But if you hang out on BUGTRAQ, the number of bugs in closed-source OSs and programs WAY outnumber the number of bugs in GNU/Linux.
[donning asbestos underware] Might this not be related to the fact that there's an awful lot more closed source programs out there than GNU/Linux programs. And isn't 18 months a little short for a meaningful sample? -- Cheers
If I'm reading you correctly, you've slightly misunderstood PnP. Plug&Pray was originally all about adding a card to your machine and having the BIOS and OS allocate the card an IRQ, DMA area, IO port and anything else it happened to ask for.
The "autoinstall" of drivers is a side-effect of this: if the Windows or NT is in a position to detect new hardware being added to the PCI (or ISA) bus, it makes (a certain) amount of sense for the OS to attempt to install the relevant drivers for the new hardware. This led to the behaviour first seen in Win95, where the OS detected that you'd added a new card and pleaded to be allowed to install drivers for it.
With the advent of more highly "swappable" bus specs such as PCMCIA and USB, as well as laptops with swappable floppy and CD-ROM/DVD drives (and no-one who's ever installed NT3.51 on a laptop from a stack of floppies will ever forget the experience) the need arose for NT to be able to handle devices arbitrarily appearing and disappearing again. Since NT, at the moment, scans the busses at boot time and then starts device drivers as appropriate, a new approach was needed.
The solution adapted is to say that PnP devices which are added when the machine is shut down (i.e. internal cards) are just a subset of all PnP devices and therefore to say that drivers shoudl have the capability to be started on demand by the PnP Manager. Obviously this is, in many cases, not highly useful (the ability to start the RTC drivers at a point other than boot time is probably not going to see much real-world application...) but it implies that load-on-demand for USB devices and PCMCIA cards (and IEEE 1394 devices, come to that) drops straight out of the design.
Now, to answer the question: the first time you add a new USB/PCMCIA/IEEE 1394 device to a Win2K box, you need to be logged in with Admin-level rights to install the drivers - but once that's done, anyone can hotswap to their heart's content no matter what their permissions. -- Cheers
... and neither EMACS or PERL "are Unix". They're escapees from the fevered brains of RMS and LW, neither of whom are renowned for their aversion to creature feep. -- Cheers
In a similar vein, in the late seventeenth century, there was an (famous) investment bubble in tulip bulbs (I kid you not...) People were speculatively buying tulips, the price of tulip bulbs soared to astronomical heights, and eventually the whole thing fell apart with a crash.
Tulips are still giving people pleasure (and you can stop sniggering at the back) three hundred years later. -- Cheers
Erm - doesn't this imply that there's no point in Sony releasing PS2, or that Nintendo shouldn't have launched SNES? Famicom and SFC shifted somewhere well over 100m units worldwide- I haven't got the figures to hand at the moment - PSX has done about 70m.
Any serious video game player has several consoles - just because a new platform's released, you don't can all your old games. For the majority of people, the software's the issue, not the perceived "purity" of the platform... The "toy" end of the market ain't a problem because (as P.T. Barnum said, in an entirely unrelated context) there's one born every minute. Since the original GB was released in (IIRC) 1988, a generation has grown up. New generation, new Gameboy - it's got a nice ring to it, don't you think <g>
Most importantly Nintendo, like Sony and Sega are in this for the long haul. If it takes them 10 years to sell 100m GBAs then that's fine with them - the revenue stream is in the software so the longer you can keep the platform active in the marketplace, the better. -- Cheers
The reason the House of Lords has been killed off is that it kept opposing measures which would destroy democracy and freedom. That it was unelected gave it the freedom -to- be "controversial", rather than tow the line.
