Amen. Emacs takes time and effort to learn, but so does anything worth knowing.
I have heard that Emacs is embeddable, in that Emacs can be made, with sufficient support from the application in question, to be used as an embedded editor.
I could almost handle some IDE's out there, if only I could edit using Emacs instead of the flimsy editor that comes with the IDE.
Why do we need parameterized types to do collection classes? I know type safety is important, but every language features is a help in some ways and a hindrance in others, and I see parameterized types as more of a hindrance (due to complexity) than a help.
Pre-2.0 Java already had some simple collection classes, like Vector... true, Vector works on Objects so there is essentially no type safety. But you know what? In the 15 months or so that I have been writing LOTS of Java code full time I have *not even once* passed the wrong type of object into a Vector, or a Hashtable, etc. It's a very rare circumstance in which you have a vector and don't know what types are being stored in it. And if you have a vector which you store multiple types of objects in, there's always instanceof.
instanceof takes the place of strong typing in many, many situations in Java, and while it makes code a little slower and a little more fragile, it's a big win when it comes to simplicity of the language and its implementations.
As far as operator overload goes -- I think it's quite simply the shortest path to unreadable, unmaintainable code. I think the very worst feature of C++ is operator overloading. Period.
I develop in Java full time and have been doing so for over a year now.
The biggest Java lie is Write Once Run Anywhere. While it is true that if you stick to the simplest subsets of Java - i.e., no GUI whatsoever and very little file IO - you can write code which will work on all platforms about 95% of the time.
But as soon as you add the more sophisticated features of Java to your code (especially anything GUI-related) you will lose. Bigtime. Applets are the worst in this respect. To get any applet at all, except the very very simplest applet, to run on all browsers is a nightmare.
The bulk of code that one writes in Java will work on all platforms, but one could do the same thing in C or C++ by having a system-independent set of code which relied on the services of a set of system-dependent object files. I think that with some foresight it would be just as easy to write a program in C or C++ using one of the cross-platform GUI toolkits and get it to work well on all platforms as it would be to write a Java program using AWT which worked on all platforms. And the C/C++ version would run faster, I don't care what *anyone* says about Java performance and how it's getting close to native code. I write and use Java every day and while in certain limited cases (usually CPU bound code that doesn't interact with the system very much) you can get decent performance, in general Java is pretty poor performance-wise.
Sun in fact realized what a nightmare AWT is, so they essentially dropped it and moved onto Swing, where they try to minimize the number of system services they rely upon for GUI stuff. Swing itself unfortunately is kind of big and bloated, and is still just as buggy as the rest of Java, which is to say, very.
I think that Java is a very elegant language in that it's simple, consistent, and easy to program. Unfortunately the ease of programming of Java is generally cancelled out by the difficulty of making Java work and work well on all supported platforms.
My prediction is that Java will end up like Pascal - a great language for teaching programming concepts (especially object-oriented programming concepts) but generally impractical for "real-world" work.
I think that the question was asked in reference to the previous posters' comments about having to install SCO server at work due to legacy code that he doesn't want to rewrite. In which case iBCS, which would let Linux run these SCO programs (potentially) would make perfect sense, as suggested by the poster...
I agree with everything you said... except the part about GTK. GTK does suck.
We just got rid of Motif (thankfully). Now we get strapped with another C "fake object oriented" graphics toolkit with function names half a page long?
RedHat does at least as good a job as anyone (and a *much* better job than, say, MS) of making bug and security fixes available quickly. Note that RedHat doesn't do much of the fixing, they just make the fixes available.
If worrying about timely responses to security problems is your main concern, then RedHat probably wouldn't disappoint you.
Just to give you an idea of what Intel does with this extra money... they pay companies like mine (we do web sites often with heavy Java content) to add extra bloat and unnecessary features to our code that we tweak to run better on Intel processors, then Intel gives us money to put a "runs better on a Pentium II" logo or somesuch on the site.
There are alot of small companies who are in a situation like ours who can't afford not to do this, when Intel will give us so much money to do it.
BTW if I was the one making the business decisions I probably wouldn't go along with it, but I'm just a coder...
I don't want voice-to-voice translation. I want a unit that I can carry around, the size of a Palm Pilot, which, when someone speaks in a language other than English, prints out what they said.
