The only real method of fixing this is to charge for e-mail.
You think that businesses would not be able to afford bulk email charges!? The best you can hope for is that only "large, respectable" businesses could afford to senselessly flood your inbox.
The best way to really solve this problem is some sort of new-generation SMTP protocol (or some widely-adopted ajunct protocol).
I'm amazed that the article has no mention of the legal battles that SCO is engaed in. There's an entire paragraph "About SCO", but nothing about what the company actually engages in on a day-to-day basis. How could the author justify the omission of such material?
It's the fan in my pc that's loud not the processor.
Ever wonder about the reason why the fan is sitting there right on top of the processor? Could there be some sort of relationship between the two? I'd wager that if the processor ran cooler, you might be able to dispense with the processor-fan altogether and just use a heat-sink which, being just a solid hunk of metal, makes no noise whatsoever. This could be the next giant leap in Quiet Computing! Imagine a beo...
The same entry has a nice discussion of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, which is where the Tit For Tat strategy comes into the picture. I can't speak to how this resembles the NN algorithm at hand.
Interesting. I can see that working if the distances are not too large. If you have an audio capture device that uses firewire 400, you're going to have a 4.5 meter limit, unless you're willing to daisy chain the up to 16 cables allowed by the spec, in which case you can get up to 72 meters, but I wonder what effect that is going to have on your latency. A less capable (and more common) audio capture device that uses USB is going to be limited to 5 meters. I suppose these limitations could work out for some people, (depending on how negotiations with the spouse work out) but in my case the nearest available closet is further than that...Did you friend have a workaround for that problem too?
That's only a good idea if you have the space in your home and you have another person around to operate the PC while you're in the other room playing your instrument, and the small amout of studio time that you rent with the remainder is enough to capture your entire range of musical creativity. For everyone else, a 1200 case is probably a better option.
Miguel has told reporters that only an immigration technicality prevented him from becoming a Microsoft employee four years ago - the small print of the H1-B Visa process disqualifies students who haven't completed their degree course.
That's amusing. Heck, they could have worked out an under-the-table deal to make him a covert astroturfing shill for.NYET -- I'm sure the H1-B Visa process doesn't prevent one from engaging in a little quid pro quo on the side. Maybe he's living his dream after all, but just can't officially brag about it. <g>
Conspiracy theories aside, at least now I understand how such a smart guy could make such a profoundly stupid strategic decision like pinning the future of gnome on perpetually playing catch-up-with-microsoft-APIs: it's not a stupid decision -- it's a smart decision made by the opposition.;-) (HHOS).
I'm clear on the intended semantics of "stable", "testing", and "unstable", but my experience is exactly the same as the grandparent post. There may be an occasional burp in the updates, but they go away fairly quickly. In contrast it seems like it takes forever for fixes to get promoted to testing. I've been a debian unstable user for years, and feel like it's the sweet spot to be at for the best balance of recent software and ease of maintenance. Face it, the debian development process is so freaking conservative that even their unstable branch is more stable than other distributions.
This is for my workstation, of course...I wouldn't maintain a server that way.
n 1994, the desktop was not a GUI desktop, the
desktop was mostly a command-line universe both
on DOS-based systems and Linux systems.
I respect your work, Miguel, but I think that your experience may deviate from reality a bit here. You were working on Midnight Commander at the time, so obviously text-based consoles were your bread & butter at the time, but from my experience the dominant desktop was the windows gui, the second in the race was the Mac GUI, and the best desktop at the time (the state of the art) was the NeXTstep GUI, with OS/2's workplace shell not being too shabby either. At the time I had already been a NeXTstep user for a few years. I remember linux at the time being only for those brave enough for the command-line, and perhaps Windows power-users lived in the DOS shell, but to equate that with the dominant desktop of the time is a severely skewed revision of history.
But now that you've shared your recollection of that period in time, I finally understand Midnight Commander, which I always took to be someone's attempt at retro redux. Now I get it.
I have pretty good ears myself, and tend to trust them more than my eyes. But I recognize that most people around me have pretty lousy ears. Well, maybe it's how they use their ears -- how much attention they give to that input device. In general I think that most people spend too much time talking to give attention to what they could be hearing. I've studied music since kindergarden, so maybe that has something to do with it too. Nevertheless, I sometimes feel like a freak for being more aurally-observant than others around me.
You can easily play OGG formats in iTunes (a tutorial in this month's MacAddict tells how to use the codec)
Does this tutorial happen to explain how to make iTunes properly export ogg music to other machines that are also configured to use the ogg codec plugin? I've had ogg support configured for a long time, but was frustrated to learn that my ogg collection at my G4 in my basement cannot be shared with the iMac in my kitchen.