The House of Lords hasn't been killed off - all that's happened is that the hereditary peers (yes, in the UK until about 8 weeks ago you got to be a legislator because your great great... grandfather was Master of the King's Whores or somesuch role) have lost their membership. Since the only time that most of the hereditaries were seen was when they trooped in in their hundreds to help vote down such freedom-opposing measures as equalising the age of consent for homo- and heterosexuals, I think this rant has little substance. There is, after all, still a House of Lords: it's just that (with the exception of the Lords Spiritual aka the bishops of the Churh of England) they're all appointees. Since they're appointed for life, it tends to make for a fairly unexciting mix of the great and good, political toadies and the odd media and sports personailities. See here for more details (for the non-Brits among you, the Guardian's a left-leaning libertarian broadsheet newspaper)
As to the comments about the masons - just who's paranoid fantasy did they come from? More generally, why do conspiracy theorists assume that governmental and non-governmental organistations and businesses which couldn't, in the main, find their own arses with both hands have both the abilities and the will to run vastly complex disinformation networks while at the same time untraceably manipulating the levers of power. And where do they find all the geniuses to run these stunts?
Furthermore, is it really rational to expect either the civil service or (especially) the masons to maintain the rule of democracy. Name me five black, Asian or even female senior civil servants. Or, for that matter, five female masons (I'm not categorically ruling out masons from ethnic minorities - there may be lots of them although it doesn't seem likely). If democracy is going to be preserved, it'll be in the same way that it was won in the first place - by the will of the people (think back to Wat Tyler, or the Chartists, or the Levellers, or the Suffragettes), not because it is handed down by fiat from "some senile old men and a mysterious, half-mythical super-secret organisation" All IM(NS)HO of course... -- Cheers
... and this is a good thing? As someone who predates the wibbly-wobbly web by some years (I got my first Internet email account in 1990 - when I was a lad, we though Gopher was the last word in distributed hypertext systems ) I remember what the Net was like before ecommerce, Cantor & Siegel, AOL etc. IMHO, it was better.
Then again, I don't see commerce as the be all and end all of human existence - I'm aware that this makes me a pinko commie faggot who stands against the good ol' USofA - and I pity those people who can't see past the next pound/dollar/ -- Cheers
Can't argue with the choice of Monica, but I'm not sure about the "embarrass an entire continent" claim: I'd guess that both the Canucks and the Mexicans spent much of the first part of 1999 pissing themselves with laughter while the finest legal brains (surely an oxymoron) in the self-proclaimed "leader of the free world" decided whether the penis of the President of the United States of America (the First Dick?) was admissable evidence.
Meanwhile most of Europe and Asia (at least the bits I was in) seemed to be a bit baffled by the whole thing - "they're trying to sack him because he had an affair? Those crazy Americans!"
At least it got us through the cold winter months... -- Cheers
Re:Why is LISP superior?
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 1
Crash Bandicoot - the object control code is written in GOOL, Naughty Dog's Game Oriented Object LISP) - see this article for details. How much more commercial do you want? -- Cheers
I'd like to see the US just say "fuck off" to the UN, WTO, and any other pseudo-government that decides it knows how to run a country better than said country's government
... were it not for the fact that the US government was among the prime movers for the foundation of the UN and the WTO (among other international organisations - see also IMF, World Bank, NATO etc). Having set these bodies up, Washington tends to use them to pursue its own aims (privatisation of the Russian economy, credit crunches in S.E. Asia, Desert Storm and continued bombing of Iraq etc), while claiming that it's a world consensus.
BTW, since when was your government delegated by a democratic vote, anyway? In a true democracy, it doesn't cost upwards of $30 million to get elected...
most of the professional coding I've done (yes, I admit it: I write code for money - I've got to pay the rent somehow, after all ) hasn't been for general release. If my experience is indicative of the industry in general (and I have no particular reason to doubt it), most code is written for bespoke systems commissioned by a client to match their (perceived) business requirements. And as such, the customer is always right. Even when they're laughably, self-evidently, brain-numbingly wrong. After all, they're the ones paying the bills, and hence paying the wages of me and mine.
In this branch of the business, the model is as follows: the client puts out an invitation to tender. Various internal and external coding shops submit a tender based on the outline functional specification the client has provided, the client picks one and a contract is signed for (generally) a fixed amount of money to do the job. Once the contract's in place, the client spends the next (80% of the allotted development time) revising/rewriting the specs - after all, they're the ones with the money - while the development team sweats, works 16-hour days and generally gets jerked around from pillar to post.
