I feel it is the duty of one of the readers of Slashdot to test the outcome of this project. Unfortunately, I believe I'm allergic to Chimp fur, so I can't volunteer for this. We should put together a fund to finance the purchase of two laboratory chimps, one of each gender, then attempt to inseminate a human female with the chimp male's ejections. At the same time, try the reverse (use logic here, you frigging Slashdotters I know will respond with a silly remark like how can a human female inseminate a chimp male).
So, for the sake of science, step up Slashdot readers, we'll all chip in for your chimp. We'd love to see the offspring.
BTW... there are special web sites spread across the Internet that would pay well for the video of the insemination itself, I learned this sadly while googling for "horse riding school" for my niece. I was more than a little embarressed trying to explain to a 12 year old girl that certain searches may return undesirable results.
First, of all, patching OS X is in violation of Apple's advertising campaign. You would have to reboot your computer and Macs don't need to be rebooted. So, you couldn't patch if you wanted to. Second, Mac is secure from viruses and trojans, so patching is obviously useless, there is no need for security patches.
If you look at it from my point of view, there is no point to patching a Mac because even with all the root problems and such, the real problem with Macs are the users. As it says on my blog, http://64now.com/ all that needs to be done to make an easily spread virus for a Mac is to download ffmpeg for mac, make an installer based on Apple's installer system, require the user to enter their administration password, install the backdoor or security hole, even disabling firewalling while you're at it, then package it and stick it on Version Tracker. It would be months before anyone knew there was a security hole and it will have been installed on a large percentage of the computers out there.... even the ones run by computer competant users.
Antivirus software for Mac is designed to block known viruses. They lack the advanced features such as sandboxing like those found on PCs since there are really not that many creative viruses on Macs. For the most part, the only purpose for virus scanning software on Mac is to make sure you're not receiving a PC virus and sending it out again to a PC user.
So, thanks to Apple that advertises that their machines are bulletproof and users shouldn't worry about security on their machines, all these fancy hacks are a waste of time, take advantage of the users' trust and you don't need rootkits.
I worked with IBM Object Technologies Inc, the original author of the Standard Windowing Toolkit when Eclipse was so new that they wouldn't even release test copies to developers working with IBM and OTI. SWT originated as a layer that OTI was using for implementing a cross platform compatability layer to allow porting AWT and Swing to mobile platforms to be easy.
The fact is, since I have extensive experience working on SWT from porting it, I can clearly say that it definately was not a Windows based toolkit in anyway. Long before hearing about Eclipse, SWT was already ported to many different platforms.
SWT had its problems. Even propagation was probably the most complex of them, but in reality, it was no more or less platform dependant than AWT itself. If you've ever read the code from Sun for AWT, you'd know that it was somewhat of a disaster. It was a nasty compatibility layer that instead of embracing platform differences, was minimized to remove the difference instead.
I have ported AWT to two windowing toolkits and frankly, time and time and time again, I found that the only practicle way of making AWT work on a new platform/windowing toolkit was to implement an SWT style GUI library in Java first, then build the AWT layer on top. This was also nasty in a way since it meant that it was extra important to make the new windowing toolkit not suffer the same incredible limitations that AWT itself did.
Also, let me make it perfectly clear, AWT and Swing, no matter how you skin them, they never integrate into the platform nearly as well as building on the native toolkits. SWT was the first widely used library that ever put an effort into recognizing that a Windows user is a Windows user, a KDE user is a KDE user, a GTK user is a GTK user, and a Mac user is a Mac user.
Sun should be bowing down and thanking IBM OTI for the creation of SWT, in fact, Sun should be rebuilding AWT and Swing on top of SWT since their own code base is so very limited in comparison.
Well, here's the deal. I've read the kernel source to MINIX several times out of interest. I really consider Andrew's book to be of the highest importance for computer science majors for several reasons. The most important reason I've ever had is simple. A developer, system or application or otherwise should never be allowed to write a single line of code without having at least a reasonable grasp of how the computer will handle the code. This means it's critical for any educated developer to have taken at least on course on operating system engineering as well as one course on microprocessor design.
I am also a fan of requiring that students take a course on compiler design as well. Sadly, noone has taken the LCC book and expanded it into object oriented languages yet. I feel that understand vTables are a minimum requirement for anyone learning to program these days.
That said, here's my bone to pick with Andy. (I use the name Andy when I'm in the mood to insult him).
Stability and Security of microkernels is obviously easier to maintain. This is fact, after all, the simple fact that typically device drivers and even memory allocation systems occur in a protected area (Ring 1,2, or 3 for Intel guys, user mode for unix people), the performance hit taken by microkernels is more than I'm willing to sacrifice. I would rather work with a monolithic kernel that is actively debugged rather than a microkernel that I feel is typically limited by the excessive protection layer boundary calls.
Yes, this has been argued time and time and time and time again. But let's get something clear. Linux performs extremely well. At a kernel level, Windows also performs extremely well. At a kernel level, microkernel operating systems such as Mac OS X, Mach-Linux, QNX, etc... are just not up to par. There are some good theories as to why, in many cases, it can be boiled down to the development time spent on each system. Microsoft employs people to constantly profile their kernel. Linux has guys that like the fame and glory of being the kernel profiler, etc...
But the problem we can clearly see is the cost of a cross-protection ring boundary call.
I'll explain why this is a problem in a very clear and simple reasoning that is undisputable (except by the typical Slashdot reader and of course our favorite group of people such as myself that thinks they can show off their pee-pee size by making comments in favor or contradicting something called undisputable). And mind you, I already know there's a huge group of you in the microkernel lover community (after all a good microkernel is the shangra-la of computing) that hate my guts for saying it. But mind you, I am also a microkernel fan, but my undisputable fact is the reasoning that I prefer monolithic.
Intel (x86, Itanic), Sun (Sparc), DEC (when they produced Alpha), SGI (MIPS), HP (when they produced PA-Risc), IBM, and more than anyone else, ARM (who somehow sells their crap simply by focussing on battery consumption), all give a crap less about microkernels.
It's true, when I was also a microkernel fenatic, I searched for the perfect microkernel platform. After all, it would be the greatest thing in the world to find a processor that would be perfectly suited for a microkernel, alter a compiler to focus on its' strengths, and make a microkerel run on it. But here's the bitch of it. The cost of a mode switch to make a huge number of cross protection boundary calls would be far too large.
There are some microkernel architectures that focus on "same ring" communication between tasks and modules, but this in my oppinion is as equally weak of a design as the monolithic kernel when referring to the paper mentioned. The strength of the microkernel architecture regarding security and stability is the protection. When elimitating the protection between tasks or kernel modules, the added stability and security no longer exists. It it 100% necessary to broker all transactions through a kernel level broker to get this security and stability that
I suspect Bram is reading, so...
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I had the pleasure to meet Bram several years back at Linux Expo NY 1999. The man is truly a unique individual. While the majority of Linux geeks (especially the Slashdot crew, who tended to through things at their audience and just act goofy) clowned around a great deal, everyone bragging about thier accomplishments, and of course everyone bragging about all their stocks and options, Bram was very down to earth. This is a man that has legitimately made a tremendous impact on the UNIX world.
There is a fairly funny story about Bram, we were sitting at the hotel, waiting for a Taxi or something, having a nice discussion about the evolution of Unix (I think, could have been that I was asking him about the Netherlands, who knows, doesn't matter in this context) and this gentleman, a man that I would have otherwise considered a fish out of water in my home town of NYC, performed an amazingly interesting feat.
There was a man sitting at the bar behind the bench we were sitting on. He had left his overcoat resting on the railing surrounding the bar. Another man came in off the street. He didn't look particularly unusual, maybe a little dirty for someone that belonged in a $300 a night hotel, but construction workers have conventions to, so why not, right? The man from the street stood next to the bench minding his own business as my conversation with Bram progressed, and then out of nowhere, Bram's arm flyed past my head and I found this other man nearly falling on me.
What had happened was the man from the street began to walk off as if he was heading to a Taxi himself and in the process had tried to take possession of the overcoat of the man at the bar when he wasn't looking. Bram had stopped the thief in the act and after the whole occurance was over, the hotel guard was resolving the issue and the man at the bar was brushing his jacket off and leaving his mouth gaping, Bram sat down and we continued our conversation as if nothing had ever happened.
Well, it's an interesting story to me at least. Sadly, it really takes a foreigner in NYC to be honest enough to go out on a limb to stop a thief. But the man with the overcoat should be thankful I hope.
Anyway, Bram, I don't typically talk about where I come from in this board, I like the minimal anonyminity that you're allowed as a logged in poster. But it's good to hear you're back in action. I'd also like to express the considerable pain and suffering I survived having ported a 1.2million line application to QNX using your VIM, I can at least say thanks for:make
Good luck with future versions, send me a private message if you'd like. It would be good to hear from you again.
Well, I'm not an accountant, and when I lived in America, even when I was pulling 6 figures, my checking account was regularly overdrawn. I prefer the system here in Norway that says "If there's no money in the account, you can't spend it".
So, here's the deal, how does this work. From what I've read, it appears that there is a issue that pirate organizations are successfully selling or distributing the equivilent of $6.1 billion in DVDs to the public which the movie studios themselves can't seem to do.
So based on the statistic the was given in the article, a claim that says for every pirated DVD which is found, there are 7 more that aren't. So, immediately, we understand that at least $763 million in lost DVD sales are made to people that are willing to purchase DVDs, but are more competative prices. Now, since that figure only accounts for 1 out of 8 copies meaning the 1 copy they find, if we were to assume that at least double that are the DVDs which are physically reproduced instead of downloaded, then we've accounted for $1.526 billion in losses.
To define the loss, I'm assuming that the studios are using the retail prices of the DVDs to calculate the actual losses. So, before we go any further with this astronomical figure of $6.1 billion, I would like to point out that the Walmart value is much lower. For example, the list price for the film "Chronicles Of Narnia" is $29.99 and the Walmart price is $19.87 or approximately 34% less. So first let's adjust the $6.1 billion to represent the walmart pricing, therefore we have $4.026 billion or round to $4 billion for nice numbers, $26 million just isn't worth that much in the real world anymore anyway.
So if my figures are even close to correct, then it means that we're already talking about a major imbelishment by the studios.
By the same math, the loss calculation should instead of being $1.526 billion would be $1.007 billion instead, still leaving approximately $3 billion unaccounted for.
