> Think about it. Virtually every time your computer thrashes its way through POST and Windows boot, it's doing the same thing it did last time. So why not just use a memory snapshot of the last time you booted?
This is the reasoning behind a plug-n-play BIOS. If hardware needs reinitializing, it'll say so, otherwise the settings will be saved and ready to use. Most OS's (Linux included) have all kinds of busy-wait delays however in their hardware initialization code, which slows down a boot immensely.
BeOS booted for me in 5 seconds on a P2/400. I don't think OS's necessarily need a lot of help from the BIOS, they just need to aim at performance. But hey, all I ever hear about is how Moore's law will fix all that, which of course justifies making everything twice as big and twice as slow next iteration...
Wow. That site is... wow. I just have one question? Why can't kooks put together a decent website? It's not like they need expensive software or publishing apparatuses that their shoestring budget couldn't absorb... and they are trying to "get their message out"... so why are their sites invariably so heinously ugly?
Price. The price difference between some of these chips they're benchmarking puts them in different leagues. The FX-53 is NOT cheap compared to the 3200, but the P4EE makes them both look like chump change. This review looked like the output of a report generator (written by Macromedia I imagine), not a review.
but I'd like to see a RPG or survival horror game including a heroin addiction
Fallout 2 had various combat or otherwise performance-enhancing drugs, and one of the side effects of them was addiction, especially for the drug called Jet. There's even a subplot where one of the characters can help you kick a Jet addiction. I think most people just saved up their drugs til the end of the game then just pumped up like crazy to beat the final boss -- game's over after that, who cares about a little addiction?
I'm glad to see that at least Europe still has some functioning antitrust laws, unlike the US where antitrust laws were effectively gutted by the judiciary.
It's always easy to stand on the side of the law when it's a foreign company. Perhaps a better test would be to see what standards the EU will apply to European companies. How about that Deutsche Telekom or Vivendi, hm?
> they're even openly hostile to the GNU efforts that they're competing with.
Because RMS came down from the mountain and decreed "wait for the great CLR that GNU will bestow on you, stop wasting your time on silliness like trying to bootstrap the project in C#, that requires you to dirty your hands with the impure Microsoft toolchain."
Last time we heard that sort of commandment to wait, it was about HURD. Is it any surprise that Mono continued to strike out on their own?
> is it possible to use GURPS in a computer RPG, like the AD&D rules have been used?
It lends itself even better, especially for combat-oriented games. GURPS combat rounds are one second each as opposed to D&D's minute rounds and vaguely defined "segments"(*) (are those even in third edition?). Bioware had to scale it down by a factor of 10 to get something approaching real time combat. In GURPS, if you fire off an automatic weapon, it has rules for modelling each individual bullet (but most GM's use the simpler variant). For a real amusing "roll a whole pile of dice" game mechanic, take a look at the shrapnel damage rules from the "GURPS High-Tech" sourcebook. GURPS has rules for weapon reach and models it at a 1 meter hex scale (or is it 1 yard?), including whether the weapon is in the right or left hand.
GURPS can mire you in so much mechanics if you follow it to the letter, that most GM's at some point do end up fudging things. Oddly, where GURPS doesn't have a lot of separate mechanics is in character stats: there's only four of them: strength, dexterity, intelligence, and health. Advantages, Disadvantages, and Quirks all make up for it, they are THE most fun in creating characters. In fact, I got to requiring any character in my D&D games to pick a balance of advantages and disadvantages from the GURPS sourcebooks, plus five quirks.
* - Not that I have a problem with D&D's system: for all of the derision aimed at D&D for being "hack and slash", it actually has one of the most abstract combat systems of any RPG, especially if you consider HP as experience and "heroic luck" instead of just being able to soak up damage, and require a DM to actually narrate combat rounds a little.
s/-1/a sufficiently high value/... was thinking "unsigned" for whatever reason. The fact that you're working on raw memory here and generally don't have a choice but to was of course my point.
> Write the same function in Haskell, in linear time
Using unboxed types I could probably transliterate that code, but I'm kind of rusty in Haskell. I just find it more interesting that I could probably crash your process by passing -1 for len.
