Won't work because of multi threaded/process apps
on
Shattering Windows
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Many applications actually use Windows messages to synchronize themselves between threads and processes.
In fact, there is also an API called PostThreadMessage that will post any windows message to any win32 application (all you need is the thread handle) with a message pump.
Out of process COM interfaces using windows messages will also be broken by removing this functionality.
Microsoft's excuse that having physical access to a machine is required is abysmal.
http and html are standards which are probably not very good examples for your argument since the focus of the GPL would be, in these cases, an instance of an actual implementation of the standard.
I did not state that IP should not apply to electronic works. In fact, the GPL uses the notion of IP (copyright) as the basis for the distribution conditions that apply to software licensed under it.
You are essentially arguing that since there are no restrictions on Public Domain, that therefore software under this license cannot be co-opted. In my opinion, this would be true except for the way patenting currently works in the US.
Since we're talking about standards, lets take the example of the MD5 algorithm. There is a company that currently owns a patent on the use of MD5 checksums to check whether a webpage has changed.
Here we have a perfect example of something that is an open and widely used standard being co-opted by a company through a patent that essentially describes a process already widely used, but for a specific case. Now, if this patent is allowed to stand, an application of the standard I previously was allowed to make under the public domain standard now will be illegal without paying a license. What was free to me no longer is because it was monopolized by means of a patent.
How would the GPL protect against this? Quite simply because if the company distributed any manner of software based on the technology, I would automatically receive the code and a license to modify and re-use it as I wished. They would still own the patent, but would implicitly give me a license to use it by distributing the GPLed software.
Public domain IP can be co-opted... and this, in my mind, means it is no longer suitable as a mechanism for ensuring the principle it exists to ensure: freely useable and available technology.
First of all, most libraries you use on Linux are LGPL based. This means they can be linked against without having to adopt a GPL license. The absolute only case where your derivative software must be GPL is only if the library you are using is GPL.
What does this mean? It means you can write public software to your heart's content with the caveat that you must spend a little effort investigating what libraries your code uses.... which is something you do as a course of your job anyways.
Examples of libraries that are LGPL: glibc, GNOME libraries, wine, etc.. etc.. etc..
On another note, I wonder why my tax dollars go to pay for software which, because it is in the public domain, can be reused in a commercial application and cause me to have to pay for it again.
The GPL serves the very useful public function of ensuring that publically available IP cannot be co-opted by an entity and monopolized.
In fact, managing windows in general is annoying. Popups are also a bad idea because users now have (at least for people using mozilla) the ability to block them easily.
I personally think the best compromise is the large box at the beginning of the story approach: you have to look at it, but since the article wraps around it, the feel is akin to reading a magazine page.
A well targetted add like that gets my attention and often a click-through.
valgrind is freely downloadable *with* the source. Here we have someone that has put toghether a very impressive tool which, you admit yourself, does things that require 3rd party tools to do on Windows, and all you find to say "I don't care because stuff on Windows sorta maybe does it anyways".
Instead of commending somebody on their very talented effort and for making it all Free, all you do is make loud claims that memory management isn't the way of the future for "us l33t modern day programmers"-- followed by the amazing claim that C memory allocation is somehow sub-optimal.
The fact is that for all that vaunted "10 years" advance you claim the Microsoft C runtime has, memory management has been the bane of every product Microsoft ever produced.... I still get company wide emails twice/thrice weekly of this or that exchange server needing to be rebooted again.
If I had mod points, I most certainly would have modded you a troll.
The problem here, as has been meentionned in other posts, is that Perens is at this conference as a representative of HP. As such, HP could be held liable for whatever "illegal" acts he does at this conference.
It's not a function of the DMCA, it is the way general liability is construed to function by the courts in the USA. Otherwise put, you'll be hard pressed to find *any* company terribly eager to sponsor you directly or indirectly for your civil disobedience. When you're on somebody else's coin, they have a big say on what you do.
"to replace the monopoly of commercial software with a monopoly of ``free'' software." Pronunciation: m&-'nä-p(&-)lE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -lies Etymology: Latin monopolium, from Greek monopOlion, from mon- + pOlein to sell Date: 1534 1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action 2 : exclusive possession or control 3 : a commodity controlled by one party 4 : one that has a monopoly
Free software is not a monopoly: you cannot have a monopoly over something you don't control.
