The original free office suite is coming along nicely. OOo is ahead, but only because it was closed source for 15-20 years. Koffice is nice (better than OOo in many fundamental ways, though clearly lacking in features), and doesn't fall into the Java Trap.
There is a difference that should be important. With open source you can hire someone else to fix it for you. Perhaps this isn't worth it in your care, but companies go out of business from time to time. If all your data was in a program from a company that goes out of business you cannot expand because you cannot get more licenses for your program.
Maybe you can use what you have (if the license doesn't expire), but as soon as you want to hire someone else you are breaking the law because you lack the ability to get more licenses. For a home user a pirate version is fine. For a business that is a bad idea. You might eventially get big enough that those who got the assets of the old company find it worth their while to sue.
With closed source you are relying on the company to provide updates. What if they abandon the software (see above)? What if they decide you are small fry and ignore you. Microsoft won't listen to my (20 person) company if we need a new feature in Word. With open source we can hire someone if we need something bad enough.
Maybe you can't hack C, but I can. Pay my salary and I will make that old program that last supported linux 2.0.19 work on a modern kernel.
People have offered to pay for the rights to M.U.L.E., and been refused. So those who love the game need to keep an atari 800 (or 400, all other models only support 2 players) and disk drive around. Which sounds easy, but the media is going bad, and the copy protection is strong enough that few attempts at copies work. A great program dies because there is no source. (Yes I'm aware of clones, but they do not change my point)
I started a new job about a couple years ago. Didn't take me long to notice the following line all over: struct devive_info = (struct device_info *)a_ulDeviceHandle. I told the chief programer we need to fix this fast as 64 bits are coming, and was told not to worry about it.
For those who can't read hungarian, this function was passed in a parameter as a int, and it was promptly cast (old style C cast too) to a pointer. This works on 32 bit platforms (normally), but will never work on 64 bit platforms.
This is the guy who decided that since GCC is a terrible C++ compiler (it is, but we were still using compilers from 1995 for the windows stuff, and working around bugs in it), he would standardize on Gcc 2.95 even though gcc 3 is much better. I never did figure out that logic. (this was a decision made late last year) Sometimes I'm glad he doesn't work there anymore.
Not that it matters much to me, I'm a UNIX guy. The last version of Windows I ever had on my machines was 3.1, and I installed OS/2 as soon as it arrived.
No, but Bush was going down the path of isolationism. I'm not sure how far he would have got, but he was going in that direction. We will never know now.
I have several 'black' friends who hate that term. They have never been to Africa, and have no intent to ever go there. (They wouldn't turn down a free vacation to one of the safe areas, but there are plenty of other places they would rather visit) They are Americans, born and raise in the USA and all that. They are no different from me, other minor genetic details.
Lets expand your history a little farther. When WWI broke out people in Europe had street dances in celebration. Even today when mention WWI to someone from Europe they tell me the world needed that war. (Not was itching for it, but needed it, as if it was a good thing)
Then when WWI was settled the winners in Europe went on a blame Germany rampage and forced restitution fines that Germany had no ability to pay. Germany was desperate, and thus willing for any desperate chance. Hitler was the name that happened to have taken advantage of it, but anyone could have done it.
When Germany rolled over France all those payments stopped.
France was allies with other countires that Germany ran over previously. They had treaties saying they would go to war with Germany, yet they did nothing as those countries fell. There is no excuse for not seeing Germany as a war machine and training troops to take them out, when your allies have already fallen! While I can accept that Germany had a better army, France should have given them a tough fight all the way to the sea. Somehow, despite being technically at war with Germany before troops started crossing the border, France didn't have enough of an army to slow Germany.
The US is annoyed with France. We have learned that like it or not we will be dragged into the world problems. We were reminded again in 2001 when a couple buildings fell, even though Bush was up to that time persuing a more isolationist policy. The US cannot be an isolationist. We are too big for the world to ignore. So we take the alternate approach and deal with the world before we have to dedicate our entire economy to war. We see France standing in the way, as if they want us to wait until things are really bad, and then sacrifice 10,000 soldiers per month, instead of ~ 1000/year now. Seems like a bad deal to me. (with the understanding that nobody can perdict the future, so who knows what would really happen if we had let thing go)
I have a nuclear power plant 3 miles from my house. Everyone in town loves it. (when we think of it at all. We just know it pays a lot of taxes and you never see it) The big city in the state hates it and wants to close it down, even though it isn't in their backyard.