I mean, now an unscrupulous open source developer could intentionally insert some blatantly stolen code, claiming it's their own; some in-cahoots business with a copyright on the code can take everyone to court; the insurance will have to pay out big time, and the company slips a million to the asshole developer under the table.
Company has to account for missing million, asshole developer has to launder the money, insurance company investigates fraud, asshole developer goes to prison... everyone's insurance rates go up anyway, and pretty soon developers will be where doctors are today -- being driven out of business by insurance premiums so only gigantic conglomerates like Catholic Healthcare West can afford to carry the liability (Catholic Healthcare West, who has monopolies in many areas... who needs to overturn Roe v. Wade when corporations do just fine at it).
> Therefore, I/O must be a side-effect, so how can a real 'purely functional' language like haskel do I/O?
I/O is not a "side" effect, it is a specified effect, not something that happens "along with" some other value being computed. It is however not deterministic, so it's contained within the I/O monad. Nondeterminism is one of the things monads are good for.
Basically any time you need something done in a sequence, whether it's executing "commands", reading input, producing output, or just producing a list, you use a monad (thankfully the syntax sugar for list monads makes the monad invisible).
I do, sort of. The "same crowd" was referring to the dittohead clucking at "those ignorant liberals". Penn and Teller are two of my personal heroes, along with James Randi.
I'm just wary of the logic that seems to go "There are ignorant silly tree-hugging airheads in the environmental movement, therefore environmentalism is silly airheaded fluff." It's funny how people will pull out the banner of critical thinking to excuse themselves from doing their own.
I suppose offering a tu quoque ad hominem doesn't exactly support my point either -- but it's not that I was trying to demonstrate anything *but* the apparent credulousness of the messenger (credulity is after all what this thread is about)
> The XBOX was an attempt at some kind of DRM and it got hacked to pieces because DRM is just impossible.
Ahh yes. Secure safes aren't possible, because anyone with an oxy-propane torch can cut through it. Perhaps you're unaware of what physical access to the console can grant you?
I'd love to see you run XBox Live on one of those hacked XBoxes. I'd say it's working just fine.
> Also see swordsmiths, buggy whip manufacturers, and so on.
I've heard it mentioned that there are probably more buggy whips being made now than at any other time before. The difference is that these days it's usually not a horse that's on the receiving end...
> That doesn't make sense. Surely you'd want to delegate to a supertype, not a subtype?
Typo on my part. Yes, I meant supertype.
> Java already has type inference.
It most certainly does not (except to some limited degree with parametric types). I urge you to become familiar with terms before you correct others on their use.
> What do you think type-checking x.y().z() does, guesswork?
No, guesswork is in fact what type inferencing is, it "guesses" which type you're using based on the signatures of the methods you call on it, and if it can't guess with complete certaintity, it won't compile.
No doubt there will be criticisms calling this approach slipshod, levied by people who have never used a ML language in their lives. I got one word for people who think java is typesafe: null.
DHTML is based on the interaction of Javascript with (x)html. It is not an invention of Microsoft, and most definitely, it's not exclusive to IE. Most other browsers have better support for the key parts of DHTML behavior (such as the Document Object Model).
I was referring specifically to Behaviors, which is a very specific addition to the DHTML object model. It's like CSS with javascript/vbscript. In fact, it is CSS with javascript/vbscript.
I imagine folks will be popping out of the woodwork next saying how wrong and evil and corrupting to our purity of our bodily fluids DHTML scripting is...
> Is there anyone who thinks Can Spam is worth the paper it's written on? (Anyone not associated with Direct Marketing).
Costs a lot to print all those congressional records, run off memos and copies, etc:^)
Seriously, yes. I don't care for how it pre-empted state law, but neither was I itching for a situation where some redneck southern state decides to label any indecent email as spam and then reach out long-arm style and put people in jail for it. There's some upsides to federal communications laws overriding state laws.
