OK - so where *can* someone find good example of C code? I have read that a good way to learn C is to download the source to a program that you respect and then get a feel for that and try and extend that. First three programs I try: 1) GNU Screen: k&r C, uncommented, undocumented mass of long functions and macros everywhere. 2) Nethack: k&r C, uncommented, undocumented mass of long functions and macros everywhere. 3) Vim: k&r C, uncommented, undocumented mass of long functions and macros everywhere.
Um... is there any application code in C out there that is even written in ANSI C, let alone well commented and understandable to someone new to the program? All the C code I look at seems to be ridden with macros which would seem to be in there for cross platform purposes - but - how do people get a feel for these macros?
> Probably because I can't think of any artist > that likes to give away his/her music for free.
What?! I can think of any number of artists who love giving their music away. Some of us even have the audacity to believe that you should do art for the sake of art and the experience, that finance need not come into it, and that there should be no notion of ownership over ideas or anything else which can be reduced to a digital format.
There are commercial artists who I respect for their music, but I don't respect the attitude of them or anyone else who one the one hand claims to be an artist and then on the other demands that people pay money for their works in order to support their lifestyle. They should go and get a real job like the rest of us!
I don't support these eye-candy arguments. Aqua is one of the things I dislike most about my mac, and the finder is another strong contender. Integration is important and responsiveness, but eye-candy - well - I think it's counterproductive. I prefer gnome to any other desktop UI. If I could swap aqua for gnome tomorrow and still have the great java integration and application support that I have on the mac I would.
Hmm. I couldn't find a way to navigate there. Typing "Adelaide, Australia" into the input box returns no results. Also, the zoom on Australia is very low. With google maps I can see my car in the driveway (at least it's the same colour - no idea how old the shots are).
Of course, Australia is missing from the Microsoft maps as well but somehow that seems less notable than... a couple of acres on the west coast of the US?
At the moment my favourite reading is: "Our government are put in place to stop anyone from concentrating power and thereby threatening our freedoms. The role of government is to perpetuate this situation and to stay the hell out of the way of its citizens in all other circumstances."
> It doesn't mean they are "supporting global > monopolies". They are casting the widest net > with the least cost, which unfortunately is > something government rarely attempts.
I agree that government should be more effecient but the rest of this is probably wrong. There's no evident reason why they couldn't have written this system in java to work in a wide range of browsers on a wide range of platforms.
> Most taxpayers use Windows. It is more popular > than Linux/MacOS
The fact that this software only runs under Windows and that they didn't pick something like java points to incompetence: this site is meant to be used by a huge userbase and can't be. This isn't due to technical limitations: they could have picked java and it would have done a similar job and worked for everyone. It's due to incompetence. An equivalent decision by a well-run company hoping to reach all citizens but finding that they can't because of a basic mistake over lockin would be labelled a failure, and it would be fixed up.
One consideration you didn't mention is this: eTax isn't the only way of submitting a tax form. You can do it on paper, and thus having Windows-specific software available is value-adding to their service. Nevertheless, for them to be investing in software development in a windows-specific way points to bad management because they will have more difficulty moving in a reasonable direction in the future as a result. ie: incompetence. If the steering committee behind the ATO had a clue the software wouldn't be in this situation.
I worked in Central London about twelve months ago. A mate and I had read up on decomissioned tube stations and the like, and thought it would be fun to spend a Saturday going around and trying to find them. This turned out to be not so fun. You pass a siding, see a shadow of something in the darkness, and go "Oh there it is"... and that's it. So this quickly turned into game of "let's see if we can pass through all of the zone 1 tube stations before the tube closes tonight. It was a close run, but we did it. We took a photo at each stop. basically - leap out of the train, *snap*, scuffle awkwardly away from the arms of any nearby security people, leap back on the train before the doors close and on to the next stop! During that day we got seriously yelled at for taking photos of an interesting looking building near Vauxhall Cross. Top day.
On another weekend I came third in a Mornington Crescent championship.
And since cab drivers are mentioned in this story, I'll also mention that during my time in London I also got propositioned by a cab driver. It was a company-paid and organised cab as well (!). I explained that while I had every confidence in his a lovely personality, I had a girlfriend back home and it just wouldn't do.