II: So we show everyone how to dump mercury into the air instead, slowly poisoning everyone in the world? No thank you, I'll take my chances with necular. At least we don't poison everyone, and are setting an example of putting the stuff under heavy guard.
III: So don't store it, recycle it.
IV: Not by any of today's numbers. Eventally perhaps we will get a renewable down to nuckular levels, but it hasn't happened yet.
V: The cat is out of the bag. A terrorists who wants a suitcase bomb can get one. 20 people willing to die for the cause can produce a simple bomb.
I'm all in favor of renewable energy. BioDiesel and Ethanol are ready to replace the fuel in your car. (We can produce ethanol for less than the cost of Gas, and bio-diesel is cheaper, though we don't have the ability to produce as much currently) Wind and solar energy hold promise, but today they are more expensive, and not quite ready.
Simple economics. Farmers are in business to make money. When you are talking about 2000 acres, the cost of everything adds up. When you can turn the sprayer down to half the volume and get the same results as before because you can use a different, stronger poison, that appears on the bottom line.
The typical suburban lawn gets at much chemicals as a 20 acre field. Homeowners care about their green lawn more than the environment, and the cost is so cheap they don't care. Farmers are using much more expensive fertilizer (something that doesn't target their crops), applied more carefully.
All those households? Where are they? Yes there are a few super insulated houses[1] of renewable materials[2] built each year not many though.
Geothermal springs to not exist in my area. A few people use geothermal (no springs) heat, but the only ones I know have something to gain. One case the owner is CEO of a structural insulated panel company, by using every trick in the book he can advertise is mansion costs less than $200/year (year, not month) to heat and cool. Most people I know interested have decided not to go for it when they discovered how much it costs.
How many solar water heaters are in use? I see many of roof tops. When I look close though I discover the pipes are not hooked up. (as in someone forgot to unwinterize the system years ago) Some people use energy saver light bulbs. Most people I know don't care, they just leave the incandescent lights on all the time.
Recycling covers just over half the people I know, and despite curb side recycling.
Walk two minutes to the shop? Most people I know live more than two minutes from any store. suburbs are build with one shopping area, for all the residents (can't have a store in a residential area is the typical zoning rule). Most people in town live more than a mile from that area, because the town is several miles across.
Public transit is used by those who work downtown and don't get paid for parking, nor carpool. Though I will note that those with parking tend to pick others up and start a car-pool. However that is only when you work downtown. Downtown covers the largest concentration of workers, but doesn't cover the majority. Public transportation assumes you live in the suburbs and are going downtown. (not to the local shopping area, downtown) So the majority of people don't use it because it is worthless.
I know other people do all of what you say. However they are a minority. At least in my area. I'm sure some areas have people who are different.
[1]The definition of super insulated has changed over the years. A 1980 super insulated house would not meat minimum insulation standards today. However the good stuff we have now that we didn't have then isn't popular even when it doesn't cost much more.
[2]Though most houses have a lot of wood, so depending on how you count houses may be made of renewables. Though there is plenty of plastic, metal, and glass used in most.
He had better start training now. Something like 2 hours/day in the pool, and one day a week make that 8. (But he should have a professional design the training program, not someone like me who doesn't know how to design such a thing)
And he needs to spend a few hours a day getting supplies planned. He will want to eat along the way. I presume that row-boat will hold a few days supplies, and every few days someone will come along (how?) to give them more.
Considering the length of the trip he needs to leave as soon as he can safely swim or it will be winter when he arrives, and that may not be any easier. Though I don't know ocean temperatures.
Lack of apps just makes it even easier to admin. None of the non-existant users will be asking for any of the non-existant applications to be upgraded. Nor will they be getting any of the non-existant viruses.
The big problem with being a BeOS admin is there is no money in it. Otherwise it is perfect.
People like me who get carsick won't call it good. Better than driving myself, but still not good. If I'm not looking out the window I soon get sick. On a bad day I can barely open a map before I get sick.
You are preaching to the choir. Traffic engineers know how to design a road correctly. politicians then review the design and force them to put in all those unsafe features to "save the neighborhood", or other such things.
