As I've gotten older (started BASIC with a Timex/Sinclair XZ81, do NoSQL engine design for a living now), I've come to believe that the population split is true; there is a segment that has the aptitude to code, and the rest who don't.
The easiest way to see this aptitidue is to look and see whether someone loves to code. Just loves it. Works late because they have their teeth into a problem, holds incredibly complex systems in their head comfortably, etc. LOVES to code. Who feels, to paraphrase The Wind in the Willows: "There is nothing-- absolutely nothing-- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in code."
You rarely find crappy software folks who enjoy puttering about in the code. You often find crappy devs who got into it for the high salary.
Our developers transitioned to Subversion about 6 months ago, and since we almost all use Eclipse, we moved to Subclipse. We experienced lots of problems, particularly related to slow performance and branch-to-branch merges behaving strangely. Subsequently we moved to the Subversive plugin, which even in its beta state was more usable for us. Since then it is at RC stage and has proven very good in an environment with sometimes daily branching per developer. It feels much more like the CVS plugin than Subclipse does though that is obviously a subjective thing.
Your points are all well taken -- but miss my point entirely. What if your singing isn't worth $16 a CD? One of the ways consumers have to tell you that is to not buy your CD, but grab the admittedly crappy mp3 for free.
Is it theft? Yep. But is it also a protest? Yep.
Was the Boston Tea Party illegal? Yep. But damned effective.
And I can't help but think that while the Mona Lisa is priceless, a poster (cheap knockoff? like an mp3?) is 6 bucks. Hmmm?
I love the Ack-Acks (RIAA/MPAA). They are doing a fine job panicking as people realize the current value of their service, and are attempting to hang on to their business model with a death grip.
Look, 60 million napster fans and who knows how many video downloaders have been hit in the face with the fact the margin cost (cost to reproduce) a CD is virtually nothing. A little more than virtually nothing to reproduce a DVD, just longer because of current bandwith issues. So they can legislate all they want, but people are now aware that the only value-add the Ack-Acks add is deliver a physical product from burn-in to your local Best Buy.
And Gee!, that's gonna be irrelevant to a large portion to the population in a few years -- legitimate or not, digital dupes of oves and songs WILL be available somewhere.
It *isn't* irrelevent yet because of technology limitations. Napster is rife with lousy recordings, bad bitrates, misnamed songs, etc. Movies take up to large a percentage of a users hard drive.
So why aren't the Ack-Acks pushing to explore new value-adds while they still have the upper hand. Wouldn't it be nice to go to amazon and select 10 songs, and order a custom CD (not MP3 version either, true blue uncompressed versions)? Or select music label appproved MP3's, where you now there are no artifacts , at a specified bitrate, for $1 a song? Choosing from 40 different version, some live, some different studio riffs?
People get it -- the copy of the Madonna (insert an artist you like here) album isn't worth $16 -- it's worth maybe $1. You know where the money in art has been, historically? Live performances! That means concerts for Music and movie theaters for movies.
You're right in that self is less of a gyration for the compiler/interpreter, but it isn't for me. It's just 4 characters (counting.) longer, and adds no benefit.
And both the book and the tutorial give it a reasonable amount of attention -- that wasn't my complaint. My beef is that it is introduced relatively late.
And while iteraters may be exotic -- if we don't introduce some higher level concepts into languages soon, we are just pushing the semantic noodle around.
Don't misunderstand me -- I use both ruby and perl and have coded 1000+ line programs in each of them in the last 3 months. Personally, I find ruby a lot simpler to use -- but python is always my second choice, and I have to be dragged into perl...
While @ is much like self, it IS easier to tune out -- as it should be. If I need to differentiate in the code, I'll do it myself. I'd rather Ruby (and Python) did the scoping without *any* lexical gyrations.
Part of the problem with Python's object model comes from how it is introduced. If you slog through the books, or th tutorial, it really gets short shrift.
