Everything compiled in Unix uses the C calling conventions, and even early Unix C, Pascal and Fortran compilers let you intermix code, IIRC.
Less true nowadays, especially with OO languages like C++ and Ada95, which doesn't fit well into systems designed for procedural languages. You can link C and C++ together, but you can run into trouble, especially when using two different C++ compilers, as there is not standard C++ ABI (or even a decent de-facto standard). The g++ ABI changes every few releases (which I don't mind too much: I would much rather have them get it right than use the first thing they managed to come up with, and then be stuck with backwards compatible hacks for the next 5 years). OTOH, C ABIs are well defined for virtually all major platforms, which is fortunate, as otherwise you would be unable to use gcc, with, say, Solaris C libraries.
You know, I don't smoke, but I really could use one right about now:)
Personally, I'm hoping that whoever makes Everclear (the drink, not the band) will start giving it away, so people can appreciate it's 190 proof power more than ever. Can you tell I'm living in a fantasy world?:)
Course, once my housemate Will turns 21 in September, we'll probably go out a buy a few hundred dollars of the stuff, so why am I bitching?
Well golly gee! Cool! Is that part of the reason so much 32 bit Linux software breaks when it's ported to Alpha?
Anyone who actually makes an effort at it and avoids stupid hacks will more likely than not have no problems porting code. Though probably anything that can't even port between Linux on Intel and Linux on Alpha is going to be written so sloppily that it isn't much good on any platform.
And anyway, you've got the source, fix it yourself if you don't like it.:P
The VMS operating system is powerful and complete, and has solved problems the Unix people haven't gotten around to thinking about yet.
Well, yeah, that was always the claim DEC made, right?
"With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there." -- Ken Olsen, 1984.
Of course: "There is is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." -- Guess who?:)
OK, I honestly don't know VMS at all, so if you can correct the following, feel free to do so:
Like clusters: talk to a VMS person sometime, tell him/her about "linux clusters", and then listen to her/him laugh at you.
Right. Then you ask him how much it cost, and you can laugh at him. Normal people can actually afford to make Beowulf or MOSIX clusters.
Then tell the VMS person about how we're getting different languages to work together. They will look at you in amazement, wondering why there isn't a standard calling convention that all the languages use.
OK, I'm really skeptical about this. Maybe this works for what I'd guess are 'traditional' VMS languages (C, FORTRAN, and maybe COBOL). And linking C/C++ and Fortran isn't that unusual. But could I link, say, C++ and Ada95 together?
And we Linux people our proud of our months of uptime, but VMS people measure uptimes and availability in *years*.
I've seen Linux machines hit year uptimes. But generally, things change so much that it's worthwhile to reboot, if only to change the kernel to the latest version (after all, if someone had a 3 year uptime on Linux they would be running an early 2.0 (maybe even 1.2?)). Also, the environment VMS is generally used in is very different from most Unix machines (especially Linux, being more desktop-oriented than most Unices). From your statement, VMS basically runs things like machinery, etc, where upgrades are rare (being very expensive), and things don't change much. Also they're willing to spend a ton of cash on the hardware, including the machines themselves and probably a UPS the size of a fridge. I suspect that something like FreeBSD, in a similar situation, could perform quite well.
Sheesh... I got curious and started downloading a VMS user's manual from FreeVMS... 1682K... I guess Ken was right.:)
No, the next Y2K scare will the Unix inspired 2038 problem, when all the 32 bit time counters roll over.
I actually kind of doubt it. Remember time_t? It's a typedef for a reason, after all. On Linux (2.2.15), time_t is typedefed to __kernel_time_t: on all architectures this value is a long. So on CPUs that use a 64bit long (Alpha, Ultra) time_t is already safe. And presumably by 2038 (January 17, ~5 PM IIRC) most people will be using 64 bit CPUs (if not 128/256!).
