I've worked with a wide array of software people. Programmers, engineers, developers, what ever you want to call them (yes, words have specific meanings, but I don't feel like debating what those meanings are right now). I've worked with PhD CS grads who couldn't create basic logic. I worked with a former country radio disc jockey that could come up with great ideas, and get them implemented quickly. I've worked at places that hire "really smart people", regardless of major, and train them. I've worked at places that really value advanced CS degrees.
But I have never worked in a place (or had a CS class for that matter) where the skill of the programmers didn't look like a bell curve or where the difference between the top and the bottom wasn't at least an order of magnitude. The low end of the curve is people that are utterly useless, and probably steal productivity by wasting more skilled people's time. The top end are so amazingly productive that they can do things in a day that other programmers would never have even conceived.
I think there is a reason for this bell curve though. If you have too many on the low end, you go out of business. If you have too many on the high end, they fight with each other and some of them leave, or just don't produce to they're true capacity.
Not that I think it's the greatest language or anything, but my experience with ADA was that vastly more stupid things that programmers (in this case me) do show up as compile time errors. Almost to the point where if a program compiled it was bug free. Of course it's still possible to have a logical errors, but whole classes of what would be run time errors in C are compile time errors when ADA is properly used with things like range checking.
Yes, and this foolishness started when Governor Tom Ridge was still in Pennsylvania. Recognize the name? He's Directory of Homeland Security Tom Ridge now. Whether Bush is directly involved, this is the kind of thing that his administration supports.
People are never going to go for that. It's not like LinkSys is the only company capable of making these boxes, or even the only one that currently does. DLink has almost the exact same product line. Joe Sixport will continue to have his bridged circuit, and there's nothing anyone can do about it (nor should there be).
Virtual desktops go back a really long time, at least until 1992 with vtwm and olvwm
Ah, the good old days when everyone used there own window manager, everybody's unix desktop looked totally different and you actually had to know something to have a desktop that was cool.
It all comes out in the end anyway. Say AOL has 100 proxies. If 10,000 AOL users visit your site, then it'll look like only 100 unique visitors. Granted this is more than the 1 unique visitor that it would look like for most proxies, but it's still less than the actual number, not more. Presumably there are significantly less proxies at AOL than there are users. It only really matters to small sites like yours and mine, where we're getting excited about each and every visitor, and 10 all at once makes us need a new keyboard.
I seriously doubt that the NT kernel provides the afformentioned cryptographic services. (Maybe some key generation using Intel's fancy hardware seeding thing, who knows) More likely they have a DLL that provides these services. The only real difference is that the DLL is part of the Windows Operating System and is authored by the same (really large) company. Whereas OpenSSL is installed via a separate package into a distribution. The age old question, but surely you think that there is more to an Operating System than the kernel. If you don't, try deleting/sbin/init, reboot, and see how far you get.
It was. If you ever want to really piss of a waitress at Fridays, ask them if they've ever seen Office Space. Then ask them how many pieces of flair they're wearing. They really call it flair, and they really have to wear 15. We did all of this by accident at someone's going away party from a software company a lot like Initech and sent the waitress screaming from the table several times.
Unless you're hot swapping just for the fun of it, you're only going to hot swap a bad drive that's part of an array that provides redundancy. Or at least one that might be bad, and will maybe end up going back into an array and thus being rebuilt to be part of that array.
Unless you're doing something bizarre, like using drives like removable storage, if you're pulling a drive, you're past the point of caring about the data.
I'll probably get slammed for this, but design patterns are not abstract in any good sense of the word. They are boilerplates that allow infinite monkeys (or bad programmers) to piece applications.
It's like the difference between Legos and carpentry. Sure, it's a little harder to cut wood to the right length and you nails or screws to put it together, but would you want to live in a house made of legos?
Learn what an algorithm is. Better, learn lots of algorithms. Don't just grab a bunch of patterns out of a bin and slap them together.
The Year for digital cameras and mp3 player
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Geek Gift Ideas 2001
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· Score: 1
I think this will be the year that everyone get's digital cameras and mp3 players. Sure all the real geeks already have them, and probably most of the script kiddies too. But anyone who doesn't will have to catch up.
I had extensive experiance trying to get Tools++, DBTools++ and their STL to work on NT, Solaris and AIX. It was a nightmare. Different compilers supported different things. For example, RW libs wouldn't work with gcc on AIX, so we had to keep using the vendor compiler.