And once you get used to the concept of iterators (we are all used to the concept of classes, loops, etc.), iterators are marvelously clear.
OO may be a pain to write some 200 line program to put a web counter, but if you are actually writing libraries or designing applications that have to be used and maintained, OO is better than its procedural alternative.
Yeah, I know they are online, but they aren't easily downloaded for my laptop, so i cancode ruby at the beach -- something i did last summer with Python...
I'm sure there will be a raft of "do we need another script language -- isn't python/perl enough?" comments.
The answer is yes we do -- if it is ruby. Ruby offers a much better OO model than either Python or (gahk) Perl, with much clearer syntax for things like instance variables (non of this execrable 'self' gunk that python forces upon you). Ruby is so OO that it is scary, whereas Python and Perl always feel like procedural scripting languages with some OO bolted on.
And iterators -- baby, they are the coolest. Forget for loops and while loops for counting, just use the iterators. They are used throughout the language and make your code both small and readable.
The main barrier for ruby i the lack of online docs for the library -- the original docs are in Japanese. I ended up having to carry my "Programming Ruby" book in my laptop case for reference. That is what I miss most from my python days -- online reference docs.
Let's face it, you couldn't do dune correctly in under 12 hours, and you'd need the inner voice commentary to make it work.
More importantly, you can't rail against the acting. SciFi channel is no money tree. They certainly could not afford name american actors (not even many american actors at all is my guess). So the complaints about accents and such is just blathering.
Anybody who is complaining about cheesy effects or bad accents or bad acting is at least partly unwilling or unable to embroider the visual performance with their imagination. Anybody ever see Doctor Who? Or is everyone utterly spoiled by the very fun but plot thin Star Wars/Star Trek mentality where everthing is spelled out for you?
So far, the miniseries seems much more faithful to the book than Lynch's flawed but fun effort. Whole sequences of dialog are lifted directly from the books. Some plot concessions were inevitable, but the largest of these seems reasonable to me: no mention or emphasis of the Butlerian Jihad/role of mentats in society.
Most of the changes seem to be ones made in the interest of slimming down screen time to fit in 3 2-hour TV blocks.
No rendition of such a rich book is going to be even remotely a interesting. But SciFi seems to have made a decent effort given budget/resource constraints. It is certainly more interesting than a million other bad scifi movies I can think of (starting with Highlander 2 which I was forced to watch for 20 minutes last week).
"The ratio is out of whack. If the Big Scary Internet Business Dot Com has X Bandwidth, and the Home User has X / 2 Bandwidth (not X / 500) as it should be), there is a BIG problem."
Er, why? Yes it will snarl up current network topology for a bit, but it will get worked out. Evolutionarily speaking, things often are available on the net before the infrastructure is ready for them, and then technology backfills the new need.
Remember when all those AOLers hit the newsgroups? The sky was falling for news culture? Servers would never handle the bandwidth? It settled itself out.
But a bigger problem is that if you start thinking about how to "manage" broadband access this way, you are throwing away potential new uses for the net. Joe User deserves as much bandwidth as he can afford, and he deserves to use it in any (nonmalicious) way he wants. Peer-to-peer, website hosting, Unreal, Internet radio station broadcasting, whatever.
This is the problem the AtHome folks are running into -- they spent all that money on caching servers for web content and everyone unconfigures (is that a word?) the proxies immediately.
And the idea that Big Scary Dot Com Company X should have more bandwidth than me is lotek scarcity thinking. We are rapidly moving toward bandwidth as a commodity. I mean a REAL commodity, where 100mbit access is a given for 5 bucks a month. All those students coming out of college these days sure think it should be and one or more of them will work to make it happen.
Don't be afraid of the posibilities. Make it possible for us to explore them!
Re:It's not the knowledge, it's the hours ...
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 2
Your point is bang-on; I am currently only working these hours because there is a short-term fixed endpoint in sight -- end of June.