Though this might be problem for some protocols that use 32-bit fields for numbers, though I actually doubt it, as for any given 32-bit timestamp, you know when the date was sent, as long as you know what 'time period' (ie 1970-2038, 2038-whatever) it's from (which will usually be obvious). Though if a protocol is actually using all 32 bits, it'll be safe until about 2106 (at which point, not only will I be retired, my kids will be retired (oh, yeah, I'll be dead, too)).
Yeah, maybe I'll be wrong, but I think it will be a major 'non-event'.
No more so than Windows is "more intuitive" than Unix.
Even though I started my PC OS using career with DOS and Win 3.x, I've always found Unix far more intuitive and easy to use (and I'm even willing to include HP-UX into that statement < g >).
I happened to use VMS before either of those, and sometimes I still long for the simple clarity of the VMS command line.
Well, whatever floats your boat, right? There are actually several VAXen where I work (running some sort of VMS, I really don't touch them if at all possible) - but I tried to log in once and was immidiatly and totally confused.:)
Just because I'm bored and don't have anything to do this weekend - you wouldn't happen to know of an easy intro to VMS (you know, just something to explain the basics of the sytanx). I was talking to a friend a last year sometime... we came to the conclusion that as nobody uses the VMS machines on campus (as nobody knows how to use them), you could probably root it (well, you probably can't actually root a VMS box, but you know what I mean), and nobody would know for months (hell, maybe years).
On a related do, do you really want to see Office's dominance extended to other platforms?
Please don't get the impression that I care one way or another whether or not I can get MS products on Unix. I stongly prefer Netscape (probably since the first graphical browser I used was Mosaic) for browsing, pine for mail, and LaTeX or flat ASCII for papers and presentations, and, oh, yeah, Unix for my OS. So MS really doesn't have anything to sell me (or that they could give away to me, for that matter). Especially in the case of Office vs. LaTeX, I find my self being absolutly horrified at the formatting Office produces. I was helping one of my housemates proofread a 30 page paper for one of her classes, and the formatting was just awful!
Though it might be good thing if Office was ported to Unix, just to provide competition with the free {beer/speach} Office-clones. That'll make both the free versions and MS's better (well, assuming MS doesn't just crank up the FUD instead). I think competition is a good thing. Hell, it made IBM into a pretty decent company (though I wasn't around in the old days to know for sure how bad they were in their prime). Maybe it'll eventually do the same for MS.
Anyone that thinks Linux is immune from virii is a moron. These are just simple attachments that dumb people run on their machine.
Yes, but no Unix mailer I've ever used exectuted attached scripts directly. If you want to run an attachment, you save it, chmod+x it, then run it. It takes a very deliberate effort, and even then it would be very hard for a script to propogate itself easily, given the numerous mailers used out there (netscape, pine, mutt, elm, exmh, etc). And it's damage would be limited to the user's home directory: no risk to the system as a whole. And if they come running to you, crying and hoping to get their precious data back, you can laugh at them and say "Well, next time don't run executables people send you!" I like being a BOFH.:)
Microsoft is porting Internet Explorer and Outlook Express to Carbon, the updated version of the Mac OS API. Carbon is Apple proprietary code and I doubt that you will ever see it on a non-Apple Unix box.
But remember that IE also runs on Solaris and HP-UX... in fact I've heard that rather than porting the IE code, they ported the Win32 API. If this is true, then it's certainly possible (though unlikely IMHO) that they might release Office, Outlook, etc, for Unix as well.
Re:Multiple SCSI adapters
on
IP Over SCSI?
·
· Score: 2
Are there any gigabit NICs available yet?
Yeah, but they're expensive as hell - Multiwave has them for $300. And a gigabit switch is going to be a pretty hefty price too.:(
100 mbit switches aren't bad. Netgear makes a nice 8 port 10/100 switch (called the FS108, IIRC), for about $90. I'm planning on getting one sometime the summer, actually: I don't see much need for anything too much faster (though IP over SCSI would be a pretty cool hack).
I want to know if they have to - that is to say, if it's possible to say "any code generated by this software is the property of Inprise, not the user of the software." or if that section of the license is just thrown in to reassure people.