There were problems with shared libs that tech support could not resolve. And, they basically would lie to us about features that would be supported in the future to get us to sign support and upgrade contracts. Then, when the release didn't contain those features, they'd lie again and say they never promised them.
As someone already mentioned, performance was a dog. For database IO we ended up improving the performance for certain select statments by over 100 times on the same hardware when we wrote our own DB abstraction layer.
They're API is easy and it's tempting to use, but my advice is to stay as far away as you can. I know we regretted locking ourselves into their tools.
The Star Wars trailer was really lacking. It didn't make me want to see it at all. Of course, i still will, but not because of the trailer. I hope upcoming trailers improve.
The good news is, no sign of everyone's favorite character.
Ashcroft still reports to Bush, and it's unlikely that any attourney general would make a decision this big without at least letting the president know.
Also, it's widely known in DC that Bush is taking advice from his aides a lot more than from his cabinet, to the point where some members of the members of his cabinet are publicly joking about it. (As attourney general, Ashcroft is in the cabinet)
You must run the "register" program as root. With the standard Debian install, at least. From strace, it tries to open the canvas7 binary O_RDWR (read/write for those not versed in C), and the permission denied error is silently ignored.
Go back a few years on this one. How old is this foundation? How much did he contribute the charity a few years ago? I don't have hard numbers, but if I'm not mistaken, it was astonishingly little, especially for a man of his wealth.
The cynic in me would say it's all a publicity thing, now that MS is getting sued and all. Of course, I'm not cynical at all. And I'm certainly not cynical about big business and how nice they are.
No, really, it is. What does real-time have to do with this? You can't solve an arbitrarily complex mathematical problem in a bounded amount of time. And that's what real-time is, bounded. Real-time has nothing to do with speed in the sense that this question is phrased. An example: A given problem must be solved in 15 seconds or less. Chip A can solve the problem in 1 second most of the time, but will take 30 seconds every once in a while. Chip B will usually take 5 seconds, but never more than 10. Guess which chip is can give you a real-time guarantee? That's right, even though Chip B is usually slower, it is the one you pick.
So they open source some stuff, what do we have then? Another failing company that open sources as a last ditch effort to save it's skin? Sounds a lot like Mozilla to me. Did Netscape really embrace OSS, does AOL? JWZ didn't seem to think so. I don't think we're going to see a shift like that, corporations full of PHB's don't change their minds unless glossy 12 pages ads say they should.
Or maybe I'm wrong, and Mozilla will pull it off. Maybe SCO can if get into OSS (or make a fake attempt to) and turn themselves around. Personally, I'd be surprized.
Microkernels and Mach are not even remotely new things. As someone pointed out, things dating back to Minix have been based on microkernels. For an amusing (if somewhat dated) discussion of differences see the old usenet discusion between Linus and Andy Tannenbalm (who created Minix).
Now Mach, which was originally written at CMU, was the basis for OSF/1. The name was changed to DEC Unix, and is now called Compaq Tru64. It's all Mach. Basically, you load the Mach microkernel, then you load the OSF/1 unix server, or the MkLinux server (just a modified linux kernel, I believe) in the case of MkLinux, or the HURD server in the case of the HURD. Of course, they all run slightly different versions the Mach microkernel, just to be ornary.
Are you going to do anything to make sure that good (valid) points that don't paint a rosy picture of all things Open Source aren't moderated into oblivion?
I for one really like to be able to browse comments what are sorted by moderation, largely to get rid of the offtopic stuff, but it's gives a distorted view of what slashdot readers really think.
I must say that it is infinately amusing to see IBM's VM described as being "like VMware". I was just describing VMware to a mainframer that I work with as "like IBM VM".
I think if we look at who uses components to build applications, we'll see that (to a large extent) it's consulting firms. These firms that are not very likely to release anything under GPL. They're really only making money because they got the contract or wrote the demo code and showed it to the client first (What, you mean they're not innovating? HAHA).
I think the only way that something like this would work is to allow any type of license.
Having said that, I think it's a great idea. Personally, I've dealt with RogueWave components a lot, and I'm not impressed, even if they have started releasing Linux versions:) I think open source could reach their mark very quickly.
Someone asked me today what it was like to be a programmer. They supposed that it must be a lot of memorization, all those different languages. They knew a couple of people that did web design, you just have to learn HTML, right? And then they asked me about C++.
