...is anyone concerned about the image of the tech community and finding more realistic ways to demonstrate the creativity and resourcefulness of nerds?
I once spent a day with a guitarist of immense talent. He spent countless hours with his instrument, but not making music...it was all just pointless scales, arpeggios, chord progressions around the cycle of fifths...not one bit of actual music did he perform. Sure, it was amazing to watch, but I couldn't understand why he was wasting his immense muscial intellect with such mundane exercises.
I wonder where he got the talent. Must have been a gift from god. It surely couldn't be that tireless practice of one's art leads to mastery, and that anything that helps one make practice fun aids in one's journey towards eminence in one's field...nope, no way.
That is a brilliant idea. All we need is one lawyer to draft a letter, a small I18N team to translate into a handful of interesting languages, and a PDF that a bajillion of us can print out and send through registered mail...make someone on their end sign for each one.
So why would you ever want to have a pool of preallocated objects which get recycled? It hurts performance, and complicates the program.
Imagine a world where memory management is not your worst enemy. In this world, worrying about garbage-collector implementation minutae such as reference age is wasted effort. This is the world where object initialization overhead is so large that keeping object pools is worth the trouble. This is the world of database connections et. al. The "complication" is only a state of mind: do you see the design pattern(s) or don't you?
You guys want your cake and eat it too. You piss and moan everyday about the "evil gubmint" and their excessive involvement in everything. Then you get your own pork project on the governments radar, in this case spam, and you are overjoyed.
Who is this collective "you" that you're talking about? Do you realize that you're in a big room, eavesdropping on a thousand conversations, and you really don't know exactly who is expressing each individual opinion that you hear?
If I say that I like to eat a good steak, and someone else says that "meat is murder", neither of us is guilty of hypocrisy just because we were both in the same room when we uttered our opinions.
That's the way it works in the real world, and it's the way it works in "virtual rooms" like slashdot. I'm sorry, but you are going to have to stop thinking of online forums as one large group of clones with identical programming.
Unless you can specifically find a fixed individual who has uttered incongruous statements, you have no grounds for your complaint. And even when you do, your complaint is only valid with respect to that individual...not everybody else who happens to be there at the time.
I think everybody missed your punchline. Good one. It's true. They're keeping us so well entertained that we don't feel the need to organize against this shit.
And, frankly, I'm not certain that organizing against this shit is still legal in the U.S. Wasn't that amendment repealed?
It seems that complex math is always the example people pull out to support operator overloading. I've used complex math exactly once, when I was writing a fractal toy...that I didn't have operator overloading in Objective C didn't bother me. Are there any really compelling examples that don't resort to the tacit assumption that dealing with imaginary numbers is something all programmers deal with on a daily basis? I mean, talk about optimizing for an edge case.
I've watched over the last two decades as quality software dies in the marketplace while scum rises to the top. I've considered the industry "dead" for a long, long time now. It will remain dead to me until consumers suddenly have an epiphany en masse that allows them to both recognize good architecture, and to desire it. Make that two simultaneous epiphany: they also must suddenly prefer publicly-published standards over the vendor-lockin du jour. Ok, make that three epiphany: they have to vote for these preferences with their money instead of admitting "yeah, MS sucks" but refusing to be part of the solution. I'm not holding my breath.
If the spammers are banding together to fight anti-spammer groups, it probably means that those anti-spamming measures are effectively interfering with their business model. Maybe those 550 rejects are actually causing them some pain.
I've been very happy with my sendmail configuration, where I'm using blacklists and whitelists (/etc/mail/access) and a collection of realtime blocking lists. I had almost given up on recreational computing because of the sorry state of my inbox, but now things are better.
I think it's time for us to better document & pomote the use of these measures so that more people are sending them 550's, instead of quietly deleting their garbage.
...my main problem with Netflix is that I can't trust my postal worker (or someone else in the chain) from grabbing movies after I drop them in the mailbox and before they get marked as "returned" in the Netflix database. Twice we have returned movies only to find that they never made it all the way back.
