After living through the 1988-2003 years where the media bias was
pro-Microsoft, it's nice to have a new media darling.
I'm sure it as more to do with the profit potential for investors than
anything else, of course.
I called the apple store to ask about whether the new video cards have cooling
fans or just passive heat-sinks...the answer is that all of the video cards offered
have cooling fans.
The technical representative that I spoke to was not able to comment on how
much noise these new machines make compared to the previous line. He said
that they've only known about the new machines for a few hours, and it usually
takes a few days for the developer notes to get to the techies that answer the
phones.
That is not a phrase that comes to mind when thinking about Creative Labs, anyway. If you want quality audio, don't you really want a firewire audio-capture device instead?
Jabber is gaining some serious steam. It was already a growing market on its own just with no major players involved, but then Apple's iChat server started supporting XMPP, and now Google's chat client speaks XMPP. That's some serious weight behind Jabber.
You may be on to something...there's not one mention of this new nature of truth in the entry, and there doesn't appear to be any debate about this new nature of truth in the discussion page, and I can't find anyone who has even attempted to note its new nature in any prior revision. Therefore we can conclude that this change to the nature of truth is unprecedented, and it's probably undocumented because the contributors to that entry have an agenda to conceal it from us.
I'm aware of the church of the "true microkernel", and its promised benefits. In fact, I truly
hope that someone can eventually deliver a system based on one that also meets all of my other
expectations of a system. I fully expect such kernels to be practical in end-user systems
within my lifetime.
Excellent post. That's exactly the sort of discourse I was hoping for. I concede most of your
points, but would still insist that although modularity can lead to runtime flexibility,
and runtime flexibility is often a sign of underlying modularity, it is important to not
conflate the two concepts, since (strictly speaking) either one is possible without the
other. More importantly, the absence of the runtime flexibility is not necessarily an
indication of the absence of modularity. It could merely be an indication that some
dynamism was sacrificed for the sake of a performance tradeoff.
Nevertheless, I think you have named a couple of good examples of runtime flexibility that could be
desired but is not offered in MacOS X at this time.
If you have no specific knowledge about what MacOS X allegedly lacks in terms of modularity, why start this thread? I was trying to have a technical conversation on a peer level with you, but you only dodged my question and spewed more vague techno-babble at me.
"Lip syncing" is a technique used in music videos where people move their lips to the music to make
it appear that they are singing, when in fact they really are not. This is normal practice when
musicians make videos to promote their own music, but I linked to an extreme example of
a pair of "artists" who received a Grammy award (later revoked) for an album that they did not
actually perform on.
I was using this as a metaphor for people who pretend to throw around computer jargon to
make it appear that they know more than they actually do. Specifically, when someone who
administers databases and systems and yet they affect software architecture expertise, it makes
me expect them to back up their performance with something substantive.
And, not to put too fine a point on it: you have yet to do this. My 7-year-old can say
the word "monolithic". It doesn't mean he knows that code can be simultaneously modular
and statically compiled into the same binary.
I don't think anybody missed it...I think most of the posts that you are creating
an exaggerated representation of are skeptical about how well the PR statements
reflect their internal reality. Many of us are unhappy former customers that
have been wanting MS to throw out the old baggage for two decades now.
Speaking only for myself, it's difficult to get excited when I've heard it all
before. It's not fear or hate...it's indifference. I moved on to a better world long,
long ago.
P.S. I think the bulk of slashdot posts anymore are disingenuous overgeneralizations
about what 95% of slashdot posts are. Yes, this one included.
Can you point to a particular line in the Linux kernel or Apache, for example, and identify who screwed it up? Not without significant effort.
Using CVS annotate (or any of the myriad tools that wrap it) is not "significant effort" for software developers. Other revision control systems have similar facilities. Here's one quick example that was easy to find via Google.
Could you cite a specific example of where there are two specific regions
of code within those systems that are not linked through a well defined interface,
and make a convincing argument that they should be?
Did you know, by the way, that a system can be modular on the source code level
and then (based upon a compilation flag) it can either be built such that (A) both
regions are in kernel space, or (B) one region is in kernel space and the other is
in user space. The former would use a very efficient interface, whereas the latter
would use one that was more expensive (for having to cross that boundary).
In both cases, the regions exist in separate modules...it's just a compile-time
optimization. Modularity is mostly a "maintainability" concept. The user should
never care whether two regions are communicating via a Mach message or a
pointer on the function-call stack to a struct in the heap. Using the latter does not
make the source less modular.
...the idea that it is only the ubiquity of a system (not its design & implementation) that is the greatest determining factor behind the likelihood of exploit.
It's not stupid beyond belief, it's a standard screwup that happens all over the software world, open and closed source. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to "do the right thing" and write a unit test to be added to an automated regression suite. Of course it's the right thing to do. (No shit, Sherlock.) Nobody has suggested that the absence of such testing is a good idea. The only thing that I've suggested is that some anonymous blowhard shouldn't be surprised if their insistence that a specific QA guy be identified and spanked is not welcomed with open arms. I wouldn't be able to finger a specific QA specialist that dropped the ball on an Internet Explorer regression either, and I'd get my account yanked for relentlessly pressing that issue on a Microsoft forum too.
