POSIX is a documentation of minimal standards for the things we all take for granted in UNIX and UNIX-like systems. Things like "time is represented as seconds since the epoch" and "regular expressions are available through the regcomp() function, which returns an opque object to be passed to regexec()" and "all POSIX systems will provide threads, mutexes, etc. that meet the following interface, in addition to whatever platform-specific threading they may have."
Linux is almost, but not quite, POSIX compliant -- I don't recall why it isn't, but in practice you're unlikely to run across the boundary cases.
POSIX, however, does not speicify things like the difference between/bin,/sbin,/usr/sbin, etc. It provides only a fairly minimal set of tool requirements (for instance,.tar files aren't guaranteed to be cross-platform compatible, iirc).
This is the hole that the LSB is trying to address -- creating a standard that actually provides real consistancy not only to programmers but to users.
--G
I don't think that adding X-headers to a message can really be called "forging" -- an MUA has every right in the world to put X-headers into messages it sends.
Forging headers would mean messing with Sender: or other header lines which have meanings specified and contents required by the RFC.
--G
Almost all of the stuff you need is already in a core dump. Perhaps the appropriate approach to this is to try to extend the core-dumping mechanism to also dump other pieces of state. Then you would just need a way to reconstruct process state from a core dump, which most runtime debuggers can almost do anyway.
I suspect that all the pieces of a solution are written and it's just a tricky pick-choose-and-integrate problem.
Better yet, Mr. Governor Davis will be looking for the Democrats' nomination to run for President in '04. You can bet that "strong on terrorism, supports your local police" will be big on his political resume.
--G
Did Universal, BMG, Sony, et al ever stop to wonder if part of the problem is that they're churning out bands that are carbon copies of each other? Do we really need more "boy bands" or breathy, heartbroken beauty queens? It's just like TV...as soon as Survivor became a hit, every network had to have a clone...but now that the market is saturated, ratings are terrible.
Is it jsut me, or is this in fact the networks doing precisely what they are trying to prevent -- they say loudly "your unrestrained copying will destroy quality and drive prices through the floor by saturating the market." Meanwhile, they copy each other and thereby destroy quality, drive prices through the floor, and saturate the market.
The difference is, I can actually see the deleterious effects of their piracy.
--G
Microsoft has long tried to subvert MIME. In particular, as noted, MIME type is used to determine how to handle a document or attachment, but extension is used to actually handle it. For kicks, try opening an mime type AUDIO/basic document. The most basic possible audio encoding pulls up an error message.
--G
How long is it going to take before ISPs start realizing that Internet Service Provider means Internet Service Provider? I just want a pipe with some bandwidth, to use as I want. This seems a simple enough notion, but the ISPs are all into "we'll sell you a piece of a pipe, as long as you don't use it much, and not for things we don't like."
Clue to ISPs: Sell the pipe. Don't worry about what goes through it unless you're sitting on a subpoena or something. Everything else is silly optional garbage.
--G
Uh, Veterans Day was yesterday, November 11, the anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War. Today is just an observed holiday thingy.
--G
Of course, this will only have an effect if a large number of people act in a relatively concerted way. I have frequently thought that there ought to be some sort of centralized database-based "blacklist" of which companies use various irresponsible marketing techniques.
Of course, I sure don't have the time to build such a list, or the money to withstand the lawsuits it would spawn.
--G
Consider something simple -- automated testing. If you want automated testing to work, you need registry settings to prevent your programs from popping up dialog boxes if they take a long walk off a short pointer or some such. But those same registry settings would be completely inappropriate for real development, when you want the opportunity to pull up the debugger. There is not a single One True and Holy Registry -- you always need to tweak reg settings.
--G
How to keep your hand in coding? Wait for crises.
on
Coder or Architect?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sooner or later a project will hit crisis. Since the heaviest load of architectural work (for an even moderately well-planned project) is near the beginning, and the crisis point for most projects is near the end, you can keep your skills up just by involving yourself in the crisis coding near the end of projects.
Of course, it's always possible that your development organization never has crises, but if that's the case then you are so blessed by the deities of programming that you will never need to worry about code anyway:)
--G
Actually, patents allow you to sue not only those who copy you but anyone who independently invents the same thing that you did. There is no requirement that somebody have copied, or indeed even have been aware of the invention or patent, for that person to be sued.