This isn't, as you rightly point out, an ideal environment for innovation. But equally it's not the section of the industry in which the Open vs Closed Source debate is happening (unless I missed something ).
The full set of PSX colours (as far as I can remember) is:
Grey - consumer PSX White - SE Asian "special edition" PSX: this one could play VCDs, which never really took off in the States or Europe but were a huge porn-delivery format in SE Asia Blue - devsys PSX. This is the one that you test your final gold drops of code on before releasing them to manufacturing (they play normal CD-Rs and don't have any territorial lockouts, thereby saving developers the need to get their PSXs chipped to test their games) Black - Yaroze. This is (was?) a special bedroom-developer Playstation: you can download 2MB of code and graphics onto it to run against the libraries, which are stored on CD-ROM. Fairly successful in that it got quite a few people jobs (they could go to games studios with their showreel Yaroze game rather than a lump of x86 code) -- Cheers
Well, in that case start asking questions about the managers who hired the staff to build the system but wouldn't fork out enough to keep them there while it was commissioned.
I too am a contractor: again, I was permie, got fscked off by my employers (the final straw was when, after pulling three months of 70 - 90 hour weeks, they didn't pay me overtime but instead gave me half-time off in liu) and went contract - but there were several reasons why I did it.
Firstly, you get to choose your jobs.
Secondly, there's absolutely no politics and no bullshit. I turn up, rearrange electrons and get paid. I don't have a career, a mentor or any of that touchy-feely HR crap. I like the people I work with, I go out for a drink with them (and, contrary to rumours, contractors do buy their round) and I may well stay in touch with some of them when I finally leave my current post.
Thirdly, I'm a geek. I design and build systems for a living. It's what I like doing and it's what I'm good at. I make a reasonable amount of money - more than I did as a permanent employee. Most importantly, though, I didn't need to stop programming to get the increased income. It may not be true in the US, but certainly in the UK, if you want to progress up the career/income ladder from a vermin-infested bedsit to a house in the country, you have to put aside your hacker urges and become a manager. And I'm not a particularly good manager (in the 'sitting-in-a-corner-office-pushing-paper-and-sack ing-people PHB sense of the word), and I don't like the role very much. I can deal with my immediate managers, because they are generally ex-techies, and know what's going on. Dealing with their managers is more difficult, 'cos they're less informed technically. And the more senior they are, the worse it gets. By staying as a contractor, I make sure I'm right at the bottom of the pile, where it's nice and warm and people rate me on my technical skills.
I've been in my current job for 18 months (six or seven renewals, I forget), worked all round the world for my employers, provided them with a great deal of knowledge and expertise and billed them a fair amount for my time and effort. Have I added value? Yes, I think (and they think) that I have - there's a $25M project resting (from a technical point of view) on code I wrote in my first year here and I've maintained and upgraded in the six months since.
However, I'll be out soon: it's nearly all over (the fat lady's tuning up) and it's time for a long holiday -- Cheers
Absolutely, but since most national (at least European and North American, which is where most mol-biol research is done) and international law is written solely for the benefit of corporations rather than the individual, there's not a lot we can do about it.
It's been fun watching Monsanto, duPont et al. squirming in Europe recently though. Their party line appears to be: GM crops are safe... and if they ain't safe you can't ban them 'cos of WTO rules... and if you do ban them it won't help you 'cos everything coming from US-Ca is mixed GM and normal so you're stuffed no matter what.
Our poxy government kow-towed before them - it's been particularly unpleasant watching the spectacle of the Rev. A.R.P. Blair toadying up to Monsanto and telling the British public that they weren't to worry and if it weren't for GM the third world would starve and anyway all these important people hav promised him it's safe. Thankfully, the masses have revolted (and after salmonella, BSE et al. it's hardly suprising), those evil anarchists in Genetix Snowball and similar organisations have been destroying crops and it looks like GM in this country is going to have an even harder ride than anticipated (and remember, Monsanto hired Burston Marsteler (sp?) to do their PR - these were the guys who tried to tell the world that the Exxon Valdez was an unfortunate accident, no-one was culpable and it wasn't serious anyway).
