Maybe, but circular eyeglasses do exist (Harry Potter's model) and newspapers have been mostly vertical for centuries.
I think it's a matter of preferences. Thanks God I still have a tall display and vertical space is not so much at a premium as on the modern reduced-height screens. I tend to put two windows side by side, usually browser and editor.
I know that Go has no pointer arithmetic and I'm fine with 'modern' languages's pass-by-reference and taking control of memory layout. Somebody even believes that this might lead to better performances, for the same reasons compilers might be better at optimizing programs than we are. However I understand that in some cases you have to know exactly which byte goes where or you want to fit as many data as you can in a small amount of memory. I did that in C many years ago and I understand the need to do that but let me quote Fran Allen, from Chapter 13 of Coders at Work. She's more qualified than me to make this point.
Allen: By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are . . . basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities.
Seibel: But most newer languages these days are higher-level than C.Things like Java and C# and Python and Ruby.
Allen: But they still overspecify. The core thing is that it specifies location of data. If you look at these other languages, they stayed away from specifying the location of data and how to move it, where to put it in the machine. It was ultimately about its value at any point.
[...]
Seibel: But very few languages other than C and C++ have raw pointers anymore. Java has garbage collection and the data moves around. Would you say that’s still overspecified?
Allen: Yes. I believe that there’s an opportunity to do what we have done with computation in the optimization world with data. We don’t manage
data very well. We don’t have good ways of managing data automatically — establishing locality of data that’s going to be used together. There are lots of threads of research now which are very exciting. But I think what’s missing is the bigger, bolder concepts. A lot of this is happening
within a space that is bounded by what exists already or the current thinking. It’s not going to change overnight by any means—there are millions
of lines of code out there. But we do need to start trying to break the boundaries of, “This’ll be done here and that’ll be done there.”
Seibel: Can you give a simple example of what you mean by bringing the data to the computation in contrast to what we know how to do now?
Allen: To me it means taking over the management of the data, Basically, how we do it now is by reference—it’s moved by hardware, or by the
underlying operating systems and support systems. [...] But another way to do that would be to organize locations of data in their relative positions as a target of optimization. The other part of it is that very often what is good for one computation is poor for another. One
organization, even of simple things like matrices, is bad when you’re actually accessing it in a different way. So it’s a combination of the order of the accessing against the location. It may require some architectural work, and hardware work, but I think that one can do this if we put some of the referencing, addressing capabilities back out in the hardware itself. There are machines where one has the ability, at the point data comes into the memory, to do quite a lot of transformations. Mapping can happen there. Computation speed is what we measure, mostly, in high-performance computing so we go through all kinds of things to increase that speed. Feeding that computational unit is one of the big issues that we face, but we never made it a first-order problem to solve. We leave it to the hardware.
Seibel: In your Turning Award lecture you said something
Yes, the artist made a mistake: the image http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicperl.gif is too wide to fit into the template. Hopefully it will be noticed now. By the way, how do we report bugs about Slashdot?
Oh my, a language with pointers. I thought they were recognized as a worst practice and forbidden in any modern language. It would be nice if they started playing with this other go instead.
I remember Archie. It was a search engine for ftp servers at the beginning of the '90. I had a Unix workstation in 1990 and I used telnet, usenet, ftp and email directly on my box. That was the Internet for me. This Telehack is only a BBS service, something I could have connected to with telnet but not of much value. Nevertheless it was a very good thing for people using modems from home. For the few (most?) of us with no direct experience of those times: there were no commercial ISPs so people had to dial a modem on a service like Telehack and use some Internet services through an interface like that. AOL built a little empire based on that model.
All the software pieces exist as OSS projects but it's not only the software that made Skype big. It's been the company behind it that signed contracts that let me connect with standard phone networks all around the world. I can call POTS numbers from within Skype, I can get a virtual phone number so phones can call my Skype client. I can redirect my Skype account to a phone number or vice versa, with voice mail. That's something that a software project cannot do: you have to be a company and start competing with Skype.
We should recognize that there is no "One True Way" to use a computer. Due to my habits OSX has the worst interface I ever used. I never liked the Mac GUI, not even in the '80s, but I concede that the global menu was a good choice on the tiny screen of the first Macs.