This is the real evil of patents: You could be infringing on one right now and not know it. We frequently have to deal with this where I work, as we discover that systems we spent years writing may have been illegal because of a patent we never heard of on a product that never made it to market half a dozen years ago.
Patents don't just prevent copying. They prevent re-invention.
--G
I know that I don't buy anything from any firm or vote for any candidate that has ever spammed or telemarketed me. I'm sure others here do the same. That's negative feedback, although it's small and unorganized.
A community blacklist would provide a way to make that sort of negative feedback more effective.
Perhaps in my spare time... alas, blacklist.com is already taken...
--G
The point of advertising is not to get your business here-and-now but to get the brand name into you brain; it's almost a bonus if you don't notice it.
Google ads are almost exactly what I would consider the perfect ad. They are well-targeted, primarily textual, visually clean, and tend to state exactly what is being advertised and why it is of interest to you. They're small pills, easy to swallow whole into your brain, and they're spare and functional for the few people who actually pay them conscious attention.
--G
The solution is to de-escalate the arms race. How do you do that? Well, stop filtering the ads.
You seem to have confused "de-escalate" with "surrender" -- blockers lose and advertisers win, period.
A negotiated truce seems more sensible: Advertisers find an advertising medium that isn't quite so f'ing annoying.
I don't block text ads. I don't bother trying to block non-animated ads. That is de-escalation; not blocking is just surrender.
And the day that advertisers start advertising things targeted at me, I may start listening to them. Advertise utility, durability, and user-serviceability, rather than the sexiness of a product when surrounded by semi-naked chicks, and maybe I wouldn't find it quite as necessary to block their crap.
If advertising isn't meant for me, I'm darned well going to block it. If advertising is flashy and distracting, I'm darned well going to block it. When advertising is simple, understated, to-the-point, truthful, and dignified, I'll listen.
--G
Looks like they're playing cookie games -- first time you hit it, it sets a cookie; if the cookie i set, it lets you see the page. So depending on the cookie source, you should still be able to browse.
Now if someone can figure out how to predictively generate those cookies...
--G
So, in another few years, world governments will be able to make whatever they want regardless of patents, while private citizen coders won't be able to write a line of code for fear of tripping over the patents that governments have even less reason than ever to regulate.
Governments and corps in a spat. Oh boy. Whichever way you cut it, the civilians lose.
--G
What on earth reason do you have to believe that the right way to get info on foo is to point your browser at foo.com? DNS ain't a keyword system.
You don't go to amazon.com to get info on amazons. You don't go to imdb.com because you like those four letters. DNS is a mnemonic system, not a frickin' search engine.
--G
First, take down two of the walls. Voila, the whole office is your cube!
Second, add a candy bowl. By thus bribing your co-workers, you'll get them to thank you for your brilliant real-estate grab. Open-door policy, my foot!
Third, add a rear-view mirror to your workstation. You can spy on your co-workers, can never be suck up on, and if you get a good mirror from a flashy vintage car ($5 at a junkyard) will be the envy of all those who ork cows for a living.
Fourth, put up a corkboard and start tacking random things to it. Never take anything down, just tack things over them. I've got an unimplemented proposal from two years ago, half a dozen bug reports, 0x0D2C (Ode to C), "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", thirty fortune-cookie fortunes, a "grammar hall of shame" where I post particularly ungrammatical notes from senior management, and ten pages of code listings that I needed to gesitculate at once.
Fifth, get a Koosh(tm) Vortex ring gun, and mount it on brackets over your workstation.
--G
A much better example would be if I studied hard for an exam, and you were peeking over my shoulder at my answers because you didn't do the studying.
Patent law as it stands even bans independent reinvention. The more accurate analogy would be if we both studied hard for an exam, and I wrote the same answer you did, and you had lawyers break my arm becasue you wrote it first.
If patents were about copying other people's work, independent reinvention would be a defense. No, patents are about legal monopolies.
--G
Slashdot Mirror
POSIX is a documentation of minimal standards for the things we all take for granted in UNIX and UNIX-like systems. Things like "time is represented as seconds since the epoch" and "regular expressions are available through the regcomp() function, which returns an opque object to be passed to regexec()" and "all POSIX systems will provide threads, mutexes, etc. that meet the following interface, in addition to whatever platform-specific threading they may have."