I agree that rubber necking to look at the accident is wrong. However when there is an accident in the next lane you should be creeping around it! Emergency works will be WALKING on the road right next to you, and they will need to move things into your lane temporarily. Sure in theory you could speed by at 65mph (though congestion because a lane is blocked means you can't anyway), but it is unsafe for them!
Even if the accident is on the other side of the median you need to slow down! Emergency vehicles will be doing U-turns in front of you to get to/from the accident in a hurry. You need to go slower so you can react to them.
I can bike that 12 miles in an hour. Faster than your light rail.
IF light rail would just put a personal alarm in your seat you could have it wake you just before your stop and take a nap. Then you would not loose those ~3 hours you spend on the train. At least for me worries about missing my stop (an uncomfortable seats) always preventing me from sleeping on the bus. If I could sleep on the bus, and didn't have transfers I could deal with long travel times.
There are not too many kids or dogs on freeways. Freeways are the easiest to automate, even when you have to contend with human drivers. Only a few controlled entry/exit points, and the speed tends to keep lesser drivers away.
We just need to start enforcing the turn signal and minimum speed laws and it can work. Maybe a few tests to make drivers aware of the rules for the freeway.
By easier, I mean easier that dealing with side streets where there are kids, bikes, and dogs erratically moving in/near traffic. It is still a hard problem, but there are few unpredictable situations, and where those happen you are not at fault. A good radar unit is better than humans at seeing stopped cars ahead. However the problem is still hard.
Not really. I often get off the freeway at one exit, and take a back street for 6 blocks and get back on. The freeway goes from 5 lanes to 2 for those 6 blocks and then back up to 3. (this is a complex intersection downtown, a lot of people exit where I do because it is the best route to work, 3 lanes would be plenty for that stretch, but there is no easy way to add another lane without taking out some important historic buildings.)
My point is there are places where people are not making the proper local optimization, they just sit in traffic. (And some days I make the wrong choice exiting there, because I don't have enough information)
Not with TCP/IP, but I've seen (not worked with) boards to offload network processing from the host machine. They ran in mainframes or VAXen, and other such large machines about 20 years ago. Never caught on though because you still need a reliable protocol to talk to the offload processor. (I was only aware that a box up on the top shelf contained such things, I'm not sure how they work, but could be prior art)
A residential thru street is still a lane, even if it can only move at 20mph. There are a lot of residential streets with essentially no traffic that could take load off of the main freeway. If I knew where those roads are I'd take them around some traffic jams. In fact just having a different random set of driver take the side street everyday could relieve congestion for everyone. Once a month I'm a little late for work because I had to take the side street is better than late everyday because everyone was on the main road and there wasn't capacity for it.
The above is only theory. Modern residential streets do not go through. They dead end, twist and weave to the point where you can't drive them far. Good for safety of the kids on bikes there, but bad for congestion relief. There are however plenty of secondary roads, and some of them can hold more traffic.
If you violate the release date and they find out, you will not get product from that company anymore. (If you are a really big company they just won't ship it until the release day)
This means customers who want the hot product on the day of release won't get it at your store, because you won't even have it until the truck arrives (If you are big, latter that day, small companies sometimes next week, unless it is a big seller when you don't get it until the big guys can keep inventory on the shelves). Not good for business.
Wal*Mart is big, but they are can be ignored if all the other stores fall into line. Nobody goes to Wal*Mart for the midnight release rush. Wal*Mart also understands release pressures. If you want them to keep boxes in stock for a few months they will object, but they are willing to agree to hold things for a short time. They have regional warehouses, and regular shipments to stores - they need to fill this channel up. If your release date is unreasonably far out they will be mad, but otherwise they have their own issues they need some time to work out.
When AMD designed the x86-64 instruction set some of the early prototypes had more registers exposed. However that left less registers available to the optimizers on this chip (I forget what they call this), so the performance was less with more registers.
Can't happen as RAII classes must define a copy constructor that handles this situation. In the case you described my copy constructor is defined private in the header, and has no implementation. The compiler will therefore refuse to compile any code that where it would otherwise silently make a copy.
This is basic RAII. I'm surprised you don't know it, as any introduction to RAII will point this out. (at least in C++ which is the only place I've seen RAII)
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The original free office suite is coming along nicely. OOo is ahead, but only because it was closed source for 15-20 years. Koffice is nice (better than OOo in many fundamental ways, though clearly lacking in features), and doesn't fall into the Java Trap.