You're welcome to your speculations as well-- we'll see in a couple years or so.
I *have* researched.NET for my company's needs and I've taken the time to go to Microsoft presentations as well.
In essence, the major conclusion I drew is that much of our existing code and designs were not useable in.NET-- ADO.NET, for example, can only be used by managed code applications.
It is apparent to me that.NET is largely just a new version of COM with all the old guts hidden under a new application management layer and runtime. It has advantages that only present themselves if you totally embrace the new paradigm-- a major pain if you use anything other than Windows in your enterprise.
More details: Existing code written as a COM object interacts through essentially yet another marshalling layer to talk to managed code. Plain win32 native code does this too, even though the visual studio IDE hides much of this. The only native code I've seen that works well when ported to managed environments are Microsoft code samples.
You mention VB programmers; this is appropriate. This is because they are the only ones who have an advantage to switching right now as VB in it's current state is a waste land of OCX controls of exponential flavors and versions that seem to only ever be good at leaking memory.
So your company is going to toss away all its PHP, Cold Fusion, ASP/COM code... interesting setup they must have.... and find that magic bullet to fix its problems. To be honest, judging by that little list, I'd say your company has a need for consistency more than anything else..NET will evolve and change-- do you want to bet your job on Microsoft not forgetting its early adopters?
There are two main potential.NET targets: 1. Companies who have not yet started to deploy solutions using J2EE or Java and are trying to decide which to use: Java or.NET 2. Companies who have a need for some software that is only as a.NET application.
I won't address issues involving getting companies to deploy the.NET environment to their PCs... Microsoft is most likely going to have to force people-- which may not be popular.
a1. If you already have a substantial investment in software written in anything but a.NET language, chances are you aren't very motivated to switch paradigms. a1. Regardless of how you view.NET the fact is java has been here for quite a while and has a good following. I have yet to meet a serious java developer who has any interest in.NET a1. Regardless of all the claims Microsoft makes about C#/.NET maturity, nobody in their right mind is going to bet the company on a new MS platform just because the pay-for-plundits say it's sexy..NET has to earn the industry's trust-- not an easy hill to climb these days. a2. There is little imperative to adopt something for which there are no major none-Microsoft commercial offerings. a2. Either way, I suspect difficult part of the sell for.NET is in convincing CEOs that they aren't further limiting their licensing choices and options in order to adopt something they just don't need-- at least not yet. The wait-and-see approach is a tried and true paradigm with respect to version 1.0 software from Microsoft.
Personally, I find it hard to get excited about something from a company whose major call to fame these days is the latest way it is reaming its customers.
They have a new version, available seperately or with the beta which purportedly is considerably more complete.
"Mozilla 1.0 comes with Venkman version 0.8.5. Venkman has made much progress since then with the 0.9.x series. If you are running Mozilla 1.0 and would like to upgrade to Venkman 0.9.x, please visit the development page. The revisions provided there are usually suitable as daily debuggers. If you do find a problem, please report a bug."
Last I checked most high-tech businesses were hurting pretty bad. It seems fairly intuitive to me that the current economy will probably cause the weaker for-profit Linux offerings to die off.
If somebody made a list of all the Windows based hi-tech offerings that went bust last year... anyways, nobody would read it because it'd be too long and boring.
Personally, I see Suse and Redhat at the end of this tunnel-- hopefully Mandrake and Connectiva also-- as there'll always be the none-commercial/niche offerings. Also, it doesn't hurt to point out that the free distros existed and thrived well before the commercial ones, just as they do now.
I don't disagree that one might very well be justified in disrupting a meeting that unfairly is excluding a position from being stated-- this, however, is not a good strategy in this situation.
What I am saying is that I believe that most of these DRM issues escape the public's understanding. Since we are precluded from having the public's immeadiate empathy of why we are angry about exclusion, heckling a meeting makes it just too easy for the organizers to say "see why they aren't invited?". Our problem is convincing legislators who quite rightly perceive that there isn't a lot of public momemtum against DRM. Getting the message out is the most important job here. Thus I continue to believe sanguine well thought out commentary and action is the best attack. It is imperative our legislators be made to understand the very important issues of balance and public interest involved here. Simply hooting at a public discussion will not accomplish this I think.