I code in C++ every day. I thought for about a second what makes my job hard. It certainly isn't anything that you can memorize (Design Patterns anyone?). I memorized the syntax long ago, but it's the logical flow that makes programming hard. On the simplest level the question is "Should I use a for or a while?". More complex things like "Where does this go in my class hierarchy?" cannot be answered my someone without experience, good training, and most importantly, a logical mind. Complex applications involve a lot of problems, and they have to be broken down accordingly.
I've wrestled with the question of whether just anyone can be a programmer for a long time. And I think that anyone can. But it takes a certain set of skills that you start developing at a very young age. You cannot deciede to be a Comp Sci major in college if you didn't deciede to do "something technical" in grade school. And you won't have done that unless it really interests you.
So anyone can write a 100 line perl script that does something useful. But you can't throw anyone at a large project (my project has about 800k lines, and I don't pretend to understand it all) and expect them to be productive, or even useful.
Slashdot Mirror
But I have never worked in a place (or had a CS class for that matter) where the skill of the programmers didn't look like a bell curve or where the difference between the top and the bottom wasn't at least an order of magnitude. The low end of the curve is people that are utterly useless, and probably steal productivity by wasting more skilled people's time. The top end are so amazingly productive that they can do things in a day that other programmers would never have even conceived.
I think there is a reason for this bell curve though. If you have too many on the low end, you go out of business. If you have too many on the high end, they fight with each other and some of them leave, or just don't produce to they're true capacity.
Nah, ADA's an interesting language, but a pain in the ass to work in.
Not that I think it's the greatest language or anything, but my experience with ADA was that vastly more stupid things that programmers (in this case me) do show up as compile time errors. Almost to the point where if a program compiled it was bug free. Of course it's still possible to have a logical errors, but whole classes of what would be run time errors in C are compile time errors when ADA is properly used with things like range checking.
Yes, and this foolishness started when Governor Tom Ridge was still in Pennsylvania. Recognize the name? He's Directory of Homeland Security Tom Ridge now. Whether Bush is directly involved, this is the kind of thing that his administration supports.
People are never going to go for that. It's not like LinkSys is the only company capable of making these boxes, or even the only one that currently does. DLink has almost the exact same product line. Joe Sixport will continue to have his bridged circuit, and there's nothing anyone can do about it (nor should there be).
Ah, the good old days when everyone used there own window manager, everybody's unix desktop looked totally different and you actually had to know something to have a desktop that was cool.
It all comes out in the end anyway. Say AOL has 100 proxies. If 10,000 AOL users visit your site, then it'll look like only 100 unique visitors. Granted this is more than the 1 unique visitor that it would look like for most proxies, but it's still less than the actual number, not more. Presumably there are significantly less proxies at AOL than there are users. It only really matters to small sites like yours and mine, where we're getting excited about each and every visitor, and 10 all at once makes us need a new keyboard.
I seriously doubt that the NT kernel provides the afformentioned cryptographic services. (Maybe some key generation using Intel's fancy hardware seeding thing, who knows) More likely they have a DLL that provides these services. The only real difference is that the DLL is part of the Windows Operating System and is authored by the same (really large) company. Whereas OpenSSL is installed via a separate package into a distribution. The age old question, but surely you think that there is more to an Operating System than the kernel. If you don't, try deleting /sbin/init, reboot, and see how far you get.
It was. If you ever want to really piss of a waitress at Fridays, ask them if they've ever seen Office Space. Then ask them how many pieces of flair they're wearing. They really call it flair, and they really have to wear 15. We did all of this by accident at someone's going away party from a software company a lot like Initech and sent the waitress screaming from the table several times.
Unless you're hot swapping just for the fun of it, you're only going to hot swap a bad drive that's part of an array that provides redundancy. Or at least one that might be bad, and will maybe end up going back into an array and thus being rebuilt to be part of that array.
Unless you're doing something bizarre, like using drives like removable storage, if you're pulling a drive, you're past the point of caring about the data.
I'll probably get slammed for this, but design patterns are not abstract in any good sense of the word. They are boilerplates that allow infinite monkeys (or bad programmers) to piece applications.
It's like the difference between Legos and carpentry. Sure, it's a little harder to cut wood to the right length and you nails or screws to put it together, but would you want to live in a house made of legos?
Learn what an algorithm is. Better, learn lots of algorithms. Don't just grab a bunch of patterns out of a bin and slap them together.