The other big plus is that while it might seem to legitimize totally unsolicited contact via co-reg, epending, or other means (scraping is now illegal), it has a lot of provisions that create a sort of "floor" that any spamming outfit is going to have to be on, or they risk real penalties for it. It means that the hardcore spammers are already violating these laws, and they'll go down for it. CAN-SPAM really sets some minimal standards that make it easier to track down any spammer that do operate within the law. Add to all this the fact that CAN-SPAM says very explicitly that ISP's can impose stricter terms for sending and receiving email if they choose, and you're still perfectly free to whack spammers with whatever degree of blocking you choose.
It's modest, but it's a net win. Are there spammers that will game the system? Probably, but not many more than already do now. Truly reputable companies have a reputation to uphold, and unless people get less angry because "spam's now legal, so it's okay", no one's getting into spamming who isn't already dabbling in it anyway, law or not.
More importantly, why didn't he define an overloaded == for strings? C++ has java beat for sheer expressive power here.
Lacking multiple inheritance is understandable, but they didn't go far enough -- they should have removed all implementation inheritance, and allow delegation to any class that's inferrable as a subtype.
Type inference in Java. Oh sorry, I dropped the brown acid again.
A man is a good programmer or he is not a good programmer. He is not "a good C++ programmer
Ballocks. I'm a pretty decent C programmer. I'm a passable C++ programmer, but I'm a lousy forth programmer and probably worse at Haskell.
It's like saying Stephen Hawking would be fine if he just walked into Genentech because he's "a good scientist" (theoretical physicist, meet lab protocols. lab protocols, meet theoretical physicist).
When over 95% of "C++ programmers" that I interview can't even answer this: straightforward question about virtual methods, I see no hope for the language. It seems most people who claim to be C++ programmers just say that because they use a C++ compiler and stick their functions in objects.
When it takes that kind of domain knowledge to avoid problems that are that inobvious, that compilers don't typically catch, and that tend to cause crashes and/or corruption... yeah, I can see why you'd hate C++. I'm not sure it's C++'s model that's at fault here, it's the default behavior that's broken. Non-virtual by default (fine if you don't want polymorphic base pointers). Slicing. Invisible overrides. Non-virtual destructors going boom.
Compiling under gcc with -pedantic -Wall -Wefc++ is a great idea (and -Werror if you really want to give people fits, but I don't recommend combining that with -Wefc++). But it's just amazing how much of a minefield very straightforward looking C++ is. I bet anyone who isn't Bjarne commits one or two of the sins from that page on a regular basis, and most perniciously, never catches it.
> The reason that this would work, at least for now, is that spammers mostly use badly written MTAs
Part of what I do for a living is looking at spamware, though not to the degree of analyzing it in depth (that's what I'm aiming for, but sadly I won't be able to share the findings). Fact is, most spamware simply re-queues rejects. Hell, lots of them simply run over the same list time and again with different forged senders, regardless of ANY protocol responses.
This scheme would more than double the traffic of legitimate mail, something a large ISP like AOL could ill-afford (well they could *afford* it financially, but it would be painful). It might have marginal benefit, but I do stress "marginal".
Maybe I'm missing something, but the article never seems to mention anything about changing the SMTP spec itself. It talks about how it's flawed, but then summarizes new ideas to add on top of SMTP (crypto, C/R, etc). It doesn't ever suggest CHANGING the underlying protocol.
I'm not blindly defending the status quo, but properly configured SMTP does NOT HAVE A PROBLEM with spam. Using the mail submission port ensures you can do all the relaying for mobile users in a proper secured manner (just make sure those passwords are good). The only weakness seems to be in having no standard for outbound MX records, but that's not a SMTP problem, that's DNS -- the only connection between the two is that you must look up MX records to deliver, not A records.
SMTP has survived over a decade of information warfare being waged over it. I'd say it's doing just fine thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
> Think about it. Virtually every time your computer thrashes its way through POST and Windows boot, it's doing the same thing it did last time. So why not just use a memory snapshot of the last time you booted?
This is the reasoning behind a plug-n-play BIOS. If hardware needs reinitializing, it'll say so, otherwise the settings will be saved and ready to use. Most OS's (Linux included) have all kinds of busy-wait delays however in their hardware initialization code, which slows down a boot immensely.