My solution for keeping productive is several games of Doom & Quake every 2-3 hours. Helps a bit.
You're comment about working harder is a bit patronizing -- I've been at this for 16 years, professionally, and am deathmarching here by choice for a potentially lucrative payoff. But my wife and I know it is temporary...
Re:It's not the knowledge, it's the hours ...
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 2
Actually, I'm implying that *management* thinks that young guys working 80+ hour weeks are better at saving badly managed projects...
It's not the knowledge, it's the hours ...
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 5
Lot's o' good comments so far, but the main thing I see is that when I was 20ish, working 80 hours a week was 'cool'. Now that I am thirty-ish, I still do it, but only because I work for a company I have an equity stake in... and every day, I think about how *nice* a 40-hour a week job would be.
I can easily see that when I am 40, I'll tell some manager to shove it if he thinks he is getting more than 40 hours out of me.
That's what I see the carreer threat as. Companies will be more willing to pay for some young guy to work gonzo hours and have no life than for a seasoned vet who will screw up the schedule by "only" working 40-45 hours a week... because the gonzo coders are better at saving really badly managed projects.
Look at the gaming industry; exclusively young gonzo types working for companies without strong management skills. They work in an industry where nearly every project involves lots of research, and research doesn't manage well.
At first blush, it seems like this is a stupid ruling, mainly for the reasons the judge gave for making it. He claims that they are essentially stealing cycles from eBay's servers and this could slow down ebay's service and have a negative impact on their customers' experience.
This is just plain stupid; if you have a page on your website which is viewable by the public then it is available for the public to download. That's the point of having a public website. Hey, I'm a customer of eBay's, am I guilty of using server cycles and slowing down the eBay website for other customers? You bet. eBay should secure the entire site and require authentication if they really want to pick and choose who can view.
On the other hand, I think what Bidder's Edge does is really indefensible from an ethical standpoint and I am rooting for them to lose because they are in effect *competing* with eBay for advertising dollars by *using* eBay's content. If you view content from ebay through Bidder's Edge, that's advertising revenue eBay doosn't get which BE does. Seems really lousy.
So it seems like the right ruling, but for totally the wrong reasons. The way the judge worded things it sounds like you could make a case for suing Yahoo, AltaVista, Google etc., if they dare to spider your site.
Geez. It's not like Outlook is the best mail client, but under windoze it offeres the best combination of multiple accounts + Palm integration. Now I have to go find some other client so I don't lose the ability to send attachments at *my* discretion.
All because there are many, many folks who aren't real bright? This was news to anyone?
Anyone who reads the Linux Kernel mailing list (or even scans the digests) is familiar with the nasty recurring battle over binary compatibility of Linux drivers from stable release to stable release. The Powers That Be in the Linux Kernel world are committed to not worrying about binary compatibility across releases for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons are good, some smack of stubborness, but that's OK.
I've written drivers for cards under NT, Solaris & Irix. In some cases it was an in house designed cards across all three platforms; in others it was a quickie driver for a specific card on a specific platform. Drivers can be very persnickety creatures requiring *lots* of fine tuning. They can also be plain-vanilla simpletons with no thought for performance.
Solaris has a fairly nice abstract ddi/ddk layer, letting you abstract things like endianess out of your code. And my 2.5 drivers work without a hitch under 2.7.
Windows is insane, because of its compatibility heritage. There are *tons* of special cases and exceptions. After 2 drivers with the HAL layer I went out and bought a 3rd-party C++ library that abstracted most of Windows undergarments away from me (Vireo DriverWorks, which I recommend). There are new developments in the Windows world since that effort however. Luckily I am gone from that!
Irix was icky, mainly because SGI couldn't decide if they really wanted to support PCI or not. They sure didn't want to support PCI bridge chips. Eventualy we were able to get enough atches to the OS to get it to work but it wasn't thrilling. Pretty damn fast however.