If you had something that was very hot and were able to suspend it in a true vacuum, then its heat would be suspended. (is this right? could light traverse a perfect vacuum to allow the escape of energy?) Could this be a way to transfer energy around the universe? Heat something up, accelerate it and the container to transport speed, and then seal it all in a pure vacuume (it's feasible we'll one day be able to do this). When it comes near to its destination, fill the vacuume, and start drawing energy away. Perhaps this could be an easy way for vessels to store up large amounts of power for space travel. You could go up to a star, gather heat, and set off, hoping not to run into asteroids en-route.
After the move to x86, Apple will continue to be Apple. Except for the possible inclusion of an intel inside sticker on the box, they will be proprietary machines running mac os x, something you won't be able to run on different hardware, and popular with end users.
Linux fills and has always filled a completely different genre - that of solid geeky type who like it for its idealogical purity, flexibility or because it's a bit unusual. The changes the Apple decision makes are minor: - there might be a few more Apples sold to linux geeks who want to use photoshop occasionally and who choose mac os x over Windows - since Apple looks set to increase its markey share, there will be a greater proportion of people making the transition from a desktop computer usage to unix-geek computer usage, which means linux will benefit.
I'm an aussie, so the idea of me having debates about Nixon on slashdot with people who probably live in his country is fun. Anyway - onwards.
One of the reasons I like Nixon in preference to some presidents is because he was bent, and he got caught for it.
He had a come-uppance. This is good in a way, because in fact it means you can appraise his record honestly. This might sound convoluted, but it's hard to say anything nice about Clinton knowing the terrible and well-documented things he got away with during his tenure (particularly right at the end) which he has never been brought to account for. He's gotten away with it and he knows it. People still talk about him as though he is a good man. This is terrible!
> WebObjects is almost universally recognized as > dead, except for internal use at apple.
It's thin client software. So it just doesn't matter what you use on the server. It's your choice. I haven't used anything.NET, but I used to be an.asp programmer (oh the shame!), and I hear C# is just a lot like java, and I use WO. I don't find your arument compelling - for me WO is still very relevant and will be for a long time come. It's still the best tool out there, and your customers don't care what you use as long as your system delivers content that works in their web browser. Cayenne looks like it will be as good as EOF, but it's still not mature. I haven't seen anything else that comes close, and you don't give any examples, but want to put faith in a product coming soon from Microsoft. Well - um -... I don't trust products before they're out, and Microsoft doesn't have a very good reputation for delivering on promises of what will be in future releases of software atm.
This "almost universally recognised" (whatever that means) is a perhaps somewhat more than an altogether generous bit controversial.;) But if ASP works for you better than WebObjects used to, that's cool as well. I agree that most of the tools suck, but you don't have to use them. Most stuff can be done in a text editor, and replacements for the rest can be built.
While I agree with your direction, people could use the same argument to say "well intellectual property is property - that's why it's called intellectual *property*". Whereas in fact the idea of ideas as property is a con.
Too late for me!
on
Zeta Goes Gold
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Once a 100% BeOS user, I played around with Be again a fortnight ago, hoping to get into working on the very very cool instant messenger kit. But it was too hard. I couldn't get SSH to work, there are problems with some tools (eg: Bethon) only working with R5, others only working with post-BONE releases, etc, etc, and the browsers are too heavy to run nicely on my compatible hardware (dual p2, 256MB) and I got sick of it. Until the community can get to the state where you can get a development workstation set up without having to bleed and until the distributions can get support for basic hardware like SATA (or else applications that work nice on the old compatible hardware), it's not going to get much momentum behind it.
This is a shame, because the interface is a damned side faster and lighter and nicer than either gnome or mac os x (and in spite of the yucky bloaty skinned rubbish that zeta has replaced the old beautiful elegant fast LAF with), and it used to be much easier for young developers to get used to the environment than linux (at least it was easier for me).
The coolest thing about Be though was the filesystem. Check out this: http://eiman.tv/imkit/use.html. This is an instant messenger system that's based on the filesystem. So each user's icon... is a file with metadata! Neat! All written by the same guy who's written this new metadata file system that's shipped with tiger.