GCH is IMO one of the most influential articles, which brought programming out of the dark ages.
GCH was certainly influential: it's been argued over passionately for the last thirty years. Brought programming out of the dark ages? Possibly - but at the same time it caused schisms reminiscent of those in the medieval Catholic church.
Dijkstra was right to argue against the 'unbridled use' of GOTO, but his cause isn't helped by the almost universal inclusion of directives such as 'GOTO will not be used under any circumstances' in programming standards (and yes, I've seen some of these and argued with the writers about them). The argument is often that GOTO doesn't conform to 'structured programming', and hence can offer nothing to the modern programmer. In the spirit of the anonymous pundit who once quipped 'real programmers can write FORTRAN in any language', structured programming isn't concerned with specific language features. GOTO has its place, and anyone who tells you otherwise just hasn't cut enough code to know what he's talking about.
Sure, SEH is a good thing, but none of the boxes I've ever worked on have offered it in hardware: it's generally provided by either the OS or the programming language used. And quite a lot of real-world programming languages (rather than the My Favourite Toy Languages beloved of CS students, researchers and profs) don't support SEH: the same is true for most OSes. GOTO - or its equivalent (computed COME... FROMs, anyone?) are present in just about every real language, and should be used when necessary, for fear of something worse happening.
The proof of correctness stuff, by the way, is one of these fields which I've been following off and on for a while - I just wish that they'd get on and prove something of (at least) interesting complexity. Last time I looked, the bleeding edge appeared to be tools and techniques for analysing programs of the complexity of a four-function calculator. Has the field progressed since?
Agree wholeheartedly about testing, by the way. It's always cheaper to spend time on the front of a project designing it correctly than on the backend patching the whole mess together with string and gaffer tape. Sadly management like to see their programmers programming, not staring into space, chatting or doodling on sheets of paper. Some time I'm going to write a manager obfuscator: you feed it various key words and tell it a language and it churns out several KLines of code which you can progressively show your PHB to demonstrate your productivity while you've been... staring into space, chatting, doodling etc. And of course you won't have to work 80-hour weeks in the month before delivery 'cos it'll be designed properly and will run first time.... -- Cheers
Whinging whey-faced milksops, the lot of you. Teach them InterCal, Befunge, Malebolge and BrainFuck. If some jobsworth complains that these are of no commercial use, teach them JCL - preferably one of the earlier variants with the really interesting syntax. Or, at a pinch, APL.
Alternatively, if DARPA are prepared to offer me sufficient money (or two crates of Newcastle Brown Ale), I'll craft them a teaching language like no other: one to make kids' brains dribble out of their ears and their pupils bleed.
Offers gratefully accepted. -- Cheers
Jon (who started programming in PET Basic and still bears the scars a dozen languages later)
Yet there's probably more code written in Basic and COBOL than in every other language put together. Go figure. Maybe academic purity of language is orthogonal to that language's utility. After all, I hate to think what Dijkstra makes of Perl...
Oh and wasn't Edgar Dijkstra also associated with "GOTO considered harmful" - which just goes to show that he either a) never wrote a on-the-metal error handler in his life - setjmp() and longjmp() anyone? or b) was a hypocrite (and yes, I have read GCH - and GCHCH...) -- Cheers
Third-degree burns: flesh is charred, holes found at burn site (IIRC - it's a while since I did my Red Cross certification). You get them from things like falling into a fire, picking up the wrong end of a poker etc.
Coffee, no matter how strong, isn't going to be much over 100C is it? We'll discount the prospects of freakishly high atmospheric pressure for the purposes of debate. -- Cheers
Yeah - I saw this in the UK papers yesterday (which didn't publish specs tho'). They were quoting $4000 which seems fairly reasonable IMHO ($4000 ~= £2400 = 2.5 * Mitsubishi 2020u 22" CRTs) Presumably it'll be about £4000 in the UK, mind... Bugger. -- Cheers
Hotmail is Apache on FreeBSD (see here for details). Microsoft just own the site: there's no NT and no IIS there at all. See the thread when this was first announced about a week ago for plenty more ignorant pro-*nix FUD. -- Cheers
> Sun makes workstations (You know, like PCs, only bigger) and operating systems, too. Sun couldn't > have possibly purchased Star Division to make StarOffice work better with these products, could they?