I was only half-aware of RTTI; thanks for pointing that out. I read a bit about it this morning, and it looks like the capabilities that it provides is a strict subset of those provided by the reflection facilities in Java.
C++ as a language is a superset of Java as a language.
By what meaning of the word "superset"? By some interpretations, one would expect to be able to take a Java progam and successfully compile it with a C++ compiler, which obviously isn't true. This would be a reasonable interpretation, since the "superset" idea is often applied to language pairs like C/C++ and C/ObjC. One genuinely can compile a plain C program with a C++ compiler or an ObjectiveC compiler.
So, if that's not the intended meaning of "superset", then you must be claiming that there are semantic constructs that you can do in C++ that you cannot do in Java, but not the other way around. multiple-inheritance-of-implementation and operator-overloading would be the obvious examples for things that C++ can describe that Java cannot, but then Java provides runtime access to class names, method names, and instance variable names...while C++ does not. So again there's not a true superset/subset relationship here either.
Is UML really a language?
on
UML Fever
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What is the justification for the 'L' in 'UML'. I realize that in the loosest sense, UML is intended to be a means of communicating ideas, but it feels extremely primitive, like cave drawings. There's not even a standard machine-parseable representation for UML so that various programs can generate/manipulate/transform UML models without reverse-engineering some proprietary cryptic file format. And as for communicating person-to-person, I find it much more practical to use design-pattern language and a few terms from The Jargon File to improve communication with my team. Think about the jargon used between surgeons and their assistants -- to me, that's the kind of language that actually improves communication where it matters...UML seem to take the part of the development cycle that proceeds at the most frustratingly glacial pace and make it even slower. And that seems to make it different from all of the other languages that I've learned.
NeXTSTEP did not run on four different platforms. OPENSTEP might have - NeXTSTEP did not.
Someone should point out that the distinction that you're making is in name only. The actual codebase is the same, rebranded as "OPENSTEP" when they published their API for open implementation. For all non-marketroid intents and purposes, NeXTstep did run on four architectures. I had the pleasure of using it on i486, an HP "Gecko" PA-RISC workstation, and one of those noisy Tadpole SPARC laptops.
And although the code segments were not interleaved within the same file in the way that you're thinking, the actual term was "fat binary" both inside NeXT and within the user community. There was even a tool called "lipo" (as in liposuction) to strip out the architectures that you didn't need. It still lives in/usr/bin on MacOS X today.
Jobs contacted Apple before he was at Apple as "unofficial leader", getting Apple to choose NeXT over Be
But isn't that a given? One couldn't really expect to sell their company without contacting the potential buyer, could they? I mean, Jean-Louis Gassée contacted apple before that time too, right? And despite his efforts he wasn't really able to make a compelling case for Apple forking out money for Be when there was this other alternative deal on the table. Don't you think you should give Gassée a little credit too?
Both Gassée and Jobs were former Apple execs with some sort of "inside track". If anything made the playing field uneven it was the fact that NeXTstep was a very mature and portable codebase and that NeXT actually had established, paying customers (the most enticing, no doubt, being government contracts in the intelligence community.) BeOS sure was a sexy system, but it was very young and mostly loved by the lone-wolf-geek demographic, of which I'm a proud member but you can't pin the future of a business on the likes of me.
He pushed his buddies from failing NeXT into power positions at Apple when he came back, and killed the Be deal (which would have given Apple a stable and powerful *IX-based OS years earlier, and a big head start over Microsoft on stability).
Sorry, but someone has to correct this little bit of revisionist history. The historical event that brought back Jobs was the Apple's choice of NeXT instead of Be...Jobs didn't make this choice, because that decision was made before he was back on board. You can claim that he distorted reality or something to give the illusion that NeXT was a better choice, but you can't really support the claim that Jobs killed the Be deal, because that deal became irrelevant the moment they decided to acquire NeXT.
Moreover, as much as I loved BeOS, it was lacking in a true multi-concurrent-user kernel at the time, and it did not have a device-independent display model. NeXTstep had both of these (although Display PostScript was replaced by a better display-PDF engine), so by some objective interpretations the decision to go with BeOS would have left them further behind.