But it's OK that what's good for me is not good for you. That's why I'll probably switch my Ubuntu desktop to xfce and you'll use a Mac or a Mac-like Ubuntu desktop and we'll both be happy.
Yes, and UNR is very good on small screens. I've got a derivative distro (eeebuntu NBR) installed on my 9" netbook and it's great. However it looks very silly on my 15" notebook. I won't use it there.
I'll wait a little and see if there are some major bugs then update. I'll also apt-get install xubuntu-desktop and get a GUI that works the way I want and not the other way around.
I think it's too early to judge what Apple is doing but
1. To help prevent DROPPED CALLS, by keeping a running database of nearby CELL TOWERS.
the ancient pre-millenium GSM phone I had years ago was one of those old voice-and-sms-only little things but it didn't drop calls. I don't have any evidence supporting my claim but I bet that it didn't store any cell tower location in any local database. How can a cell towers database make better something that was already working? (genuine question, no sarcasm intended).
You're right about the key but I expected Dropbox to check if I shared the file with the people accessing it. It seems it doesn't so all the sharing thing is actually only a way to distribute the keys to the files. I naively thought it was part of the access policies in the same way Unix and Windows file systems do access control. If this were a Unix file system, we'd be able to access any file given the inode with no checks on the uid and gid. Basically we'd be working as root and that's a well known worst practice.
Basically that means that the secrecy of that hash is the only thing that protects our files on Dropbox. They probably encrypt the files but if anybody has the right hashes s/he can decrypt them. The hash is the key and invites and sharing are not even checked.
I agree that they don't encrypt data in any safe way. They're exposing the weakness of their security algorithms. This is the third/. post about different problems with Dropbox in a month. Here are the first one and the second one. Definitely not a server one should upload anything to before having encrypted it.
This is a genuine question because I got a feeling that I might have missed something.
I've been a user of both Ubuntu (LTS and not) and Windows XP Professional. What kind of support Microsoft gave me that Ubuntu didn't? They looked exactly the same to me: some patches automatically coming down the pipe, automatic installation, occasional reboots required on Ubuntu (only for kernel updates) vs constant reboots required on WinXP. Overall Ubuntu fared better: less reboots (I usually suspend my notebook overnight) and less costs.
For a single business user working alone outside a company I can't imagine a scenario in which I might want more support than that. When I need support on the notebook itself I call HP. The technician didn't care that I had Ubuntu on the notebook and not the WinXP they originally sold me when he came to replace the screen a couple of years ago.
If you are a very big company then yes, maybe you want to buy support, but if you are a very big company you probably already have a company supporting your PCs and the choice of the OS is part of the deal (I saw that happen).
Well said. I know a 50+k employees company that was still using Windows 2000 in 2008 because of the test and support costs. They finally started to deploy Vista when MS was about to start selling Windows 7. I hope they'll jump straight to Windows 8 next time.
You don't but it might not be that easy. Firefox 4 probably won't be backported to many old versions of Linux distros so you might not be able to get it from your package manager. Mozilla has binary builds (I'm using one of them on Ubuntu 10.10 right now) but who knows if they work on a 8 years old Linux installation. I had to fiddle with the Flash plugin (deinstall and reinstall) and fix another couple of things to make it work on my one from 6 months ago. The average user would have stayed with FF 3.6 or switched to Chromium.
I purchased Red Hat support licenses for some 10 or 20 servers years ago but I forgot the details. I'm paying $0 (zero) for my Ubuntu now. That includes all the patches and the OS upgrades (I started with 8.10 and I'm at 10.10 now). Before switching to Ubuntu I had WinXP on the same box. I had to pay MS a OS license to get the patches and the service packs for free. That doesn't include upgrades to Vista (thanks god!) and Win7. Ubuntu is cheaper and works better for me (until they'll force Unity on all of us, I'll switch to Xubuntu then). If Red Hat asks for a service fee on the desktop my suggestion is not to use Red Hat.
