Page 5 of the PEW Internet study reports that "...only 4% of email users admitted to action that keeps the spam industry viable, which is ordering a product or service from an unsolicited email. This number has always been low; it was 7% in 2003, 5% in 2004, and 6% in 2005."
These figures are interesting because there is often speculation about these numbers during conversations about the financial viability of being a spammer. The article suggests that these figures are "low" but they are much higher than the "back of the envelope" estimate of 1% that I usually see people use when guessing. It is going to be difficult to stop the spam problem when people keep buying things from spammers. Even if technical solutions like DKIM have some degree of success, such a high response rate to spam gives an obvious incentive to spammers to continue to find work-arounds.
Sorry you had a disappointing experience. Mine turned out much happier.
I wanted to see what Solaris 10 was like so I put it on an AthlonXP 2400 machine I had. The motherboard has onboard audio and network. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if Solaris could detect the network adapter and it didn't seem to be able to do so, so I put in an Intel EtherExpress Pro adapter I had in a box and it immediately recognized this. As for audio, I did a Google search for "Solaris 10 audio" and found a site that had drivers that I downloaded, installed with one or two commands that were pretty clearly indicated, and rebooted. Audio worked then.
My video card is a 2D Matrox card which was immediately recognized and configured by the X11 server used by Solaris 10 (this is called Xorg and is probably the same X11 server you use on Linux). I have seen people using accelerated NVidia video on Solaris 10 but I have not personally tried this. I know that there ARE drivers available from NVidia, so I am assuming that if I can follow the instructions to get them to work with Linux that I can probably also do so with Solaris. One advantage that Solaris has here (as far as I know) is that you don't have to keep relinking the driver to deal with ABI issues that Linux has when you upgrade your Linux kernel. I appreciate that because it makes my life simpler.
I don't have a SATA controller in my Athlon, so I cannot speak to that. However I believe that the machines coming from Sun have SATA so I assume that it must work.
I do not believe that Solaris 10 is supported on notebook computers, so I do not believe that wireless cards are typical hardware for Solaris. That said, during my Googling around I did see that someone has some experimental wireless drivers, but I have not looked at them in detail nor have I attempted to use them, so I cannot speak to how well they work.
I don't think my AthlonXP 2400+, EtherExpress, and Matrox card are too atypical to expect geeks to be able to easily get if someone was determined to try Solaris 10. It was certainly nowhere near as difficult for me to put together this system for experimenting as it was for me to put together my first Linux systems in the mid-1990's that required things like SCSI adapters to really work well.
I'm not sure that they really care much about CDE except for supporting legacy users. The default window system that Sun seems to be pushing now is called the Java Desktop System which is simply a repackaged version of an open source desktop management system called Gnome (http://www.gnome.org/). I myself am typically a fan of KDE but decided to give JDS a try and it seems to have its own merits that make it worthwhile. To that end, it hasn't been a big enough deal to me so far to spend the effort necessary to replace JDS with KDE on my Solaris 10 machine. I've also gained some perspective in allowing myself to get exposure to another desktop environment.
I have recently been engaged in a serious effort to learn about Solaris 10, and have been very pleasantly surprised at what I have found. While there may be valid reasons that some Linux users may dislike Solaris, I cannot agree that the criticism you cite about the userland tools being "basically unmodified from the early 1990s" is one of the valid reasons. Most of the GNU userland tools that you describe as missing are actually installed under/usr/sfw/bin in the *default* Solaris 10 install that you get right from the standard DVD. This is in addition to the same non-GNU tools being present in other locations on the default install. You simply need to adjust your PATH accordingly if you want the GNU tools to be found first.
If you want to prefer Linux over Solaris that's fine, but make sure that what you are criticizing is actually true. Otherwise you are misleading yourself and possibly missing out on some really cool technology. You point out the cool technology in ZFS and DTrace, and I agree that they are really fantastic reasons to use Solaris. In fact, I am right now thinking that Solaris offers a lot of technologies that Linux can't touch without giving up a lot of the characteristics that make Linux useful. Give it an honest chance and you might be surprised at what Solaris 10 can do!