Anyway - it's too late for me now. I only had one computer left that would run Be or Zeta (my newish mac and newer SATA x86 box won't run it.:( ) and my experiences trying to get basic tools up and working a fornight ago put me off one time too many. I installed debian stable on that on Sunday so it can replace my mailserver.
But I'm guessing that in ten or fifteen years we'll start getting to the point where kernels are interchangable, so I hope Be people keep up their good work because it was one hell of a fast exciting system back in the day.
There are a couple of significant flaws in this suggestion: 1) That Pepsi thing
A while back, Pepsi entered the fast food industry by buying a couple of chains. Thus, Pizza Hut and KFC always offered Pepsi instead of Coke. Problem was, other fast food companies all identified pepsi as an enemy at this point and moved away from them. This is a slightly different situation because intel is far more powerful than pepsi was at the time - but AMD is lurking in the wings, and it wouldn't take too much for Microsoft to try and push AMD into a being a far surperior rival to intel, perhaps even locking intel out of the top-of-the-line Windows server market..
2) Jobs doesn't work like that
Jobs has consistently demonstrated that he wants Apple to be just the sort of company it is now. Selling computers, making cool software, waving a stick at other companies.
So... this guy gets modded up as funny (which it is I guess), but the comments talking about statistical significance and which are therefore directly relevent to the topic have a lower rating..
?!
It would be nice if there was a feature in the interface to turn off allegedly funny comments rather than it being limited to your session.
I'd had the term 'internetwork' in mind to describe the effect that a specific ISP has in Adelaide. All the geeks I know use it, as do the geeky companies. So you've got a network that's connected to the Internet, but where at times it feels incidental. The vast majority of your bandwidth never leaves their network, whether you're doing things for work, coding at home, or interacting with mates. Telecommuting, download mirror, radio, file sharing, counterstrike, skype, email, even a fair bit of hosting - all goes on inside the network (and the one of the major reasons is of course because they're the ISP who have the reputation for having support staff who don't treat you like dirt when you say you're running something other than Windows, or if your home adsl connects to an internal network rather than a standalone PC. actually, their support is really good independent of that. they know their stuff.).
This is all completely off-topic for what this article is about, but that's the label I'd been thinking of to describe the effect:)
> Keyboards are one of the few things > with computers where cheaper is better.
In recent years this has been so true. The cheap*est* keyboards just keep getting better. My current favourite is the A$8 "Diamond Digital" (Mitsubishi). It's by far the best keyboard I've ever used and I've won a friend to it (without trying - he was using my workstation at work one weekend when he was there with a colleague and said he wanted one of the keyboards. I'd bought a spare and kept it in the booot I'd be able to sell it to a friend and did.)
Bit strange to be posting on a thred this old, but here I go.
One thing that was neat about the first matrix film was that it had a twist that had solid philosophical underpinnings. The rest of the series effectively abandoned this. It changed from being a believable logic story into a story about magic.
I completely expected the second and third film to explore the possibility of there being different levels at play - for example - the machines and humans would be trapped inside another simulated world and The One's power would have been to find another breakout of that. But... it just got bogged down in martial arts and a less-than-compelling man vs machines plot. Or perhaps this plot would have had to have ended with the rational decision most of us make - although we could be stuck within the powers of an evil scientist probing our brains, we have no evidence of this and so - rather than getting carried away worrying about it, we're better off just getting on with our lives.
An alternative plot line would have been if Neo could have brought awakening to humans stuck in the machine such that they could reach a consensus with the machines. If they could have all become aware, they would have been able to demand concessions from the machines in exchange from continuing to function in the matrix.
I like this idea of taking the broken bits of series and letting fans fill in the gaps. Anyway, if you find any of this interesting and would prefer to reply by email, I'm craig @ my domain name.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks! Both postfix and gnu wget are programs I have a high regard for. I'll check them out.
OK - so where *can* someone find good example of C code? I have read that a good way to learn C is to download the source to a program that you respect and then get a feel for that and try and extend that. First three programs I try:
1) GNU Screen: k&r C, uncommented, undocumented mass of long functions and macros everywhere.