There is a difference that should be important. With open source you can hire someone else to fix it for you. Perhaps this isn't worth it in your care, but companies go out of business from time to time. If all your data was in a program from a company that goes out of business you cannot expand because you cannot get more licenses for your program.
Maybe you can use what you have (if the license doesn't expire), but as soon as you want to hire someone else you are breaking the law because you lack the ability to get more licenses. For a home user a pirate version is fine. For a business that is a bad idea. You might eventially get big enough that those who got the assets of the old company find it worth their while to sue.
With closed source you are relying on the company to provide updates. What if they abandon the software (see above)? What if they decide you are small fry and ignore you. Microsoft won't listen to my (20 person) company if we need a new feature in Word. With open source we can hire someone if we need something bad enough.
Maybe you can't hack C, but I can. Pay my salary and I will make that old program that last supported linux 2.0.19 work on a modern kernel.
People have offered to pay for the rights to M.U.L.E., and been refused. So those who love the game need to keep an atari 800 (or 400, all other models only support 2 players) and disk drive around. Which sounds easy, but the media is going bad, and the copy protection is strong enough that few attempts at copies work. A great program dies because there is no source. (Yes I'm aware of clones, but they do not change my point)
Granted one feed is likely (though I have seen out buildings with separate feeds), but even still ground issues are not trivial.
I started a new job about a couple years ago. Didn't take me long to notice the following line all over:
struct devive_info = (struct device_info *)a_ulDeviceHandle.
I told the chief programer we need to fix this fast as 64 bits are coming, and was told not to worry about it.
For those who can't read hungarian, this function was passed in a parameter as a int, and it was promptly cast (old style C cast too) to a pointer. This works on 32 bit platforms (normally), but will never work on 64 bit platforms.
This is the guy who decided that since GCC is a terrible C++ compiler (it is, but we were still using compilers from 1995 for the windows stuff, and working around bugs in it), he would standardize on Gcc 2.95 even though gcc 3 is much better. I never did figure out that logic. (this was a decision made late last year) Sometimes I'm glad he doesn't work there anymore.
Not that it matters much to me, I'm a UNIX guy. The last version of Windows I ever had on my machines was 3.1, and I installed OS/2 as soon as it arrived.
No, but Bush was going down the path of isolationism. I'm not sure how far he would have got, but he was going in that direction. We will never know now.
I have several 'black' friends who hate that term. They have never been to Africa, and have no intent to ever go there. (They wouldn't turn down a free vacation to one of the safe areas, but there are plenty of other places they would rather visit) They are Americans, born and raise in the USA and all that. They are no different from me, other minor genetic details.
Lets expand your history a little farther. When WWI broke out people in Europe had street dances in celebration. Even today when mention WWI to someone from Europe they tell me the world needed that war. (Not was itching for it, but needed it, as if it was a good thing)
Then when WWI was settled the winners in Europe went on a blame Germany rampage and forced restitution fines that Germany had no ability to pay. Germany was desperate, and thus willing for any desperate chance. Hitler was the name that happened to have taken advantage of it, but anyone could have done it.
When Germany rolled over France all those payments stopped.
France was allies with other countires that Germany ran over previously. They had treaties saying they would go to war with Germany, yet they did nothing as those countries fell. There is no excuse for not seeing Germany as a war machine and training troops to take them out, when your allies have already fallen! While I can accept that Germany had a better army, France should have given them a tough fight all the way to the sea. Somehow, despite being technically at war with Germany before troops started crossing the border, France didn't have enough of an army to slow Germany.
The US is annoyed with France. We have learned that like it or not we will be dragged into the world problems. We were reminded again in 2001 when a couple buildings fell, even though Bush was up to that time persuing a more isolationist policy. The US cannot be an isolationist. We are too big for the world to ignore. So we take the alternate approach and deal with the world before we have to dedicate our entire economy to war. We see France standing in the way, as if they want us to wait until things are really bad, and then sacrifice 10,000 soldiers per month, instead of ~ 1000/year now. Seems like a bad deal to me. (with the understanding that nobody can perdict the future, so who knows what would really happen if we had let thing go)
I have a nuclear power plant 3 miles from my house. Everyone in town loves it. (when we think of it at all. We just know it pays a lot of taxes and you never see it) The big city in the state hates it and wants to close it down, even though it isn't in their backyard.