So we had to cancel our service, only because the value of the "intellectual property" was too high and the packaging was too conspicuous -- too tempting for people that we trust to return the movies safely.
This is an interesting line of thought, worthy of extending to lawyers. Although the initial idea of lawyers was noble, it has become clear that (in practice) their primary use is to promote grief and suffering through harassment...a kind of violence-by-proxy, leveraging the official power structure. So we should send lawyers to jail. That might actually solve the problem.
That sounds very similar to the dynamics of the anti-virus market in windows. The optimal profit strategy for a virus-scanner vendor is to perpetually be slightly behind the arms-race between stealth malicious code and malicious code detectors. I'm not saying that any real businesses operate this way, but it is a way that revenue could be generated.
I sometimes wonder about the 550 response codes. I really don't know, of course, since I'm not a spammer -- but I imagine that all of the 550 codes that I'm watching in my logs do nothing more than make me feel better. Are they really getting all the way back to the spammer, consuming disk space as bounces? Or does each one just end up incrementing some counter in their client software?
Perhaps sendmail et. al. could implement a thoughtful pause (of a configurable value) before it gives the 550. If my mail server slept for 60 seconds before issuing the error, it might slow them down, or cause them to run out of threads.
...and loved it. The author has a deliciously dry sense of humor, and offers an interesting insight. For those of you who did not have the patience, the whole point of the article came at the very end. Since we can project that in a century the resources will be enormous (by our standards today)... Now we have two ideas that, if you combine them, suggest interesting possibilities: (1) the hundred-year language could, in principle, be designed today, and (2) such a language, if it existed, might be good to program in today. When you see these ideas laid out like that, it's hard not to think, why not try writing the hundred-year language now?
I think the same thing would be true of the 100-year operating system, and that these two long-term visions need to be aware of each other. Every time I read about some amazing new OS architecture, like EROS for example, somewhere in the literature there's some essential feature that the designers think cannot be done unless the language & compiler writers get together with them.
Alas, the long-view language designers are off in their own world away from the long-view OS designers. This, combined with the seemingly-insurmountable problem of propagating the new cultural elements of programming, makes me think that we're toast. In 100 years, the state of the art will be only slightly less miserable than it is now. There will be fascinating research projects off in a corner, but no one will use them because of retraining issues, or abysmally-inadequate libraries.
If we're smart and we follow the author's advice, however, maybe 100 years from now the libraries will be there, and the ideas will have propagated.
Ah, so "StateChart diagrams" are just what the softies are calling "state diagrams" or "state machines" these days. Look mom, I can write a switch/case statement and diagram it in UML. Yawn.
The headline of this article is misleading. Java is a public standard: it is completely and unambiguously documented in public documents, and any member of the public has license to use those documents to create an independent and conformant implementation.
What Java lacks is a bureaucratic standard: one where the document was given a stamp of approval by some committee that companies can buy a seat on. This latter kind of public standard actually makes it more difficult for me, a member of the public, to influence the content of the documents.
But, you know what? I don't really care much about influencing the content of the documents. My priorities are
that the documents exist
that they are complete
that they are unambiguous
that I have license to create a conformant implemention.
Beyond that, it's all marketing hype. Java is a public standard in the same sense that PDF is, and that's good enough for me.
I've wondered about that too. You could always manually add the person to your whitelist before you send the initial message.
What I'm wondering about is how you would buy something online where you can't really predict the address that shipping-confirmations will come from. In that case one wouldn't know what to add to the whitelist, and the odds of a human being on the other end are small...so your TMDA message would probably go ignored.
Is there a good FAQ somewhere that addresses questions like these?
It's true this bug has been idle for a long time, but there's been a lot of activity on it in just the last few days. I would expect a windows-only implementation to be available in the next release, judging from the recent activity of Bug 159015.
Don't hold your breath for a cross-platform solution that will allow Linux user to work in such an environment, though. (Which is a bummer for me, because that's why I'm following the bug.)
...we're crushing the server, so I have not yet RTFA. Is it going to tell me how to deal with the resource contention and scheduling problems of all of these meatspace conversation? I personally like to have a queue so that I can interleave communications with other things. In fact, I think it's quite rude for someone to grab a mutex lock on me for something that amounts to a trivial one-liner.