I want the benefit of hearing the voice of the person who is speaking, but reading what they actually said on my translator unit.
This voice-to-voice stuff turns me off. I want realtime real-life subtitles!
For 3.5 years (94 - 98). I was lucky in that I found a nice 2 bedroom in Mountain View for $795, so split that was only $397.50 for me.
I was lucky though; real estate in that area is ridiculously expensive. Also the traffic is just unbelievable. I got married in Palo Alto a few weeks ago and for the three weeks I was in the bay area I experienced more motor vehicle traffic than I have experienced in the 1.5 years I have been living here in Westchester County, NY. The number of cars, and of ugly cheaply constructed strip mall acreage, is just disgusting.
Silicon Valley is nice in alot of ways - the computer culture there can't be beat. I would *kill* for a Fry's in NYC. But I really don't think that the computer culture and the mild weather is worth the sacrifices you have to make to live comfortably there. Also I found that all of the friends I had when I lived there seem to be getting more and more materialistic as time goes on - the valley seems to be all about showing money these days. I can do without that also.
Just my humble opinions...
I'm still looking for the ideal place to live. I think I might try NC next...
I know the guy who registered x.com in 1995 (I think it was). It was during a small window in time (I am told) when Internic was allowing one-letter domain names.
He sold it a few months ago for $600,000. No kidding.
What is this world coming to? I certainly don't know. In my mind the aggregate wealth of our society only grows when money is exchanged for useful services. Alot of money seems to be circulating these days for completely useless things. The result is that some random person who happened to have done something of no value, or questionable value (such as registering x.com) winds up with a windfall. Someone else who would have done something useful that would have benefitted our economy for that 600 grand never got the chance.
I find that hard to believe -- that IBM gave up on a windows clone becase MS changed the Win32 API so often.
Anyone who had a Win32 clone would probably be more than happy to devote however many programmers were necessary to maintain compatibility with MS releases, because the market for a Windows clone is HUGE. If you've already got one, then you're looking at a not-small slice of a multi-billion-dollar market, which can pay for ALOT of programmers verifying every single MS API call for every single MS release...
Did removing this kfree_skb call cause a memory leak? Or was the memory free always unnecessary?
If I ever fix a bug in my code by removing a call to free() I tend to get very suspicious... I'm not suggesting that the people in the know kernel-wise haven't considered this, I just find it odd that a free can be so readily removed without requiring new code elsewhere to make sure that the memory really does get freed at the right time.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know of any True statement, of any sufficiently powerful logical system, which is unprovable?
The only one I am familiar with is the "This statement is false" self-reference statement (which is basically the statement that Godel used to prove his Theorem, from what I understand). I read recently (in Scientific American) that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, while a great shock to all scientists who thought they were going to be able to prove everything, has actually not been very fruitful.
Well thanks for the suggestion, but I have given this quite a bit of thought. Unfortunately, my world view is one which demands logical consistency and the box you speak of is in fact defined completely by the rules of logic.
I will think outside of any box you like, just not logic. Sorry.
These are interesting possibilities, and I have considered both before...
There is also the possibility, equally as compelling and as likely as either, that we are all completely crazy, and that every moment of our perceived life is a hallucination that doesn't have to follow any rules or satisfy any logical constraints. In which case, onwards time travel!
Going back in time implicitly creates a logical contradiction. The space occupied by my body when it appears in 1969 to witness the birth of Unix would have been, in 1969, either there, or not there. If it was there, then my course of actions are already decided -- I can do nothing except follow exactly the course of events which would have put me in the time machine on my way back to 1969. In which case, I can't cause the future as you said.
Or, my body was originally not there in 1969, but when I warp back, I change history such that my body was there. That is a logical contradiction -- I can't do that, because it would imply that at the same moment in time, my body was there and it was not there. That is as close to a pure logical contradiction as you can get.
So it must be the first case, in which the universe is deterministic, everything is going to happen according to preordained rules, we have no free will, and furthermore, the rules and properties and actual events of the universe just happen to be structured in such a way as to not actually cause a logical contradiction.
I don't find this particularly compelling... do you?:)
Calling light a wave is a convenient model for describing some of its behavior. Calling light a particle is likewise a model which describes some of its behavior.