If every single person on the planet were to spend $2 on DVDs each year, then the $3 in losses would be accounted for. But if were to say that 10% of the people which is probably getting closer to reality, spent $20 on DVDs each year, then it would also be made up for. Or if we say that 5% of the people on the planet actually buy DVDs, elimitating 3rd world, countries where hollywood doesn't relase translations, countries where local video is prefered, grandparents that don't own DVD players, children that don't buy their own DVDs, etc... we might have a number that is more realistic. Therefore, we're talking about $40 more spending on DVDs per year per consumer.
That's 2 discs more per year per DVD consumer. So Hollywood is saying that they can't seem to find a method to get DVD consumers to buy 2 more discs per year each. But they're also saying that they believe the consumer is in fact either pirating or purchasing pirated copies for 2 more discs per year.
I'm going to take a leap and assume that for the sake of reality, that up to 1/2 of these pirated copies are actually pirated by people that simply can't afford the additional $40 per year on discs. The average minimum wage in America is approximately $5.50 per hour. The American work day is 40 hours in an american working week and 2080 hours (typically rounded to 2000) working hours in a year. Meaning that minimum wage employees make appoximately $11,000 a year. The number of minimum wage employees in the movie purchasing demographic which I regularly see published as ages 18-26 (primarily male) is staggering. With the exception of childrens films which are most commonly purchased by parents for children, much of the DVD purchases made in a year are by 18-26 primarily male.
So this leads us to the next point, in modern times when broadband is becoming more important, even paying bills is online for most people in this demographic, an internet connection, which shockingly enough costs about $29.95 a month or $359.4 a year from Road Runner, a Time Warner company (a
Well, I script in C++ using Qt. It's very nice to have such a refined scripting language available and it's consistant across platforms as well.
So that being said. I have also written applications in scripting languages. Although none of mine are worth mentioning, maybe it would be best to mention G3 Torrent, an entire GUI torrent app written I think in Python. I think this application is an excellent example of why not to write applications in python, this fellow did an excellent job overall, but the performance just isn't there. Oh memory consumption is aweful, I'm guessing the garbage collector is hindered without some form of dynamic heap compression/relocation.
Well, here we go. Although I feel there are places where scripting and programming are clearly blurred, let's approach the topic.
In my opinion, a script is an application that serves a single minimal purpose. In most cases, a script is less likely to use functions or classes, but instead would be dependant on external applications or components (comparible to functions) that replace command line utilities almost exactly in functionality. For example, instead of using find, using another script in the same language which serves the same purpose.
A C Program that uses fork and stream redirection to call external applications instead of handling the tasks internally is more of a scripting task than a programming task.
The problem at this point is that unlike the days of sed/awk/bourne shell/c shell being the scripting languages where the scripts were quite simple and clearly were scripts, and apps were "programmed" in C. These days the scripting languages are more advanced and closer to compiled langauges in functionality, at the very least, the simple fact that most languages offer some method of runtime linking to C libaries makes them able to make more extensive system calls than the limite functionality they had earlier.
So in reality, the easiest way to define the difference is that "Scripting accomplishes a scripting task where Programming accomplishes a programming task". The language doesn't really matter so much anymore, what matters is the type of program being written.
As far as I can tell, the entire literate world uses google or some other oddball engine. The people that use google can never use MSN since the MSN search just doesn't feel right and it always sends the user to either Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, or AOL.
I figure that both Google and Yahoo will do just fine since everyone will have either the google search bar or have their homepage set to google.
Not a big deal. (BTW, Doesn't IE already default to MSN for their search button?)
I'm not as interested in how it does against NVidia and ATI. To me, it seems more like competition for on board graphics. And if that's the case, how does it do again GMA900?
Can't speak on the licensing, I'd say that the technology itself however is the complication in deployment. Java has a tremendous number of rough edges and that is was is the problem.
Now, before I take a moment to rag on your ridiculous RAM comment, let me assure you that I hate Java from that ground up. I find it to be little more than a virus.
JVM is thin thin thin. The fact is that most non-Sun implementations of the JVM are tight and small. In fact, from a performance perspective, Java is typically superior to compiled languages because of how it handles RAM. Before you blow me off, let me justify my comment. Thanks to the Java license and NDA agreements, I in fact can not say where I learned this information, but I have extensive experience in this topic since I was forced for extended periods to suffer the Java VM on embedded devices.
Java is a relatively simplistic (though strangley complete to the point of OVER KILL!!!) architecture/language/etc... It provides a language matched to a virtual machine matched to a set of somewhat poorly written libraries.
What makes Java superior to compiled languages is that it compensates for several key factors. First I'll refine my definition of a compiled language to clearly specify C/C++/Pascal/other non-garbage collected languages.
1) Application Developers are not System Developers Using C++ as an example, most application developers use the standard implementation of new and delete. This is fine, but the first thing to keep in mind is that memory allocation for a C++ application that makes use of a lot of small objects tend to pay a huge performance price. C developers regularly shoot down the performance of C++ without realizing that it's the limitation in the C allocation routines.
Object oriented programming is typically very heap intensive. In many cases, developers insist on iterating through strings and lists far too much. Students are even taught in the university that data structures should be used absolutely everywhere. Of course they are taught Big-O and Little-O, but unless you're actually implementing the data structure classes and types, very little importance is placed on performance of these classes.
Strings are abused regularly since even though the allocation unit size of the heap allocator is limited to blocks of 16 bytes (for example), programmers will actually reallocate the buffer for a string to resize it from 8 to 9 bytes in length. By reallocating, I mean they will in fact allocate a new 9 byte string, then copy the original to the new buffer and delete the original buffer.
Application developers pay very little attention to the actual internal mechanics of the classes and functions which they use. To a certain extent, I can forgive them since an application developer is expected to think differently than a system developer. When we depend on system developers to write applications, they're often extremely fast, but relatively unusable.
So here's where Java shines, because of the garbage collection system and because of the relocatable memory architecture, memory is managed in such a way which decreases the cycles spent in allocation and deallocation of buffers. A well written JVM actually will actually either when necessary or when time is available compress the heap to maximize performance and minimize heap consumption.
So although Java seems like a memory hog, it's actually not that bad given the number of allocations and deallocations being performed by the developers. Sadly, the extreme memory use you're talking about is related to the poor system level development skills of application developers stacked on the additional layer which abstracts even more from the developer therefore making it less practical for the developer to understand the internals of the system.
2) System Developers make Terrible Applications A system developer is typically biased towards raw high level languages such as C (not C++) because their used to making use of the stack whereever po
Steve Jobs is a mountain. What I mean is that there is something special about his whole life story and personality that although financially he can't scratch Bill Gates, Jobs is just more interesting. He's been around, done lots of things and whereever he goes, the press will follow. He has his own technical paparatzi (sp.)
When Jobs ran Pixar, the press loved Pixar. They could do no wrong. When Jobs ran NeXT, making the most overpriced workstation ever, even though noone could afford the machine, the press stayed interested because there had to be something awesome happening there. When Jobs ran Apple.... well I think that just looking at the positive press he receives is more than enough, I can't do it justice.
I don't know if the term is popular outside of NY where I grew up, but we used a term called "Rain Maker" for the type of executive that could walk into a stubbling company such as Xerox and gain attraction throughout the world. Jobs is quite possibly the greatest "Rain Maker" ever in the corporate history of the world. His presence alone gains so much positive press for any company that he steps foot into that the rest of the people there start feeling more confident and doing better jobs.
I think another factor to point out is that Jobs, although he'll ride a horse until it's dead and then cut the sucker up and serve it for dinner, he has a skill in listening to his subordinates and knowing where to go next. When it comes to managing, along the road I learned a little from one guy and little from another, but the most important thing I ever learned was from Jobs himself. I'll misquote it badly, and I don't remember where I heard it, but here it goes. It was in an interview sometime back when he was starting back at Apple again.
Interviewer : Steve, your success has been phenominal, but how can you be CEO of Pixar and Apple without spreading yourself too thin.
Steve Jobs : It's a challenge of course, but I have a team of people at both Apple and Pixar made up of really bright guys that I trust completely. In reality, these teams run most of each company, but I listen to them and manage them and the rest takes care of itself.
It was something along those lines, but from a business perspective, I've learned a lot from that statement alone. It's really a matter of having a team you trust and being a person that the team trusts as well. You have to all believe that you're there to take care of each other and that everyone is there to take care of you too. If you build a team like that, you'll suceed.
As for what will happen to Apple when Job's is gone, it's hard to speculate, but I'd say there's a very very good chance that whoever comes next would not be able to attract as much positive attention for Apple as Jobs does. In my experience, Mac is just another computer and in most cases the hardware is excellent but the software is a bit clunky. But Steve Jobs can stand on a stage and pitch a product no matter how silly, for example, a new web cam and it'll make headline news on NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and pretty much every web site people read the next day. For example, if I recall correctly, Slashdot had the iSight as an article within hours of it happening.
I doubt anyone else could hold the interest in the industry that Jobs does. After all, with the exception of the blue screen presentations by Bill, how many times has he had a web video on the front page of news.com.com.com.com.com
Well, I've always loved Intel. Maybe not so much back in the days when the only chipsets came from the likes of UMC, SIS, SMC and others. I have always stuck to Intel not because it was a better processor, but because I felt it was a better platform. I like to know that all the multi-million transistor chips in my system come from a vendor that develops the chips together. Last time I felt comfortable buying AMD was when they produced their own dual processor chipset for the Athlon. Sadly, they stopped doing this far too soon.
At my company, where I have the final say in all hardware purchases, I've refused new computers for users for a while. I have kept family and friends from buying new systems as well. I loan my personal computers to people that need them now and can't wait for something else. The reason behind this is simple. Intel!
I have held off on all these purchases because I don't want to buy Athlon, with the exception of the big iron produced by IBM and HP for Athlon, I still don't trust the platform, only the chip. Besides, from what I've seen so far, the specs on the Intel processors arriving now and coming later are far better than Athlon because of the overall picture.
My next computer purchase will be tomorrow when I purchase my first Core Duo notebook. This is a notebook with a CPU from Intel and a chipset from Intel and a graphics chip from nVidia. The memory will be replaced with either Kingston or Crucial since I max out the RAM in all the notebooks I buy because it just makes sense. I'll install Windows XP and Windows XP 64 on the system and start testing to see which I prefer. How the compiler performs will be a huge factor.
So my point of all this other than just rambling is that Intel's sales have dropped, not because AMD has a better product, but because I feel that when AMD took the performance lead, it was obvious that Intel wasn't just sitting on their thumbs no matter how it looked. Intel had the Core design on its' way. And frankly, the perfomance per watt and the overall performance in general is more than enough to wait for. After all, who wants to buy a new computer with a Pentium D when Core Duo for desktop is coming. And who wants to buy a Pentium M when Core Duo is here and we're just waiting for it to propagate through the sales channels. It just wouldn't make sense.