Slashdot Mirror
After living through the 1988-2003 years where the media bias was pro-Microsoft, it's nice to have a new media darling. I'm sure it as more to do with the profit potential for investors than anything else, of course.
I called the apple store to ask about whether the new video cards have cooling fans or just passive heat-sinks...the answer is that all of the video cards offered have cooling fans. The technical representative that I spoke to was not able to comment on how much noise these new machines make compared to the previous line. He said that they've only known about the new machines for a few hours, and it usually takes a few days for the developer notes to get to the techies that answer the phones.
Good call. Do the new video cards have fans? The previous models came with fanless cards. Has that changed?
That is not a phrase that comes to mind when thinking about Creative Labs, anyway. If you want quality audio, don't you really want a firewire audio-capture device instead?
Jabber is gaining some serious steam. It was already a growing market on its own just with no major players involved, but then Apple's iChat server started supporting XMPP, and now Google's chat client speaks XMPP. That's some serious weight behind Jabber.
Counterpoint is a noun. Funny, though.
I was never a member.
You may be on to something...there's not one mention of this new nature of truth in the entry, and there doesn't appear to be any debate about this new nature of truth in the discussion page, and I can't find anyone who has even attempted to note its new nature in any prior revision. Therefore we can conclude that this change to the nature of truth is unprecedented, and it's probably undocumented because the contributors to that entry have an agenda to conceal it from us.
I'm aware of the church of the "true microkernel", and its promised benefits. In fact, I truly hope that someone can eventually deliver a system based on one that also meets all of my other expectations of a system. I fully expect such kernels to be practical in end-user systems within my lifetime.
Nevertheless, I think you have named a couple of good examples of runtime flexibility that could be desired but is not offered in MacOS X at this time.
I am not here to show knowledge.
Clearly.
I was using this as a metaphor for people who pretend to throw around computer jargon to make it appear that they know more than they actually do. Specifically, when someone who administers databases and systems and yet they affect software architecture expertise, it makes me expect them to back up their performance with something substantive.
And, not to put too fine a point on it: you have yet to do this. My 7-year-old can say the word "monolithic". It doesn't mean he knows that code can be simultaneously modular and statically compiled into the same binary.
Dig?
Well, you can say it...but that doesn't mean that you're doing anything but lip-syncing the jargon .
Speaking only for myself, it's difficult to get excited when I've heard it all before. It's not fear or hate...it's indifference. I moved on to a better world long, long ago.
P.S. I think the bulk of slashdot posts anymore are disingenuous overgeneralizations about what 95% of slashdot posts are. Yes, this one included.
Using CVS annotate (or any of the myriad tools that wrap it) is not "significant effort" for software developers. Other revision control systems have similar facilities. Here's one quick example that was easy to find via Google.
Did you know, by the way, that a system can be modular on the source code level and then (based upon a compilation flag) it can either be built such that (A) both regions are in kernel space, or (B) one region is in kernel space and the other is in user space. The former would use a very efficient interface, whereas the latter would use one that was more expensive (for having to cross that boundary).
In both cases, the regions exist in separate modules...it's just a compile-time optimization. Modularity is mostly a "maintainability" concept. The user should never care whether two regions are communicating via a Mach message or a pointer on the function-call stack to a struct in the heap. Using the latter does not make the source less modular.
You're right, but you're also being obtuse. The "nightmare scenario" is that the web-as-a-platform happens and they don't own it.
What amazes me is how much the NeXT pirates got paid to take over the Apple vessel...that's success in my book.
Sorry if this is a FAQ, but how many times do I have to reload before these conspiracy theory posts start to show up?
Nice link in your sig...so Linus doesn't like slashdot, but he follows it anyway. Doesn't that mean he's just like the rest of us?
I'm glad someone else noticed that. There seems to be far more "cue the MS-bashers in 3, 2, 1..." comments than there are actual MS-bashing comments.
...the idea that it is only the ubiquity of a system (not its design & implementation) that is the greatest determining factor behind the likelihood of exploit.
If you think it's a valid security question, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt: rephrase it in such a way that it is worthy and answerable.
It's not stupid beyond belief, it's a standard screwup that happens all over the software world, open and closed source. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to "do the right thing" and write a unit test to be added to an automated regression suite. Of course it's the right thing to do. (No shit, Sherlock.) Nobody has suggested that the absence of such testing is a good idea. The only thing that I've suggested is that some anonymous blowhard shouldn't be surprised if their insistence that a specific QA guy be identified and spanked is not welcomed with open arms. I wouldn't be able to finger a specific QA specialist that dropped the ball on an Internet Explorer regression either, and I'd get my account yanked for relentlessly pressing that issue on a Microsoft forum too.
If it is the Mozilla Foundation that you're thinking of, it is a non-profit organization. (Unless the referenced page has out of date information.)