I don't think there's really any contradiction there because we're not saying that light IS a wave and that it IS a particle - that would be a contradiction. What we say is that light exhibits behavior of both a wave and a particle, which isn't a contradiction - it's just evidence of how incomplete either the wave or the particle model is for describing the behavior of light.
The simple fact that travelling backwards in time would allow me to kill my former self, thus preventing me from ever having gone back in time to do so, is a complete logical contradiction, causes me to not care even in the slightest about this or that new theory which suggest FTL travel.
The only thing I have done to speed up my Linux box boots is probably the worst thing you could do. And so it's not something I am recommending at all.
Given that the standard ext2 filesystem forces an fsck every 16 mounts, I was having to sit through long, slow, irritating fscks about once every week or two. So I used ext2ed to change the forced fsck to every 64 mounts instead.
This is not recommended because you have a greater chance of losing data. But, it makes those fscks happen alot less frequently!
Nothing. But the second boot won't load the RAM image off the disk. Each RAM image only loads once (at least on my laptop). If you were to load a RAM image off disk, and then you immediately crashed, your next reboot would not load the RAM image off disk. The only time a RAM image will be loaded and run is if saving an image to disk was the mechnism you used to shut down last.
In other words, it's not a problem.
My laptop is faster at loading the 64M (+ 4M video RAM) image off disk than it is at booting up to Linux + X. Add in the extra time it takes me to start the applications and a regular boot becomes even slower. Which is why I always use the suspend-to-disk option of my laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen. Emacs takes time and effort to learn, but so does anything worth knowing.
I have heard that Emacs is embeddable, in that Emacs can be made, with sufficient support from the application in question, to be used as an embedded editor.
I could almost handle some IDE's out there, if only I could edit using Emacs instead of the flimsy editor that comes with the IDE.
Why do we need parameterized types to do collection classes? I know type safety is important, but every language features is a help in some ways and a hindrance in others, and I see parameterized types as more of a hindrance (due to complexity) than a help.
... true, Vector works on Objects so there is essentially no type safety. But you know what? In the 15 months or so that I have been writing LOTS of Java code full time I have *not even once* passed the wrong type of object into a Vector, or a Hashtable, etc. It's a very rare circumstance in which you have a vector and don't know what types are being stored in it. And if you have a vector which you store multiple types of objects in, there's always instanceof.
Pre-2.0 Java already had some simple collection classes, like Vector
instanceof takes the place of strong typing in many, many situations in Java, and while it makes code a little slower and a little more fragile, it's a big win when it comes to simplicity of the language and its implementations.
As far as operator overload goes -- I think it's quite simply the shortest path to unreadable, unmaintainable code. I think the very worst feature of C++ is operator overloading. Period.
I develop in Java full time and have been doing so for over a year now.
The biggest Java lie is Write Once Run Anywhere. While it is true that if you stick to the simplest subsets of Java - i.e., no GUI whatsoever and very little file IO - you can write code which will work on all platforms about 95% of the time.
But as soon as you add the more sophisticated features of Java to your code (especially anything GUI-related) you will lose. Bigtime. Applets are the worst in this respect. To get any applet at all, except the very very simplest applet, to run on all browsers is a nightmare.
The bulk of code that one writes in Java will work on all platforms, but one could do the same thing in C or C++ by having a system-independent set of code which relied on the services of a set of system-dependent object files. I think that with some foresight it would be just as easy to write a program in C or C++ using one of the cross-platform GUI toolkits and get it to work well on all platforms as it would be to write a Java program using AWT which worked on all platforms. And the C/C++ version would run faster, I don't care what *anyone* says about Java performance and how it's getting close to native code. I write and use Java every day and while in certain limited cases (usually CPU bound code that doesn't interact with the system very much) you can get decent performance, in general Java is pretty poor performance-wise.
Sun in fact realized what a nightmare AWT is, so they essentially dropped it and moved onto Swing, where they try to minimize the number of system services they rely upon for GUI stuff. Swing itself unfortunately is kind of big and bloated, and is still just as buggy as the rest of Java, which is to say, very.
I think that Java is a very elegant language in that it's simple, consistent, and easy to program. Unfortunately the ease of programming of Java is generally cancelled out by the difficulty of making Java work and work well on all supported platforms.
My prediction is that Java will end up like Pascal - a great language for teaching programming concepts (especially object-oriented programming concepts) but generally impractical for "real-world" work.