BeOS booted for me in 5 seconds on a P2/400. I don't think OS's necessarily need a lot of help from the BIOS, they just need to aim at performance. But hey, all I ever hear about is how Moore's law will fix all that, which of course justifies making everything twice as big and twice as slow next iteration...
Wow. That site is ... wow. I just have one question? Why can't kooks put together a decent website? It's not like they need expensive software or publishing apparatuses that their shoestring budget couldn't absorb ... and they are trying to "get their message out" ... so why are their sites invariably so heinously ugly?
Price. The price difference between some of these chips they're benchmarking puts them in different leagues. The FX-53 is NOT cheap compared to the 3200, but the P4EE makes them both look like chump change. This review looked like the output of a report generator (written by Macromedia I imagine), not a review.
but I'd like to see a RPG or survival horror game including a heroin addiction
Fallout 2 had various combat or otherwise performance-enhancing drugs, and one of the side effects of them was addiction, especially for the drug called Jet. There's even a subplot where one of the characters can help you kick a Jet addiction. I think most people just saved up their drugs til the end of the game then just pumped up like crazy to beat the final boss -- game's over after that, who cares about a little addiction?
I'm glad to see that at least Europe still has some functioning antitrust laws, unlike the US where antitrust laws were effectively gutted by the judiciary.
It's always easy to stand on the side of the law when it's a foreign company. Perhaps a better test would be to see what standards the EU will apply to European companies. How about that Deutsche Telekom or Vivendi, hm?
> they're even openly hostile to the GNU efforts that they're competing with.
Because RMS came down from the mountain and decreed "wait for the great CLR that GNU will bestow on you, stop wasting your time on silliness like trying to bootstrap the project in C#, that requires you to dirty your hands with the impure Microsoft toolchain."
Last time we heard that sort of commandment to wait, it was about HURD. Is it any surprise that Mono continued to strike out on their own?
> is it possible to use GURPS in a computer RPG, like the AD&D rules have been used?
It lends itself even better, especially for combat-oriented games. GURPS combat rounds are one second each as opposed to D&D's minute rounds and vaguely defined "segments"(*) (are those even in third edition?). Bioware had to scale it down by a factor of 10 to get something approaching real time combat. In GURPS, if you fire off an automatic weapon, it has rules for modelling each individual bullet (but most GM's use the simpler variant). For a real amusing "roll a whole pile of dice" game mechanic, take a look at the shrapnel damage rules from the "GURPS High-Tech" sourcebook. GURPS has rules for weapon reach and models it at a 1 meter hex scale (or is it 1 yard?), including whether the weapon is in the right or left hand.
GURPS can mire you in so much mechanics if you follow it to the letter, that most GM's at some point do end up fudging things. Oddly, where GURPS doesn't have a lot of separate mechanics is in character stats: there's only four of them: strength, dexterity, intelligence, and health. Advantages, Disadvantages, and Quirks all make up for it, they are THE most fun in creating characters. In fact, I got to requiring any character in my D&D games to pick a balance of advantages and disadvantages from the GURPS sourcebooks, plus five quirks.
* - Not that I have a problem with D&D's system: for all of the derision aimed at D&D for being "hack and slash", it actually has one of the most abstract combat systems of any RPG, especially if you consider HP as experience and "heroic luck" instead of just being able to soak up damage, and require a DM to actually narrate combat rounds a little.
s/-1/a sufficiently high value/ ... was thinking "unsigned" for whatever reason. The fact that you're working on raw memory here and generally don't have a choice but to was of course my point.
> Write the same function in Haskell, in linear time
Using unboxed types I could probably transliterate that code, but I'm kind of rusty in Haskell. I just find it more interesting that I could probably crash your process by passing -1 for len.
I mean, now an unscrupulous open source developer could intentionally insert some blatantly stolen code, claiming it's their own; some in-cahoots business with a copyright on the code can take everyone to court; the insurance will have to pay out big time, and the company slips a million to the asshole developer under the table.