With that as backround, I have to say that the 1 source compiling to many driver binaries will only work at all well for simple stuff. Things like inked-list DMA, card-to-card DMA, etc, are tricky beasts and are very OS sensitive.
And endianness persisit as an issue; Solaris lets you specify any arbitrary memory range to be an arbitrary endianess.
On the other hand, because of the conflagration over binary drivers across Linux versions, a toolkit like this that just targeted Linux would be very nice; it would let companies write closed source drivers for Linux and not get hammered with each new stable tree. And sometimes closed source is an economic necessity for companies -- they may have signifigant IP tied up in that driver.
I have to ask, is everyone's stance on KiddiePorn etc. gonna stay the same when the porn in question is entirely artificial? You can surely see the day coming where both still and motion pictures can be created out of thin air?
I'm not advocating this, but in a lot of ways, a digital bitstream is just a dgital bitstream. When will we start embedding crypto text in private digital pictures? Using MP3 streams as crypto keys? Things like this will endlessly blur the lines of content -- leaving those pushing content control out in the dark.
... as in resources required to fight all the coming stupid cases like this. Between the censorship cases, crypto, MPAA/RIAA, patents and so forth, the EFF/ACLU/CPSR(sp?) are overwhelmed. It seem to me it will take a long, long time to get all of this crap overturned in the courts just because it will take a long, long time to educate the judiciary about what the real issues are.
Slashdot Mirror
As I've gotten older (started BASIC with a Timex/Sinclair XZ81, do NoSQL engine design for a living now), I've come to believe that the population split is true; there is a segment that has the aptitude to code, and the rest who don't.
The easiest way to see this aptitidue is to look and see whether someone loves to code. Just loves it. Works late because they have their teeth into a problem, holds incredibly complex systems in their head comfortably, etc. LOVES to code. Who feels, to paraphrase The Wind in the Willows: "There is nothing-- absolutely nothing-- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in code."
You rarely find crappy software folks who enjoy puttering about in the code. You often find crappy devs who got into it for the high salary.
I concur on Zodiac. Simply a perfect little book, tight plot, not a wasted word. A goto comfort book.
Our developers transitioned to Subversion about 6 months ago, and since we almost all use Eclipse, we moved to Subclipse. We experienced lots of problems, particularly related to slow performance and branch-to-branch merges behaving strangely. Subsequently we moved to the Subversive plugin, which even in its beta state was more usable for us. Since then it is at RC stage and has proven very good in an environment with sometimes daily branching per developer. It feels much more like the CVS plugin than Subclipse does though that is obviously a subjective thing.
r oject=subversive
It is open source, has frequent updates, and retains a lean feel. Check it out: http://www.polarion.org/index.php?page=overview&p
I loved my cable modem. I had it for 3+ years, worked flawlessly, good upload speed, GREAT upload speed, all the stuff you know.
OK, now I live in an area that isn't wired yet, and Comcast's predictions as to when it will get here seem to be rolling out into the future.
Meanwhile, Comcast here in Maryland seems to be endlessly running ads for new people to sign up. I wonder what will happen there?
Meanwhile, being 30k+ feet from my CO means that I am anxiously awaiting the installation of my ISDN line, complete with per minute charges. Blech!
Your points are all well taken -- but miss my point entirely. What if your singing isn't worth $16 a CD? One of the ways consumers have to tell you that is to not buy your CD, but grab the admittedly crappy mp3 for free.
Is it theft? Yep. But is it also a protest? Yep.
Was the Boston Tea Party illegal? Yep. But damned effective.
And I can't help but think that while the Mona Lisa is priceless, a poster (cheap knockoff? like an mp3?) is 6 bucks. Hmmm?
So this costs you $1000+ $1*#cds? OK, so say you sell 2000 CDs: $1000+$2000=$3000. Say you sell half your CDs. $3000/$1000= $3. See my point?
.10 per CD to press, I'm unimpressed.
Given that major labels expect to sell 10's of thousands of even a bad cd, and it costs thm
It still seems to me bands should be looking to make most of their money off of live performances...