On the other side you might argue that you don't want to have to constantly upgrade to newer versions of the OS, but you want to keep using the same one for 8 years. This is not something I'll do but I'm sure there are good reasons for it. If that's the case maybe RH is the right vendor for you even if it costs money but maybe Linux is not the OS you should use as it tends to move on quite quickly.
Speaking as a person raised in a metric country, the problem that's going to prevent the switch forever is: you can't just convert from imperial to metric, you have to throw away everything you have and start from scratch with metric tools and metric parts. Every single new object you touch and see is going to have different sizes than old ones. Other posts already demonstrated that you get weird measures if you convert standard manufacturing parts from inches and yards to centimeters and meters. Metric countries use totally different sizes: you want to have 240 x 120 centimeters boards and not some odd decimal number that no metric ruler will be able to measure. So, conversion from imperial to metric is useless.
Think now about what it means to reboot an economy as large as the US one whilst being able to service all the existing stuff built with imperial measures. Two different tool chains, two different manufacturing chains, two different servicing chains and that's an oversimplification.
My bet is that the US might switch for not very important things like measurements of foods and liquids. That could even be good marketing: having a 0.5 kg beef might sound slimmer than a 1 pound one (it isn't) and 1.05 USD per liter of gas might sound less than 4 USD per gallon (it's the same). No way they'll switch for more fundamental things like house building.
One noticeable exception is the width of sanitary pipes; these are measured in inches and quarter inches. (which greatly confuses me)
Same in Italy. We have pipes (sanitary and gas) in both metric and English sizes and there are different set of tools to work with them. That's the power of legacies. We never had Imperial units but evidently we heavily imported pipes and tools from the UK at some point in our history. After all Industrial Revolutions happened there first.
Same in Italy and probably all around the world, but if I want to know if that TV set fits in the available space on my wall I don't look at the screen diagonal (inches) but at the TV set dimensions expressed in centimeters on the spec sheet. Actually the diagonal is not that useful. All it does is impressing your friends: "my one is 2" larger than your one", it's all the same old story.
They'll probably use a symmetric key cryptography because I don't remember having setup an asymmetric key pair when I subscribed their service.
I'm not using Dropbox to sync my computers, I'm using it for backups and I encrypt all the data before I move it into the Dropbox folder. I don't even live into their country. So long for their access to my stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but circular eyeglasses do exist (Harry Potter's model) and newspapers have been mostly vertical for centuries.
I think it's a matter of preferences. Thanks God I still have a tall display and vertical space is not so much at a premium as on the modern reduced-height screens. I tend to put two windows side by side, usually browser and editor.
Oh well, too bad for the camel. It's going to stay headless until the next major UI rewrite. Thanks anyway.
Allen: By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are . . . basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities.
Seibel: But most newer languages these days are higher-level than C.Things like Java and C# and Python and Ruby.
Allen: But they still overspecify. The core thing is that it specifies location of data. If you look at these other languages, they stayed away from specifying the location of data and how to move it, where to put it in the machine. It was ultimately about its value at any point.
[...]
Seibel: But very few languages other than C and C++ have raw pointers anymore. Java has garbage collection and the data moves around. Would you say that’s still overspecified?
Allen: Yes. I believe that there’s an opportunity to do what we have done with computation in the optimization world with data. We don’t manage data very well. We don’t have good ways of managing data automatically — establishing locality of data that’s going to be used together. There are lots of threads of research now which are very exciting. But I think what’s missing is the bigger, bolder concepts. A lot of this is happening within a space that is bounded by what exists already or the current thinking. It’s not going to change overnight by any means—there are millions of lines of code out there. But we do need to start trying to break the boundaries of, “This’ll be done here and that’ll be done there.”
Seibel: Can you give a simple example of what you mean by bringing the data to the computation in contrast to what we know how to do now?
Allen: To me it means taking over the management of the data, Basically, how we do it now is by reference—it’s moved by hardware, or by the underlying operating systems and support systems. [...] But another way to do that would be to organize locations of data in their relative positions as a target of optimization. The other part of it is that very often what is good for one computation is poor for another. One organization, even of simple things like matrices, is bad when you’re actually accessing it in a different way. So it’s a combination of the order of the accessing against the location. It may require some architectural work, and hardware work, but I think that one can do this if we put some of the referencing, addressing capabilities back out in the hardware itself. There are machines where one has the ability, at the point data comes into the memory, to do quite a lot of transformations. Mapping can happen there. Computation speed is what we measure, mostly, in high-performance computing so we go through all kinds of things to increase that speed. Feeding that computational unit is one of the big issues that we face, but we never made it a first-order problem to solve. We leave it to the hardware.