And as far as his buddies from NeXT, those were some damned competent people and they deserve the leadership roles they were given.
behind the XCode curtain
on
Optimizing distcc
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is cool...I learned something on slashdot today. On a hunch I got a bash shell on my OSX box at home and typed "dist--", and lo there be distcc already installed and ready to go. That must be what they use for distributed builds in XCode
Could someone explain this use of the word 'commodity' to me? (I'm asking in earnest, not trolling.) To me the word means 'a parcel or quantity of goods', or 'articles of commerce'. So anything bought & sold would qualify. So what's not 'true' about software being bought & sold?
However, I have to ask, which OS (major or minor) are you using?
Any operating system that falls under the "unix-like" umbrella will get you this. I'm currently using two of them: linux and MacOS X. I suppose one could argue that these are not "major" individually, but collectively UNIX is quite major.
Also, I have to point out that you aren't claiming protection from buffer overflows, which was the specific context of my original.
Actually, I'm claiming that privilege separation provides some containment, which is a rudimentary sort of protection against buffer overflows. I admit that it's not much, and that more could be done, but it is a facility that is provided by the system's architecture to afford at least some protection. I, too, would like more.
And, apparently, buffer overrun protection is still much too rare to allow fair-minded commentators to blame just one OS for permitting a multiplatform application exploit. Which, I maintain, was my point.
As a former Microsoft customer, I can see their point. I remember when Windows95 was just the code-name "Chicago". (Back then I was using NeXTstep, as I was already aware of many of these issues.) I recall reading the writings of a lot of computer professionals who understood the sorts of architectural decisions that needed to be placed into an operating system (and even applications) that was intended to exist on the internet. Back then the UNIX community had the great internet worm of 1988 behind them, and learned from that painful experience. For the greatest software giant on the planet to continue to (for all practical purposes) provide new, convenient Worm Authoring APIs as late as they have (ActiveX, I'm looking in your direction) is unconscionable.
UNIX isn't perfect either, but the distinction between Microsoft and the UNIX community, in terms of architectural decisions and their impact on worm protection, is clear enough to justify taking your consumer dollars elsewere...let alone clear enough to justify blowing off some steam in a slashdot thread.
That's not strictly true. I have network daemons running on my machine that have some protection given to them by the underlying operating system. Were a buffer overflow exploit to be discovered in one and leveraged by an attacker, the best that the attacker can hope for is a shell that gives them all of the privileges of the user under whose authority the process is running. An attacker would have to find another vulnerability in another part of the system to get no another, more dangerous, level of privilege. This protection comes from architectural decisions made by those who wrote the OS.
Excellent point. From my own personal experience, I became a habitual user of Alta Vista in the early days. Over time, Google became better in all respects except one: AltaVista still had the ability to search Usenet posts (which is very useful for troubleshooting tech issues!). But when AltaVista stopped allowing usenet searches, I became an immediate Google user. Eventually, Google Groups became available and "customer loyalty" set in. I can't imagine a scenario where that well-worn rut of hitting google is disrupted. They'd have to start sucking, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon.
WTF do you mean by "slashdot logic"? You're comparing separate acts of moderation by (almost certainly) different individuals. By what reason would you exect Person A's world view to be consistent with Person B's? Just because they're both in the same slashdot thread on the same day? How about you "go figure".
Slashdot Mirror
You think that businesses would not be able to afford bulk email charges!? The best you can hope for is that only "large, respectable" businesses could afford to senselessly flood your inbox.
The best way to really solve this problem is some sort of new-generation SMTP protocol (or some widely-adopted ajunct protocol).
I'm amazed that the article has no mention of the legal battles that SCO is engaed in. There's an entire paragraph "About SCO", but nothing about what the company actually engages in on a day-to-day basis. How could the author justify the omission of such material?
Ever wonder about the reason why the fan is sitting there right on top of the processor? Could there be some sort of relationship between the two? I'd wager that if the processor ran cooler, you might be able to dispense with the processor-fan altogether and just use a heat-sink which, being just a solid hunk of metal, makes no noise whatsoever. This could be the next giant leap in Quiet Computing! Imagine a beo...
The same entry has a nice discussion of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma , which is where the Tit For Tat strategy comes into the picture. I can't speak to how this resembles the NN algorithm at hand.
Both the parent and the grandparent should have been +5 Insightful.
Interesting. I can see that working if the distances are not too large. If you have an audio capture device that uses firewire 400, you're going to have a 4.5 meter limit, unless you're willing to daisy chain the up to 16 cables allowed by the spec, in which case you can get up to 72 meters, but I wonder what effect that is going to have on your latency. A less capable (and more common) audio capture device that uses USB is going to be limited to 5 meters. I suppose these limitations could work out for some people, (depending on how negotiations with the spouse work out) but in my case the nearest available closet is further than that...Did you friend have a workaround for that problem too?