They might have - but not according to Sun: see the press release on Sun's web site. Do you want to get in a scrap with Scott MacNealy about his company's direction?
> Sun makes workstations (You know, like PCs, only bigger) and operating systems, too. Sun couldn't > have possibly purchased Star Division to make StarOffice work better with these products, could they?
Slashdot Mirror
extern "C" __declspec( dllexport ) int foo(long bar);
Hope this helps as well...
--
Cheers
[donning asbestos underware]
Might this not be related to the fact that there's an awful lot more closed source programs out there than GNU/Linux programs. And isn't 18 months a little short for a meaningful sample?
--
Cheers
The "autoinstall" of drivers is a side-effect of this: if the Windows or NT is in a position to detect new hardware being added to the PCI (or ISA) bus, it makes (a certain) amount of sense for the OS to attempt to install the relevant drivers for the new hardware. This led to the behaviour first seen in Win95, where the OS detected that you'd added a new card and pleaded to be allowed to install drivers for it.
With the advent of more highly "swappable" bus specs such as PCMCIA and USB, as well as laptops with swappable floppy and CD-ROM/DVD drives (and no-one who's ever installed NT3.51 on a laptop from a stack of floppies will ever forget the experience) the need arose for NT to be able to handle devices arbitrarily appearing and disappearing again. Since NT, at the moment, scans the busses at boot time and then starts device drivers as appropriate, a new approach was needed.
The solution adapted is to say that PnP devices which are added when the machine is shut down (i.e. internal cards) are just a subset of all PnP devices and therefore to say that drivers shoudl have the capability to be started on demand by the PnP Manager. Obviously this is, in many cases, not highly useful (the ability to start the RTC drivers at a point other than boot time is probably not going to see much real-world application ...) but it implies that load-on-demand for USB devices and PCMCIA cards (and IEEE 1394 devices, come to that) drops straight out of the design.
Now, to answer the question: the first time you add a new USB/PCMCIA/IEEE 1394 device to a Win2K box, you need to be logged in with Admin-level rights to install the drivers - but once that's done, anyone can hotswap to their heart's content no matter what their permissions.
--
Cheers
... and neither EMACS or PERL "are Unix". They're escapees from the fevered brains of RMS and LW, neither of whom are renowned for their aversion to creature feep.
--
Cheers
Tulips are still giving people pleasure (and you can stop sniggering at the back) three hundred years later.
--
Cheers
SMP - until AMD get that sorted out, they're toast in the workstation and server market.
--
Cheers
Any serious video game player has several consoles - just because a new platform's released, you don't can all your old games. For the majority of people, the software's the issue, not the perceived "purity" of the platform... The "toy" end of the market ain't a problem because (as P.T. Barnum said, in an entirely unrelated context) there's one born every minute. Since the original GB was released in (IIRC) 1988, a generation has grown up. New generation, new Gameboy - it's got a nice ring to it, don't you think <g>
Most importantly Nintendo, like Sony and Sega are in this for the long haul. If it takes them 10 years to sell 100m GBAs then that's fine with them - the revenue stream is in the software so the longer you can keep the platform active in the marketplace, the better.