II: So we show everyone how to dump mercury into the air instead, slowly poisoning everyone in the world? No thank you, I'll take my chances with necular. At least we don't poison everyone, and are setting an example of putting the stuff under heavy guard.
III: So don't store it, recycle it.
IV: Not by any of today's numbers. Eventally perhaps we will get a renewable down to nuckular levels, but it hasn't happened yet.
V: The cat is out of the bag. A terrorists who wants a suitcase bomb can get one. 20 people willing to die for the cause can produce a simple bomb.
I'm all in favor of renewable energy. BioDiesel and Ethanol are ready to replace the fuel in your car. (We can produce ethanol for less than the cost of Gas, and bio-diesel is cheaper, though we don't have the ability to produce as much currently) Wind and solar energy hold promise, but today they are more expensive, and not quite ready.
Simple economics. Farmers are in business to make money. When you are talking about 2000 acres, the cost of everything adds up. When you can turn the sprayer down to half the volume and get the same results as before because you can use a different, stronger poison, that appears on the bottom line.
The typical suburban lawn gets at much chemicals as a 20 acre field. Homeowners care about their green lawn more than the environment, and the cost is so cheap they don't care. Farmers are using much more expensive fertilizer (something that doesn't target their crops), applied more carefully.
All those households? Where are they? Yes there are a few super insulated houses[1] of renewable materials[2] built each year not many though.
Geothermal springs to not exist in my area. A few people use geothermal (no springs) heat, but the only ones I know have something to gain. One case the owner is CEO of a structural insulated panel company, by using every trick in the book he can advertise is mansion costs less than $200/year (year, not month) to heat and cool. Most people I know interested have decided not to go for it when they discovered how much it costs.
How many solar water heaters are in use? I see many of roof tops. When I look close though I discover the pipes are not hooked up. (as in someone forgot to unwinterize the system years ago) Some people use energy saver light bulbs. Most people I know don't care, they just leave the incandescent lights on all the time.
Recycling covers just over half the people I know, and despite curb side recycling.
Walk two minutes to the shop? Most people I know live more than two minutes from any store. suburbs are build with one shopping area, for all the residents (can't have a store in a residential area is the typical zoning rule). Most people in town live more than a mile from that area, because the town is several miles across.
Public transit is used by those who work downtown and don't get paid for parking, nor carpool. Though I will note that those with parking tend to pick others up and start a car-pool. However that is only when you work downtown. Downtown covers the largest concentration of workers, but doesn't cover the majority. Public transportation assumes you live in the suburbs and are going downtown. (not to the local shopping area, downtown) So the majority of people don't use it because it is worthless.
I know other people do all of what you say. However they are a minority. At least in my area. I'm sure some areas have people who are different.
[1]The definition of super insulated has changed over the years. A 1980 super insulated house would not meat minimum insulation standards today. However the good stuff we have now that we didn't have then isn't popular even when it doesn't cost much more.
[2]Though most houses have a lot of wood, so depending on how you count houses may be made of renewables. Though there is plenty of plastic, metal, and glass used in most.
He had better start training now. Something like 2 hours/day in the pool, and one day a week make that 8. (But he should have a professional design the training program, not someone like me who doesn't know how to design such a thing)
And he needs to spend a few hours a day getting supplies planned. He will want to eat along the way. I presume that row-boat will hold a few days supplies, and every few days someone will come along (how?) to give them more.
Considering the length of the trip he needs to leave as soon as he can safely swim or it will be winter when he arrives, and that may not be any easier. Though I don't know ocean temperatures.
I hope he makes it!
Hey, don't blame me, I use konqueror.
Lack of apps just makes it even easier to admin. None of the non-existant users will be asking for any of the non-existant applications to be upgraded. Nor will they be getting any of the non-existant viruses.
The big problem with being a BeOS admin is there is no money in it. Otherwise it is perfect.
People like me who get carsick won't call it good. Better than driving myself, but still not good. If I'm not looking out the window I soon get sick. On a bad day I can barely open a map before I get sick.
You are preaching to the choir. Traffic engineers know how to design a road correctly. politicians then review the design and force them to put in all those unsafe features to "save the neighborhood", or other such things.