I am not sure that I can agree with your analogy. Like many analogies, it is flawed because the circumstance you describe is different from the circumstance to which you are making a comparison. For one thing, in your analogy, the BMW is physically stolen and I can no longer drive it. In the case of the students, no physical item is missing.
Consider a different analogy. How about if you are sitting in a library (which, much like a school, is a place that you go to learn things) and I come in with my own personal book (which, much like a computer, is something you would expect to use to learn) and set it on a table while I go to the restroom. In my absence, you pick up my book and skim through it to see if it looks like something you might want to read and then put it back where you found it before I return. In this analogy, much like what the students really (reportedly) did, you didn't take anything physical and simply looked around. In a place like a library (or a school) where people go to learn, I'd expect curious people to harmlessly fulfill their curiousity.
Now, these students also reportedly used hacking tools to retrieve the administrator password even after it was changed. That was wrong. Further, they installed software on the machines that they were specifically told not to install. That was also wrong. Other articles I have read about this situation seem to suggest that they were warned many times that they would be punished if they continued to do this. (Which, I can appreciate the position of the school officials. However I think it is often not such a good idea to send a message to students that "learning outside of school time will not be tolerated".)
Kids' behavior is defined by doing things that are often well not thought out. This is why children are not allowed to vote or drive or use alcohol. I think that felony punishments for this transgression are extremely out of line with the crime. If you hand this many laptops to kids, you have to expect that some "creative examination" of them is likely to happen.
The complexity of the SMP code in FreeBSD 5.3 was what I was talking about. IMHO, the FreeBSD hackers have been working very hard to move forward with fine-grained locking and my main worry is that they're making such a complicated system that it's going to be hard to continue moving forward with it.
I am really interested to see what Matt comes up with in DragonFly and have read a lot of the design info that he has posted as well as taken a look at a fair amount of his source code. He's a smart guy, and I think the hackers working on this project stand a good chance of doing something that will get a lot of attention. I'm not sure how directly applicable the technique is to any of the other BSDs without major work, though.
What is the condition of the SMP support in the upcoming NetBSD 2.0 release?
I know that SMP has been present in -current, at least for architectures like Alpha (and others?), for several years. My impression is that 2.0 is intended to be the first release where SMP is a real priority. I have been a longtime FreeBSD user and have watched their progress (and struggles) as the state of the art has moved from SMP in the 4.x kernels into the 5.x kernels where they are trying to squash down the BGL. How does the SMP work in NetBSD compare to this effort? Is it more akin to the FreeBSD 4.x efforts, are they trying to do something more along the lines of the FreeBSD 5.x work, or something else entirely?
The reason that I ask is that NetBSD has this reputation for not doing something until they figure out the "right" way to do it. So I guess what I'm really asking is what their take is on the "right" way to do SMP. I really want to look at the source code to figure this out, but haven't had the time to invest in this, so I'm wondering if someone else who has might share their impressions.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
When you are running on battery, try turning the display brightness down to ~7-8 instead of running it at 10. To my eyes, the difference is not very perceptible, but the improvement in battery life is pretty big.
Actually, I immediately thought of the USL v. BSDI case when I heard about SCO's recent filing. My OS of choice tends to lean towards the BSD side (simply due to my background as a CS Ph.D. student, I suppose) but I certainly use Linux for many projects. I used FreeBSD back in ca. 1992 when it seemed that it might be encumbered due to licensing difficulties from USL.
I think the important thing to realize is that while different open source software camps may at times compete against each other (Linux vs. BSD, Gnome vs. KDE, etc.), in the end the diversity we have within our ranks is a very powerful asset. Had the lawsuit in 1992 turned out differently, Linux would have been an unencumbered alternative that would have allowed the movement to continue forward. Likewise, in the extremely off chance that SCO did do something to encumber Linux today, the open source community has many other fine operating systems that are alternatives and which could be a basis to continue moving forward.