Slashdot Mirror
...is anyone concerned about the image of the tech community and finding more realistic ways to demonstrate the creativity and resourcefulness of nerds?
I once spent a day with a guitarist of immense talent. He spent countless hours with his instrument, but not making music...it was all just pointless scales, arpeggios, chord progressions around the cycle of fifths...not one bit of actual music did he perform. Sure, it was amazing to watch, but I couldn't understand why he was wasting his immense muscial intellect with such mundane exercises.
I wonder where he got the talent. Must have been a gift from god. It surely couldn't be that tireless practice of one's art leads to mastery, and that anything that helps one make practice fun aids in one's journey towards eminence in one's field...nope, no way.
That is a brilliant idea. All we need is one lawyer to draft a letter, a small I18N team to translate into a handful of interesting languages, and a PDF that a bajillion of us can print out and send through registered mail...make someone on their end sign for each one.
Imagine a world where memory management is not your worst enemy. In this world, worrying about garbage-collector implementation minutae such as reference age is wasted effort. This is the world where object initialization overhead is so large that keeping object pools is worth the trouble. This is the world of database connections et. al. The "complication" is only a state of mind: do you see the design pattern(s) or don't you?
Sounds like science fiction, I know...
Who is this collective "you" that you're talking about? Do you realize that you're in a big room, eavesdropping on a thousand conversations, and you really don't know exactly who is expressing each individual opinion that you hear?
If I say that I like to eat a good steak, and someone else says that "meat is murder", neither of us is guilty of hypocrisy just because we were both in the same room when we uttered our opinions.
That's the way it works in the real world, and it's the way it works in "virtual rooms" like slashdot. I'm sorry, but you are going to have to stop thinking of online forums as one large group of clones with identical programming.
Unless you can specifically find a fixed individual who has uttered incongruous statements, you have no grounds for your complaint. And even when you do, your complaint is only valid with respect to that individual...not everybody else who happens to be there at the time.
I think everybody missed your punchline. Good one. It's true. They're keeping us so well entertained that we don't feel the need to organize against this shit.
And, frankly, I'm not certain that organizing against this shit is still legal in the U.S. Wasn't that amendment repealed?
It seems that complex math is always the example people pull out to support operator overloading. I've used complex math exactly once, when I was writing a fractal toy...that I didn't have operator overloading in Objective C didn't bother me. Are there any really compelling examples that don't resort to the tacit assumption that dealing with imaginary numbers is something all programmers deal with on a daily basis? I mean, talk about optimizing for an edge case.
Yeah, because you know RMS is all about snap, sizzle, and other marketroid buzzwords.
So now it's "news for herds"?
Strange...is this an example of embrace-and-extend branding?
It takes an epiphany to get cattle through a chute nowadays?
I've watched over the last two decades as quality software dies in the marketplace while scum rises to the top. I've considered the industry "dead" for a long, long time now. It will remain dead to me until consumers suddenly have an epiphany en masse that allows them to both recognize good architecture, and to desire it. Make that two simultaneous epiphany: they also must suddenly prefer publicly-published standards over the vendor-lockin du jour. Ok, make that three epiphany: they have to vote for these preferences with their money instead of admitting "yeah, MS sucks" but refusing to be part of the solution. I'm not holding my breath.
Somewhere in the world, a virus author adds a couple of bullet points to his TODO file.
If the spammers are banding together to fight anti-spammer groups, it probably means that those anti-spamming measures are effectively interfering with their business model. Maybe those 550 rejects are actually causing them some pain.
I've been very happy with my sendmail configuration, where I'm using blacklists and whitelists (/etc/mail/access) and a collection of realtime blocking lists. I had almost given up on recreational computing because of the sorry state of my inbox, but now things are better.
I think it's time for us to better document & pomote the use of these measures so that more people are sending them 550's, instead of quietly deleting their garbage.