Aside from giving the obvious impression you don't have anything intelligent to say, it strongly conveys the notion that you are actually trying to block public discussion on a matter.
The best way to get the Media's attention is often to simply do their job for them. Write up insightful, well summarized and brief positions explaining a matter and distribute it to the reporters. Doing so goes a long distance towards guaranteeing that your position will be accurately reflected by a reporter's statements.
In these kinds of dicussions, the first person to get mad and upset is very often the one who appears to be on the losing side.
1. Treat your customers like criminals by filling your software with "product activation" to stop the 'thieves'. 2. Send flesh eating lawyers after every mom & pop business the instant it appears their licensing is out of order. 3. Refuse to fix security holes. Blame the user for being too dumb. Then, refuse to give people the ability to remove defective/insecure software. 4. Cater to the content pimps (RIAA, MPAA etc..) and promise a new version of your system whose only benefit is to further limit how people can user their computer. 5. etc....
'Issue': KDE is driven by the desires of evil developers who dont care what users want, are arrogant, and rude to anybody who asks for feature xyz: therefore open source is flawed since all projects must be similar.
First of all, as a general rule, telling somebody their work 'sucks' because feature xyz is missing and needs to be changed will never be well received by a developer. Open Source or commercial. Try it.
Second, the only guaranteed support you'll ever get is the one you paid for. This is why distributions exist and why they offer pay-for support. Good will usually comes when it is given first.
Third, the author seems to think the motivations of Open Source developers differ from commercial ones. I recall in particular the quote "I do this because it's cool" and the criticism following it. Commercial developers have exactly the same motivations, they do things because they are cool. Want fast turnover in your company? Keep your programmers working on boring projects. See how good your 'code' is after that.
The author laments about backwards compatability. I compare and respond with: "who the hell wants Windows 1.0 compatability anymore"-- in fact, there isn't a single programmer I know that doesn't twitch violently at the thought of writting win16 software much less supporting it. KDE has been evolving at a dramatic speed. 3.0 is the version has brought it into it's age in my opinion. Everybody I know who actually uses KDE doesn't touch or need 1.0 apps anymore.
I'll finish by commenting on my expericence dealing with/working on commercial software. Most of it sucks monkey balls. It's spaghetti, crap, driven by tight deadlines and endless kludges to fix issues just enough to meet the requirements. 3/4 of the stuff would get laughed of usenet if the code was posted. With open source, distributions and companies can evaluate exactly what they are getting and make changes as is needed. I'll take that freedom over closed binary crap anyday.
I would never have visisted countless sites I reguarly surf to. Google has definitely been a major gateway to the internet for me.
I think making an issue of the caching is a moot point, as about 99% of the time I always go to the website for the content since the source is always better than the cache. I use the cache only in cases when the content has disapeared or in some cases when the website itself is gone.
This is a valuable service Google is providing-- and webmasters get it for free.
Sofware that currently uses 32 bit values to compute hard drive space is probably broken right now as the maximum value a unsigned 32 bit nubmer can represent is about aproximately 4 gigabytes. Have you ever written code to convert between an int64 and long? It's not complicated but boy can it ever be annoying.
time_t this happy 32 bit little time value is ubiquiteous accross all platforms and is also broken after 2038. Switching to a 64 bit version makes the problem go away.
32 bits starts to get a lot smaller when you're dealing with signed values. ~2billion isn't that big a number for a lot of computations.
In short, switching to 64bit will solve a lot of little niggly programming problems for free.
Operating systems with standardized ways of writing software will probably make the transition fairly seemlessly (UNIX: already available). Operating systems with rampant use of hard coded 32bit values (DWORD) for handling pointers and system resources will have a more painful transition (Windows: delayed).
Here in Canada quite a commotion has erupted over the firing of an editor of the Ottawa Citizen for having written an editorial calling for the resignation of our Prime Minister.
In question are the close ties the owner of the media chain has with the Prime Minister due to the fact that it was his very government that allowed the media chain to persue a number of controversial acquisitions that had been previously disallowed by canadian law.