IMHO, an important lesson to realize from this after it finally settles down (and I have no doubt that SCO will end up appearing kind of stupid in the end) is that the diversity in open source software is the biggest benefit and allows it to overcome these kinds of things.
Ignoring the aspect of FBI agents sneaking around and installing sneaky devices in peoples' keyboards, this means one of three things:
1. Nobody in the government (FBI, CIA, NSA) has the capability of easily decrypting PGP-encrypted files.
2. The FBI cannot easily decrypt PGP-encrypted files, but other government agencies (CIA, NSA) can but will not share.
3. The government can routinely decrypt PGP-encrypted files, but don't want to tip their hand to this ability. Therefore in order to explain how they have access to such encrypted files they have to install a device that could give them access to the files through a means other than decrypting them with sheer computing power.
Due to the merger between BSDi and Walnut Creek, FreeBSD will soon be getting the benefit of fine-grained SMP from BSD/OS. When this code becomes available in the FreeBSD codebase, do you think it will have a large impact on the deployment of SMP in OpenBSD? That is, would you expect to be able to directly leverage much of this code for use within the OpenBSD codebase?
I don't know if you'll read this follow-up or even actually care to know this, but...
Goedel's theorem doesn't have anything to do with this situation. His theorem says that any system that starts with a set of axioms and laws and then uses these to prove theorems is inherently incomplete. Back around the turn of the century a mathematician named Hilbert proposed that the mathematics world should try to tie all mathematics together into a sort of "grand unified theory of mathematics", but a few years later Goedel's insight and subsequent theorem proved that this was impossible.
I don't know what level you are at in school, but if you are in college, check out classes from your local computer science department about the Theory of Computation. Turing theory is one of the topics in this class and is closely related to the Incompleteness Theorem.
Look at the web pages for this "degree" and you find out that it is actually an "option" on another degree program. That is, one actually gets a Ph.D. in physics or chemistry or another related field (they're listed) "with a nanotechnology option". This means that you fulfill the requirements of the Ph.D. program of your choice plus take additional coursework and fulfill extra requirements for the nanotechnology option.
Also, take a look at the courses listed on the web page. The only ones that mention nanotechnology are seminar-type courses. As a graduate student, I can tell you that these seminar courses usually involve sitting around and reading/discussing papers and ideas in your field of study. The remaining balance of courses are taken from physics, chemistry, etc. and are courses that majors in these fields are probably already taking.
That said, this is the way new graduate programs often start up. That is, they start by being options on traditional degree programs. Then, as the field expands and the amount of knowledge in the field grows, the options turn into true degree-granting programs of their own. See, for example, the many Computational Science programs in the United States. A few years ago these were all options on more traditional degrees from computer science or physics or chemistry or other related field. Now they are turning into real degree-granting departments at some schools.
Yes, a free (speech, beer) Eiffel compiler exists, but (at least the last time I looked at it) it is nowhere near as good as the commercial Eiffel compiler that Meyer's company sells. I had actually meant to include this in my original post but forgot.
I don't think that the GNU Eiffel compiler is going to sway that many people towards Eiffel as a reasonable language to code in instead of C/C++ unless the free compiler is equivalent to what you would get with a commercial compiler. GCC is as good as commercial C compilers. The last time I checked, GNU Eiffel was not as good as ISE's Eiffel.
Boy, this was certainly a long article. In some ways this is good because it gives the reader a significant chance to understand the author's viewpoints on the subject very well. I've certainly been interested in this since I started following Meyer's work around the time when the first edition of Object Oriented Software Construction came out. The long article is unfortunate, though, because I'm not sure many people will read the entire thing and try to suck all the nuances out; some of the message will get lost in the noise.
One thing that I noticed is that Meyer seems to confuse "free software" (as in free speech) with "open source software" which simply means that you can obtain the source code for the software you are using. I'm not positive yet if I think this is significant in what he is saying in this essay.