And for programmers, the Intel C/C++ compilers for Core look fantastic. The extra performance that will come out of compiling with those will be really amazing I think.
It's the fear of the consumer swiping the card and being fined. I was a bit tired when writing and had felt the point was implicitly clear from the rest of the statement. Being able to use cash ensures the average person that they are able pay. With the current system which is directly controlled by banks, when the consumer swipes their card and the payment is rejected because of "attempted overdraw", the consumer is fined $20-$30 by their bank on the spot. I once had this happen to me with a $2 payment because a money transfer from savings to checking had not cleared yet.
In countries where the customer is right, if you swipe your card and there isn't enough cash there, then put back an item and swipe again. No penalty.
The other issue which I know is a problem, when I was living in Florida, also fondly known by many of the local residents as "The Minimum Wage State", without the ability to float a check for 2 days over the weekend or even face the charge of $30 for a bounced check, there are many average people that can't even buy diapers for their babies.
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On another note, when I first moved to Norway and was initially employed here, I was horrified to hear that the company I worked for would only pay me monthly. I mean that's ridiculos right? Well the fact was, i struggled like hell for the first 3-4 months to get used to it, after all, right after the move, I lived paycheck to paycheck. But after the initial period ended, it was great because then I received a large lump sum of money once per month, I could pay all my bills for the month and have a handle on my finances for the rest of the period. This is quite common here. I think this type of forced budgeting really helps people get thier finances in order and allows the not-so-good at budgetting such as myself to learn the responsibility out of necessity.
On a similar note, as an employee, try to avoid working for a firm that pays weekly, it's a sign that the management has learned that their employee base (or sometimes themselves) are not responsible enough to make it more than a week without cash coming in. As an employer, it's a good idea to refuse salary advances except under extrodinary circumstances, if your employees are so poor at managing their own finances that they can't make it from paycheck to paycheck, then it's time to find other employees.
I'm an American that lives in Norway. Since moving here 7 years ago, I don't recall using cash very much at all, much to my son's dismay. He likes to jingle my pockets for change to put in his piggy bank, but I have to make special stops to get change for him to avoid disappointing him.
I am a person that never has an empty savings account but regularly keeps my spending account low to avoid spending too much. See it's nice to have a reminder that you're blowing all your dough. I don't go to the ATM machine, so I never know what my balance is. Simply put, if there's no money in the account when I try to pay for something, I pick up my phone, push a few buttons, pay for what I need and I'm cautious for the rest of the month.
Since leaving the states, I no longer have a checkbook. All my bills (except my AMEX) is on autopay. I would put the AMEX that way too, but I'd like to see how much I'm spending on it.
The office I used to work in has a coke machine that was payable by telephone and I've even paid for train tickets using my phone as well.
As for cash, the only time I use it is when I'm paying the maid or paying the car wash that is run by people that would prefer to fly below the radar.
What I'm really trying to say is that Norway has been more or less a cashless society for several years now. Of course people still use cash, I know a lot of older people that still don't feel comfortable with the idea of everything being done with plastic, but it's an option which is nice to leave open to them. Cash has some benefits.
As for the experience in France, well, I see it as publicizing something that is not that interesting. It sounds as if they're just testing to see if telephone payment is an option. Personally I hate that idea since there are many times my telephone battery dies and I'd be stranded. Can you imagine not being able to pay for a taxi because you forgot to charge your battery?
As for America, well it's a long time before this modern world ever gets there. There's a tremendous amount of money made by the banks on bounced check fees and even worse, "Overdraw attempt fees" on using your check cards. I mean, come on, if the money isn't in the bank and the bank and the store knows it there on the spot, it's the store that should penalize you, not the bank. And having worked at a banking clearing house, I wrote a report generator for producing an account of three things on one report.
1) How much money was lost due to bounced checks
2) How much money was made from overdraw fees that were later corrected by the account holder
3) How much of a difference was there between the two. The number was always positive and not by small margins. I ran this script many many many times because I simply couldn't believe the numbers coming out. In one case, I printing a 60 page report of this activity over a single week and tallied it manually to ensure that what I was calculating was in fact correct. It's unbelievable. The American banking system is dependant on these overdraw fees and will never separate with them. So as long as that's the case, removing classic style paper based money and checks is out of the question.
There was a time a long time ago where John C. Dvorak almost made sense. It was a much simpler time, but Dvorak has spent his entire career trying to come up with a "Dvorak's Law" that would make him even more famous than Moore.
I remember a time when anyone heard Norton, they would immediately think of Peter Norton, the guy who wrote the famous books every developer needed on PC assembly language programming. These were the days when John C. Dvorak was more than just another quack.
Well, John C. these days isn't of much more use than doing a TV spot regarding video games. Even then I can't see that I agree with his opinions.
If I had nothing better to do with my time, I would browse through all the "Dvorak's Predictions" for the industry and what I would find is that he's made about 2 accurate predictions in the world. And one would be what time lunch would arrive within a margin of error of 1 hour. The second noone even cares about.
So, I have to agree 100% with you regarding your comment, this is a man that would be otherwise unemployed if someone like ZDNet or whoever holds his leash this week didn't think his name was of at least a little value.
P.S. - Does anyone know whatever happened to Mace Tools? There was a time when Paul Mace was an interesting name in computing as well. Looks like he's still selling software, but nothing of any interest.
There are many different approaches to DRM. A perfect DRM system would require that rights managment is handled entirely at the endpoints. It would require that the video card is designed in such a manor that it handled all the DRM decoding directly on board and the video card would return information that it obtained from the monitor verifying that the screen itself is in fact able to handle a final stage of DRM decoding. The rights management at the monitor would have to be more secure than a single bit. It would have to perform key exchange as well.
The video card would require some method of secure key exchange with a rights management authority. This piece of code would be open sourced and GPLd. Probably as part of the video driver. This code would simple provide a means for which the video card could communicate with the authority. The actual method of decoding and key management would still be highly encrypted.
The drawback to this system is that there would need to be a central authority ceritifying specific hardware devices as DRM compliant. Every screen from a manufacturer would have to be placed in a test environment where it would be tested to guarantee that the key exchange system is properly implemented and could not be read from the device itself. There would also have to be some means in which the monitors correctly identify themselves, such as a serial number. Video chip vendors would have to also verify their DRM compliancy the same way.
As for audio, I can't possibly imagine a method of DRM that would be entirely effective. Until such time that speakers are a sealed device that contains a processor, D/A converter, and a digital transducer (meaning no magnetic could of any type), there is no conceivable method of producing a DRM that can protect audio content. High frequency watermarks might be able to ensure that computers can't be used to record audio containing the water mark, but any graphical equalizer should be able to filter these high frequency bands out. And even though it wouldn't be perfect CD quality, using something such as an RME DSP card produces high enough quality output that the difference should be relatively unnoticable, even to trained ears.
We get into privacy concerns at this level. It means that a video card and monitor is registered to a user somehow. This means that everytime that the rights of a title is verified, it is entirely traceable. It means that the FBI could effectively petition the court for a warrant to release data regarding the IP address which was last used to verify rights to a piece of music.
It gives organizations a line tapping type of right that typically Americans are protected from under law, it's the end user rights agreements that noone reads that then forfeits their rights to their anonyminity. I'd like to point out at this time that it is quite common that people forfeit rights unknowingly because even if they did read the end user licenses on most material, they would not understand what is said in the legalese.
So, to make a brief answer to the initial question, no... GPL'd code to assist in DRM is by no means a key to open the door in a properly implemented DRM system. The code itself would only assist in the DRM process, not perform the task itself.
As to the legality and morality of the issue, personally I care less what people see me doing. For all I care, they can watch me in hopes of catching me cross-dressed in lingerie committing an act of murder. But others don't see violations of their rights to privacy the same way. Many people are paranoid of "The Man" and fear that these rights violations will lead to the end of civilization. The Advent 1611 group likes to publish that anything with an tracking ability is one step closer to revelations (but they also damn the Queen of England for meeting with devil worshipping Ozzy).
So here's the deal, to implement a DRM system that is able to potentially actually work, and also to make it so that there's any chance the
If I understand your interprettation correctly, what you're saying is for example that when the ALU has completed a calculation, instead of the clock signal informing the first stage register latches to trigger, instead the ALU itself would inform the register latches to trigger?
If this is the case, then my first CPU design was in fact an async/"Clockless" CPU from that perspective. I didn't believe there was a need for a clock to signify that calculation was completed.
The problems I had with the overall design wasn't the development of such a processor, after all, using SRAM made it quite simple to be clockless on the memory circuitry. The problem was specifically that it was impossible to modularize the architecture. For example, the prefetch and decoder were dependant on the result from the arithmetic or store logic. When using a single state prefetch, I could simply decode and execute an instruction by latching the instruction into a register of its own. This would allow me to prefetch the next instruction, but when I expanded the prefetch to include a branch predictor, my dependancy on a variable execution time per instruction became nearly impossible.
What finished off the design and sent the majority of it to the "maybe I'll work on it someday" directory was when an arithmetic or store operation could execute in a shorter time than the prefetch could update the ring buffer state.
So if I understand your interprettation correctly, then what I'm reading is that ARM has managed to actually develop a single CPU design that performs all operations on a "As needed" basis. But this in itself is by no means exciting or revelutionary, what would be genuinely exciting is if they managed to develop a method of making it modular enough to enhance the design without having to redesign the entire "order of execution" state machine every time.
P.S. - One last thing... after trying for the past 20 years (I am really a digital man, and I started at age 10), I finally understood analog well enough to develop my very own high speed opamp. My only purpose for this was to design a minimal transistor clock multiplier instead of stealing someone elses design. If this architecture catches on, then I'll have learned opamps for no reason and I'll be really put out
Point taken... I admit my writing skills aren't as polished at they should be before writing on slashdot.
I had meant new as in new to the environment they are to be presented. Which in the context of the original post is more suitable. I was not meant to label the age of the language as new. I recall the early hub bub in Dr. Dobbs back when I was in elementary school reading the magazine in the library. If I recall correctly, it was during one of Dr. Dobbs articals predicting which language would be the logical successor to C in the modern world. They presented maybe 5 other languages as well, including D which I believe is not actually the D we are aquainted with now. I also recall that C++ was not given much merit (which as a c++ developer I would be forced to agree with when comparing the other languages I've evaluated) and that Dobbs called it wrong.