OK, I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect that if they wanted to, they would be able to do that. I don't know if it's in the newer Borland compilers, but the Borland C++ 5.0 academic license prohibts you from making an operating system, compiler, database, or 'any other program that could be seen as competing with one prodcuced by Borland' (paraphrasing the license, I don't know what the exact words were, but that's close). So it seems that a compiler vendor can maintain pretty strict control over what is produced by their compiler (I suspect those restrictions may have only been for the academic license, though).
How exactly do you measure the 'speed' of a GUI? Generally speaking, a GUI is going to be limited in speed by how fast it gets user input, not by processing time - and if not nobody will want to use that interface. I know that C/C++ GUIs aren't like that (or I'd be using lynx right now...) and hopefully neither are Java GUIs?!?!?!? It just seems like a very strange thing to try to compare.
That said, most common GUI libraries (GTK+, QT, and, of course, Motif) run on Solaris, since they use Xlib (GTK+) or Xt (QT?), which are available everywhere. Motif seems the obvious choice since that's the one that's 'native', so to speak, on Solaris. And there are many different Motif builders for Unix, and as I've never touched any of them, I'll leave other/.ers to recommend something specific in this area.
However, you said C++: if you really want C++ and not C, you have several options, including GTK--, QT (which you will need to pay for depending on what you're doing), FOX (a multi platform GUI library that I've looked at but never had time to use), and there are probably several others. But OTOH if you're using a GUI builder it probably doesn't matter too much what language it's in.
Without knowing more about your problem, I'd recommend you use either Motif and one of the many interface builders, or GTK+ and Glade.
I'm wondering how soon some virus writer will work out a (time delayed?) FTP install of a different OS.
I've seen jokes about that somewhere or another. Basically a Windows virus would connect to an ftp server, download a minimal slackware install, overwrite the drive, reboot the machine, then present a message to the (l)user, giving them some basic info about what to do (ie log in, man pages, etc). Be pretty cool if someone did it, and half of the systems in microsoft started running Linux overnight - wonder if people would take the hint?
but what about geek girls? Hey taco don't you think that if you're going to post articles(sic) from playboy that maybe you should do a little something for us? I bet you don't realize how many of us actually read/.
I don't think you really want CmdrTaco to post links to nude pictures of himself, do you?
Linux is good, very very good, and can do it's job very well, but it is not a 'professional' product.
That depends on what you need to do. For doing something like typesetting books in LaTeX or coding POSIX applications, Linux is (IMHO) the best platform around. OTOH, for serving a hundred million hits on a web site every day, playing 3d games, video editing, or reading/writing Office docs (ick), Linux is less than optimal (compared to various other OSes): though it's getting increasingly better at all of these tasks.
Everyone knows C++, but not everyone knows OO in the ture fashion. Does this book take you from the design process with an OO architechure which will really drive the OO development or does it just use object while maintaining a structured core?
I think it would be very hard to really learn OO just by learning languages like C++, Perl, or Objective C, where OO features are basically attached onto an existing procedural language. I've been programming C++ about 3 years and still haven't figured it all out (getting there). Maybe better luck is to be had with languages like Python, Smalltalk, Simula, and other such languages [though I have a feeling it wouldn't, for some reason... dunno]
Design Patterns, by Gamma et. al. is probably the book that has helped me with OO the most; it has code examples in C++ and Smalltalk but you really don't need to know either language to understand the book (I have no clue about Smalltalk), as they explain everything in English very clearly, and then use the code just as examples of their methods. I highly recommend it anyone doing OOP in any language.
Can anyone explain why GNOME would need VB compatiable scripting?