I think this will be the year that everyone get's digital cameras and mp3 players. Sure all the real geeks already have them, and probably most of the script kiddies too. But anyone who doesn't will have to catch up.
I had extensive experiance trying to get Tools++, DBTools++ and their STL to work on NT, Solaris and AIX. It was a nightmare. Different compilers supported different things. For example, RW libs wouldn't work with gcc on AIX, so we had to keep using the vendor compiler.
There were problems with shared libs that tech support could not resolve. And, they basically would lie to us about features that would be supported in the future to get us to sign support and upgrade contracts. Then, when the release didn't contain those features, they'd lie again and say they never promised them.
As someone already mentioned, performance was a dog. For database IO we ended up improving the performance for certain select statments by over 100 times on the same hardware when we wrote our own DB abstraction layer.
They're API is easy and it's tempting to use, but my advice is to stay as far away as you can. I know we regretted locking ourselves into their tools.
The Star Wars trailer was really lacking. It didn't make me want to see it at all. Of course, i still will, but not because of the trailer. I hope upcoming trailers improve.
The good news is, no sign of everyone's favorite character.
Holland, Michigan. Of course, it's almost Dutch. Tulips, windmills, large "van der" section in the phone book...
You ain't much if you ain't Dutch.
Ashcroft still reports to Bush, and it's unlikely that any attourney general would make a decision this big without at least letting the president know.
Also, it's widely known in DC that Bush is taking advice from his aides a lot more than from his cabinet, to the point where some members of the members of his cabinet are publicly joking about it. (As attourney general, Ashcroft is in the cabinet)
You must run the "register" program as root. With the standard Debian install, at least. From strace, it tries to open the canvas7 binary O_RDWR (read/write for those not versed in C), and the permission denied error is silently ignored.
The cynic in me would say it's all a publicity thing, now that MS is getting sued and all. Of course, I'm not cynical at all. And I'm certainly not cynical about big business and how nice they are.
No, really, it is. What does real-time have to do with this? You can't solve an arbitrarily complex mathematical problem in a bounded amount of time. And that's what real-time is, bounded. Real-time has nothing to do with speed in the sense that this question is phrased. An example: A given problem must be solved in 15 seconds or less. Chip A can solve the problem in 1 second most of the time, but will take 30 seconds every once in a while. Chip B will usually take 5 seconds, but never more than 10. Guess which chip is can give you a real-time guarantee? That's right, even though Chip B is usually slower, it is the one you pick.
Or maybe I'm wrong, and Mozilla will pull it off. Maybe SCO can if get into OSS (or make a fake attempt to) and turn themselves around. Personally, I'd be surprized.
Now Mach, which was originally written at CMU, was the basis for OSF/1. The name was changed to DEC Unix, and is now called Compaq Tru64. It's all Mach. Basically, you load the Mach microkernel, then you load the OSF/1 unix server, or the MkLinux server (just a modified linux kernel, I believe) in the case of MkLinux, or the HURD server in the case of the HURD. Of course, they all run slightly different versions the Mach microkernel, just to be ornary.
So, HURD isn't really that revolutionary at all
I for one really like to be able to browse comments what are sorted by moderation, largely to get rid of the offtopic stuff, but it's gives a distorted view of what slashdot readers really think.
It's amusing to me, anyway.
I think the only way that something like this would work is to allow any type of license.
Having said that, I think it's a great idea. Personally, I've dealt with RogueWave components a lot, and I'm not impressed, even if they have started releasing Linux versions :) I think open source could reach their mark very quickly.
I code in C++ every day. I thought for about a second what makes my job hard. It certainly isn't anything that you can memorize (Design Patterns anyone?). I memorized the syntax long ago, but it's the logical flow that makes programming hard. On the simplest level the question is "Should I use a for or a while?". More complex things like "Where does this go in my class hierarchy?" cannot be answered my someone without experience, good training, and most importantly, a logical mind. Complex applications involve a lot of problems, and they have to be broken down accordingly.
I've wrestled with the question of whether just anyone can be a programmer for a long time. And I think that anyone can. But it takes a certain set of skills that you start developing at a very young age. You cannot deciede to be a Comp Sci major in college if you didn't deciede to do "something technical" in grade school. And you won't have done that unless it really interests you.
So anyone can write a 100 line perl script that does something useful. But you can't throw anyone at a large project (my project has about 800k lines, and I don't pretend to understand it all) and expect them to be productive, or even useful.