2) Nethack: k&r C, uncommented, undocumented mass of long functions and macros everywhere.
3) Vim: k&r C, uncommented, undocumented mass of long functions and macros everywhere.
Um... is there any application code in C out there that is even written in ANSI C, let alone well commented and understandable to someone new to the program? All the C code I look at seems to be ridden with macros which would seem to be in there for cross platform purposes - but - how do people get a feel for these macros?
> Some of what I said might not reflect exactly
> what I feel because I have trouble putting ideas
> like that into words.
OK. Now I think about it that happens to me quite a bit as well.
> Probably because I can't think of any artist
> that likes to give away his/her music for free.
What?! I can think of any number of artists who love giving their music away. Some of us even have the audacity to believe that you should do art for the sake of art and the experience, that finance need not come into it, and that there should be no notion of ownership over ideas or anything else which can be reduced to a digital format.
There are commercial artists who I respect for their music, but I don't respect the attitude of them or anyone else who one the one hand claims to be an artist and then on the other demands that people pay money for their works in order to support their lifestyle. They should go and get a real job like the rest of us!
Are there any portable music players that support .ogg vorbis yet? (and are they any good?)
I don't support these eye-candy arguments. Aqua is one of the things I dislike most about my mac, and the finder is another strong contender. Integration is important and responsiveness, but eye-candy - well - I think it's counterproductive. I prefer gnome to any other desktop UI. If I could swap aqua for gnome tomorrow and still have the great java integration and application support that I have on the mac I would.
Hmm. I couldn't find a way to navigate there. Typing "Adelaide, Australia" into the input box returns no results. Also, the zoom on Australia is very low. With google maps I can see my car in the driveway (at least it's the same colour - no idea how old the shots are).
Of course, Australia is missing from the Microsoft maps as well but somehow that seems less notable than... a couple of acres on the west coast of the US?
> Is there really anything worth watching on TV anymore?
BBC World. Everything else worthwhile can be downloaded.
At the moment my favourite reading is:
"Our government are put in place to stop anyone from concentrating power and thereby threatening our freedoms. The role of government is to perpetuate this situation and to stay the hell out of the way of its citizens in all other circumstances."
> It doesn't mean they are "supporting global
> monopolies". They are casting the widest net
> with the least cost, which unfortunately is
> something government rarely attempts.
I agree that government should be more effecient but the rest of this is probably wrong. There's no evident reason why they couldn't have written this system in java to work in a wide range of browsers on a wide range of platforms.
> Most taxpayers use Windows. It is more popular
> than Linux/MacOS
The fact that this software only runs under Windows and that they didn't pick something like java points to incompetence: this site is meant to be used by a huge userbase and can't be. This isn't due to technical limitations: they could have picked java and it would have done a similar job and worked for everyone. It's due to incompetence. An equivalent decision by a well-run company hoping to reach all citizens but finding that they can't because of a basic mistake over lockin would be labelled a failure, and it would be fixed up.
One consideration you didn't mention is this: eTax isn't the only way of submitting a tax form. You can do it on paper, and thus having Windows-specific software available is value-adding to their service. Nevertheless, for them to be investing in software development in a windows-specific way points to bad management because they will have more difficulty moving in a reasonable direction in the future as a result. ie: incompetence. If the steering committee behind the ATO had a clue the software wouldn't be in this situation.
I worked in Central London about twelve months ago. A mate and I had read up on decomissioned tube stations and the like, and thought it would be fun to spend a Saturday going around and trying to find them. This turned out to be not so fun. You pass a siding, see a shadow of something in the darkness, and go "Oh there it is"... and that's it. So this quickly turned into game of "let's see if we can pass through all of the zone 1 tube stations before the tube closes tonight. It was a close run, but we did it. We took a photo at each stop. basically - leap out of the train, *snap*, scuffle awkwardly away from the arms of any nearby security people, leap back on the train before the doors close and on to the next stop! During that day we got seriously yelled at for taking photos of an interesting looking building near Vauxhall Cross. Top day.
On another weekend I came third in a Mornington Crescent championship.