For compatibility with Office/Outlook/etc, I suppose. Personally, I wouldn't want any kind of script being executing by my mailer (unless of course it's already installed in the system and is explicitly invoked). But then I use pine so I guess I'm ok there.;)
One of my housemates uses her cell phone for all her calls (we're going to be using her landline for DSL), and my parents have disconnected long distance over the regular line because the cell phone is cheaper (mostly because 300 minutes/month free, anywhere in the US). Though amusingly, after my Dad cancelled long distance, we started getting $5/month charges for not having long distance. So he signed up for it again and then didn't pay the bill, at which point they cancelled our long distance service (without the monthly fee). Phone companies suck.:)
Science fiction is responsible for conceptualizing a number of things we use every day. The best example of this is probably the satellite, as the people who build them still credit Arthur C. Clarke for coming up with the idea.
Not to mention solar sails themselves (I read several SF stories about them several years ago, all probably written in the 70s). Now if only we had fusion engines: we could make a Bussard Ramjet and reach the center of the galaxy in a few years.:)
OK, the patent license requires that the code implementing the patented techniques be licensed under the GPL. What prevents a person from using that GPLed code in a proprietary program? The copyright on the code. But nowhere in the GPL (that I can see) does it require that the code by copyrighted. In which case a company could hire someone to write a bunch of code, GPL it, but not copyright it. In which case they could use it as much as they wanted, violating the license, but it wouldn't matter because no copyright would be violated (alternatly, the copyright owner could "turn a blind eye" to the violation if given some, ahem, compensation).
There are probably holes in my argument, but in any case I think someone should take a closer look at this patent license. Personally I would be much happier if he entered into a patent-sharing group, which would not only allow it to be used by anyone (GPL, BSD, and yes, commercial code) but would most likely introduce many new patents into public availability, which seems like it would help free software much more than just these patents on their own will (not to slam on his contribution, it was a very nice thing to do).
As long as you choose reasonably decent hardware and a good OS (FreeBSD or Linux seem like good choices for this), you should be OK. Lots of memory (128M+) would probably be useful, though.
Mailman has a great user and admin interface (all web based, very intuitive to use), but it gets kind of hard to admin once the mailing list reaches any size at all (it's kind of a pain to work with only 150 members on one list I admin). I don't know much about MTAs; sendmail seems to work OK but I've heard that postfix or qmail are faster. YMMV.
In using Tucows OpenSRS we have had extreme reliability, durability, speed, and low prices. Any ISP who hasn't implemented this service yet doesn't know what they are missing... Only $10/year per domain.
This is basically a "me too!" post but I would like to attest to the quality of OpenSRS. The best part is that people can group together (LUGs and ACM chapters are good starts) and start selling domains (both to themselves at-cost, and at a slight markup for non-members).
I got my domain for $10 a year, and I've been very pleased with service, speed, etc. AND NOBODY OWNS MY FSCKING DOMAIN BUT ME!!!:)
The BSD license basically says, "Do whatever you want, just don't claim you wrote it." From this interpretation, MS is within their legal rights as far as Kerberos goes. This ain't the GPL were're talking about here.
I think he was talking about the 4th clause (the one that says you can't use the names MIT (or, presumably, Kerberos) without permission of MIT). However, this assumes that MS is using the MIT Kerberos code (they could have done a reimplementation). If they are using the MIT code and IF they follow the license, they have put a small notice somewhere in the W2K docs that some of the code is copyrighted by MIT (which is required by the 2nd provision, probably very much in effect). If they haven't done so then MIT should sue them for a lot of money for copyright infringment.
And in either case (MS reimplemention or hacking on the MIT code), MS has every right to copyright both:
a) Their changes to the MIT code (or their own code)
b) Their specification that gives the changes they made.
Which means that they can demand/. to remove the spec from the comments (assuming DMCA is constitutional).
I have a US domain name. You know how much I paid to register it three years ago? $10. You know how much I've paid since then? Zilch. Nothing.
Not bad. I'm paying $10 a year for my nice TLD. OpenSRS rocks!
I think the only conclusion that can be made is that the whole naming system is totally screwed and there really isn't any way to fix it. Everyone wants IPv6 and that will take years (if not decades) to complete. Not everyone will want a new naming system (in fact quite a few people won't): you think that anyone will be able to fix it anytime this century?
Slashdot Mirror
Everything compiled in Unix uses the C calling conventions, and even early Unix C, Pascal and Fortran compilers let you intermix code, IIRC.