I think that the question was asked in reference to the previous posters' comments about having to install SCO server at work due to legacy code that he doesn't want to rewrite. In which case iBCS, which would let Linux run these SCO programs (potentially) would make perfect sense, as suggested by the poster ...
People are *still* talking about bogomips as if they had any value as a benchmark whatsoever?
... guess not ...
I thought we cleared this up around 1995 or so
I agree with everything you said ... except the part about GTK. GTK does suck.
We just got rid of Motif (thankfully). Now we get strapped with another C "fake object oriented" graphics toolkit with function names half a page long?
I agree with everything the author said, except that I think it's stupid to try to prolong the lifespan of Motif.
X is part of what made Unix great, Motif is what almost ruined Unix forever.
RedHat does at least as good a job as anyone (and a *much* better job than, say, MS) of making bug and security fixes available quickly. Note that RedHat doesn't do much of the fixing, they just make the fixes available.
If worrying about timely responses to security problems is your main concern, then RedHat probably wouldn't disappoint you.
Just to give you an idea of what Intel does with this extra money ... they pay companies like mine (we do web sites often with heavy Java content) to add extra bloat and unnecessary features to our code that we tweak to run better on Intel processors, then Intel gives us money to put a "runs better on a Pentium II" logo or somesuch on the site.
...
There are alot of small companies who are in a situation like ours who can't afford not to do this, when Intel will give us so much money to do it.
BTW if I was the one making the business decisions I probably wouldn't go along with it, but I'm just a coder
I don't want voice-to-voice translation. I want a unit that I can carry around, the size of a Palm Pilot, which, when someone speaks in a language other than English, prints out what they said.
I want the benefit of hearing the voice of the person who is speaking, but reading what they actually said on my translator unit.
This voice-to-voice stuff turns me off. I want realtime real-life subtitles!
For 3.5 years (94 - 98). I was lucky in that I found a nice 2 bedroom in Mountain View for $795, so split that was only $397.50 for me.
...
...
I was lucky though; real estate in that area is ridiculously expensive. Also the traffic is just unbelievable. I got married in Palo Alto a few weeks ago and for the three weeks I was in the bay area I experienced more motor vehicle traffic than I have experienced in the 1.5 years I have been living here in Westchester County, NY. The number of cars, and of ugly cheaply constructed strip mall acreage, is just disgusting.
Silicon Valley is nice in alot of ways - the computer culture there can't be beat. I would *kill* for a Fry's in NYC. But I really don't think that the computer culture and the mild weather is worth the sacrifices you have to make to live comfortably there. Also I found that all of the friends I had when I lived there seem to be getting more and more materialistic as time goes on - the valley seems to be all about showing money these days. I can do without that also.
Just my humble opinions
I'm still looking for the ideal place to live. I think I might try NC next
I know the guy who registered x.com in 1995 (I think it was). It was during a small window in time (I am told) when Internic was allowing one-letter domain names.
He sold it a few months ago for $600,000. No kidding.
What is this world coming to? I certainly don't know. In my mind the aggregate wealth of our society only grows when money is exchanged for useful services. Alot of money seems to be circulating these days for completely useless things. The result is that some random person who happened to have done something of no value, or questionable value (such as registering x.com) winds up with a windfall. Someone else who would have done something useful that would have benefitted our economy for that 600 grand never got the chance.
I think it's a big lose for everyone.
I find that hard to believe -- that IBM gave up on a windows clone becase MS changed the Win32 API so often.
...
Anyone who had a Win32 clone would probably be more than happy to devote however many programmers were necessary to maintain compatibility with MS releases, because the market for a Windows clone is HUGE. If you've already got one, then you're looking at a not-small slice of a multi-billion-dollar market, which can pay for ALOT of programmers verifying every single MS API call for every single MS release
We have a firewall with one RTL-8029 10-base-T ethernet card and 1 3Com 3c905 10/100-base-T ethernet card and it works fine.