That's only a good idea if you have the space in your home and you have another person around to operate the PC while you're in the other room playing your instrument, and the small amout of studio time that you rent with the remainder is enough to capture your entire range of musical creativity. For everyone else, a 1200 case is probably a better option.
That's amusing. Heck, they could have worked out an under-the-table deal to make him a covert astroturfing shill for .NYET -- I'm sure the H1-B Visa process doesn't prevent one from engaging in a little quid pro quo on the side. Maybe he's living his dream after all, but just can't officially brag about it. <g>
Conspiracy theories aside, at least now I understand how such a smart guy could make such a profoundly stupid strategic decision like pinning the future of gnome on perpetually playing catch-up-with-microsoft-APIs: it's not a stupid decision -- it's a smart decision made by the opposition. ;-) (HHOS).
This is for my workstation, of course...I wouldn't maintain a server that way.
I respect your work, Miguel, but I think that your experience may deviate from reality a bit here. You were working on Midnight Commander at the time, so obviously text-based consoles were your bread & butter at the time, but from my experience the dominant desktop was the windows gui, the second in the race was the Mac GUI, and the best desktop at the time (the state of the art) was the NeXTstep GUI, with OS/2's workplace shell not being too shabby either. At the time I had already been a NeXTstep user for a few years. I remember linux at the time being only for those brave enough for the command-line, and perhaps Windows power-users lived in the DOS shell, but to equate that with the dominant desktop of the time is a severely skewed revision of history.
But now that you've shared your recollection of that period in time, I finally understand Midnight Commander, which I always took to be someone's attempt at retro redux. Now I get it.
It's interesting to note, since you brought up optical illusions, that there are similar phenomenon with respect to the ear. One such example are Shepard tones. I suppose other examples would be those that are the basis for some clever tricks that the Vorbis codec (and others?) use to compress music audio.
Does this tutorial happen to explain how to make iTunes properly export ogg music to other machines that are also configured to use the ogg codec plugin? I've had ogg support configured for a long time, but was frustrated to learn that my ogg collection at my G4 in my basement cannot be shared with the iMac in my kitchen.
I was only half-aware of RTTI; thanks for pointing that out. I read a bit about it this morning, and it looks like the capabilities that it provides is a strict subset of those provided by the reflection facilities in Java.
By what meaning of the word "superset"? By some interpretations, one would expect to be able to take a Java progam and successfully compile it with a C++ compiler, which obviously isn't true. This would be a reasonable interpretation, since the "superset" idea is often applied to language pairs like C/C++ and C/ObjC. One genuinely can compile a plain C program with a C++ compiler or an ObjectiveC compiler.
So, if that's not the intended meaning of "superset", then you must be claiming that there are semantic constructs that you can do in C++ that you cannot do in Java, but not the other way around. multiple-inheritance-of-implementation and operator-overloading would be the obvious examples for things that C++ can describe that Java cannot, but then Java provides runtime access to class names, method names, and instance variable names...while C++ does not. So again there's not a true superset/subset relationship here either.
What is the justification for the 'L' in 'UML'. I realize that in the loosest sense, UML is intended to be a means of communicating ideas, but it feels extremely primitive, like cave drawings. There's not even a standard machine-parseable representation for UML so that various programs can generate/manipulate/transform UML models without reverse-engineering some proprietary cryptic file format. And as for communicating person-to-person, I find it much more practical to use design-pattern language and a few terms from The Jargon File to improve communication with my team. Think about the jargon used between surgeons and their assistants -- to me, that's the kind of language that actually improves communication where it matters...UML seem to take the part of the development cycle that proceeds at the most frustratingly glacial pace and make it even slower. And that seems to make it different from all of the other languages that I've learned.
Someone should point out that the distinction that you're making is in name only. The actual codebase is the same, rebranded as "OPENSTEP" when they published their API for open implementation. For all non-marketroid intents and purposes, NeXTstep did run on four architectures. I had the pleasure of using it on i486, an HP "Gecko" PA-RISC workstation, and one of those noisy Tadpole SPARC laptops.
And although the code segments were not interleaved within the same file in the way that you're thinking, the actual term was "fat binary" both inside NeXT and within the user community. There was even a tool called "lipo" (as in liposuction) to strip out the architectures that you didn't need. It still lives in /usr/bin on MacOS X today.
But isn't that a given? One couldn't really expect to sell their company without contacting the potential buyer, could they? I mean, Jean-Louis Gassée contacted apple before that time too, right? And despite his efforts he wasn't really able to make a compelling case for Apple forking out money for Be when there was this other alternative deal on the table. Don't you think you should give Gassée a little credit too?