I love the Ack-Acks (RIAA/MPAA). They are doing a fine job panicking as people realize the current value of their service, and are attempting to hang on to their business model with a death grip.
Look, 60 million napster fans and who knows how many video downloaders have been hit in the face with the fact the margin cost (cost to reproduce) a CD is virtually nothing. A little more than virtually nothing to reproduce a DVD, just longer because of current bandwith issues. So they can legislate all they want, but people are now aware that the only value-add the Ack-Acks add is deliver a physical product from burn-in to your local Best Buy.
And Gee!, that's gonna be irrelevant to a large portion to the population in a few years -- legitimate or not, digital dupes of oves and songs WILL be available somewhere.
It *isn't* irrelevent yet because of technology limitations. Napster is rife with lousy recordings, bad bitrates, misnamed songs, etc. Movies take up to large a percentage of a users hard drive.
So why aren't the Ack-Acks pushing to explore new value-adds while they still have the upper hand. Wouldn't it be nice to go to amazon and select 10 songs, and order a custom CD (not MP3 version either, true blue uncompressed versions)? Or select music label appproved MP3's, where you now there are no artifacts , at a specified bitrate, for $1 a song? Choosing from 40 different version, some live, some different studio riffs?
People get it -- the copy of the Madonna (insert an artist you like here) album isn't worth $16 -- it's worth maybe $1. You know where the money in art has been, historically? Live performances! That means concerts for Music and movie theaters for movies.
The Ack-Acks don't get it.
You're right in that self is less of a gyration for the compiler/interpreter, but it isn't for me. It's just 4 characters (counting .) longer, and adds no benefit.
And both the book and the tutorial give it a reasonable amount of attention -- that wasn't my complaint. My beef is that it is introduced relatively late.
And while iteraters may be exotic -- if we don't introduce some higher level concepts into languages soon, we are just pushing the semantic noodle around.
Don't misunderstand me -- I use both ruby and perl and have coded 1000+ line programs in each of them in the last 3 months. Personally, I find ruby a lot simpler to use -- but python is always my second choice, and I have to be dragged into perl...
While @ is much like self, it IS easier to tune out -- as it should be. If I need to differentiate in the code, I'll do it myself. I'd rather Ruby (and Python) did the scoping without *any* lexical gyrations.
Part of the problem with Python's object model comes from how it is introduced. If you slog through the books, or th tutorial, it really gets short shrift.
And once you get used to the concept of iterators (we are all used to the concept of classes, loops, etc.), iterators are marvelously clear.
Yes, but it is easier to read and type, but more importantly, it does *not* appear in the function declaration!
OO may be a pain to write some 200 line program to put a web counter, but if you are actually writing libraries or designing applications that have to be used and maintained, OO is better than its procedural alternative.
Yeah, I know they are online, but they aren't easily downloaded for my laptop, so i cancode ruby at the beach -- something i did last summer with Python ...
I'm sure there will be a raft of "do we need another script language -- isn't python/perl enough?" comments.
The answer is yes we do -- if it is ruby. Ruby offers a much better OO model than either Python or (gahk) Perl, with much clearer syntax for things like instance variables (non of this execrable 'self' gunk that python forces upon you). Ruby is so OO that it is scary, whereas Python and Perl always feel like procedural scripting languages with some OO bolted on.
And iterators -- baby, they are the coolest. Forget for loops and while loops for counting, just use the iterators. They are used throughout the language and make your code both small and readable.
The main barrier for ruby i the lack of online docs for the library -- the original docs are in Japanese. I ended up having to carry my "Programming Ruby" book in my laptop case for reference. That is what I miss most from my python days -- online reference docs.
Let's face it, you couldn't do dune correctly in under 12 hours, and you'd need the inner voice commentary to make it work.
More importantly, you can't rail against the acting. SciFi channel is no money tree. They certainly could not afford name american actors (not even many american actors at all is my guess). So the complaints about accents and such is just blathering.
