would get to use it after they were done.
You notice that all popular scripting languages are cross platform? Maybe, just maybe, that's why nobody wants to look at yours.
Yeah like VB that is waaay cross platform. Besides all projects start on one platform. If you care why dont you stop bitching and pitch in and help us port it.
1 Kb doesn't seem like a lot of music. 1 Mb/min is the usal rate for at least decent encodings. That means that 1Kb would play... 1/1024 min or approx.05 seconds. Ouch
I applaud you for supporting the language you love. I am not a Visual Basic programmer myself, but I know that it has a place in the world, a place that is not filled by a more complex and more formal language. There are things you wouldn't want to write in VB, true, but that doesn't make a language useless. Just like a more conventional scripting language VB allows the creation of tools at minimal programmer expense. Why code up an app from scratch in days when you can do it for a few hours in VB. Especially when the app is light weight or in-house VB can easily outshine other languages. While VB may be coming to an end of it's lifespan it will leave a hole in a programmer's tool box that will eventually need to be filled by something else, something not currently available.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see the advantages to standardizing these languages. One of the things that makes them useful is that they are designed to perform a smallish set of tasks efficiently and with little effort for the programmer. Standardizing them seems like it would move them all away from their problem domains making them less useful.
Stupid ad blcoker didn't seem to catch this ad, better go write the extension people.
(I know its free ware, but it is still a product placement I didn't need)
You have to admit, no matter how much you like Linux, that both windows and mac have done a much better job with their installers. I can whip up an installer in a few minutes on windows that I am confident will work on everyone's machine, but this is unfortunately not true in Linux.
From skimming the language spec I saw a couple cool features. One is support for multiple return values, which I love. I also liked the fobid clause, which throws an unchecked exception on certain conditions. Forbid, along with several other run-time checks in the language spec. will give fortress developers an easier time debugging code. The downside to this language however is that it tries to imitate java. Constantly the language spec compares fortress to java. I don't think Java is a bad language, however we only need one language. It would have been better if Fortress had tried to be different than Java, and explore problem domains that Java is weak in solving.
I try to "convert" my friends to open-source projects because I want them to be using the best and most secure software. However I don't really care about advertising to the masses.
How do his kids remember their passwords, especially since i assume they are random and are changed weekly? I assume they don't write them down. Why doesn't he just give his kids limited accounts and let them have easy passwords, that way even if they are broken into they can't do much damage.
The last word in documenting your code is doxygen. Especially the @author tag so you know who to yell at. I find that keeping individual functions short and then documenting what each one is supposed to do / take as parameters / return is better than comments within large blocks of code. What I hate though are large blocks of commented code. I guess sometimes the developers is too timid to remove old code, but seeing them always makes me wonder if the new code really works, and if so why is the old code still there.
huh huh huh huh huh - hyperventilates.
Good thing I have the series on DVD to hold me until the movie. I didn't see Shepard Book in the preview. I hope we learn more of his back story.
Mine too: http://lunarflight.europic.net/index.html Now if I could only get her into programming.
Does it come with Java 5?
In reality there is no way MS will open up the .doc format. Lock-in for office file formats and the office products are central to MS's revenue scheme. The way to beat them is not to beg for them to open up their standard, but to create a better open standard backed by the community, one that is not layered in junk like the .doc standard is (why would you need to embed a video in a text document?). Then this standard could be supported by as many open source, and maybe even commercial projects as possible. With enough momentum we might be able to pull an adobe and create a format that is able to coexist popularly with the .doc format. It would be wonderful if MS would play nice; they don't have too, but we don't have to play their game either.
I think this is the fault of the command not asking for confirmation. I mean Format C: will at least ask you if you are sure. It's not like you have to clear the root directory that often that this would be a pain.