Less true nowadays, especially with OO languages like C++ and Ada95, which doesn't fit well into systems designed for procedural languages. You can link C and C++ together, but you can run into trouble, especially when using two different C++ compilers, as there is not standard C++ ABI (or even a decent de-facto standard). The g++ ABI changes every few releases (which I don't mind too much: I would much rather have them get it right than use the first thing they managed to come up with, and then be stuck with backwards compatible hacks for the next 5 years). OTOH, C ABIs are well defined for virtually all major platforms, which is fortunate, as otherwise you would be unable to use gcc, with, say, Solaris C libraries.
You know, I don't smoke, but I really could use one right about now :)
:)
Personally, I'm hoping that whoever makes Everclear (the drink, not the band) will start giving it away, so people can appreciate it's 190 proof power more than ever. Can you tell I'm living in a fantasy world?
Course, once my housemate Will turns 21 in September, we'll probably go out a buy a few hundred dollars of the stuff, so why am I bitching?
Well golly gee! Cool! Is that part of the reason so much 32 bit Linux software breaks when it's ported to Alpha?
:P
Anyone who actually makes an effort at it and avoids stupid hacks will more likely than not have no problems porting code. Though probably anything that can't even port between Linux on Intel and Linux on Alpha is going to be written so sloppily that it isn't much good on any platform.
And anyway, you've got the source, fix it yourself if you don't like it.
The VMS operating system is powerful and complete, and has solved problems the Unix people haven't gotten around to thinking about yet.
:)
:)
Well, yeah, that was always the claim DEC made, right?
"With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there." -- Ken Olsen, 1984.
Of course: "There is is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." -- Guess who?
OK, I honestly don't know VMS at all, so if you can correct the following, feel free to do so:
Like clusters: talk to a VMS person sometime, tell him/her about "linux clusters", and then listen to her/him laugh at you.
Right. Then you ask him how much it cost, and you can laugh at him. Normal people can actually afford to make Beowulf or MOSIX clusters.
Then tell the VMS person about how we're getting different languages to work together. They will look at you in amazement, wondering why there isn't a standard calling convention that all the languages use.
OK, I'm really skeptical about this. Maybe this works for what I'd guess are 'traditional' VMS languages (C, FORTRAN, and maybe COBOL). And linking C/C++ and Fortran isn't that unusual. But could I link, say, C++ and Ada95 together?
And we Linux people our proud of our months of uptime, but VMS people measure uptimes and availability in *years*.
I've seen Linux machines hit year uptimes. But generally, things change so much that it's worthwhile to reboot, if only to change the kernel to the latest version (after all, if someone had a 3 year uptime on Linux they would be running an early 2.0 (maybe even 1.2?)). Also, the environment VMS is generally used in is very different from most Unix machines (especially Linux, being more desktop-oriented than most Unices). From your statement, VMS basically runs things like machinery, etc, where upgrades are rare (being very expensive), and things don't change much. Also they're willing to spend a ton of cash on the hardware, including the machines themselves and probably a UPS the size of a fridge. I suspect that something like FreeBSD, in a similar situation, could perform quite well.
Sheesh... I got curious and started downloading a VMS user's manual from FreeVMS... 1682K... I guess Ken was right.
No, the next Y2K scare will the Unix inspired 2038 problem, when all the 32 bit time counters roll over.
I actually kind of doubt it. Remember time_t? It's a typedef for a reason, after all. On Linux (2.2.15), time_t is typedefed to __kernel_time_t: on all architectures this value is a long. So on CPUs that use a 64bit long (Alpha, Ultra) time_t is already safe. And presumably by 2038 (January 17, ~5 PM IIRC) most people will be using 64 bit CPUs (if not 128/256!).
Though this might be problem for some protocols that use 32-bit fields for numbers, though I actually doubt it, as for any given 32-bit timestamp, you know when the date was sent, as long as you know what 'time period' (ie 1970-2038, 2038-whatever) it's from (which will usually be obvious). Though if a protocol is actually using all 32 bits, it'll be safe until about 2106 (at which point, not only will I be retired, my kids will be retired (oh, yeah, I'll be dead, too)).