And since cab drivers are mentioned in this story, I'll also mention that during my time in London I also got propositioned by a cab driver. It was a company-paid and organised cab as well (!). I explained that while I had every confidence in his a lovely personality, I had a girlfriend back home and it just wouldn't do.
Yeah - and while we're at it - that ninth symphony was pure gold!
If you had something that was very hot and were able to suspend it in a true vacuum, then its heat would be suspended. (is this right? could light traverse a perfect vacuum to allow the escape of energy?) Could this be a way to transfer energy around the universe? Heat something up, accelerate it and the container to transport speed, and then seal it all in a pure vacuume (it's feasible we'll one day be able to do this). When it comes near to its destination, fill the vacuume, and start drawing energy away. Perhaps this could be an easy way for vessels to store up large amounts of power for space travel. You could go up to a star, gather heat, and set off, hoping not to run into asteroids en-route.
After the move to x86, Apple will continue to be Apple. Except for the possible inclusion of an intel inside sticker on the box, they will be proprietary machines running mac os x, something you won't be able to run on different hardware, and popular with end users.
Linux fills and has always filled a completely different genre - that of solid geeky type who like it for its idealogical purity, flexibility or because it's a bit unusual. The changes the Apple decision makes are minor:
- there might be a few more Apples sold to linux geeks who want to use photoshop occasionally and who choose mac os x over Windows
- since Apple looks set to increase its markey share, there will be a greater proportion of people making the transition from a desktop computer usage to unix-geek computer usage, which means linux will benefit.
I'm an aussie, so the idea of me having debates about Nixon on slashdot with people who probably live in his country is fun. Anyway - onwards.
One of the reasons I like Nixon in preference to some presidents is because he was bent, and he got caught for it.
He had a come-uppance. This is good in a way, because in fact it means you can appraise his record honestly. This might sound convoluted, but it's hard to say anything nice about Clinton knowing the terrible and well-documented things he got away with during his tenure (particularly right at the end) which he has never been brought to account for. He's gotten away with it and he knows it. People still talk about him as though he is a good man. This is terrible!
> WebObjects is almost universally recognized as
.NET, but I used to be an .asp programmer (oh the shame!), and I hear C# is just a lot like java, and I use WO. I don't find your arument compelling - for me WO is still very relevant and will be for a long time come. It's still the best tool out there, and your customers don't care what you use as long as your system delivers content that works in their web browser. Cayenne looks like it will be as good as EOF, but it's still not mature. I haven't seen anything else that comes close, and you don't give any examples, but want to put faith in a product coming soon from Microsoft. Well - um - ... I don't trust products before they're out, and Microsoft doesn't have a very good reputation for delivering on promises of what will be in future releases of software atm.
;) But if ASP works for you better than WebObjects used to, that's cool as well. I agree that most of the tools suck, but you don't have to use them. Most stuff can be done in a text editor, and replacements for the rest can be built.
> dead, except for internal use at apple.
It's thin client software. So it just doesn't matter what you use on the server. It's your choice. I haven't used anything
This "almost universally recognised" (whatever that means) is a perhaps somewhat more than an altogether generous bit controversial.
While I agree with your direction, people could use the same argument to say "well intellectual property is property - that's why it's called intellectual *property*". Whereas in fact the idea of ideas as property is a con.
Once a 100% BeOS user, I played around with Be again a fortnight ago, hoping to get into working on the very very cool instant messenger kit. But it was too hard. I couldn't get SSH to work, there are problems with some tools (eg: Bethon) only working with R5, others only working with post-BONE releases, etc, etc, and the browsers are too heavy to run nicely on my compatible hardware (dual p2, 256MB) and I got sick of it. Until the community can get to the state where you can get a development workstation set up without having to bleed and until the distributions can get support for basic hardware like SATA (or else applications that work nice on the old compatible hardware), it's not going to get much momentum behind it.
:( ) and my experiences trying to get basic tools up and working a fornight ago put me off one time too many. I installed debian stable on that on Sunday so it can replace my mailserver.
This is a shame, because the interface is a damned side faster and lighter and nicer than either gnome or mac os x (and in spite of the yucky bloaty skinned rubbish that zeta has replaced the old beautiful elegant fast LAF with), and it used to be much easier for young developers to get used to the environment than linux (at least it was easier for me).