Seibel: In your Turning Award lecture you said something
Yes, the artist made a mistake: the image http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicperl.gif is too wide to fit into the template. Hopefully it will be noticed now. By the way, how do we report bugs about Slashdot?
Oh my, a language with pointers. I thought they were recognized as a worst practice and forbidden in any modern language. It would be nice if they started playing with this other go instead.
In this age of silly patents do I really have to do all the hard work of inventing it or patenting it would be good enough?
I remember Archie. It was a search engine for ftp servers at the beginning of the '90. I had a Unix workstation in 1990 and I used telnet, usenet, ftp and email directly on my box. That was the Internet for me. This Telehack is only a BBS service, something I could have connected to with telnet but not of much value. Nevertheless it was a very good thing for people using modems from home. For the few (most?) of us with no direct experience of those times: there were no commercial ISPs so people had to dial a modem on a service like Telehack and use some Internet services through an interface like that. AOL built a little empire based on that model.
That line seems to be very common today.
All the software pieces exist as OSS projects but it's not only the software that made Skype big. It's been the company behind it that signed contracts that let me connect with standard phone networks all around the world. I can call POTS numbers from within Skype, I can get a virtual phone number so phones can call my Skype client. I can redirect my Skype account to a phone number or vice versa, with voice mail. That's something that a software project cannot do: you have to be a company and start competing with Skype.
We should recognize that there is no "One True Way" to use a computer. Due to my habits OSX has the worst interface I ever used. I never liked the Mac GUI, not even in the '80s, but I concede that the global menu was a good choice on the tiny screen of the first Macs.
But it's OK that what's good for me is not good for you. That's why I'll probably switch my Ubuntu desktop to xfce and you'll use a Mac or a Mac-like Ubuntu desktop and we'll both be happy.
Yes, and UNR is very good on small screens. I've got a derivative distro (eeebuntu NBR) installed on my 9" netbook and it's great. However it looks very silly on my 15" notebook. I won't use it there.
I'll wait a little and see if there are some major bugs then update. I'll also apt-get install xubuntu-desktop and get a GUI that works the way I want and not the other way around.
1. To help prevent DROPPED CALLS, by keeping a running database of nearby CELL TOWERS.
the ancient pre-millenium GSM phone I had years ago was one of those old voice-and-sms-only little things but it didn't drop calls. I don't have any evidence supporting my claim but I bet that it didn't store any cell tower location in any local database. How can a cell towers database make better something that was already working? (genuine question, no sarcasm intended).
You're right about the key but I expected Dropbox to check if I shared the file with the people accessing it. It seems it doesn't so all the sharing thing is actually only a way to distribute the keys to the files. I naively thought it was part of the access policies in the same way Unix and Windows file systems do access control. If this were a Unix file system, we'd be able to access any file given the inode with no checks on the uid and gid. Basically we'd be working as root and that's a well known worst practice.
Basically that means that the secrecy of that hash is the only thing that protects our files on Dropbox. They probably encrypt the files but if anybody has the right hashes s/he can decrypt them. The hash is the key and invites and sharing are not even checked.
I agree that they don't encrypt data in any safe way. They're exposing the weakness of their security algorithms. This is the third /. post about different problems with Dropbox in a month. Here are the first one and the second one. Definitely not a server one should upload anything to before having encrypted it.
This is a genuine question because I got a feeling that I might have missed something.
I've been a user of both Ubuntu (LTS and not) and Windows XP Professional. What kind of support Microsoft gave me that Ubuntu didn't? They looked exactly the same to me: some patches automatically coming down the pipe, automatic installation, occasional reboots required on Ubuntu (only for kernel updates) vs constant reboots required on WinXP. Overall Ubuntu fared better: less reboots (I usually suspend my notebook overnight) and less costs.