Yeah, maybe I'll be wrong, but I think it will be a major 'non-event'.
No more so than Windows is "more intuitive" than Unix.
:)
Even though I started my PC OS using career with DOS and Win 3.x, I've always found Unix far more intuitive and easy to use (and I'm even willing to include HP-UX into that statement < g >).
I happened to use VMS before either of those, and sometimes I still long for the simple clarity of the VMS command line.
Well, whatever floats your boat, right? There are actually several VAXen where I work (running some sort of VMS, I really don't touch them if at all possible) - but I tried to log in once and was immidiatly and totally confused.
Just because I'm bored and don't have anything to do this weekend - you wouldn't happen to know of an easy intro to VMS (you know, just something to explain the basics of the sytanx). I was talking to a friend a last year sometime... we came to the conclusion that as nobody uses the VMS machines on campus (as nobody knows how to use them), you could probably root it (well, you probably can't actually root a VMS box, but you know what I mean), and nobody would know for months (hell, maybe years).
On a related do, do you really want to see Office's dominance extended to other platforms?
Please don't get the impression that I care one way or another whether or not I can get MS products on Unix. I stongly prefer Netscape (probably since the first graphical browser I used was Mosaic) for browsing, pine for mail, and LaTeX or flat ASCII for papers and presentations, and, oh, yeah, Unix for my OS. So MS really doesn't have anything to sell me (or that they could give away to me, for that matter). Especially in the case of Office vs. LaTeX, I find my self being absolutly horrified at the formatting Office produces. I was helping one of my housemates proofread a 30 page paper for one of her classes, and the formatting was just awful!
Though it might be good thing if Office was ported to Unix, just to provide competition with the free {beer/speach} Office-clones. That'll make both the free versions and MS's better (well, assuming MS doesn't just crank up the FUD instead). I think competition is a good thing. Hell, it made IBM into a pretty decent company (though I wasn't around in the old days to know for sure how bad they were in their prime). Maybe it'll eventually do the same for MS.
Anyone that thinks Linux is immune from virii is a moron. These are just simple attachments that dumb people run on their machine.
:)
Yes, but no Unix mailer I've ever used exectuted attached scripts directly. If you want to run an attachment, you save it, chmod+x it, then run it. It takes a very deliberate effort, and even then it would be very hard for a script to propogate itself easily, given the numerous mailers used out there (netscape, pine, mutt, elm, exmh, etc). And it's damage would be limited to the user's home directory: no risk to the system as a whole. And if they come running to you, crying and hoping to get their precious data back, you can laugh at them and say "Well, next time don't run executables people send you!" I like being a BOFH.
Microsoft is porting Internet Explorer and Outlook Express to Carbon, the updated version of the Mac OS API. Carbon is Apple proprietary code and I doubt that you will ever see it on a non-Apple Unix box.
But remember that IE also runs on Solaris and HP-UX... in fact I've heard that rather than porting the IE code, they ported the Win32 API. If this is true, then it's certainly possible (though unlikely IMHO) that they might release Office, Outlook, etc, for Unix as well.
Are there any gigabit NICs available yet?
:(
Yeah, but they're expensive as hell - Multiwave has them for $300. And a gigabit switch is going to be a pretty hefty price too.
100 mbit switches aren't bad. Netgear makes a nice 8 port 10/100 switch (called the FS108, IIRC), for about $90. I'm planning on getting one sometime the summer, actually: I don't see much need for anything too much faster (though IP over SCSI would be a pretty cool hack).
I want to know if they have to - that is to say, if it's possible to say "any code generated by this software is the property of Inprise, not the user of the software." or if that section of the license is just thrown in to reassure people.