What is clear here, is that politicians will meddle with the media and what they report when given the chance to do so. What is to stop, in this case, an australian Prime Minister from blocking a website whose constant criticism of his policies has aggravated him? Since the list cannot be checked the answer is probably nothing.
This government sponsored censorship raises a serious issue of precedent. The precedent of the governement having the power to block access to information, otherwise publically accessible to the citizen, for unverifiable purposes and results. It is the governement giving itself the right to restrict what a citizen could normally view without restriction in any other country-- without appeal or public review.
In my view, there is a careful balance of power that is being toyed with, both in Australia and in Canada, that needs to be stopped. I hope the Australian courts see the danger here and reverse the decision and I hope justice prevails in the case of this editor who has been wrongfully fired-- in fact it is my wish now that this media group be broken up.
See Citizen story here and here
Level designers do this all the time. It's a nice sure way of ensuring posterity and guarantees people will pay some attention to the name of the author.
I'm sure Bioware is just covering it's butt for the case where somebody felt they weren't given 'enough' credit. Put a nice easter egg in your maps which clearly identifies you as the author and you'll be guranteed your authorship will be hard to remove even accidentally.
It's not not the potential affect of the virus. It's the fact that it's even there.
"Only a complete moron would get infected by this virus."
Yes sir, we know there's a bomb in your car, but don't worry: it's not wired to the engine so it can't hurt you.
The fact that Microsoft could allow its flagship development tool to ship with such a notorious virus is absolutely incomprehensible and humiliating. If I were Balmer I'd be skinning alive those involved with a dull spoon.
Slashdot Mirror
Many applications actually use Windows messages to synchronize themselves between threads and processes.
In fact, there is also an API called PostThreadMessage that will post any windows message to any win32 application (all you need is the thread handle) with a message pump.
Out of process COM interfaces using windows messages will also be broken by removing this functionality.
Microsoft's excuse that having physical access to a machine is required is abysmal.
http and html are standards which are probably not very good examples for your argument since the focus of the GPL would be, in these cases, an instance of an actual implementation of the standard.
I did not state that IP should not apply to electronic works. In fact, the GPL uses the notion of IP (copyright) as the basis for the distribution conditions that apply to software licensed under it.
You are essentially arguing that since there are no restrictions on Public Domain, that therefore software under this license cannot be co-opted. In my opinion, this would be true except for the way patenting currently works in the US.
Since we're talking about standards, lets take the example of the MD5 algorithm. There is a company that currently owns a patent on the use of MD5 checksums to check whether a webpage has changed.
Here we have a perfect example of something that is an open and widely used standard being co-opted by a company through a patent that essentially describes a process already widely used, but for a specific case. Now, if this patent is allowed to stand, an application of the standard I previously was allowed to make under the public domain standard now will be illegal without paying a license. What was free to me no longer is because it was monopolized by means of a patent.
How would the GPL protect against this? Quite simply because if the company distributed any manner of software based on the technology, I would automatically receive the code and a license to modify and re-use it as I wished. They would still own the patent, but would implicitly give me a license to use it by distributing the GPLed software.
Public domain IP can be co-opted... and this, in my mind, means it is no longer suitable as a mechanism for ensuring the principle it exists to ensure: freely useable and available technology.
First of all, most libraries you use on Linux are LGPL based. This means they can be linked against without having to adopt a GPL license. The absolute only case where your derivative software must be GPL is only if the library you are using is GPL.
What does this mean? It means you can write public software to your heart's content with the caveat that you must spend a little effort investigating what libraries your code uses.... which is something you do as a course of your job anyways.
Examples of libraries that are LGPL:
glibc, GNOME libraries, wine, etc.. etc.. etc..
On another note, I wonder why my tax dollars go to pay for software which, because it is in the public domain, can be reused in a commercial application and cause me to have to pay for it again.
The GPL serves the very useful public function of ensuring that publically available IP cannot be co-opted by an entity and monopolized.
The exact feature is: "open unrequested windows"
It works most excellently for me. I recommend you give it a try.
In fact, managing windows in general is annoying. Popups are also a bad idea because users now have (at least for people using mozilla) the ability to block them easily.