Regarding the Scheme remark, again my writing skills could have been better, but I was remarking not based on the syntactical merits which easily convey to LISP (mind you I've never been terribly fond of either of them after being forced to write AutoLISP ages ago), but more to the point that the clear superiority of Scheme (which does not convey to LISP) is that the compilers are the most optimized compilers out there because of the compiler researchers' affinity to the language (which as you point out is due to its simplicity). Theorically, there's not reason that Scheme could not be as main stream as Common Lisp since extensions such as FFIGEN and Header to Scheme are able to bridge the gap between Scheme and system libraries quite cleanly.
P.S. For all the others reading, this is a perfect example why writing a post on slashdot should be reviewed by 10 other people to close all loopholes in an argument before clicking submit:) If there are further holes in my statement above, let them stand, I've already spent far more time than legitimately budgetable backing up arguments that were written to back up a sarcastic remark, after all, we're talking about Eiffel, it's really just not that important.
P.P.S As for being old enough to drink, well, umm.... I've worked with enough compilers that can't seem to generate the same output twice, would this be the reasoning why?
When choosing the right tool for the job, you choose the tool that can meet a balance of three particular things.
1) Best tool for producing the application
2) The tool you can find people that know how to use
3) The tool with the best support
Well, there are tons of places that Eiffel is the best tool for the job. I would even imagine that there are circumstances where the support is there. Problem is finding the people that know how to use it.
I've been goofing with Eiffel ocassionally, but time and time again, it proves the wrong tool for the job. It's just too different from other languages to be able to meet my needs. I always fall back onto C++ with a widget toolkit (such as Qt). It is definately not because C++ is a better language. It is definately not that Qt is the ultimate widget toolkit. It is because there is a good balance of all 3 criteria being met.
I am 100% in favor of companies trying to sell us a new language, but what it really boils down to is that only a handful of people will use it and other than an ocassional interest article, this is probably the big hay day for the language since there is a open source news worthy article written about it.
Another great example of a language that is probably better but has never picked up steam is Scheme. Every compiler developer in the world loves scheme. It is by far the most heavily optimized compiled language on the planet. It has great merits. But the fact is that with the exception of the scheme compilers written in scheme and an ocassional university project, the language stalled years ago.
The parent comment to yours was sarcasm... it may have been misinformed as you comment, but the fact is that he is right in his sarcasm.
I see a whole lot of text in the article, but frankly, until I see whether it's some gag (especially this close to Apr 1.) I don't care to read articles like this. At the moment I'm picturing a stone with the imprints of the stomach of a fish and 6 little shoes with a Nike Swoosh.
Well, it may sound crazy, but the most effective method I've come across for dealing with addiction is to remove the person from it. Talk to the guy, convince him that you need to take a trip to somewhere that his vice is not available. If you both have passports, I recommend a trip to somewhere that is less likely to have computers that can play WoW. As a good example, I would recommend either the Virgin Islands or maybe the Greek island of Samos. If you're American without a passport, then a trip to the Keys in south Florida is pretty good. The goal is to get him away from easily addictive things. For example, if you were to go to Amsterdam and sit at the coffee shops and enjoy the hash, it's counter productive. Hash itself is believed to be not addictive, but the environment and lifestyle of using it is addictive. Drinking girly drinks with little unbrellas in it in a tropic island is relaxing, not so addictive.
Often with game addictions the player just needs to experience life without the game to see that it really isn't so bad.
Alternatively, you can be a mean assed bastard, take taser gun and hit the telephone wires on the side of his house with it. (Hit the cable wire if he's using cable modem). It should do enough damage that he won't be able to access the net without the cable installation guy coming out and fixing it. Of course, the less destructive method would be just to take a minitorch and a shit load of solder and make the biggest solder ball you've ever seen on top of the connections, shorting it out. Lots of 2 part epoxy on top of that adds a nice effect. I personally prefer the taser approach just because it's really fun to listen to a person screaming their head off yelling "FFS" and such when their cablemodem/adsl modem goes up in smoke.
I simply don't understand the pressure from the industry placed on Microsoft to become part of the ODF. The fact of the matter is that there would be no benefit to the Open Source community for Microsoft to adopt this format, worse, it would be highly detrimental to the community if Microsoft were to implement it and in the future standardize on it.
OpenOffice is by no means a tinker toy application anymore. It is gradually coming to support as many useless features as Microsoft Word does. In time, the number of features will be almost beyond documentation.
Wikipedia documents the original release of Microsoft Word as May 2nd, 1983. The entry also states that Charles Simonyi left Xerox PARC to work at Microsoft starting in 1981, so I can only assume that the development of Word had already begun at this point.
So by this, I'm suggesting that in a period of 23 years and a sum of money far exceeding the gross income of billions in development, marketing, user research, testing, etc... Microsoft word includes such a vast amount of functionality, that any document format standard that could contain all these possible data types requirements would have to be huge.
So that brings me to the next item, ODF is being advocated through the industry under false pretexts. The companies noise makers out there are possibly under the false assumption that a document format is all that is needed to guarantee interoperability between word processors and spreadsheets made by different organizations. This is simply false.
If Microsoft were to make a serious attempt to use ODF as their document container format, initially what would occur is that Microsoft Word would be able to save only a limited subset of its features in this format. Microsoft would be forced to introduce extensions to the format. And although extensions are provided for in the format, the ODF consortium would need to either make alternative suggestions to provide the same functionality or they would simply have to adopt the Microsoft extension since it would already be in wide spread use.
Now this in itself is not a real problem, but the problems starts to occur as we go further. Microsoft provides multiple scripting languages in their document format, for example, it is quite common to find Word Basic and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in the document format. These languages have bindings to objects such as toolbars, menus, internal document structures, image decoders and more. If Microsoft were to provide support for these languages through an extension to ODF, then in reality, for ODF to remain a standard, ODF would have to bless these extensions. In the case of scripting language support, there is a much bigger problem than with simple document primatives like tables. For OpenOffice or AbiWord to be ODF compliant, then they would in fact have to implement scripting engines for each of these languages supported by Word and build in the minimum required user interface and object bindings to support the languages since these languages are in fact useless without the ability to interact with the application.
This brings me to the next point which is items such as font embedding. Using a language such as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), it is entirely possible to encapsulate fonts as moveto, arcto, lineto, etc.. paths. But as many know, the graphics world is clearly less friendly to the Open Source concept than the software world is. There would have to be some sort of digital rights management to guarantee the intellectual property of the font vendors that guard their property as much as the music or movie industry does. This would require the introduction of a DRM engine to be standardized on. The reason for this is that simple encryption or obsurification would not be good enough to satisfy the font vendors, the open products would provide source to extract fonts from the documents. This is obviously not acceptable. So OpenOffice, ABIWord (etc...) would then have to implement a DRM engine that would cause equally as m
PDF is effectively worthless as a single page format... this is the webs domain.
The CSS committee has attempted to tackle pagination for ages... guess what... it doesn't work... it's aweful, it'll be years before it's even close to ok.
Let me point out that Opera, Mozilla, Netscape 4.X, Internet Explorer, etc... have supported this kind of functionality for ever... it's MIME embedding. I don't recall the exact syntax and it doesn't interest me enough to bother looking it up, but things like or (syntax is completely wrong, but the concept is there) have been around forever.
So, what's new about this? And more importantly, is someone just wasting my time by publishing a story about a program that just automates the process?
And in response to the earlier story from someone, last I checked SVG is a scalable format in web pages that theoretically is nearly identical to PDF. PDF is a path based renderer. By path based renderer, I mean that everything is based on (CreatePath, MoveTo, LineTo, ArcTo, ClosePath, FillPath) type operations. This is the mechanism that is adopted from PostScript (maybe some earlier technologies), SVG is based on the same idea.
In the more than futile search of a way to get the religious fanatics that I unfortunately am often bombarded by to back off, I've formulated an alternative complimentary theory of intelligent design that takes their emotional attachment to faith in the highly scientific reverend they listen to as well as actual scientific theory. On both topics I am not an expert. I am however well versed in the arguments most often presented by both sides.
First of all, let me clarify that I am an atheist minister and missionary. I feel it is my personal responsibility to dispute anyone who feels their right about anything no matter how much proof is available. I believe in the only two certainties being death and taxes. I also will gladly present myself as an expert on a vast array of fields that I am not qualified to even say the names of. So now that the disclaimer is presented, I'll continue forward to ensure that my opinion will be preached and spread. (P.S. I don't believe this, but consider it a better alternative to intelligent design or creationism). Also for the sake of influencing the religious weirdos, I've chosed to ignore fact in favor of truth and also chose to pretend that politics had nothing to do with the evolution of any religion and lean towards the "God said so" idealism.
Intelligent design and the alternative beliefs including big bang and evolution do not necessarily need to be exclusive. This theory as I present it merges the classical beliefs of the theologian and the modern beliefs of the educated and unite them together as a single common belief. This theory obviously needs to "Throw a few punches" at the old beliefs in order to justify the need for a more intelligent design theory.
It is important for me to clearly state that intelligent design is not in fact a theory or even a valid belief as much as a buzzword that can be used to draw god into th educational system. Intelligent design is nothing more than an incomplete idea that is used to sound smarter without actually understanding the idea at all.
It is also important to clarify that truth is religious. Fact is scientific. Fact require that something is indisputable, for example, 2+2=4 is fact. Absence makes the heart grow fonder is truth.
So let us lay the bricks for the theory of intelligent design. I will attempt to use arguments that are no weaker than any other truth in religion. I will leave it to the smarter people to expand on my theories and make them at least as credible as Christianity.
Judeism was a religion that although believed to exist long before, was in fact formalized as a faith and belief during the times of King Ramses II in ancient egypt by the king's "adopted" grandson Moses. Before this, although monotheistic beliefs had been experimented (such as the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten's Atenism several generations earlier) with, the "civilized" world at the time was a society of polytheistic belief. Moses raised awareness of the monotheistic system (some say with the help of witches trying to cause the downfall of Ramses) within his people, the nomadic tribe of the Jews. Upon their grand Exodus, Moses spoke with God and wrote the first ten laws of the Jews, the Ten Commandments. By some beliefs (although I am not a yeshiva graduate) Moses himself transcribed the five books of Moses, others belief it was transcribed as dictated by God in later times. Also, certain rules were presented. For example, Kosher, the diet handed down from God to keep the Jews pure (an some would say at least alive in the desert while travelling 40 years). I can tell this story for hours or days, but we all know it, it has been around for a while. I'll makes notes of the interesting parts are required if needed.