OK, I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect that if they wanted to, they would be able to do that. I don't know if it's in the newer Borland compilers, but the Borland C++ 5.0 academic license prohibts you from making an operating system, compiler, database, or 'any other program that could be seen as competing with one prodcuced by Borland' (paraphrasing the license, I don't know what the exact words were, but that's close). So it seems that a compiler vendor can maintain pretty strict control over what is produced by their compiler (I suspect those restrictions may have only been for the academic license, though).
How exactly do you measure the 'speed' of a GUI? Generally speaking, a GUI is going to be limited in speed by how fast it gets user input, not by processing time - and if not nobody will want to use that interface. I know that C/C++ GUIs aren't like that (or I'd be using lynx right now...) and hopefully neither are Java GUIs?!?!?!? It just seems like a very strange thing to try to compare.
/.ers to recommend something specific in this area.
That said, most common GUI libraries (GTK+, QT, and, of course, Motif) run on Solaris, since they use Xlib (GTK+) or Xt (QT?), which are available everywhere. Motif seems the obvious choice since that's the one that's 'native', so to speak, on Solaris. And there are many different Motif builders for Unix, and as I've never touched any of them, I'll leave other
However, you said C++: if you really want C++ and not C, you have several options, including GTK--, QT (which you will need to pay for depending on what you're doing), FOX (a multi platform GUI library that I've looked at but never had time to use), and there are probably several others. But OTOH if you're using a GUI builder it probably doesn't matter too much what language it's in.
Without knowing more about your problem, I'd recommend you use either Motif and one of the many interface builders, or GTK+ and Glade.
I'm wondering how soon some virus writer will work out a (time delayed?) FTP install of a different OS.
I've seen jokes about that somewhere or another. Basically a Windows virus would connect to an ftp server, download a minimal slackware install, overwrite the drive, reboot the machine, then present a message to the (l)user, giving them some basic info about what to do (ie log in, man pages, etc). Be pretty cool if someone did it, and half of the systems in microsoft started running Linux overnight - wonder if people would take the hint?
but what about geek girls? Hey taco don't you think that if you're going to post articles(sic) from playboy that maybe you should do a little something for us? I bet you don't realize how many of us actually read /.
I don't think you really want CmdrTaco to post links to nude pictures of himself, do you?
Linux is good, very very good, and can do it's job very well, but it is not a 'professional' product.
That depends on what you need to do. For doing something like typesetting books in LaTeX or coding POSIX applications, Linux is (IMHO) the best platform around. OTOH, for serving a hundred million hits on a web site every day, playing 3d games, video editing, or reading/writing Office docs (ick), Linux is less than optimal (compared to various other OSes): though it's getting increasingly better at all of these tasks.
Everyone knows C++, but not everyone knows OO in the ture fashion. Does this book take you from the design process with an OO architechure which will really drive the OO development or does it just use object while maintaining a structured core?
I think it would be very hard to really learn OO just by learning languages like C++, Perl, or Objective C, where OO features are basically attached onto an existing procedural language. I've been programming C++ about 3 years and still haven't figured it all out (getting there). Maybe better luck is to be had with languages like Python, Smalltalk, Simula, and other such languages [though I have a feeling it wouldn't, for some reason... dunno]
Design Patterns, by Gamma et. al. is probably the book that has helped me with OO the most; it has code examples in C++ and Smalltalk but you really don't need to know either language to understand the book (I have no clue about Smalltalk), as they explain everything in English very clearly, and then use the code just as examples of their methods. I highly recommend it anyone doing OOP in any language.
Can anyone explain why GNOME would need VB compatiable scripting?
;)
For compatibility with Office/Outlook/etc, I suppose. Personally, I wouldn't want any kind of script being executing by my mailer (unless of course it's already installed in the system and is explicitly invoked). But then I use pine so I guess I'm ok there.
One of my housemates uses her cell phone for all her calls (we're going to be using her landline for DSL), and my parents have disconnected long distance over the regular line because the cell phone is cheaper (mostly because 300 minutes/month free, anywhere in the US). Though amusingly, after my Dad cancelled long distance, we started getting $5/month charges for not having long distance. So he signed up for it again and then didn't pay the bill, at which point they cancelled our long distance service (without the monthly fee). Phone companies suck. :)
Science fiction is responsible for conceptualizing a number of things we use every day. The best example of this is probably the satellite, as the people who build them still credit Arthur C. Clarke for coming up with the idea.