The coolest thing about Be though was the filesystem. Check out this: http://eiman.tv/imkit/use.html. This is an instant messenger system that's based on the filesystem. So each user's icon... is a file with metadata! Neat! All written by the same guy who's written this new metadata file system that's shipped with tiger.
Anyway - it's too late for me now. I only had one computer left that would run Be or Zeta (my newish mac and newer SATA x86 box won't run it.
But I'm guessing that in ten or fifteen years we'll start getting to the point where kernels are interchangable, so I hope Be people keep up their good work because it was one hell of a fast exciting system back in the day.
There are a couple of significant flaws in this suggestion:
1) That Pepsi thing
A while back, Pepsi entered the fast food industry by buying a couple of chains. Thus, Pizza Hut and KFC always offered Pepsi instead of Coke. Problem was, other fast food companies all identified pepsi as an enemy at this point and moved away from them. This is a slightly different situation because intel is far more powerful than pepsi was at the time - but AMD is lurking in the wings, and it wouldn't take too much for Microsoft to try and push AMD into a being a far surperior rival to intel, perhaps even locking intel out of the top-of-the-line Windows server market..
2) Jobs doesn't work like that
Jobs has consistently demonstrated that he wants Apple to be just the sort of company it is now. Selling computers, making cool software, waving a stick at other companies.
> Disney is purchasing Apple.
I think Disney used to be one of the biggest employers of webobjects programmers, so it's less silly than some ideas.
So... this guy gets modded up as funny (which it is I guess), but the comments talking about statistical significance and which are therefore directly relevent to the topic have a lower rating..
?!
It would be nice if there was a feature in the interface to turn off allegedly funny comments rather than it being limited to your session.
I'd had the term 'internetwork' in mind to describe the effect that a specific ISP has in Adelaide. All the geeks I know use it, as do the geeky companies. So you've got a network that's connected to the Internet, but where at times it feels incidental. The vast majority of your bandwidth never leaves their network, whether you're doing things for work, coding at home, or interacting with mates. Telecommuting, download mirror, radio, file sharing, counterstrike, skype, email, even a fair bit of hosting - all goes on inside the network (and the one of the major reasons is of course because they're the ISP who have the reputation for having support staff who don't treat you like dirt when you say you're running something other than Windows, or if your home adsl connects to an internal network rather than a standalone PC. actually, their support is really good independent of that. they know their stuff.).
:)
This is all completely off-topic for what this article is about, but that's the label I'd been thinking of to describe the effect
> Keyboards are one of the few things
> with computers where cheaper is better.
In recent years this has been so true. The cheap*est* keyboards just keep getting better. My current favourite is the A$8 "Diamond Digital" (Mitsubishi). It's by far the best keyboard I've ever used and I've won a friend to it (without trying - he was using my workstation at work one weekend when he was there with a colleague and said he wanted one of the keyboards. I'd bought a spare and kept it in the booot I'd be able to sell it to a friend and did.)
Bit strange to be posting on a thred this old, but here I go.
... it just got bogged down in martial arts and a less-than-compelling man vs machines plot. Or perhaps this plot would have had to have ended with the rational decision most of us make - although we could be stuck within the powers of an evil scientist probing our brains, we have no evidence of this and so - rather than getting carried away worrying about it, we're better off just getting on with our lives.
One thing that was neat about the first matrix film was that it had a twist that had solid philosophical underpinnings. The rest of the series effectively abandoned this. It changed from being a believable logic story into a story about magic.
I completely expected the second and third film to explore the possibility of there being different levels at play - for example - the machines and humans would be trapped inside another simulated world and The One's power would have been to find another breakout of that. But
An alternative plot line would have been if Neo could have brought awakening to humans stuck in the machine such that they could reach a consensus with the machines. If they could have all become aware, they would have been able to demand concessions from the machines in exchange from continuing to function in the matrix.
I like this idea of taking the broken bits of series and letting fans fill in the gaps. Anyway, if you find any of this interesting and would prefer to reply by email, I'm craig @ my domain name.