For a single business user working alone outside a company I can't imagine a scenario in which I might want more support than that. When I need support on the notebook itself I call HP. The technician didn't care that I had Ubuntu on the notebook and not the WinXP they originally sold me when he came to replace the screen a couple of years ago.
If you are a very big company then yes, maybe you want to buy support, but if you are a very big company you probably already have a company supporting your PCs and the choice of the OS is part of the deal (I saw that happen).
Well said. I know a 50+k employees company that was still using Windows 2000 in 2008 because of the test and support costs. They finally started to deploy Vista when MS was about to start selling Windows 7. I hope they'll jump straight to Windows 8 next time.
You don't but it might not be that easy. Firefox 4 probably won't be backported to many old versions of Linux distros so you might not be able to get it from your package manager. Mozilla has binary builds (I'm using one of them on Ubuntu 10.10 right now) but who knows if they work on a 8 years old Linux installation. I had to fiddle with the Flash plugin (deinstall and reinstall) and fix another couple of things to make it work on my one from 6 months ago. The average user would have stayed with FF 3.6 or switched to Chromium.
I purchased Red Hat support licenses for some 10 or 20 servers years ago but I forgot the details. I'm paying $0 (zero) for my Ubuntu now. That includes all the patches and the OS upgrades (I started with 8.10 and I'm at 10.10 now). Before switching to Ubuntu I had WinXP on the same box. I had to pay MS a OS license to get the patches and the service packs for free. That doesn't include upgrades to Vista (thanks god!) and Win7. Ubuntu is cheaper and works better for me (until they'll force Unity on all of us, I'll switch to Xubuntu then). If Red Hat asks for a service fee on the desktop my suggestion is not to use Red Hat. On the other side you might argue that you don't want to have to constantly upgrade to newer versions of the OS, but you want to keep using the same one for 8 years. This is not something I'll do but I'm sure there are good reasons for it. If that's the case maybe RH is the right vendor for you even if it costs money but maybe Linux is not the OS you should use as it tends to move on quite quickly.
Speaking as a person raised in a metric country, the problem that's going to prevent the switch forever is: you can't just convert from imperial to metric, you have to throw away everything you have and start from scratch with metric tools and metric parts. Every single new object you touch and see is going to have different sizes than old ones. Other posts already demonstrated that you get weird measures if you convert standard manufacturing parts from inches and yards to centimeters and meters. Metric countries use totally different sizes: you want to have 240 x 120 centimeters boards and not some odd decimal number that no metric ruler will be able to measure. So, conversion from imperial to metric is useless.
Think now about what it means to reboot an economy as large as the US one whilst being able to service all the existing stuff built with imperial measures. Two different tool chains, two different manufacturing chains, two different servicing chains and that's an oversimplification.
My bet is that the US might switch for not very important things like measurements of foods and liquids. That could even be good marketing: having a 0.5 kg beef might sound slimmer than a 1 pound one (it isn't) and 1.05 USD per liter of gas might sound less than 4 USD per gallon (it's the same). No way they'll switch for more fundamental things like house building.
One noticeable exception is the width of sanitary pipes; these are measured in inches and quarter inches. (which greatly confuses me)
Same in Italy. We have pipes (sanitary and gas) in both metric and English sizes and there are different set of tools to work with them. That's the power of legacies. We never had Imperial units but evidently we heavily imported pipes and tools from the UK at some point in our history. After all Industrial Revolutions happened there first.
Same in Italy and probably all around the world, but if I want to know if that TV set fits in the available space on my wall I don't look at the screen diagonal (inches) but at the TV set dimensions expressed in centimeters on the spec sheet. Actually the diagonal is not that useful. All it does is impressing your friends: "my one is 2" larger than your one", it's all the same old story.
They do. They even have undelete.
They'll probably use a symmetric key cryptography because I don't remember having setup an asymmetric key pair when I subscribed their service.
I'm not using Dropbox to sync my computers, I'm using it for backups and I encrypt all the data before I move it into the Dropbox folder. I don't even live into their country. So long for their access to my stuff.
Who needs the backdoors supposedly made by Symantec when they already installed the ones supposedly made by Microsoft? Or a BIOS or hardware itself?