--
Cheers
The House of Lords hasn't been killed off - all that's happened is that the hereditary peers (yes, in the UK until about 8 weeks ago you got to be a legislator because your great great ... grandfather was Master of the King's Whores or somesuch role) have lost their membership. Since the only time that most of the hereditaries were seen was when they trooped in in their hundreds to help vote down such freedom-opposing measures as equalising the age of consent for homo- and heterosexuals, I think this rant has little substance. There is, after all, still a House of Lords: it's just that (with the exception of the Lords Spiritual aka the bishops of the Churh of England) they're all appointees. Since they're appointed for life, it tends to make for a fairly unexciting mix of the great and good, political toadies and the odd media and sports personailities. See here for more details (for the non-Brits among you, the Guardian's a left-leaning libertarian broadsheet newspaper)
As to the comments about the masons - just who's paranoid fantasy did they come from? More generally, why do conspiracy theorists assume that governmental and non-governmental organistations and businesses which couldn't, in the main, find their own arses with both hands have both the abilities and the will to run vastly complex disinformation networks while at the same time untraceably manipulating the levers of power. And where do they find all the geniuses to run these stunts?
Furthermore, is it really rational to expect either the civil service or (especially) the masons to maintain the rule of democracy. Name me five black, Asian or even female senior civil servants. Or, for that matter, five female masons (I'm not categorically ruling out masons from ethnic minorities - there may be lots of them although it doesn't seem likely). If democracy is going to be preserved, it'll be in the same way that it was won in the first place - by the will of the people (think back to Wat Tyler, or the Chartists, or the Levellers, or the Suffragettes), not because it is handed down by fiat from "some senile old men and a mysterious, half-mythical super-secret organisation" All IM(NS)HO of course...
--
Cheers
Then again, I don't see commerce as the be all and end all of human existence - I'm aware that this makes me a pinko commie faggot who stands against the good ol' USofA - and I pity those people who can't see past the next pound/dollar/
--
Cheers
Meanwhile most of Europe and Asia (at least the bits I was in) seemed to be a bit baffled by the whole thing - "they're trying to sack him because he had an affair? Those crazy Americans!"
At least it got us through the cold winter months...
--
Cheers
Crash Bandicoot - the object control code is written in GOOL, Naughty Dog's Game Oriented Object LISP) - see this article for details. How much more commercial do you want?
--
Cheers
BTW, since when was your government delegated by a democratic vote, anyway? In a true democracy, it doesn't cost upwards of $30 million to get elected...
most of the professional coding I've done (yes, I admit it: I write code for money - I've got to pay the rent somehow, after all ) hasn't been for general release. If my experience is indicative of the industry in general (and I have no particular reason to doubt it), most code is written for bespoke systems commissioned by a client to match their (perceived) business requirements. And as such, the customer is always right. Even when they're laughably, self-evidently, brain-numbingly wrong. After all, they're the ones paying the bills, and hence paying the wages of me and mine.
In this branch of the business, the model is as follows: the client puts out an invitation to tender. Various internal and external coding shops submit a tender based on the outline functional specification the client has provided, the client picks one and a contract is signed for (generally) a fixed amount of money to do the job. Once the contract's in place, the client spends the next (80% of the allotted development time) revising/rewriting the specs - after all, they're the ones with the money - while the development team sweats, works 16-hour days and generally gets jerked around from pillar to post.
This isn't, as you rightly point out, an ideal environment for innovation. But equally it's not the section of the industry in which the Open vs Closed Source debate is happening (unless I missed something ).
The full set of PSX colours (as far as I can remember) is:
Grey - consumer PSX
White - SE Asian "special edition" PSX: this one could play VCDs, which never really took off in the States or Europe but were a huge porn-delivery format in SE Asia
Blue - devsys PSX. This is the one that you test your final gold drops of code on before releasing them to manufacturing (they play normal CD-Rs and don't have any territorial lockouts, thereby saving developers the need to get their PSXs chipped to test their games)
Black - Yaroze. This is (was?) a special bedroom-developer Playstation: you can download 2MB of code and graphics onto it to run against the libraries, which are stored on CD-ROM. Fairly successful in that it got quite a few people jobs (they could go to games studios with their showreel Yaroze game rather than a lump of x86 code)
--
Cheers
Jon
Well, in that case start asking questions about the managers who hired the staff to build the system but wouldn't fork out enough to keep them there while it was commissioned.
k ing-people PHB sense of the word), and I don't like the role very much. I can deal with my immediate managers, because they are generally ex-techies, and know what's going on. Dealing with their managers is more difficult, 'cos they're less informed technically. And the more senior they are, the worse it gets. By staying as a contractor, I make sure I'm right at the bottom of the pile, where it's nice and warm and people rate me on my technical skills.