I personally think the best compromise is the large box at the beginning of the story approach: you have to look at it, but since the article wraps around it, the feel is akin to reading a magazine page.
A well targetted add like that gets my attention and often a click-through.
valgrind is freely downloadable *with* the source. Here we have someone that has put toghether a very impressive tool which, you admit yourself, does things that require 3rd party tools to do on Windows, and all you find to say "I don't care because stuff on Windows sorta maybe does it anyways".
Instead of commending somebody on their very talented effort and for making it all Free, all you do is make loud claims that memory management isn't the way of the future for "us l33t modern day programmers"-- followed by the amazing claim that C memory allocation is somehow sub-optimal.
The fact is that for all that vaunted "10 years" advance you claim the Microsoft C runtime has, memory management has been the bane of every product Microsoft ever produced.... I still get company wide emails twice/thrice weekly of this or that exchange server needing to be rebooted again.
If I had mod points, I most certainly would have modded you a troll.
number: 4,6211,231
.... maybe I made a mistake.
It doesn't exist in any of the searches I made
Calling something a monopoly for promoting freedom is a little bit of a provocation don't you think?
The problem here, as has been meentionned in other posts, is that Perens is at this conference as a representative of HP. As such, HP could be held liable for whatever "illegal" acts he does at this conference.
It's not a function of the DMCA, it is the way general liability is construed to function by the courts in the USA. Otherwise put, you'll be hard pressed to find *any* company terribly eager to sponsor you directly or indirectly for your civil disobedience. When you're on somebody else's coin, they have a big say on what you do.
"to replace the monopoly of commercial software with a monopoly of ``free'' software."
Pronunciation: m&-'nä-p(&-)lE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -lies
Etymology: Latin monopolium, from Greek monopOlion, from mon- + pOlein to sell
Date: 1534
1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
2 : exclusive possession or control
3 : a commodity controlled by one party
4 : one that has a monopoly
Free software is not a monopoly: you cannot have a monopoly over something you don't control.
".NET has nothing to do with COM. It exists as it is even if COM never existed."
... that must have been a big relief.
Well that's pretty rich. I guess I was imagining all those GUIDs.
"Yes, just as you can't use a PHP function in Java. I'm not sure what your point is."
Not having to reinvent the wheel for a new paradigm was the point... you know.. reusing existing code... anyways..
"We had code in Beta2 that runs flawlessly on the 1.0 CLR less one minor exception (minor syntax change)."
I'm glad to hear Microsoft didn't redesign the CLR between beta2 and version 1.0
Working for a company that has the budget to redesign and re-code everything must be nice though. I'm glad not everyone is hurting in this economy.
You're welcome to your speculations as well-- we'll see in a couple years or so.
.NET for my company's needs and I've taken the time to go to Microsoft presentations as well.
.NET-- ADO.NET, for example, can only be used by managed code applications.
.NET is largely just a new version of COM with all the old guts hidden under a new application management layer and runtime. It has advantages that only present themselves if you totally embrace the new paradigm-- a major pain if you use anything other than Windows in your enterprise.
.... and find that magic bullet to fix its problems. To be honest, judging by that little list, I'd say your company has a need for consistency more than anything else. .NET will evolve and change-- do you want to bet your job on Microsoft not forgetting its early adopters?
I *have* researched
In essence, the major conclusion I drew is that much of our existing code and designs were not useable in
It is apparent to me that
More details: Existing code written as a COM object interacts through essentially yet another marshalling layer to talk to managed code. Plain win32 native code does this too, even though the visual studio IDE hides much of this. The only native code I've seen that works well when ported to managed environments are Microsoft code samples.
You mention VB programmers; this is appropriate. This is because they are the only ones who have an advantage to switching right now as VB in it's current state is a waste land of OCX controls of exponential flavors and versions that seem to only ever be good at leaking memory.
So your company is going to toss away all its PHP, Cold Fusion, ASP/COM code... interesting setup they must have
There are two main potential .NET targets: .NET .NET application.
.NET environment to their PCs... Microsoft is most likely going to have to force people-- which may not be popular.