... everyone's insurance rates go up anyway, and pretty soon developers will be where doctors are today -- being driven out of business by insurance premiums so only gigantic conglomerates like Catholic Healthcare West can afford to carry the liability (Catholic Healthcare West, who has monopolies in many areas ... who needs to overturn Roe v. Wade when corporations do just fine at it).
Company has to account for missing million, asshole developer has to launder the money, insurance company investigates fraud, asshole developer goes to prison
I gotta find a new profession.
> Therefore, I/O must be a side-effect, so how can a real 'purely functional' language like haskel do I/O?
I/O is not a "side" effect, it is a specified effect, not something that happens "along with" some other value being computed. It is however not deterministic, so it's contained within the I/O monad. Nondeterminism is one of the things monads are good for.
Basically any time you need something done in a sequence, whether it's executing "commands", reading input, producing output, or just producing a list, you use a monad (thankfully the syntax sugar for list monads makes the monad invisible).
> You don't know Penn and Teller very well, then.
I do, sort of. The "same crowd" was referring to the dittohead clucking at "those ignorant liberals". Penn and Teller are two of my personal heroes, along with James Randi.
I'm just wary of the logic that seems to go "There are ignorant silly tree-hugging airheads in the environmental movement, therefore environmentalism is silly airheaded fluff." It's funny how people will pull out the banner of critical thinking to excuse themselves from doing their own.
I suppose offering a tu quoque ad hominem doesn't exactly support my point either -- but it's not that I was trying to demonstrate anything *but* the apparent credulousness of the messenger (credulity is after all what this thread is about)
> Penn and Teller, on thier Showtime show 'Bullshit' did a similair trick to expose the ridiculous ignorance of the liberals
...
From the same crowd that still derides evolution as "just a theory"
Mmmm hmmm.
> The state of California is an unknown disease.
Most of us would be more than happy to be excised and secede. Wouldn't have to put up with your stupid politicia--
ah crap, arnold.
Yes, we are certifiably nuts.
> The XBOX was an attempt at some kind of DRM and it got hacked to pieces because DRM is just impossible.
Ahh yes. Secure safes aren't possible, because anyone with an oxy-propane torch can cut through it. Perhaps you're unaware of what physical access to the console can grant you?
I'd love to see you run XBox Live on one of those hacked XBoxes. I'd say it's working just fine.
> Ther is something wrong with charging a lot for software that does nothing I couldn't accomplish in an hour of python scripting around ssh.
Then why don't you stop talking and do it?
> Also see swordsmiths, buggy whip manufacturers, and so on.
I've heard it mentioned that there are probably more buggy whips being made now than at any other time before. The difference is that these days it's usually not a horse that's on the receiving end...
> That doesn't make sense. Surely you'd want to delegate to a supertype, not a subtype?
Typo on my part. Yes, I meant supertype.
> Java already has type inference.
It most certainly does not (except to some limited degree with parametric types). I urge you to become familiar with terms before you correct others on their use.
> What do you think type-checking x.y().z() does, guesswork?
No, guesswork is in fact what type inferencing is, it "guesses" which type you're using based on the signatures of the methods you call on it, and if it can't guess with complete certaintity, it won't compile.
No doubt there will be criticisms calling this approach slipshod, levied by people who have never used a ML language in their lives. I got one word for people who think java is typesafe: null.
DHTML is based on the interaction of Javascript with (x)html. It is not an invention of Microsoft, and most definitely, it's not exclusive to IE. Most other browsers have better support for the key parts of DHTML behavior (such as the Document Object Model).
I was referring specifically to Behaviors, which is a very specific addition to the DHTML object model. It's like CSS with javascript/vbscript. In fact, it is CSS with javascript/vbscript.
I imagine folks will be popping out of the woodwork next saying how wrong and evil and corrupting to our purity of our bodily fluids DHTML scripting is...
> Is there anyone who thinks Can Spam is worth the paper it's written on? (Anyone not associated with Direct Marketing).