As the Christian belief system came around (conveniently when most needed, around the time of the not quite sane Emporer Caligula Caesar) and already as forming a following in Rome, and King Herod Agrippa was lining himself up to be the prophesized son of God to the world, things began to change. Although
Slashdot Mirror
I feel it is the duty of one of the readers of Slashdot to test the outcome of this project. Unfortunately, I believe I'm allergic to Chimp fur, so I can't volunteer for this. We should put together a fund to finance the purchase of two laboratory chimps, one of each gender, then attempt to inseminate a human female with the chimp male's ejections. At the same time, try the reverse (use logic here, you frigging Slashdotters I know will respond with a silly remark like how can a human female inseminate a chimp male).
So, for the sake of science, step up Slashdot readers, we'll all chip in for your chimp. We'd love to see the offspring.
BTW... there are special web sites spread across the Internet that would pay well for the video of the insemination itself, I learned this sadly while googling for "horse riding school" for my niece. I was more than a little embarressed trying to explain to a 12 year old girl that certain searches may return undesirable results.
First, of all, patching OS X is in violation of Apple's advertising campaign. You would have to reboot your computer and Macs don't need to be rebooted. So, you couldn't patch if you wanted to. Second, Mac is secure from viruses and trojans, so patching is obviously useless, there is no need for security patches.
If you look at it from my point of view, there is no point to patching a Mac because even with all the root problems and such, the real problem with Macs are the users. As it says on my blog, http://64now.com/ all that needs to be done to make an easily spread virus for a Mac is to download ffmpeg for mac, make an installer based on Apple's installer system, require the user to enter their administration password, install the backdoor or security hole, even disabling firewalling while you're at it, then package it and stick it on Version Tracker. It would be months before anyone knew there was a security hole and it will have been installed on a large percentage of the computers out there.... even the ones run by computer competant users.
Antivirus software for Mac is designed to block known viruses. They lack the advanced features such as sandboxing like those found on PCs since there are really not that many creative viruses on Macs. For the most part, the only purpose for virus scanning software on Mac is to make sure you're not receiving a PC virus and sending it out again to a PC user.
So, thanks to Apple that advertises that their machines are bulletproof and users shouldn't worry about security on their machines, all these fancy hacks are a waste of time, take advantage of the users' trust and you don't need rootkits.
I worked with IBM Object Technologies Inc, the original author of the Standard Windowing Toolkit when Eclipse was so new that they wouldn't even release test copies to developers working with IBM and OTI. SWT originated as a layer that OTI was using for implementing a cross platform compatability layer to allow porting AWT and Swing to mobile platforms to be easy.
The fact is, since I have extensive experience working on SWT from porting it, I can clearly say that it definately was not a Windows based toolkit in anyway. Long before hearing about Eclipse, SWT was already ported to many different platforms.
SWT had its problems. Even propagation was probably the most complex of them, but in reality, it was no more or less platform dependant than AWT itself. If you've ever read the code from Sun for AWT, you'd know that it was somewhat of a disaster. It was a nasty compatibility layer that instead of embracing platform differences, was minimized to remove the difference instead.
I have ported AWT to two windowing toolkits and frankly, time and time and time again, I found that the only practicle way of making AWT work on a new platform/windowing toolkit was to implement an SWT style GUI library in Java first, then build the AWT layer on top. This was also nasty in a way since it meant that it was extra important to make the new windowing toolkit not suffer the same incredible limitations that AWT itself did.
Also, let me make it perfectly clear, AWT and Swing, no matter how you skin them, they never integrate into the platform nearly as well as building on the native toolkits. SWT was the first widely used library that ever put an effort into recognizing that a Windows user is a Windows user, a KDE user is a KDE user, a GTK user is a GTK user, and a Mac user is a Mac user.
Sun should be bowing down and thanking IBM OTI for the creation of SWT, in fact, Sun should be rebuilding AWT and Swing on top of SWT since their own code base is so very limited in comparison.
Well, here's the deal. I've read the kernel source to MINIX several times out of interest. I really consider Andrew's book to be of the highest importance for computer science majors for several reasons. The most important reason I've ever had is simple. A developer, system or application or otherwise should never be allowed to write a single line of code without having at least a reasonable grasp of how the computer will handle the code. This means it's critical for any educated developer to have taken at least on course on operating system engineering as well as one course on microprocessor design.
I am also a fan of requiring that students take a course on compiler design as well. Sadly, noone has taken the LCC book and expanded it into object oriented languages yet. I feel that understand vTables are a minimum requirement for anyone learning to program these days.
That said, here's my bone to pick with Andy. (I use the name Andy when I'm in the mood to insult him).
Stability and Security of microkernels is obviously easier to maintain. This is fact, after all, the simple fact that typically device drivers and even memory allocation systems occur in a protected area (Ring 1,2, or 3 for Intel guys, user mode for unix people), the performance hit taken by microkernels is more than I'm willing to sacrifice. I would rather work with a monolithic kernel that is actively debugged rather than a microkernel that I feel is typically limited by the excessive protection layer boundary calls.
Yes, this has been argued time and time and time and time again. But let's get something clear. Linux performs extremely well. At a kernel level, Windows also performs extremely well. At a kernel level, microkernel operating systems such as Mac OS X, Mach-Linux, QNX, etc... are just not up to par. There are some good theories as to why, in many cases, it can be boiled down to the development time spent on each system. Microsoft employs people to constantly profile their kernel. Linux has guys that like the fame and glory of being the kernel profiler, etc...
But the problem we can clearly see is the cost of a cross-protection ring boundary call.
I'll explain why this is a problem in a very clear and simple reasoning that is undisputable (except by the typical Slashdot reader and of course our favorite group of people such as myself that thinks they can show off their pee-pee size by making comments in favor or contradicting something called undisputable). And mind you, I already know there's a huge group of you in the microkernel lover community (after all a good microkernel is the shangra-la of computing) that hate my guts for saying it. But mind you, I am also a microkernel fan, but my undisputable fact is the reasoning that I prefer monolithic.
Intel (x86, Itanic), Sun (Sparc), DEC (when they produced Alpha), SGI (MIPS), HP (when they produced PA-Risc), IBM, and more than anyone else, ARM (who somehow sells their crap simply by focussing on battery consumption), all give a crap less about microkernels.
It's true, when I was also a microkernel fenatic, I searched for the perfect microkernel platform. After all, it would be the greatest thing in the world to find a processor that would be perfectly suited for a microkernel, alter a compiler to focus on its' strengths, and make a microkerel run on it. But here's the bitch of it. The cost of a mode switch to make a huge number of cross protection boundary calls would be far too large.
There are some microkernel architectures that focus on "same ring" communication between tasks and modules, but this in my oppinion is as equally weak of a design as the monolithic kernel when referring to the paper mentioned. The strength of the microkernel architecture regarding security and stability is the protection. When elimitating the protection between tasks or kernel modules, the added stability and security no longer exists. It it 100% necessary to broker all transactions through a kernel level broker to get this security and stability that
I had the pleasure to meet Bram several years back at Linux Expo NY 1999. The man is truly a unique individual. While the majority of Linux geeks (especially the Slashdot crew, who tended to through things at their audience and just act goofy) clowned around a great deal, everyone bragging about thier accomplishments, and of course everyone bragging about all their stocks and options, Bram was very down to earth. This is a man that has legitimately made a tremendous impact on the UNIX world.
:make
There is a fairly funny story about Bram, we were sitting at the hotel, waiting for a Taxi or something, having a nice discussion about the evolution of Unix (I think, could have been that I was asking him about the Netherlands, who knows, doesn't matter in this context) and this gentleman, a man that I would have otherwise considered a fish out of water in my home town of NYC, performed an amazingly interesting feat.
There was a man sitting at the bar behind the bench we were sitting on. He had left his overcoat resting on the railing surrounding the bar. Another man came in off the street. He didn't look particularly unusual, maybe a little dirty for someone that belonged in a $300 a night hotel, but construction workers have conventions to, so why not, right? The man from the street stood next to the bench minding his own business as my conversation with Bram progressed, and then out of nowhere, Bram's arm flyed past my head and I found this other man nearly falling on me.
What had happened was the man from the street began to walk off as if he was heading to a Taxi himself and in the process had tried to take possession of the overcoat of the man at the bar when he wasn't looking. Bram had stopped the thief in the act and after the whole occurance was over, the hotel guard was resolving the issue and the man at the bar was brushing his jacket off and leaving his mouth gaping, Bram sat down and we continued our conversation as if nothing had ever happened.
Well, it's an interesting story to me at least. Sadly, it really takes a foreigner in NYC to be honest enough to go out on a limb to stop a thief. But the man with the overcoat should be thankful I hope.
Anyway, Bram, I don't typically talk about where I come from in this board, I like the minimal anonyminity that you're allowed as a logged in poster. But it's good to hear you're back in action. I'd also like to express the considerable pain and suffering I survived having ported a 1.2million line application to QNX using your VIM, I can at least say thanks for
Good luck with future versions, send me a private message if you'd like. It would be good to hear from you again.
Well, I'm not an accountant, and when I lived in America, even when I was pulling 6 figures, my checking account was regularly overdrawn. I prefer the system here in Norway that says "If there's no money in the account, you can't spend it".
So, here's the deal, how does this work. From what I've read, it appears that there is a issue that pirate organizations are successfully selling or distributing the equivilent of $6.1 billion in DVDs to the public which the movie studios themselves can't seem to do.
So based on the statistic the was given in the article, a claim that says for every pirated DVD which is found, there are 7 more that aren't. So, immediately, we understand that at least $763 million in lost DVD sales are made to people that are willing to purchase DVDs, but are more competative prices. Now, since that figure only accounts for 1 out of 8 copies meaning the 1 copy they find, if we were to assume that at least double that are the DVDs which are physically reproduced instead of downloaded, then we've accounted for $1.526 billion in losses.
To define the loss, I'm assuming that the studios are using the retail prices of the DVDs to calculate the actual losses. So, before we go any further with this astronomical figure of $6.1 billion, I would like to point out that the Walmart value is much lower. For example, the list price for the film "Chronicles Of Narnia" is $29.99 and the Walmart price is $19.87 or approximately 34% less. So first let's adjust the $6.1 billion to represent the walmart pricing, therefore we have $4.026 billion or round to $4 billion for nice numbers, $26 million just isn't worth that much in the real world anymore anyway.
So if my figures are even close to correct, then it means that we're already talking about a major imbelishment by the studios.
By the same math, the loss calculation should instead of being $1.526 billion would be $1.007 billion instead, still leaving approximately $3 billion unaccounted for.
If every single person on the planet were to spend $2 on DVDs each year, then the $3 in losses would be accounted for. But if were to say that 10% of the people which is probably getting closer to reality, spent $20 on DVDs each year, then it would also be made up for. Or if we say that 5% of the people on the planet actually buy DVDs, elimitating 3rd world, countries where hollywood doesn't relase translations, countries where local video is prefered, grandparents that don't own DVD players, children that don't buy their own DVDs, etc... we might have a number that is more realistic. Therefore, we're talking about $40 more spending on DVDs per year per consumer.