/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin, etc. It provides only a fairly minimal set of tool requirements (for instance, .tar files aren't guaranteed to be cross-platform compatible, iirc).
Linux is almost, but not quite, POSIX compliant -- I don't recall why it isn't, but in practice you're unlikely to run across the boundary cases.
POSIX, however, does not speicify things like the difference between
This is the hole that the LSB is trying to address -- creating a standard that actually provides real consistancy not only to programmers but to users.
--G
I don't think that adding X-headers to a message can really be called "forging" -- an MUA has every right in the world to put X-headers into messages it sends.
Forging headers would mean messing with Sender: or other header lines which have meanings specified and contents required by the RFC.
--G
Almost all of the stuff you need is already in a core dump. Perhaps the appropriate approach to this is to try to extend the core-dumping mechanism to also dump other pieces of state. Then you would just need a way to reconstruct process state from a core dump, which most runtime debuggers can almost do anyway.
I suspect that all the pieces of a solution are written and it's just a tricky pick-choose-and-integrate problem.
And damn but I'd love to have this ability.
--G
...combines a fast gated micro-channel plate (MCP)...
And if it gets out of hand, only Tron can save us!
--G
Better yet, Mr. Governor Davis will be looking for the Democrats' nomination to run for President in '04. You can bet that "strong on terrorism, supports your local police" will be big on his political resume.
--G
Did Universal, BMG, Sony, et al ever stop to wonder if part of the problem is that they're churning out bands that are carbon copies of each other? Do we really need more "boy bands" or breathy, heartbroken beauty queens? It's just like TV...as soon as Survivor became a hit, every network had to have a clone...but now that the market is saturated, ratings are terrible.
Is it jsut me, or is this in fact the networks doing precisely what they are trying to prevent -- they say loudly "your unrestrained copying will destroy quality and drive prices through the floor by saturating the market." Meanwhile, they copy each other and thereby destroy quality, drive prices through the floor, and saturate the market.
The difference is, I can actually see the deleterious effects of their piracy.
--G
Microsoft has long tried to subvert MIME. In particular, as noted, MIME type is used to determine how to handle a document or attachment, but extension is used to actually handle it. For kicks, try opening an mime type AUDIO/basic document. The most basic possible audio encoding pulls up an error message.
--G
How long is it going to take before ISPs start realizing that Internet Service Provider means Internet Service Provider? I just want a pipe with some bandwidth, to use as I want. This seems a simple enough notion, but the ISPs are all into "we'll sell you a piece of a pipe, as long as you don't use it much, and not for things we don't like."
Clue to ISPs: Sell the pipe. Don't worry about what goes through it unless you're sitting on a subpoena or something. Everything else is silly optional garbage.
--G
Uh, Veterans Day was yesterday, November 11, the anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War. Today is just an observed holiday thingy.
--G
Of course, this will only have an effect if a large number of people act in a relatively concerted way. I have frequently thought that there ought to be some sort of centralized database-based "blacklist" of which companies use various irresponsible marketing techniques.
Of course, I sure don't have the time to build such a list, or the money to withstand the lawsuits it would spawn.
--G
Consider something simple -- automated testing. If you want automated testing to work, you need registry settings to prevent your programs from popping up dialog boxes if they take a long walk off a short pointer or some such. But those same registry settings would be completely inappropriate for real development, when you want the opportunity to pull up the debugger. There is not a single One True and Holy Registry -- you always need to tweak reg settings.
--G
Sooner or later a project will hit crisis. Since the heaviest load of architectural work (for an even moderately well-planned project) is near the beginning, and the crisis point for most projects is near the end, you can keep your skills up just by involving yourself in the crisis coding near the end of projects.
:)
Of course, it's always possible that your development organization never has crises, but if that's the case then you are so blessed by the deities of programming that you will never need to worry about code anyway
--G
To pick a nit:
There are two things that patents do:
let you sue someone who copies you
Actually, patents allow you to sue not only those who copy you but anyone who independently invents the same thing that you did. There is no requirement that somebody have copied, or indeed even have been aware of the invention or patent, for that person to be sued.
This is the real evil of patents: You could be infringing on one right now and not know it. We frequently have to deal with this where I work, as we discover that systems we spent years writing may have been illegal because of a patent we never heard of on a product that never made it to market half a dozen years ago.