/etc/lilo.conf):
We had to append the following option to the kernel boot arguments (in
append="ether=0,0,eth1"
dmesg says the following about our ethernet cards:
ne2k-pci.c:v0.99L 2/7/98 D. Becker/P. Gortmaker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linu
x/drivers/ne2k-pci.html
ne2k-pci.c: PCI NE2000 clone 'RealTek RTL-8029' at I/O 0x7f80, IRQ 9.
eth0: PCI NE2000 found at 0x7f80, IRQ 9, 00:80:C8:C1:D0:1E.
eth1: 3Com 3c905 Boomerang 100baseTx at 0x7f00, 00:10:4b:9d:fc:25, IRQ 10
8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, autoselect/NWay Autonegotiation interface.
eth1: MII transceiver found at address 24.
3c59x.c:v0.99E 5/12/98 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/v
ortex.html
Did removing this kfree_skb call cause a memory leak? Or was the memory free always unnecessary?
... I'm not suggesting that the people in the know kernel-wise haven't considered this, I just find it odd that a free can be so readily removed without requiring new code elsewhere to make sure that the memory really does get freed at the right time.
If I ever fix a bug in my code by removing a call to free() I tend to get very suspicious
Out of curiosity, does anyone know of any True statement, of any sufficiently powerful logical system, which is unprovable?
The only one I am familiar with is the "This statement is false" self-reference statement (which is basically the statement that Godel used to prove his Theorem, from what I understand). I read recently (in Scientific American) that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, while a great shock to all scientists who thought they were going to be able to prove everything, has actually not been very fruitful.
Thanks!
Well thanks for the suggestion, but I have given this quite a bit of thought. Unfortunately, my world view is one which demands logical consistency and the box you speak of is in fact defined completely by the rules of logic.
I will think outside of any box you like, just not logic. Sorry.
These are interesting possibilities, and I have considered both before ...
There is also the possibility, equally as compelling and as likely as either, that we are all completely crazy, and that every moment of our perceived life is a hallucination that doesn't have to follow any rules or satisfy any logical constraints. In which case, onwards time travel!
Going back in time implicitly creates a logical contradiction. The space occupied by my body when it appears in 1969 to witness the birth of Unix would have been, in 1969, either there, or not there. If it was there, then my course of actions are already decided -- I can do nothing except follow exactly the course of events which would have put me in the time machine on my way back to 1969. In which case, I can't cause the future as you said.
... do you? :)
Or, my body was originally not there in 1969, but when I warp back, I change history such that my body was there. That is a logical contradiction -- I can't do that, because it would imply that at the same moment in time, my body was there and it was not there. That is as close to a pure logical contradiction as you can get.
So it must be the first case, in which the universe is deterministic, everything is going to happen according to preordained rules, we have no free will, and furthermore, the rules and properties and actual events of the universe just happen to be structured in such a way as to not actually cause a logical contradiction.
I don't find this particularly compelling
I could read every book in the world.
...
But it still wouldn't make logical contradictions possible
Calling light a wave is a convenient model for describing some of its behavior. Calling light a particle is likewise a model which describes some of its behavior.
I don't think there's really any contradiction there because we're not saying that light IS a wave and that it IS a particle - that would be a contradiction. What we say is that light exhibits behavior of both a wave and a particle, which isn't a contradiction - it's just evidence of how incomplete either the wave or the particle model is for describing the behavior of light.
Is a logical contradiction.
The simple fact that travelling backwards in time would allow me to kill my former self, thus preventing me from ever having gone back in time to do so, is a complete logical contradiction, causes me to not care even in the slightest about this or that new theory which suggest FTL travel.
It just ain't possible.
The only thing I have done to speed up my Linux box boots is probably the worst thing you could do. And so it's not something I am recommending at all.
Given that the standard ext2 filesystem forces an fsck every 16 mounts, I was having to sit through long, slow, irritating fscks about once every week or two. So I used ext2ed to change the forced fsck to every 64 mounts instead.
This is not recommended because you have a greater chance of losing data. But, it makes those fscks happen alot less frequently!
Nothing. But the second boot won't load the RAM image off the disk. Each RAM image only loads once (at least on my laptop). If you were to load a RAM image off disk, and then you immediately crashed, your next reboot would not load the RAM image off disk. The only time a RAM image will be loaded and run is if saving an image to disk was the mechnism you used to shut down last.
In other words, it's not a problem.
My laptop is faster at loading the 64M (+ 4M video RAM) image off disk than it is at booting up to Linux + X. Add in the extra time it takes me to start the applications and a regular boot becomes even slower. Which is why I always use the suspend-to-disk option of my laptop.