...my main problem with Netflix is that I can't trust my postal worker (or someone else in the chain) from grabbing movies after I drop them in the mailbox and before they get marked as "returned" in the Netflix database. Twice we have returned movies only to find that they never made it all the way back.
So we had to cancel our service, only because the value of the "intellectual property" was too high and the packaging was too conspicuous -- too tempting for people that we trust to return the movies safely.
This is an interesting line of thought, worthy of extending to lawyers. Although the initial idea of lawyers was noble, it has become clear that (in practice) their primary use is to promote grief and suffering through harassment...a kind of violence-by-proxy, leveraging the official power structure. So we should send lawyers to jail. That might actually solve the problem.
That sounds very similar to the dynamics of the anti-virus market in windows. The optimal profit strategy for a virus-scanner vendor is to perpetually be slightly behind the arms-race between stealth malicious code and malicious code detectors. I'm not saying that any real businesses operate this way, but it is a way that revenue could be generated.
I sometimes wonder about the 550 response codes. I really don't know, of course, since I'm not a spammer -- but I imagine that all of the 550 codes that I'm watching in my logs do nothing more than make me feel better. Are they really getting all the way back to the spammer, consuming disk space as bounces? Or does each one just end up incrementing some counter in their client software?
Perhaps sendmail et. al. could implement a thoughtful pause (of a configurable value) before it gives the 550. If my mail server slept for 60 seconds before issuing the error, it might slow them down, or cause them to run out of threads.
ok, so where's my soma?
Now we have two ideas that, if you combine them, suggest interesting possibilities: (1) the hundred-year language could, in principle, be designed today, and (2) such a language, if it existed, might be good to program in today. When you see these ideas laid out like that, it's hard not to think, why not try writing the hundred-year language now?
I think the same thing would be true of the 100-year operating system, and that these two long-term visions need to be aware of each other. Every time I read about some amazing new OS architecture, like EROS for example, somewhere in the literature there's some essential feature that the designers think cannot be done unless the language & compiler writers get together with them.
Alas, the long-view language designers are off in their own world away from the long-view OS designers. This, combined with the seemingly-insurmountable problem of propagating the new cultural elements of programming, makes me think that we're toast. In 100 years, the state of the art will be only slightly less miserable than it is now. There will be fascinating research projects off in a corner, but no one will use them because of retraining issues, or abysmally-inadequate libraries.
If we're smart and we follow the author's advice, however, maybe 100 years from now the libraries will be there, and the ideas will have propagated.
Ah, so "StateChart diagrams" are just what the softies are calling "state diagrams" or "state machines" these days. Look mom, I can write a switch/case statement and diagram it in UML. Yawn.
What Java lacks is a bureaucratic standard: one where the document was given a stamp of approval by some committee that companies can buy a seat on. This latter kind of public standard actually makes it more difficult for me, a member of the public, to influence the content of the documents.
But, you know what? I don't really care much about influencing the content of the documents. My priorities are
Beyond that, it's all marketing hype. Java is a public standard in the same sense that PDF is, and that's good enough for me.
I've wondered about that too. You could always manually add the person to your whitelist before you send the initial message.
What I'm wondering about is how you would buy something online where you can't really predict the address that shipping-confirmations will come from. In that case one wouldn't know what to add to the whitelist, and the odds of a human being on the other end are small...so your TMDA message would probably go ignored.
Is there a good FAQ somewhere that addresses questions like these?
It's true this bug has been idle for a long time, but there's been a lot of activity on it in just the last few days. I would expect a windows-only implementation to be available in the next release, judging from the recent activity of Bug 159015.
Don't hold your breath for a cross-platform solution that will allow Linux user to work in such an environment, though. (Which is a bummer for me, because that's why I'm following the bug.)
If you don't like the taste of the water, drink from a different fountain.
...we're crushing the server, so I have not yet RTFA. Is it going to tell me how to deal with the resource contention and scheduling problems of all of these meatspace conversation? I personally like to have a queue so that I can interleave communications with other things. In fact, I think it's quite rude for someone to grab a mutex lock on me for something that amounts to a trivial one-liner.