:^)
Costs a lot to print all those congressional records, run off memos and copies, etc
Seriously, yes. I don't care for how it pre-empted state law, but neither was I itching for a situation where some redneck southern state decides to label any indecent email as spam and then reach out long-arm style and put people in jail for it. There's some upsides to federal communications laws overriding state laws.
The other big plus is that while it might seem to legitimize totally unsolicited contact via co-reg, epending, or other means (scraping is now illegal), it has a lot of provisions that create a sort of "floor" that any spamming outfit is going to have to be on, or they risk real penalties for it. It means that the hardcore spammers are already violating these laws, and they'll go down for it. CAN-SPAM really sets some minimal standards that make it easier to track down any spammer that do operate within the law. Add to all this the fact that CAN-SPAM says very explicitly that ISP's can impose stricter terms for sending and receiving email if they choose, and you're still perfectly free to whack spammers with whatever degree of blocking you choose.
It's modest, but it's a net win. Are there spammers that will game the system? Probably, but not many more than already do now. Truly reputable companies have a reputation to uphold, and unless people get less angry because "spam's now legal, so it's okay", no one's getting into spamming who isn't already dabbling in it anyway, law or not.
More importantly, why didn't he define an overloaded == for strings? C++ has java beat for sheer expressive power here.
Lacking multiple inheritance is understandable, but they didn't go far enough -- they should have removed all implementation inheritance, and allow delegation to any class that's inferrable as a subtype.
Type inference in Java. Oh sorry, I dropped the brown acid again.
A man is a good programmer or he is not a good programmer. He is not "a good C++ programmer
Ballocks. I'm a pretty decent C programmer. I'm a passable C++ programmer, but I'm a lousy forth programmer and probably worse at Haskell.
It's like saying Stephen Hawking would be fine if he just walked into Genentech because he's "a good scientist" (theoretical physicist, meet lab protocols. lab protocols, meet theoretical physicist).
When over 95% of "C++ programmers" that I interview can't even answer this: straightforward question about virtual methods, I see no hope for the language. It seems most people who claim to be C++ programmers just say that because they use a C++ compiler and stick their functions in objects.
... yeah, I can see why you'd hate C++. I'm not sure it's C++'s model that's at fault here, it's the default behavior that's broken. Non-virtual by default (fine if you don't want polymorphic base pointers). Slicing. Invisible overrides. Non-virtual destructors going boom.
When it takes that kind of domain knowledge to avoid problems that are that inobvious, that compilers don't typically catch, and that tend to cause crashes and/or corruption
Compiling under gcc with -pedantic -Wall -Wefc++ is a great idea (and -Werror if you really want to give people fits, but I don't recommend combining that with -Wefc++). But it's just amazing how much of a minefield very straightforward looking C++ is. I bet anyone who isn't Bjarne commits one or two of the sins from that page on a regular basis, and most perniciously, never catches it.
> The reason that this would work, at least for now, is that spammers mostly use badly written MTAs
Part of what I do for a living is looking at spamware, though not to the degree of analyzing it in depth (that's what I'm aiming for, but sadly I won't be able to share the findings). Fact is, most spamware simply re-queues rejects. Hell, lots of them simply run over the same list time and again with different forged senders, regardless of ANY protocol responses.
This scheme would more than double the traffic of legitimate mail, something a large ISP like AOL could ill-afford (well they could *afford* it financially, but it would be painful). It might have marginal benefit, but I do stress "marginal".
Maybe I'm missing something, but the article never seems to mention anything about changing the SMTP spec itself. It talks about how it's flawed, but then summarizes new ideas to add on top of SMTP (crypto, C/R, etc). It doesn't ever suggest CHANGING the underlying protocol.
I'm not blindly defending the status quo, but properly configured SMTP does NOT HAVE A PROBLEM with spam. Using the mail submission port ensures you can do all the relaying for mobile users in a proper secured manner (just make sure those passwords are good). The only weakness seems to be in having no standard for outbound MX records, but that's not a SMTP problem, that's DNS -- the only connection between the two is that you must look up MX records to deliver, not A records.
SMTP has survived over a decade of information warfare being waged over it. I'd say it's doing just fine thank you.