BitKeeper, the proprietary source management tool used by Linus Torvalds and other Linux kernel hackers to apply patches to their versions of the kernel, is once again at the center of controversy. This time it looks as if the relationship between BitKeeper and the poster-child project for free software is going to come to an end as the result of irreconcilable differences. We spoke with the three primary figures involved in the dispute -- Larry McVoy, Linus Torvalds, and Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell -- to learn what happened and whether it could have been avoided. Click Here We asked Larry McVoy, BitKeeper's primary author, to tell us what happened to cause him to end the relationship by giving Torvalds and the Linux kernel developers using BitKeeper three months to move to another tool for their source code management. He explained: Back on February 23 I learned from Linus that Tridge was reverse-engineering BK so that he could pull stuff out of BK trees without agreeing to the BK license. As you might expect, we were less than thrilled and began having talks with Linus, Tridge, and Stuart Cohen, the CEO of OSDL. These talks didn't go anywhere. Tridge believes strongly enough in free software that he thinks anyone using non-free software is living in sin. Linus worked very hard to get Tridge to stop. He and I spent a significant amount of time on this issue and Linus understands my position very well He summarized it nicely: Larry is perfectly fine with somebody writing a free replacement. He's told me so, and I believe him, because I actually do believe that he has a strong moral back-bone. What Larry is _not_ fine with, is somebody writing a free replacement by just reverse-engineering what _he_ did. Larry has a very clear moral standpoint: "You can compete with me, but you can't do so by riding on my coat-tails. Solve the problems on your own, and compete _honestly_. Don't compete by looking at my solution." And that is what the BK license boils down to. It says: "Get off my coat-tails, you free-loader". And I can't really argue against that. This position seemed to be lost on Tridge. Concurrently we were working with OSDL's management. In this area I pulled in calmer heads than mine and our VP of sales got involved. He negotiates all of our enterprise level agreements, (his strength is finding common ground) so you can imagine he's a pretty reasonable guy. He was unsuccessful in getting anywhere with OSDL's CEO. Stuart's position was that this was not their problem and this is the sort of activity you expect in the open source world. We did get a verbal promise from OSDL that Tridge had discontinued his work and would not begin again as long as we were trying to work things out. We believed we had an uneasy truce, but it ends up Tridge was still working. We ended up in a no-win situation. OSDL didn't appear to care and we couldn't trust what we were being told. With that we were fairly confident that Tridge was going to release his code. That was a problem for us for two reasons: a) Corruption. BK is a complicated system, there are >10,000 replicas of the BK database holding Linux floating around. If a problem starts moving through those there is no way to fix them all by hand. This happened once before, a user tweaked the ChangeSet file, and it costs $35,000 plus a custom release to fix it. If Tridge's tool is out there we are now supporting our code and his code. We couldn't do that. b) IP loss. If we sat back and did nothing about Tridge then we are implicitly condoning reverse engineering. Internally, we were looking at ways to best handle this. One option was to have two versions of BK, one that we gave away and another that was commercial only. This had been our course for some time and it wasn't working out. The difficulty with that solution is we couldn't just stop all work on the free version because of future compatibility issues. Trying to maintain compatibility between a free product and commercial version was grinding our
Although I don't like reality tv it doesn't bother me that it exists. Its not like I am exceptionally happy with the other kinds of tv out there. All I want is my battlestar galactica, and if some people out there like reality tv, more power to them. Dropping reality tv will not make good shows appear.
I agree with this (why did you get modded down i wonder?). I know that in my high school students who were destined to become good computer professionals had already begun to explore the technical world. Those students are the ones who would benefit from these classes, but by the time that they take them they will already have mastered the simple knowledge that this class will cover, and yes it will have to stay simple since not everyone will come into it being technically aware.
How many teachers do you think are going to hear about this and react as following: "hacker highshool? why would we want to teach our kids to be hackers (computer criminals)". Perhaps they could have called it something involving the word security or protection.
I am a testament to that. I have never bothered with understanding RSS, but live book marks are really great for me. For example I have slashdot's feed always open, which lets me see what it new in the news and go to it without any hastle. Combining a list of headlines in the same application that you will use to view them is brilliant.
Doesn't seem like many slashdot users are intersted in 2nd life, i bet because reading slashdot and EQ/WOW take up all their free time. Plus as a subscription service 2nd life doesn't seem to offer much in the way of "fun" (in my opinion). Anyways it seems hard to get people interested in developing for something they probably won't be able to enjoy, as only the winning team gets a free subsrciption. It seems more likely that any developers who could be doing this would find it much more rewarding to do Open Source work, after all they would get to use it after they were done.
Take that Mac Mini!!
Yeah like VB that is waaay cross platform. Besides all projects start on one platform. If you care why dont you stop bitching and pitch in and help us port it.
Those basterds ignored us again!! (no I didn't seriously expect to be noticed).
1 Kb doesn't seem like a lot of music. 1 Mb/min is the usal rate for at least decent encodings. That means that 1Kb would play ... 1/1024 min or approx .05 seconds. Ouch
I applaud you for supporting the language you love. I am not a Visual Basic programmer myself, but I know that it has a place in the world, a place that is not filled by a more complex and more formal language. There are things you wouldn't want to write in VB, true, but that doesn't make a language useless. Just like a more conventional scripting language VB allows the creation of tools at minimal programmer expense. Why code up an app from scratch in days when you can do it for a few hours in VB. Especially when the app is light weight or in-house VB can easily outshine other languages. While VB may be coming to an end of it's lifespan it will leave a hole in a programmer's tool box that will eventually need to be filled by something else, something not currently available.
Netcraft confirms Netcraft jokes are dying
Netcraft confirms that the DvD is dying.