.NET language, chances are you aren't very motivated to switch paradigms. .NET the fact is java has been here for quite a while and has a good following. I have yet to meet a serious java developer who has any interest in .NET .NET has to earn the industry's trust-- not an easy hill to climb these days. .NET is in convincing CEOs that they aren't further limiting their licensing choices and options in order to adopt something they just don't need-- at least not yet. The wait-and-see approach is a tried and true paradigm with respect to version 1.0 software from Microsoft.
1. Companies who have not yet started to deploy solutions using J2EE or Java and are trying to decide which to use: Java or
2. Companies who have a need for some software that is only as a
I won't address issues involving getting companies to deploy the
a1. If you already have a substantial investment in software written in anything but a
a1. Regardless of how you view
a1. Regardless of all the claims Microsoft makes about C#/.NET maturity, nobody in their right mind is going to bet the company on a new MS platform just because the pay-for-plundits say it's sexy.
a2. There is little imperative to adopt something for which there are no major none-Microsoft commercial offerings.
a2. Either way, I suspect difficult part of the sell for
Personally, I find it hard to get excited about something from a company whose major call to fame these days is the latest way it is reaming its customers.
They have a new version, available seperately or with the beta which purportedly is considerably more complete.
"Mozilla 1.0 comes with Venkman version 0.8.5. Venkman has made much progress since then with the 0.9.x series. If you are running Mozilla 1.0 and would like to upgrade to Venkman 0.9.x, please visit the development page. The revisions provided there are usually suitable as daily debuggers. If you do find a problem, please report a bug."
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/
I suggest you give it a try.
Last I checked most high-tech businesses were hurting pretty bad. It seems fairly intuitive to me that the current economy will probably cause the weaker for-profit Linux offerings to die off.
If somebody made a list of all the Windows based hi-tech offerings that went bust last year... anyways, nobody would read it because it'd be too long and boring.
Personally, I see Suse and Redhat at the end of this tunnel-- hopefully Mandrake and Connectiva also-- as there'll always be the none-commercial/niche offerings. Also, it doesn't hurt to point out that the free distros existed and thrived well before the commercial ones, just as they do now.
Silly rabbits.
I don't disagree that one might very well be justified in disrupting a meeting that unfairly is excluding a position from being stated-- this, however, is not a good strategy in this situation.
What I am saying is that I believe that most of these DRM issues escape the public's understanding. Since we are precluded from having the public's immeadiate empathy of why we are angry about exclusion, heckling a meeting makes it just too easy for the organizers to say "see why they aren't invited?".
Our problem is convincing legislators who quite rightly perceive that there isn't a lot of public momemtum against DRM.
Getting the message out is the most important job here. Thus I continue to believe sanguine well thought out commentary and action is the best attack. It is imperative our legislators be made to understand the very important issues of balance and public interest involved here.
Simply hooting at a public discussion will not accomplish this I think.
Aside from giving the obvious impression you don't have anything intelligent to say, it strongly conveys the notion that you are actually trying to block public discussion on a matter.
The best way to get the Media's attention is often to simply do their job for them. Write up insightful, well summarized and brief positions explaining a matter and distribute it to the reporters. Doing so goes a long distance towards guaranteeing that your position will be accurately reflected by a reporter's statements.
In these kinds of dicussions, the first person to get mad and upset is very often the one who appears to be on the losing side.
1. Treat your customers like criminals by filling your software with "product activation" to stop the 'thieves'.
2. Send flesh eating lawyers after every mom & pop business the instant it appears their licensing is out of order.
3. Refuse to fix security holes. Blame the user for being too dumb. Then, refuse to give people the ability to remove defective/insecure software.
4. Cater to the content pimps (RIAA, MPAA etc..) and promise a new version of your system whose only benefit is to further limit how people can user their computer.
5. etc....
Result: My next computer will be a mac.
'Issue': KDE is driven by the desires of evil developers who dont care what users want, are arrogant, and rude to anybody who asks for feature xyz: therefore open source is flawed since all projects must be similar.
First of all, as a general rule, telling somebody their work 'sucks' because feature xyz is missing and needs to be changed will never be well received by a developer. Open Source or commercial. Try it.
Second, the only guaranteed support you'll ever get is the one you paid for. This is why distributions exist and why they offer pay-for support. Good will usually comes when it is given first.