That's 2 discs more per year per DVD consumer. So Hollywood is saying that they can't seem to find a method to get DVD consumers to buy 2 more discs per year each. But they're also saying that they believe the consumer is in fact either pirating or purchasing pirated copies for 2 more discs per year.
I'm going to take a leap and assume that for the sake of reality, that up to 1/2 of these pirated copies are actually pirated by people that simply can't afford the additional $40 per year on discs. The average minimum wage in America is approximately $5.50 per hour. The American work day is 40 hours in an american working week and 2080 hours (typically rounded to 2000) working hours in a year. Meaning that minimum wage employees make appoximately $11,000 a year. The number of minimum wage employees in the movie purchasing demographic which I regularly see published as ages 18-26 (primarily male) is staggering. With the exception of childrens films which are most commonly purchased by parents for children, much of the DVD purchases made in a year are by 18-26 primarily male.
So this leads us to the next point, in modern times when broadband is becoming more important, even paying bills is online for most people in this demographic, an internet connection, which shockingly enough costs about $29.95 a month or $359.4 a year from Road Runner, a Time Warner company (a
Well, I script in C++ using Qt. It's very nice to have such a refined scripting language available and it's consistant across platforms as well.
So that being said. I have also written applications in scripting languages. Although none of mine are worth mentioning, maybe it would be best to mention G3 Torrent, an entire GUI torrent app written I think in Python. I think this application is an excellent example of why not to write applications in python, this fellow did an excellent job overall, but the performance just isn't there. Oh memory consumption is aweful, I'm guessing the garbage collector is hindered without some form of dynamic heap compression/relocation.
Well, here we go. Although I feel there are places where scripting and programming are clearly blurred, let's approach the topic.
In my opinion, a script is an application that serves a single minimal purpose. In most cases, a script is less likely to use functions or classes, but instead would be dependant on external applications or components (comparible to functions) that replace command line utilities almost exactly in functionality. For example, instead of using find, using another script in the same language which serves the same purpose.
A C Program that uses fork and stream redirection to call external applications instead of handling the tasks internally is more of a scripting task than a programming task.
The problem at this point is that unlike the days of sed/awk/bourne shell/c shell being the scripting languages where the scripts were quite simple and clearly were scripts, and apps were "programmed" in C. These days the scripting languages are more advanced and closer to compiled langauges in functionality, at the very least, the simple fact that most languages offer some method of runtime linking to C libaries makes them able to make more extensive system calls than the limite functionality they had earlier.
So in reality, the easiest way to define the difference is that "Scripting accomplishes a scripting task where Programming accomplishes a programming task". The language doesn't really matter so much anymore, what matters is the type of program being written.
As far as I can tell, the entire literate world uses google or some other oddball engine. The people that use google can never use MSN since the MSN search just doesn't feel right and it always sends the user to either Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, or AOL.
I figure that both Google and Yahoo will do just fine since everyone will have either the google search bar or have their homepage set to google.
Not a big deal. (BTW, Doesn't IE already default to MSN for their search button?)
I'm not as interested in how it does against NVidia and ATI. To me, it seems more like competition for on board graphics. And if that's the case, how does it do again GMA900?
Can't speak on the licensing, I'd say that the technology itself however is the complication in deployment. Java has a tremendous number of rough edges and that is was is the problem.
Now, before I take a moment to rag on your ridiculous RAM comment, let me assure you that I hate Java from that ground up. I find it to be little more than a virus.
JVM is thin thin thin. The fact is that most non-Sun implementations of the JVM are tight and small. In fact, from a performance perspective, Java is typically superior to compiled languages because of how it handles RAM. Before you blow me off, let me justify my comment. Thanks to the Java license and NDA agreements, I in fact can not say where I learned this information, but I have extensive experience in this topic since I was forced for extended periods to suffer the Java VM on embedded devices.
Java is a relatively simplistic (though strangley complete to the point of OVER KILL!!!) architecture/language/etc... It provides a language matched to a virtual machine matched to a set of somewhat poorly written libraries.
What makes Java superior to compiled languages is that it compensates for several key factors. First I'll refine my definition of a compiled language to clearly specify C/C++/Pascal/other non-garbage collected languages.
1) Application Developers are not System Developers
Using C++ as an example, most application developers use the standard implementation of new and delete. This is fine, but the first thing to keep in mind is that memory allocation for a C++ application that makes use of a lot of small objects tend to pay a huge performance price. C developers regularly shoot down the performance of C++ without realizing that it's the limitation in the C allocation routines.
Object oriented programming is typically very heap intensive. In many cases, developers insist on iterating through strings and lists far too much. Students are even taught in the university that data structures should be used absolutely everywhere. Of course they are taught Big-O and Little-O, but unless you're actually implementing the data structure classes and types, very little importance is placed on performance of these classes.
Strings are abused regularly since even though the allocation unit size of the heap allocator is limited to blocks of 16 bytes (for example), programmers will actually reallocate the buffer for a string to resize it from 8 to 9 bytes in length. By reallocating, I mean they will in fact allocate a new 9 byte string, then copy the original to the new buffer and delete the original buffer.
Application developers pay very little attention to the actual internal mechanics of the classes and functions which they use. To a certain extent, I can forgive them since an application developer is expected to think differently than a system developer. When we depend on system developers to write applications, they're often extremely fast, but relatively unusable.
So here's where Java shines, because of the garbage collection system and because of the relocatable memory architecture, memory is managed in such a way which decreases the cycles spent in allocation and deallocation of buffers. A well written JVM actually will actually either when necessary or when time is available compress the heap to maximize performance and minimize heap consumption.
So although Java seems like a memory hog, it's actually not that bad given the number of allocations and deallocations being performed by the developers. Sadly, the extreme memory use you're talking about is related to the poor system level development skills of application developers stacked on the additional layer which abstracts even more from the developer therefore making it less practical for the developer to understand the internals of the system.
2) System Developers make Terrible Applications
A system developer is typically biased towards raw high level languages such as C (not C++) because their used to making use of the stack whereever po
Steve Jobs is a mountain. What I mean is that there is something special about his whole life story and personality that although financially he can't scratch Bill Gates, Jobs is just more interesting. He's been around, done lots of things and whereever he goes, the press will follow. He has his own technical paparatzi (sp.)
When Jobs ran Pixar, the press loved Pixar. They could do no wrong.
When Jobs ran NeXT, making the most overpriced workstation ever, even though noone could afford the machine, the press stayed interested because there had to be something awesome happening there.
When Jobs ran Apple.... well I think that just looking at the positive press he receives is more than enough, I can't do it justice.
I don't know if the term is popular outside of NY where I grew up, but we used a term called "Rain Maker" for the type of executive that could walk into a stubbling company such as Xerox and gain attraction throughout the world. Jobs is quite possibly the greatest "Rain Maker" ever in the corporate history of the world. His presence alone gains so much positive press for any company that he steps foot into that the rest of the people there start feeling more confident and doing better jobs.
I think another factor to point out is that Jobs, although he'll ride a horse until it's dead and then cut the sucker up and serve it for dinner, he has a skill in listening to his subordinates and knowing where to go next. When it comes to managing, along the road I learned a little from one guy and little from another, but the most important thing I ever learned was from Jobs himself. I'll misquote it badly, and I don't remember where I heard it, but here it goes. It was in an interview sometime back when he was starting back at Apple again.
Interviewer : Steve, your success has been phenominal, but how can you be CEO of Pixar and Apple without spreading yourself too thin.
Steve Jobs : It's a challenge of course, but I have a team of people at both Apple and Pixar made up of really bright guys that I trust completely. In reality, these teams run most of each company, but I listen to them and manage them and the rest takes care of itself.
It was something along those lines, but from a business perspective, I've learned a lot from that statement alone. It's really a matter of having a team you trust and being a person that the team trusts as well. You have to all believe that you're there to take care of each other and that everyone is there to take care of you too. If you build a team like that, you'll suceed.
As for what will happen to Apple when Job's is gone, it's hard to speculate, but I'd say there's a very very good chance that whoever comes next would not be able to attract as much positive attention for Apple as Jobs does. In my experience, Mac is just another computer and in most cases the hardware is excellent but the software is a bit clunky. But Steve Jobs can stand on a stage and pitch a product no matter how silly, for example, a new web cam and it'll make headline news on NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and pretty much every web site people read the next day. For example, if I recall correctly, Slashdot had the iSight as an article within hours of it happening.
I doubt anyone else could hold the interest in the industry that Jobs does. After all, with the exception of the blue screen presentations by Bill, how many times has he had a web video on the front page of news.com.com.com.com.com
Well, I've always loved Intel. Maybe not so much back in the days when the only chipsets came from the likes of UMC, SIS, SMC and others. I have always stuck to Intel not because it was a better processor, but because I felt it was a better platform. I like to know that all the multi-million transistor chips in my system come from a vendor that develops the chips together. Last time I felt comfortable buying AMD was when they produced their own dual processor chipset for the Athlon. Sadly, they stopped doing this far too soon.
At my company, where I have the final say in all hardware purchases, I've refused new computers for users for a while. I have kept family and friends from buying new systems as well. I loan my personal computers to people that need them now and can't wait for something else. The reason behind this is simple. Intel!
I have held off on all these purchases because I don't want to buy Athlon, with the exception of the big iron produced by IBM and HP for Athlon, I still don't trust the platform, only the chip. Besides, from what I've seen so far, the specs on the Intel processors arriving now and coming later are far better than Athlon because of the overall picture.
My next computer purchase will be tomorrow when I purchase my first Core Duo notebook. This is a notebook with a CPU from Intel and a chipset from Intel and a graphics chip from nVidia. The memory will be replaced with either Kingston or Crucial since I max out the RAM in all the notebooks I buy because it just makes sense. I'll install Windows XP and Windows XP 64 on the system and start testing to see which I prefer. How the compiler performs will be a huge factor.
So my point of all this other than just rambling is that Intel's sales have dropped, not because AMD has a better product, but because I feel that when AMD took the performance lead, it was obvious that Intel wasn't just sitting on their thumbs no matter how it looked. Intel had the Core design on its' way. And frankly, the perfomance per watt and the overall performance in general is more than enough to wait for. After all, who wants to buy a new computer with a Pentium D when Core Duo for desktop is coming. And who wants to buy a Pentium M when Core Duo is here and we're just waiting for it to propagate through the sales channels. It just wouldn't make sense.