I too am a contractor: again, I was permie, got fscked off by my employers (the final straw was when, after pulling three months of 70 - 90 hour weeks, they didn't pay me overtime but instead gave me half-time off in liu) and went contract - but there were several reasons why I did it.
Firstly, you get to choose your jobs.
Secondly, there's absolutely no politics and no bullshit. I turn up, rearrange electrons and get paid. I don't have a career, a mentor or any of that touchy-feely HR crap. I like the people I work with, I go out for a drink with them (and, contrary to rumours, contractors do buy their round) and I may well stay in touch with some of them when I finally leave my current post.
Thirdly, I'm a geek. I design and build systems for a living. It's what I like doing and it's what I'm good at. I make a reasonable amount of money - more than I did as a permanent employee. Most importantly, though, I didn't need to stop programming to get the increased income. It may not be true in the US, but certainly in the UK, if you want to progress up the career/income ladder from a vermin-infested bedsit to a house in the country, you have to put aside your hacker urges and become a manager. And I'm not a particularly good manager (in the 'sitting-in-a-corner-office-pushing-paper-and-sac
I've been in my current job for 18 months (six or seven renewals, I forget), worked all round the world for my employers, provided them with a great deal of knowledge and expertise and billed them a fair amount for my time and effort. Have I added value? Yes, I think (and they think) that I have - there's a $25M project resting (from a technical point of view) on code I wrote in my first year here and I've maintained and upgraded in the six months since.
However, I'll be out soon: it's nearly all over (the fat lady's tuning up) and it's time for a long holiday
--
Cheers
Jon
Absolutely, but since most national (at least European and North American, which is where most mol-biol research is done) and international law is written solely for the benefit of corporations rather than the individual, there's not a lot we can do about it.
... and if they ain't safe you can't ban them 'cos of WTO rules ... and if you do ban them it won't help you 'cos everything coming from US-Ca is mixed GM and normal so you're stuffed no matter what.
It's been fun watching Monsanto, duPont et al. squirming in Europe recently though. Their party line appears to be: GM crops are safe
Our poxy government kow-towed before them - it's been particularly unpleasant watching the spectacle of the Rev. A.R.P. Blair toadying up to Monsanto and telling the British public that they weren't to worry and if it weren't for GM the third world would starve and anyway all these important people hav promised him it's safe. Thankfully, the masses have revolted (and after salmonella, BSE et al. it's hardly suprising), those evil anarchists in Genetix Snowball and similar organisations have been destroying crops and it looks like GM in this country is going to have an even harder ride than anticipated (and remember, Monsanto hired Burston Marsteler (sp?) to do their PR - these were the guys who tried to tell the world that the Exxon Valdez was an unfortunate accident, no-one was culpable and it wasn't serious anyway).
Zaibatsu? Who needs 'em...
--
Cheers
Jon
GCH is IMO one of the most influential articles, which brought programming out of the dark ages.
... FROMs, anyone?) are present in just about every real language, and should be used when necessary, for fear of something worse happening.
... staring into space, chatting, doodling etc. And of course you won't have to work 80-hour weeks in the month before delivery 'cos it'll be designed properly and will run first time....
GCH was certainly influential: it's been argued over passionately for the last thirty years. Brought programming out of the dark ages? Possibly - but at the same time it caused schisms reminiscent of those in the medieval Catholic church.
Dijkstra was right to argue against the 'unbridled use' of GOTO, but his cause isn't helped by the almost universal inclusion of directives such as 'GOTO will not be used under any circumstances' in programming standards (and yes, I've seen some of these and argued with the writers about them). The argument is often that GOTO doesn't conform to 'structured programming', and hence can offer nothing to the modern programmer. In the spirit of the anonymous pundit who once quipped 'real programmers can write FORTRAN in any language', structured programming isn't concerned with specific language features. GOTO has its place, and anyone who tells you otherwise just hasn't cut enough code to know what he's talking about.