Both Gassée and Jobs were former Apple execs with some sort of "inside track". If anything made the playing field uneven it was the fact that NeXTstep was a very mature and portable codebase and that NeXT actually had established, paying customers (the most enticing, no doubt, being government contracts in the intelligence community.) BeOS sure was a sexy system, but it was very young and mostly loved by the lone-wolf-geek demographic, of which I'm a proud member but you can't pin the future of a business on the likes of me.
Sorry, but someone has to correct this little bit of revisionist history. The historical event that brought back Jobs was the Apple's choice of NeXT instead of Be...Jobs didn't make this choice, because that decision was made before he was back on board. You can claim that he distorted reality or something to give the illusion that NeXT was a better choice, but you can't really support the claim that Jobs killed the Be deal, because that deal became irrelevant the moment they decided to acquire NeXT.
Moreover, as much as I loved BeOS, it was lacking in a true multi-concurrent-user kernel at the time, and it did not have a device-independent display model. NeXTstep had both of these (although Display PostScript was replaced by a better display-PDF engine), so by some objective interpretations the decision to go with BeOS would have left them further behind.
And as far as his buddies from NeXT, those were some damned competent people and they deserve the leadership roles they were given.
This is cool...I learned something on slashdot today. On a hunch I got a bash shell on my OSX box at home and typed "dist--", and lo there be distcc already installed and ready to go. That must be what they use for distributed builds in XCode
Could someone explain this use of the word 'commodity' to me? (I'm asking in earnest, not trolling.) To me the word means 'a parcel or quantity of goods', or 'articles of commerce'. So anything bought & sold would qualify. So what's not 'true' about software being bought & sold?
Any operating system that falls under the "unix-like" umbrella will get you this. I'm currently using two of them: linux and MacOS X. I suppose one could argue that these are not "major" individually, but collectively UNIX is quite major.
Also, I have to point out that you aren't claiming protection from buffer overflows, which was the specific context of my original.
Actually, I'm claiming that privilege separation provides some containment, which is a rudimentary sort of protection against buffer overflows. I admit that it's not much, and that more could be done, but it is a facility that is provided by the system's architecture to afford at least some protection. I, too, would like more.
And, apparently, buffer overrun protection is still much too rare to allow fair-minded commentators to blame just one OS for permitting a multiplatform application exploit. Which, I maintain, was my point.
As a former Microsoft customer, I can see their point. I remember when Windows95 was just the code-name "Chicago". (Back then I was using NeXTstep, as I was already aware of many of these issues.) I recall reading the writings of a lot of computer professionals who understood the sorts of architectural decisions that needed to be placed into an operating system (and even applications) that was intended to exist on the internet. Back then the UNIX community had the great internet worm of 1988 behind them, and learned from that painful experience. For the greatest software giant on the planet to continue to (for all practical purposes) provide new, convenient Worm Authoring APIs as late as they have (ActiveX, I'm looking in your direction) is unconscionable.
UNIX isn't perfect either, but the distinction between Microsoft and the UNIX community, in terms of architectural decisions and their impact on worm protection, is clear enough to justify taking your consumer dollars elsewere...let alone clear enough to justify blowing off some steam in a slashdot thread.
That's not strictly true. I have network daemons running on my machine that have some protection given to them by the underlying operating system. Were a buffer overflow exploit to be discovered in one and leveraged by an attacker, the best that the attacker can hope for is a shell that gives them all of the privileges of the user under whose authority the process is running. An attacker would have to find another vulnerability in another part of the system to get no another, more dangerous, level of privilege. This protection comes from architectural decisions made by those who wrote the OS.
Excellent point. From my own personal experience, I became a habitual user of Alta Vista in the early days. Over time, Google became better in all respects except one: AltaVista still had the ability to search Usenet posts (which is very useful for troubleshooting tech issues!). But when AltaVista stopped allowing usenet searches, I became an immediate Google user. Eventually, Google Groups became available and "customer loyalty" set in. I can't imagine a scenario where that well-worn rut of hitting google is disrupted. They'd have to start sucking, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon.
It's true that the Win32 port isn't up to snuff, but you should be able to find plenty of non-ass-jamming kernels supported in this list
WTF do you mean by "slashdot logic"? You're comparing separate acts of moderation by (almost certainly) different individuals. By what reason would you exect Person A's world view to be consistent with Person B's? Just because they're both in the same slashdot thread on the same day? How about you "go figure".