Patents don't just prevent copying. They prevent re-invention.
--G
Heck, even the Department of Homeland Security sounds like something out of Nazi Germany.
Stalinist Russia is closer: KGB stood for (in Russian, of course) Office of State Security.
--G
...that they're fighting this battle on technical grounds. I hope we see a good clean fight, technology vs. technology, with no lawyers.
May the best code win.
--G
The solution may have to be blacklisting.
I know that I don't buy anything from any firm or vote for any candidate that has ever spammed or telemarketed me. I'm sure others here do the same. That's negative feedback, although it's small and unorganized.
A community blacklist would provide a way to make that sort of negative feedback more effective.
Perhaps in my spare time... alas, blacklist.com is already taken...
--G
You don't click on your television, either.
The point of advertising is not to get your business here-and-now but to get the brand name into you brain; it's almost a bonus if you don't notice it.
Google ads are almost exactly what I would consider the perfect ad. They are well-targeted, primarily textual, visually clean, and tend to state exactly what is being advertised and why it is of interest to you. They're small pills, easy to swallow whole into your brain, and they're spare and functional for the few people who actually pay them conscious attention.
--G
The solution is to de-escalate the arms race. How do you do that? Well, stop filtering the ads.
You seem to have confused "de-escalate" with "surrender" -- blockers lose and advertisers win, period.
A negotiated truce seems more sensible: Advertisers find an advertising medium that isn't quite so f'ing annoying.
I don't block text ads. I don't bother trying to block non-animated ads. That is de-escalation; not blocking is just surrender.
And the day that advertisers start advertising things targeted at me, I may start listening to them. Advertise utility, durability, and user-serviceability, rather than the sexiness of a product when surrounded by semi-naked chicks, and maybe I wouldn't find it quite as necessary to block their crap.
If advertising isn't meant for me, I'm darned well going to block it. If advertising is flashy and distracting, I'm darned well going to block it. When advertising is simple, understated, to-the-point, truthful, and dignified, I'll listen.
--G
Looks like they're playing cookie games -- first time you hit it, it sets a cookie; if the cookie i set, it lets you see the page. So depending on the cookie source, you should still be able to browse.
Now if someone can figure out how to predictively generate those cookies...
--G
...in a world where terrorists regularly use encryption to fly other people's computers into the sides of tall buildings.
--G
Behold the [processor] power of Cheese!
--G
So, in another few years, world governments will be able to make whatever they want regardless of patents, while private citizen coders won't be able to write a line of code for fear of tripping over the patents that governments have even less reason than ever to regulate.
Governments and corps in a spat. Oh boy. Whichever way you cut it, the civilians lose.
--G
What on earth reason do you have to believe that the right way to get info on foo is to point your browser at foo.com? DNS ain't a keyword system.
You don't go to amazon.com to get info on amazons. You don't go to imdb.com because you like those four letters. DNS is a mnemonic system, not a frickin' search engine.
--G
First, take down two of the walls. Voila, the whole office is your cube!
Second, add a candy bowl. By thus bribing your co-workers, you'll get them to thank you for your brilliant real-estate grab. Open-door policy, my foot!
Third, add a rear-view mirror to your workstation. You can spy on your co-workers, can never be suck up on, and if you get a good mirror from a flashy vintage car ($5 at a junkyard) will be the envy of all those who ork cows for a living.
Fourth, put up a corkboard and start tacking random things to it. Never take anything down, just tack things over them. I've got an unimplemented proposal from two years ago, half a dozen bug reports, 0x0D2C (Ode to C), "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", thirty fortune-cookie fortunes, a "grammar hall of shame" where I post particularly ungrammatical notes from senior management, and ten pages of code listings that I needed to gesitculate at once.
Fifth, get a Koosh(tm) Vortex ring gun, and mount it on brackets over your workstation.
--G
No, you've got it wrong:
A much better example would be if I studied hard for an exam, and you were peeking over my shoulder at my answers because you didn't do the studying.
Patent law as it stands even bans independent reinvention. The more accurate analogy would be if we both studied hard for an exam, and I wrote the same answer you did, and you had lawyers break my arm becasue you wrote it first.
If patents were about copying other people's work, independent reinvention would be a defense. No, patents are about legal monopolies.
--G