Sure, SEH is a good thing, but none of the boxes I've ever worked on have offered it in hardware: it's generally provided by either the OS or the programming language used. And quite a lot of real-world programming languages (rather than the My Favourite Toy Languages beloved of CS students, researchers and profs) don't support SEH: the same is true for most OSes. GOTO - or its equivalent (computed COME
The proof of correctness stuff, by the way, is one of these fields which I've been following off and on for a while - I just wish that they'd get on and prove something of (at least) interesting complexity. Last time I looked, the bleeding edge appeared to be tools and techniques for analysing programs of the complexity of a four-function calculator. Has the field progressed since?
Agree wholeheartedly about testing, by the way. It's always cheaper to spend time on the front of a project designing it correctly than on the backend patching the whole mess together with string and gaffer tape. Sadly management like to see their programmers programming, not staring into space, chatting or doodling on sheets of paper. Some time I'm going to write a manager obfuscator: you feed it various key words and tell it a language and it churns out several KLines of code which you can progressively show your PHB to demonstrate your productivity while you've been
--
Cheers
Jon
Python? Perl? Java? C++? C? Fortran?
Whinging whey-faced milksops, the lot of you. Teach them InterCal, Befunge, Malebolge and BrainFuck. If some jobsworth complains that these are of no commercial use, teach them JCL - preferably one of the earlier variants with the really interesting syntax. Or, at a pinch, APL.
Alternatively, if DARPA are prepared to offer me sufficient money (or two crates of Newcastle Brown Ale), I'll craft them a teaching language like no other: one to make kids' brains dribble out of their ears and their pupils bleed.
Offers gratefully accepted.
--
Cheers
Jon (who started programming in PET Basic and still bears the scars a dozen languages later)
Yet there's probably more code written in Basic and COBOL than in every other language put together. Go figure. Maybe academic purity of language is orthogonal to that language's utility. After all, I hate to think what Dijkstra makes of Perl...
Oh and wasn't Edgar Dijkstra also associated with "GOTO considered harmful" - which just goes to show that he either a) never wrote a on-the-metal error handler in his life - setjmp() and longjmp() anyone? or b) was a hypocrite (and yes, I have read GCH - and GCHCH...)
--
Cheers
Jon
Third-degree burns: flesh is charred, holes found at burn site (IIRC - it's a while since I did my Red Cross certification). You get them from things like falling into a fire, picking up the wrong end of a poker etc.
Coffee, no matter how strong, isn't going to be much over 100C is it? We'll discount the prospects of freakishly high atmospheric pressure for the purposes of debate.
--
Cheers
Jon
s/Unix/VMS/g (I think - my sed's a bit rusty)
--
Cheers
Jon
Yeah - I saw this in the UK papers yesterday (which didn't publish specs tho'). They were quoting $4000 which seems fairly reasonable IMHO ($4000 ~= £2400 = 2.5 * Mitsubishi 2020u 22" CRTs) Presumably it'll be about £4000 in the UK, mind... Bugger.
--
Cheers
Jon
Hotmail is Apache on FreeBSD (see here for details). Microsoft just own the site: there's no NT and no IIS there at all. See the thread when this was first announced about a week ago for plenty more ignorant pro-*nix FUD.
--
Cheers
Jon
> Sun makes workstations (You know, like PCs, only bigger) and operating systems, too. Sun couldn't
> have possibly purchased Star Division to make StarOffice work better with these products, could they?
They might have - but not according to Sun: see the press release on Sun's web site. Do you want to get in a scrap with Scott MacNealy about his company's direction?
> Sun makes workstations (You know, like PCs, only bigger) and operating systems, too. Sun couldn't
s h.990831.1.html. Do you want to get in a scrap with Scott MacNealy about his company's direction?
> have possibly purchased Star Division to make StarOffice work better with these products, could they?
They might have - but not according to Sun: see the press release at http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/9908/sunfla
--
Cheers
Jon