And for programmers, the Intel C/C++ compilers for Core look fantastic. The extra performance that will come out of compiling with those will be really amazing I think.
It's the fear of the consumer swiping the card and being fined. I was a bit tired when writing and had felt the point was implicitly clear from the rest of the statement. Being able to use cash ensures the average person that they are able pay. With the current system which is directly controlled by banks, when the consumer swipes their card and the payment is rejected because of "attempted overdraw", the consumer is fined $20-$30 by their bank on the spot. I once had this happen to me with a $2 payment because a money transfer from savings to checking had not cleared yet. In countries where the customer is right, if you swipe your card and there isn't enough cash there, then put back an item and swipe again. No penalty. The other issue which I know is a problem, when I was living in Florida, also fondly known by many of the local residents as "The Minimum Wage State", without the ability to float a check for 2 days over the weekend or even face the charge of $30 for a bounced check, there are many average people that can't even buy diapers for their babies. --- On another note, when I first moved to Norway and was initially employed here, I was horrified to hear that the company I worked for would only pay me monthly. I mean that's ridiculos right? Well the fact was, i struggled like hell for the first 3-4 months to get used to it, after all, right after the move, I lived paycheck to paycheck. But after the initial period ended, it was great because then I received a large lump sum of money once per month, I could pay all my bills for the month and have a handle on my finances for the rest of the period. This is quite common here. I think this type of forced budgeting really helps people get thier finances in order and allows the not-so-good at budgetting such as myself to learn the responsibility out of necessity. On a similar note, as an employee, try to avoid working for a firm that pays weekly, it's a sign that the management has learned that their employee base (or sometimes themselves) are not responsible enough to make it more than a week without cash coming in. As an employer, it's a good idea to refuse salary advances except under extrodinary circumstances, if your employees are so poor at managing their own finances that they can't make it from paycheck to paycheck, then it's time to find other employees.
I'm an American that lives in Norway. Since moving here 7 years ago, I don't recall using cash very much at all, much to my son's dismay. He likes to jingle my pockets for change to put in his piggy bank, but I have to make special stops to get change for him to avoid disappointing him.
I am a person that never has an empty savings account but regularly keeps my spending account low to avoid spending too much. See it's nice to have a reminder that you're blowing all your dough. I don't go to the ATM machine, so I never know what my balance is. Simply put, if there's no money in the account when I try to pay for something, I pick up my phone, push a few buttons, pay for what I need and I'm cautious for the rest of the month.
Since leaving the states, I no longer have a checkbook. All my bills (except my AMEX) is on autopay. I would put the AMEX that way too, but I'd like to see how much I'm spending on it.
The office I used to work in has a coke machine that was payable by telephone and I've even paid for train tickets using my phone as well.
As for cash, the only time I use it is when I'm paying the maid or paying the car wash that is run by people that would prefer to fly below the radar.
What I'm really trying to say is that Norway has been more or less a cashless society for several years now. Of course people still use cash, I know a lot of older people that still don't feel comfortable with the idea of everything being done with plastic, but it's an option which is nice to leave open to them. Cash has some benefits.
As for the experience in France, well, I see it as publicizing something that is not that interesting. It sounds as if they're just testing to see if telephone payment is an option. Personally I hate that idea since there are many times my telephone battery dies and I'd be stranded. Can you imagine not being able to pay for a taxi because you forgot to charge your battery?
As for America, well it's a long time before this modern world ever gets there. There's a tremendous amount of money made by the banks on bounced check fees and even worse, "Overdraw attempt fees" on using your check cards. I mean, come on, if the money isn't in the bank and the bank and the store knows it there on the spot, it's the store that should penalize you, not the bank. And having worked at a banking clearing house, I wrote a report generator for producing an account of three things on one report.
1) How much money was lost due to bounced checks
2) How much money was made from overdraw fees that were later corrected by the account holder
3) How much of a difference was there between the two.
The number was always positive and not by small margins. I ran this script many many many times because I simply couldn't believe the numbers coming out. In one case, I printing a 60 page report of this activity over a single week and tallied it manually to ensure that what I was calculating was in fact correct. It's unbelievable. The American banking system is dependant on these overdraw fees and will never separate with them. So as long as that's the case, removing classic style paper based money and checks is out of the question.
There was a time a long time ago where John C. Dvorak almost made sense. It was a much simpler time, but Dvorak has spent his entire career trying to come up with a "Dvorak's Law" that would make him even more famous than Moore.
I remember a time when anyone heard Norton, they would immediately think of Peter Norton, the guy who wrote the famous books every developer needed on PC assembly language programming. These were the days when John C. Dvorak was more than just another quack.
Well, John C. these days isn't of much more use than doing a TV spot regarding video games. Even then I can't see that I agree with his opinions.
If I had nothing better to do with my time, I would browse through all the "Dvorak's Predictions" for the industry and what I would find is that he's made about 2 accurate predictions in the world. And one would be what time lunch would arrive within a margin of error of 1 hour. The second noone even cares about.
So, I have to agree 100% with you regarding your comment, this is a man that would be otherwise unemployed if someone like ZDNet or whoever holds his leash this week didn't think his name was of at least a little value.
P.S. - Does anyone know whatever happened to Mace Tools? There was a time when Paul Mace was an interesting name in computing as well. Looks like he's still selling software, but nothing of any interest.
Well yes, no, maybe.
There are many different approaches to DRM. A perfect DRM system would require that rights managment is handled entirely at the endpoints. It would require that the video card is designed in such a manor that it handled all the DRM decoding directly on board and the video card would return information that it obtained from the monitor verifying that the screen itself is in fact able to handle a final stage of DRM decoding. The rights management at the monitor would have to be more secure than a single bit. It would have to perform key exchange as well.
The video card would require some method of secure key exchange with a rights management authority. This piece of code would be open sourced and GPLd. Probably as part of the video driver. This code would simple provide a means for which the video card could communicate with the authority. The actual method of decoding and key management would still be highly encrypted.
The drawback to this system is that there would need to be a central authority ceritifying specific hardware devices as DRM compliant. Every screen from a manufacturer would have to be placed in a test environment where it would be tested to guarantee that the key exchange system is properly implemented and could not be read from the device itself. There would also have to be some means in which the monitors correctly identify themselves, such as a serial number. Video chip vendors would have to also verify their DRM compliancy the same way.
As for audio, I can't possibly imagine a method of DRM that would be entirely effective. Until such time that speakers are a sealed device that contains a processor, D/A converter, and a digital transducer (meaning no magnetic could of any type), there is no conceivable method of producing a DRM that can protect audio content. High frequency watermarks might be able to ensure that computers can't be used to record audio containing the water mark, but any graphical equalizer should be able to filter these high frequency bands out. And even though it wouldn't be perfect CD quality, using something such as an RME DSP card produces high enough quality output that the difference should be relatively unnoticable, even to trained ears.
We get into privacy concerns at this level. It means that a video card and monitor is registered to a user somehow. This means that everytime that the rights of a title is verified, it is entirely traceable. It means that the FBI could effectively petition the court for a warrant to release data regarding the IP address which was last used to verify rights to a piece of music.
It gives organizations a line tapping type of right that typically Americans are protected from under law, it's the end user rights agreements that noone reads that then forfeits their rights to their anonyminity. I'd like to point out at this time that it is quite common that people forfeit rights unknowingly because even if they did read the end user licenses on most material, they would not understand what is said in the legalese.
So, to make a brief answer to the initial question, no... GPL'd code to assist in DRM is by no means a key to open the door in a properly implemented DRM system. The code itself would only assist in the DRM process, not perform the task itself.
As to the legality and morality of the issue, personally I care less what people see me doing. For all I care, they can watch me in hopes of catching me cross-dressed in lingerie committing an act of murder. But others don't see violations of their rights to privacy the same way. Many people are paranoid of "The Man" and fear that these rights violations will lead to the end of civilization. The Advent 1611 group likes to publish that anything with an tracking ability is one step closer to revelations (but they also damn the Queen of England for meeting with devil worshipping Ozzy).
So here's the deal, to implement a DRM system that is able to potentially actually work, and also to make it so that there's any chance the
Ok... add to the confusion... my turn :)
If I understand your interprettation correctly, what you're saying is for example that when the ALU has completed a calculation, instead of the clock signal informing the first stage register latches to trigger, instead the ALU itself would inform the register latches to trigger?
If this is the case, then my first CPU design was in fact an async/"Clockless" CPU from that perspective. I didn't believe there was a need for a clock to signify that calculation was completed.
The problems I had with the overall design wasn't the development of such a processor, after all, using SRAM made it quite simple to be clockless on the memory circuitry. The problem was specifically that it was impossible to modularize the architecture. For example, the prefetch and decoder were dependant on the result from the arithmetic or store logic. When using a single state prefetch, I could simply decode and execute an instruction by latching the instruction into a register of its own. This would allow me to prefetch the next instruction, but when I expanded the prefetch to include a branch predictor, my dependancy on a variable execution time per instruction became nearly impossible.
What finished off the design and sent the majority of it to the "maybe I'll work on it someday" directory was when an arithmetic or store operation could execute in a shorter time than the prefetch could update the ring buffer state.
So if I understand your interprettation correctly, then what I'm reading is that ARM has managed to actually develop a single CPU design that performs all operations on a "As needed" basis. But this in itself is by no means exciting or revelutionary, what would be genuinely exciting is if they managed to develop a method of making it modular enough to enhance the design without having to redesign the entire "order of execution" state machine every time.
P.S. - One last thing... after trying for the past 20 years (I am really a digital man, and I started at age 10), I finally understood analog well enough to develop my very own high speed opamp. My only purpose for this was to design a minimal transistor clock multiplier instead of stealing someone elses design. If this architecture catches on, then I'll have learned opamps for no reason and I'll be really put out
Point taken... I admit my writing skills aren't as polished at they should be before writing on slashdot.
:) If there are further holes in my statement above, let them stand, I've already spent far more time than legitimately budgetable backing up arguments that were written to back up a sarcastic remark, after all, we're talking about Eiffel, it's really just not that important.
I had meant new as in new to the environment they are to be presented. Which in the context of the original post is more suitable. I was not meant to label the age of the language as new. I recall the early hub bub in Dr. Dobbs back when I was in elementary school reading the magazine in the library. If I recall correctly, it was during one of Dr. Dobbs articals predicting which language would be the logical successor to C in the modern world. They presented maybe 5 other languages as well, including D which I believe is not actually the D we are aquainted with now. I also recall that C++ was not given much merit (which as a c++ developer I would be forced to agree with when comparing the other languages I've evaluated) and that Dobbs called it wrong.