:)
Not to mention solar sails themselves (I read several SF stories about them several years ago, all probably written in the 70s). Now if only we had fusion engines: we could make a Bussard Ramjet and reach the center of the galaxy in a few years.
Pass Voyager? that implies that they are both going in the same direction.
Probably they mean in total distance from the {sun,earth,some other 'fixed' point}, rather than the sail zooming right past Voyager.
OK, the patent license requires that the code implementing the patented techniques be licensed under the GPL. What prevents a person from using that GPLed code in a proprietary program? The copyright on the code. But nowhere in the GPL (that I can see) does it require that the code by copyrighted. In which case a company could hire someone to write a bunch of code, GPL it, but not copyright it. In which case they could use it as much as they wanted, violating the license, but it wouldn't matter because no copyright would be violated (alternatly, the copyright owner could "turn a blind eye" to the violation if given some, ahem, compensation).
There are probably holes in my argument, but in any case I think someone should take a closer look at this patent license. Personally I would be much happier if he entered into a patent-sharing group, which would not only allow it to be used by anyone (GPL, BSD, and yes, commercial code) but would most likely introduce many new patents into public availability, which seems like it would help free software much more than just these patents on their own will (not to slam on his contribution, it was a very nice thing to do).
As long as you choose reasonably decent hardware and a good OS (FreeBSD or Linux seem like good choices for this), you should be OK. Lots of memory (128M+) would probably be useful, though.
Mailman has a great user and admin interface (all web based, very intuitive to use), but it gets kind of hard to admin once the mailing list reaches any size at all (it's kind of a pain to work with only 150 members on one list I admin). I don't know much about MTAs; sendmail seems to work OK but I've heard that postfix or qmail are faster. YMMV.
In using Tucows OpenSRS we have had extreme reliability, durability, speed, and low prices. Any ISP who hasn't implemented this service yet doesn't know what they are missing... Only $10/year per domain.
:)
This is basically a "me too!" post but I would like to attest to the quality of OpenSRS. The best part is that people can group together (LUGs and ACM chapters are good starts) and start selling domains (both to themselves at-cost, and at a slight markup for non-members).
I got my domain for $10 a year, and I've been very pleased with service, speed, etc. AND NOBODY OWNS MY FSCKING DOMAIN BUT ME!!!
The BSD license basically says, "Do whatever you want, just don't claim you wrote it." From this interpretation, MS is within their legal rights as far as Kerberos goes. This ain't the GPL were're talking about here.
/. to remove the spec from the comments (assuming DMCA is constitutional).
:)
I think he was talking about the 4th clause (the one that says you can't use the names MIT (or, presumably, Kerberos) without permission of MIT). However, this assumes that MS is using the MIT Kerberos code (they could have done a reimplementation). If they are using the MIT code and IF they follow the license, they have put a small notice somewhere in the W2K docs that some of the code is copyrighted by MIT (which is required by the 2nd provision, probably very much in effect). If they haven't done so then MIT should sue them for a lot of money for copyright infringment.
And in either case (MS reimplemention or hacking on the MIT code), MS has every right to copyright both:
a) Their changes to the MIT code (or their own code)
b) Their specification that gives the changes they made.
Which means that they can demand
Hah, like I know what I'm talking about.
I have a US domain name. You know how much I paid to register it three years ago? $10. You know how much I've paid since then? Zilch. Nothing.
Not bad. I'm paying $10 a year for my nice TLD. OpenSRS rocks!
I think the only conclusion that can be made is that the whole naming system is totally screwed and there really isn't any way to fix it. Everyone wants IPv6 and that will take years (if not decades) to complete. Not everyone will want a new naming system (in fact quite a few people won't): you think that anyone will be able to fix it anytime this century?