Anybody who is complaining about cheesy effects or bad accents or bad acting is at least partly unwilling or unable to embroider the visual performance with their imagination. Anybody ever see Doctor Who? Or is everyone utterly spoiled by the very fun but plot thin Star Wars/Star Trek mentality where everthing is spelled out for you?
So far, the miniseries seems much more faithful to the book than Lynch's flawed but fun effort. Whole sequences of dialog are lifted directly from the books. Some plot concessions were inevitable, but the largest of these seems reasonable to me: no mention or emphasis of the Butlerian Jihad/role of mentats in society.
Most of the changes seem to be ones made in the interest of slimming down screen time to fit in 3 2-hour TV blocks.
No rendition of such a rich book is going to be even remotely a interesting. But SciFi seems to have made a decent effort given budget/resource constraints. It is certainly more interesting than a million other bad scifi movies I can think of (starting with Highlander 2 which I was forced to watch for 20 minutes last week).
"The ratio is out of whack. If the Big Scary Internet Business Dot Com has X Bandwidth, and the Home User has X / 2 Bandwidth (not X / 500) as it should be), there is a BIG problem."
Er, why? Yes it will snarl up current network topology for a bit, but it will get worked out. Evolutionarily speaking, things often are available on the net before the infrastructure is ready for them, and then technology backfills the new need.
Remember when all those AOLers hit the newsgroups? The sky was falling for news culture? Servers would never handle the bandwidth? It settled itself out.
But a bigger problem is that if you start thinking about how to "manage" broadband access this way, you are throwing away potential new uses for the net. Joe User deserves as much bandwidth as he can afford, and he deserves to use it in any (nonmalicious) way he wants. Peer-to-peer, website hosting, Unreal, Internet radio station broadcasting, whatever.
This is the problem the AtHome folks are running into -- they spent all that money on caching servers for web content and everyone unconfigures (is that a word?) the proxies immediately.
And the idea that Big Scary Dot Com Company X should have more bandwidth than me is lotek scarcity thinking. We are rapidly moving toward bandwidth as a commodity. I mean a REAL commodity, where 100mbit access is a given for 5 bucks a month. All those students coming out of college these days sure think it should be and one or more of them will work to make it happen.
Don't be afraid of the posibilities. Make it possible for us to explore them!
Your point is bang-on; I am currently only working these hours because there is a short-term fixed endpoint in sight -- end of June.
My solution for keeping productive is several games of Doom & Quake every 2-3 hours. Helps a bit.
You're comment about working harder is a bit patronizing -- I've been at this for 16 years, professionally, and am deathmarching here by choice for a potentially lucrative payoff. But my wife and I know it is temporary...
Actually, I'm implying that *management* thinks that young guys working 80+ hour weeks are better at saving badly managed projects...
Lot's o' good comments so far, but the main thing I see is that when I was 20ish, working 80 hours a week was 'cool'. Now that I am thirty-ish, I still do it, but only because I work for a company I have an equity stake in ... and every day, I think about how *nice* a 40-hour a week job would be.
... because the gonzo coders are better at saving really badly managed projects.
I can easily see that when I am 40, I'll tell some manager to shove it if he thinks he is getting more than 40 hours out of me.
That's what I see the carreer threat as. Companies will be more willing to pay for some young guy to work gonzo hours and have no life than for a seasoned vet who will screw up the schedule by "only" working 40-45 hours a week
Look at the gaming industry; exclusively young gonzo types working for companies without strong management skills. They work in an industry where nearly every project involves lots of research, and research doesn't manage well.
At first blush, it seems like this is a stupid ruling, mainly for the reasons the judge gave for making it. He claims that they are essentially stealing cycles from eBay's servers and this could slow down ebay's service and have a negative impact on their customers' experience.