Regarding the Scheme remark, again my writing skills could have been better, but I was remarking not based on the syntactical merits which easily convey to LISP (mind you I've never been terribly fond of either of them after being forced to write AutoLISP ages ago), but more to the point that the clear superiority of Scheme (which does not convey to LISP) is that the compilers are the most optimized compilers out there because of the compiler researchers' affinity to the language (which as you point out is due to its simplicity). Theorically, there's not reason that Scheme could not be as main stream as Common Lisp since extensions such as FFIGEN and Header to Scheme are able to bridge the gap between Scheme and system libraries quite cleanly.
P.S. For all the others reading, this is a perfect example why writing a post on slashdot should be reviewed by 10 other people to close all loopholes in an argument before clicking submit
P.P.S As for being old enough to drink, well, umm.... I've worked with enough compilers that can't seem to generate the same output twice, would this be the reasoning why?
When choosing the right tool for the job, you choose the tool that can meet a balance of three particular things.
1) Best tool for producing the application
2) The tool you can find people that know how to use
3) The tool with the best support
Well, there are tons of places that Eiffel is the best tool for the job. I would even imagine that there are circumstances where the support is there. Problem is finding the people that know how to use it.
I've been goofing with Eiffel ocassionally, but time and time again, it proves the wrong tool for the job. It's just too different from other languages to be able to meet my needs. I always fall back onto C++ with a widget toolkit (such as Qt). It is definately not because C++ is a better language. It is definately not that Qt is the ultimate widget toolkit. It is because there is a good balance of all 3 criteria being met.
I am 100% in favor of companies trying to sell us a new language, but what it really boils down to is that only a handful of people will use it and other than an ocassional interest article, this is probably the big hay day for the language since there is a open source news worthy article written about it.
Another great example of a language that is probably better but has never picked up steam is Scheme. Every compiler developer in the world loves scheme. It is by far the most heavily optimized compiled language on the planet. It has great merits. But the fact is that with the exception of the scheme compilers written in scheme and an ocassional university project, the language stalled years ago.
The parent comment to yours was sarcasm... it may have been misinformed as you comment, but the fact is that he is right in his sarcasm.
I see a whole lot of text in the article, but frankly, until I see whether it's some gag (especially this close to Apr 1.) I don't care to read articles like this. At the moment I'm picturing a stone with the imprints of the stomach of a fish and 6 little shoes with a Nike Swoosh.
Well, it may sound crazy, but the most effective method I've come across for dealing with addiction is to remove the person from it. Talk to the guy, convince him that you need to take a trip to somewhere that his vice is not available. If you both have passports, I recommend a trip to somewhere that is less likely to have computers that can play WoW. As a good example, I would recommend either the Virgin Islands or maybe the Greek island of Samos. If you're American without a passport, then a trip to the Keys in south Florida is pretty good. The goal is to get him away from easily addictive things. For example, if you were to go to Amsterdam and sit at the coffee shops and enjoy the hash, it's counter productive. Hash itself is believed to be not addictive, but the environment and lifestyle of using it is addictive. Drinking girly drinks with little unbrellas in it in a tropic island is relaxing, not so addictive. Often with game addictions the player just needs to experience life without the game to see that it really isn't so bad. Alternatively, you can be a mean assed bastard, take taser gun and hit the telephone wires on the side of his house with it. (Hit the cable wire if he's using cable modem). It should do enough damage that he won't be able to access the net without the cable installation guy coming out and fixing it. Of course, the less destructive method would be just to take a minitorch and a shit load of solder and make the biggest solder ball you've ever seen on top of the connections, shorting it out. Lots of 2 part epoxy on top of that adds a nice effect. I personally prefer the taser approach just because it's really fun to listen to a person screaming their head off yelling "FFS" and such when their cablemodem/adsl modem goes up in smoke.
I simply don't understand the pressure from the industry placed on Microsoft to become part of the ODF. The fact of the matter is that there would be no benefit to the Open Source community for Microsoft to adopt this format, worse, it would be highly detrimental to the community if Microsoft were to implement it and in the future standardize on it.
OpenOffice is by no means a tinker toy application anymore. It is gradually coming to support as many useless features as Microsoft Word does. In time, the number of features will be almost beyond documentation.
Wikipedia documents the original release of Microsoft Word as May 2nd, 1983. The entry also states that Charles Simonyi left Xerox PARC to work at Microsoft starting in 1981, so I can only assume that the development of Word had already begun at this point.
So by this, I'm suggesting that in a period of 23 years and a sum of money far exceeding the gross income of billions in development, marketing, user research, testing, etc... Microsoft word includes such a vast amount of functionality, that any document format standard that could contain all these possible data types requirements would have to be huge.
So that brings me to the next item, ODF is being advocated through the industry under false pretexts. The companies noise makers out there are possibly under the false assumption that a document format is all that is needed to guarantee interoperability between word processors and spreadsheets made by different organizations. This is simply false.
If Microsoft were to make a serious attempt to use ODF as their document container format, initially what would occur is that Microsoft Word would be able to save only a limited subset of its features in this format. Microsoft would be forced to introduce extensions to the format. And although extensions are provided for in the format, the ODF consortium would need to either make alternative suggestions to provide the same functionality or they would simply have to adopt the Microsoft extension since it would already be in wide spread use.
Now this in itself is not a real problem, but the problems starts to occur as we go further. Microsoft provides multiple scripting languages in their document format, for example, it is quite common to find Word Basic and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in the document format. These languages have bindings to objects such as toolbars, menus, internal document structures, image decoders and more. If Microsoft were to provide support for these languages through an extension to ODF, then in reality, for ODF to remain a standard, ODF would have to bless these extensions. In the case of scripting language support, there is a much bigger problem than with simple document primatives like tables. For OpenOffice or AbiWord to be ODF compliant, then they would in fact have to implement scripting engines for each of these languages supported by Word and build in the minimum required user interface and object bindings to support the languages since these languages are in fact useless without the ability to interact with the application.
This brings me to the next point which is items such as font embedding. Using a language such as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), it is entirely possible to encapsulate fonts as moveto, arcto, lineto, etc.. paths. But as many know, the graphics world is clearly less friendly to the Open Source concept than the software world is. There would have to be some sort of digital rights management to guarantee the intellectual property of the font vendors that guard their property as much as the music or movie industry does. This would require the introduction of a DRM engine to be standardized on. The reason for this is that simple encryption or obsurification would not be good enough to satisfy the font vendors, the open products would provide source to extract fonts from the documents. This is obviously not acceptable. So OpenOffice, ABIWord (etc...) would then have to implement a DRM engine that would cause equally as m
PDF is effectively worthless as a single page format... this is the webs domain.
The CSS committee has attempted to tackle pagination for ages... guess what... it doesn't work... it's aweful, it'll be years before it's even close to ok.
Let me point out that Opera, Mozilla, Netscape 4.X, Internet Explorer, etc... have supported this kind of functionality for ever... it's MIME embedding. I don't recall the exact syntax and it doesn't interest me enough to bother looking it up, but things like or (syntax is completely wrong, but the concept is there) have been around forever.
So, what's new about this? And more importantly, is someone just wasting my time by publishing a story about a program that just automates the process?
And in response to the earlier story from someone, last I checked SVG is a scalable format in web pages that theoretically is nearly identical to PDF. PDF is a path based renderer. By path based renderer, I mean that everything is based on (CreatePath, MoveTo, LineTo, ArcTo, ClosePath, FillPath) type operations. This is the mechanism that is adopted from PostScript (maybe some earlier technologies), SVG is based on the same idea.
Is this still true?
In the more than futile search of a way to get the religious fanatics that I unfortunately am often bombarded by to back off, I've formulated an alternative complimentary theory of intelligent design that takes their emotional attachment to faith in the highly scientific reverend they listen to as well as actual scientific theory. On both topics I am not an expert. I am however well versed in the arguments most often presented by both sides.
First of all, let me clarify that I am an atheist minister and missionary. I feel it is my personal responsibility to dispute anyone who feels their right about anything no matter how much proof is available. I believe in the only two certainties being death and taxes. I also will gladly present myself as an expert on a vast array of fields that I am not qualified to even say the names of. So now that the disclaimer is presented, I'll continue forward to ensure that my opinion will be preached and spread. (P.S. I don't believe this, but consider it a better alternative to intelligent design or creationism). Also for the sake of influencing the religious weirdos, I've chosed to ignore fact in favor of truth and also chose to pretend that politics had nothing to do with the evolution of any religion and lean towards the "God said so" idealism.
Intelligent design and the alternative beliefs including big bang and evolution do not necessarily need to be exclusive. This theory as I present it merges the classical beliefs of the theologian and the modern beliefs of the educated and unite them together as a single common belief. This theory obviously needs to "Throw a few punches" at the old beliefs in order to justify the need for a more intelligent design theory.
It is important for me to clearly state that intelligent design is not in fact a theory or even a valid belief as much as a buzzword that can be used to draw god into th educational system. Intelligent design is nothing more than an incomplete idea that is used to sound smarter without actually understanding the idea at all.
It is also important to clarify that truth is religious. Fact is scientific. Fact require that something is indisputable, for example, 2+2=4 is fact. Absence makes the heart grow fonder is truth.
So let us lay the bricks for the theory of intelligent design. I will attempt to use arguments that are no weaker than any other truth in religion. I will leave it to the smarter people to expand on my theories and make them at least as credible as Christianity.
Judeism was a religion that although believed to exist long before, was in fact formalized as a faith and belief during the times of King Ramses II in ancient egypt by the king's "adopted" grandson Moses. Before this, although monotheistic beliefs had been experimented (such as the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten's Atenism several generations earlier) with, the "civilized" world at the time was a society of polytheistic belief. Moses raised awareness of the monotheistic system (some say with the help of witches trying to cause the downfall of Ramses) within his people, the nomadic tribe of the Jews. Upon their grand Exodus, Moses spoke with God and wrote the first ten laws of the Jews, the Ten Commandments. By some beliefs (although I am not a yeshiva graduate) Moses himself transcribed the five books of Moses, others belief it was transcribed as dictated by God in later times. Also, certain rules were presented. For example, Kosher, the diet handed down from God to keep the Jews pure (an some would say at least alive in the desert while travelling 40 years). I can tell this story for hours or days, but we all know it, it has been around for a while. I'll makes notes of the interesting parts are required if needed.
As the Christian belief system came around (conveniently when most needed, around the time of the not quite sane Emporer Caligula Caesar) and already as forming a following in Rome, and King Herod Agrippa was lining himself up to be the prophesized son of God to the world, things began to change. Although