I agree that rubber necking to look at the accident is wrong. However when there is an accident in the next lane you should be creeping around it! Emergency works will be WALKING on the road right next to you, and they will need to move things into your lane temporarily. Sure in theory you could speed by at 65mph (though congestion because a lane is blocked means you can't anyway), but it is unsafe for them!
Even if the accident is on the other side of the median you need to slow down! Emergency vehicles will be doing U-turns in front of you to get to/from the accident in a hurry. You need to go slower so you can react to them.
I can bike that 12 miles in an hour. Faster than your light rail.
IF light rail would just put a personal alarm in your seat you could have it wake you just before your stop and take a nap. Then you would not loose those ~3 hours you spend on the train. At least for me worries about missing my stop (an uncomfortable seats) always preventing me from sleeping on the bus. If I could sleep on the bus, and didn't have transfers I could deal with long travel times.
There are not too many kids or dogs on freeways. Freeways are the easiest to automate, even when you have to contend with human drivers. Only a few controlled entry/exit points, and the speed tends to keep lesser drivers away.
We just need to start enforcing the turn signal and minimum speed laws and it can work. Maybe a few tests to make drivers aware of the rules for the freeway.
By easier, I mean easier that dealing with side streets where there are kids, bikes, and dogs erratically moving in/near traffic. It is still a hard problem, but there are few unpredictable situations, and where those happen you are not at fault. A good radar unit is better than humans at seeing stopped cars ahead. However the problem is still hard.
Not really. I often get off the freeway at one exit, and take a back street for 6 blocks and get back on. The freeway goes from 5 lanes to 2 for those 6 blocks and then back up to 3. (this is a complex intersection downtown, a lot of people exit where I do because it is the best route to work, 3 lanes would be plenty for that stretch, but there is no easy way to add another lane without taking out some important historic buildings.)
My point is there are places where people are not making the proper local optimization, they just sit in traffic. (And some days I make the wrong choice exiting there, because I don't have enough information)
Not with TCP/IP, but I've seen (not worked with) boards to offload network processing from the host machine. They ran in mainframes or VAXen, and other such large machines about 20 years ago. Never caught on though because you still need a reliable protocol to talk to the offload processor. (I was only aware that a box up on the top shelf contained such things, I'm not sure how they work, but could be prior art)
A residential thru street is still a lane, even if it can only move at 20mph. There are a lot of residential streets with essentially no traffic that could take load off of the main freeway. If I knew where those roads are I'd take them around some traffic jams. In fact just having a different random set of driver take the side street everyday could relieve congestion for everyone. Once a month I'm a little late for work because I had to take the side street is better than late everyday because everyone was on the main road and there wasn't capacity for it.
The above is only theory. Modern residential streets do not go through. They dead end, twist and weave to the point where you can't drive them far. Good for safety of the kids on bikes there, but bad for congestion relief. There are however plenty of secondary roads, and some of them can hold more traffic.
(In addition to what the others have said)
If you violate the release date and they find out, you will not get product from that company anymore. (If you are a really big company they just won't ship it until the release day)
This means customers who want the hot product on the day of release won't get it at your store, because you won't even have it until the truck arrives (If you are big, latter that day, small companies sometimes next week, unless it is a big seller when you don't get it until the big guys can keep inventory on the shelves). Not good for business.
Wal*Mart is big, but they are can be ignored if all the other stores fall into line. Nobody goes to Wal*Mart for the midnight release rush. Wal*Mart also understands release pressures. If you want them to keep boxes in stock for a few months they will object, but they are willing to agree to hold things for a short time. They have regional warehouses, and regular shipments to stores - they need to fill this channel up. If your release date is unreasonably far out they will be mad, but otherwise they have their own issues they need some time to work out.
When AMD designed the x86-64 instruction set some of the early prototypes had more registers exposed. However that left less registers available to the optimizers on this chip (I forget what they call this), so the performance was less with more registers.
and a copy constructor is called
Can't happen as RAII classes must define a copy constructor that handles this situation. In the case you described my copy constructor is defined private in the header, and has no implementation. The compiler will therefore refuse to compile any code that where it would otherwise silently make a copy.
This is basic RAII. I'm surprised you don't know it, as any introduction to RAII will point this out. (at least in C++ which is the only place I've seen RAII)