This is just plain stupid; if you have a page on your website which is viewable by the public then it is available for the public to download. That's the point of having a public website. Hey, I'm a customer of eBay's, am I guilty of using server cycles and slowing down the eBay website for other customers? You bet. eBay should secure the entire site and require authentication if they really want to pick and choose who can view.
On the other hand, I think what Bidder's Edge does is really indefensible from an ethical standpoint and I am rooting for them to lose because they are in effect *competing* with eBay for advertising dollars by *using* eBay's content. If you view content from ebay through Bidder's Edge, that's advertising revenue eBay doosn't get which BE does. Seems really lousy.
So it seems like the right ruling, but for totally the wrong reasons. The way the judge worded things it sounds like you could make a case for suing Yahoo, AltaVista, Google etc., if they dare to spider your site.
Whot crap!
Geez. It's not like Outlook is the best mail client, but under windoze it offeres the best combination of multiple accounts + Palm integration. Now I have to go find some other client so I don't lose the ability to send attachments at *my* discretion.
All because there are many, many folks who aren't real bright? This was news to anyone?
Anyone who reads the Linux Kernel mailing list (or even scans the digests) is familiar with the nasty recurring battle over binary compatibility of Linux drivers from stable release to stable release. The Powers That Be in the Linux Kernel world are committed to not worrying about binary compatibility across releases for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons are good, some smack of stubborness, but that's OK.
I've written drivers for cards under NT, Solaris & Irix. In some cases it was an in house designed cards across all three platforms; in others it was a quickie driver for a specific card on a specific platform. Drivers can be very persnickety creatures requiring *lots* of fine tuning. They can also be plain-vanilla simpletons with no thought for performance.
Solaris has a fairly nice abstract ddi/ddk layer, letting you abstract things like endianess out of your code. And my 2.5 drivers work without a hitch under 2.7.
Windows is insane, because of its compatibility heritage. There are *tons* of special cases and exceptions. After 2 drivers with the HAL layer I went out and bought a 3rd-party C++ library that abstracted most of Windows undergarments away from me (Vireo DriverWorks, which I recommend). There are new developments in the Windows world since that effort however. Luckily I am gone from that!
Irix was icky, mainly because SGI couldn't decide if they really wanted to support PCI or not. They sure didn't want to support PCI bridge chips. Eventualy we were able to get enough atches to the OS to get it to work but it wasn't thrilling. Pretty damn fast however.
With that as backround, I have to say that the 1 source compiling to many driver binaries will only work at all well for simple stuff. Things like inked-list DMA, card-to-card DMA, etc, are tricky beasts and are very OS sensitive.
And endianness persisit as an issue; Solaris lets you specify any arbitrary memory range to be an arbitrary endianess.
On the other hand, because of the conflagration over binary drivers across Linux versions, a toolkit like this that just targeted Linux would be very nice; it would let companies write closed source drivers for Linux and not get hammered with each new stable tree. And sometimes closed source is an economic necessity for companies -- they may have signifigant IP tied up in that driver.
I have to ask, is everyone's stance on KiddiePorn etc. gonna stay the same when the porn in question is entirely artificial? You can surely see the day coming where both still and motion pictures can be created out of thin air?
I'm not advocating this, but in a lot of ways, a digital bitstream is just a dgital bitstream. When will we start embedding crypto text in private digital pictures? Using MP3 streams as crypto keys? Things like this will endlessly blur the lines of content -- leaving those pushing content control out in the dark.
"This could include opinions that no democrat could countenance."
Please. Could you make a more elitist bullshit comment?
There are no ideas which can't stand the light of day.
... what someone is willing to pay. No more, no less.
... as in resources required to fight all the coming stupid cases like this. Between the censorship cases, crypto, MPAA/RIAA, patents and so forth, the EFF/ACLU/CPSR(sp?) are overwhelmed. It seem to me it will take a long, long time to get all of this crap overturned in the courts just because it will take a long, long time to educate the judiciary about what the real issues are.