Third, the author seems to think the motivations of Open Source developers differ from commercial ones. I recall in particular the quote "I do this because it's cool" and the criticism following it.
Commercial developers have exactly the same motivations, they do things because they are cool.
Want fast turnover in your company? Keep your programmers working on boring projects. See how good your 'code' is after that.
The author laments about backwards compatability. I compare and respond with: "who the hell wants Windows 1.0 compatability anymore"-- in fact, there isn't a single programmer I know that doesn't twitch violently at the thought of writting win16 software much less supporting it. KDE has been evolving at a dramatic speed. 3.0 is the version has brought it into it's age in my opinion. Everybody I know who actually uses KDE doesn't touch or need 1.0 apps anymore.
I'll finish by commenting on my expericence dealing with/working on commercial software. Most of it sucks monkey balls. It's spaghetti, crap, driven by tight deadlines and endless kludges to fix issues just enough to meet the requirements. 3/4 of the stuff would get laughed of usenet if the code was posted. With open source, distributions and companies can evaluate exactly what they are getting and make changes as is needed. I'll take that freedom over closed binary crap anyday.
Perhaps, but the article did. Try reading it again.
I would never have visisted countless sites I reguarly surf to. Google has definitely been a major gateway to the internet for me.
I think making an issue of the caching is a moot point, as about 99% of the time I always go to the website for the content since the source is always better than the cache. I use the cache only in cases when the content has disapeared or in some cases when the website itself is gone.
This is a valuable service Google is providing-- and webmasters get it for free.
Sofware that currently uses 32 bit values to compute hard drive space is probably broken right now as the maximum value a unsigned 32 bit nubmer can represent is about aproximately 4 gigabytes. Have you ever written code to convert between an int64 and long? It's not complicated but boy can it ever be annoying.
time_t this happy 32 bit little time value is ubiquiteous accross all platforms and is also broken after 2038. Switching to a 64 bit version makes the problem go away.
32 bits starts to get a lot smaller when you're dealing with signed values. ~2billion isn't that big a number for a lot of computations.
In short, switching to 64bit will solve a lot of little niggly programming problems for free.
Operating systems with standardized ways of writing software will probably make the transition fairly seemlessly (UNIX: already available). Operating systems with rampant use of hard coded 32bit values (DWORD) for handling pointers and system resources will have a more painful transition (Windows: delayed).
Here in Canada quite a commotion has erupted over the firing of an editor of the Ottawa Citizen for having written an editorial calling for the resignation of our Prime Minister.
In question are the close ties the owner of the media chain has with the Prime Minister due to the fact that it was his very government that allowed the media chain to persue a number of controversial acquisitions that had been previously disallowed by canadian law.
What is clear here, is that politicians will meddle with the media and what they report when given the chance to do so. What is to stop, in this case, an australian Prime Minister from blocking a website whose constant criticism of his policies has aggravated him? Since the list cannot be checked the answer is probably nothing.
This government sponsored censorship raises a serious issue of precedent. The precedent of the governement having the power to block access to information, otherwise publically accessible to the citizen, for unverifiable purposes and results. It is the governement giving itself the right to restrict what a citizen could normally view without restriction in any other country-- without appeal or public review.
In my view, there is a careful balance of power that is being toyed with, both in Australia and in Canada, that needs to be stopped. I hope the Australian courts see the danger here and reverse the decision and I hope justice prevails in the case of this editor who has been wrongfully fired-- in fact it is my wish now that this media group be broken up.
See Citizen story here and here
Level designers do this all the time. It's a nice sure way of ensuring posterity and guarantees people will pay some attention to the name of the author.
I'm sure Bioware is just covering it's butt for the case where somebody felt they weren't given 'enough' credit. Put a nice easter egg in your maps which clearly identifies you as the author and you'll be guranteed your authorship will be hard to remove even accidentally.
It's not not the potential affect of the virus. It's the fact that it's even there.
"Only a complete moron would get infected by this virus."
Yes sir, we know there's a bomb in your car, but don't worry: it's not wired to the engine so it can't hurt you.
The fact that Microsoft could allow its flagship development tool to ship with such a notorious virus is absolutely incomprehensible and humiliating. If I were Balmer I'd be skinning alive those involved with a dull spoon.