The biggest thing that I notice is that some of Meyer's views have certainly had impact on the success of the Eiffel programming language. For those of you who don't know Meyer, he is a Ph.D. who wrote a very large tome called Object Oriented Software Construction now in its second edition. This book, at over 1100 pages, lays the groundwork for his views on how one should construct object-oriented software. He adopts a very conservative view (use strong declared types for variables, cause the compiler to catch as many errors as possible during compilation of the source code, etc.) and makes many strong points that are useful particularly for building extremely large software systems. Although his views go against some compelling ideas from other sides of the object-oriented software camp (such as Smalltalkers), his treatment of the subject in an almost academic manner have made a lot of people pay attention to him.
One vehicle Meyer uses to promote his ideas is the Eiffel programming language. Eiffel is actually used as a "pseudocode" in OOSC and at the end of the text he reveals that it is actually a true programming language that you can get compilers for and use in real development. In my opinion, as a community, computer professionals do too much coding with low-level tools and languages such as C/C++ and I would like to see a higher level language such as Eiffel succeed as a way of allowing developers to consider problems at a higher level, which I think will result in better-quality code. Unfortunately, Meyer's company charges money for all versions of its Eiffel compiler. While the cost isn't prohibitive (it's less than $100 I believe) I don't think anybody is going to buy the compiler to "try it out" on the outside chance than it may be better than what they are using when they can just continue to use GCC for free. The consequence of this is that as a community, developers will keep using the same stupid low-level tools for building EVERYTHING when they could be using more sophisticated higher-level tools for building many pieces of software. I believe that if Meyer could just see this and offer free (beer) ways to get their tools, Eiffel could really take off.
How can they do this and stay in business? (And this touches on the topic Meyer was writing about.) Easy. The base Eiffel compiler could be free (beer, or even speech). Students and individuals would be able to try it out and see that it really is cool and that they can code much more effectively with it. Eiffel would become more popular. Companies would start building software with it, and for this they would like tools such as profilers, safety checkers, etc. These could cost money. Meyer's company could make money off of these more advanced tools that companies will want anyway when building large software systems. Everybody wins.
Another poster suggested Python, and I would like to agree with that suggestion.
On NT, Python can access any COM object that you can script with, say, Visual Basic. Since nearly every application on NT is also accessible via COM, this opens many possibilities.
On NT, Python also includes the ability to talk to ODBC data sources. I believe there is direct access via ODBC class libraries. If not, you can definitely use the ADO COM objects (I have done this to access SQLServer).
Python has good access to system calls on whatever platform it is running on via its rich class libraries. This is also the case with NT.
Python has a CORBA ORB, called FNORB, available that should be able to interoperate with Visibroker.
Check out www.python.org for more information about Python. There is a link from the main page to Mark Hammond's extensions to allow Python to run on Win32. You need to get two things for this: the base Python package for Windows, plus a package of extensions.
Finally, Python is undergoing a transition from the current version (1.5.2) to the new version (1.6) due out by the beginning of June. Any 1.6 stuff you see will be alpha/beta quality code.
Best of luck to you. I hope you find Python as enjoyable to work with as I have!
Except from what I understand, the range of Bluetooth is pretty limited. Like, it works in ranges of much less than 10 meters, more like 1-2 meters.
But this thread is pretty interesting to me because it's exactly what I have been thinking for at least a year. As the original poster says, I'd like to be able to be sitting in a meeting and pull out my Pilot and check to see if I have new email, or to see if my long-running job has finished, or to check on my stock quotes. And then without changing anything, be able to go home and have the same configuration of software connect to my LAN at home so I can do the same things while I'm watching TV without having to go into the computer room. It's only a secondary concern of mine to be able to have cellular-type access where I can be sitting in a coffee shop and access the network. Most of the time I'm in a location that would be wired to the LAN anyway.
Plus, like the original poster pointed out, all sorts of cool applications would ensue. My Pilot could exchange information with your Pilot if we were close enough to each other. One can envision all sorts of interesting applications.
The only concern I'd have is that the wireless connectivity might trash battery lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
Page 5 of the PEW Internet study reports that "...only 4% of email users admitted to action that keeps the spam industry viable, which is ordering a product or service from an unsolicited email. This number has always been low; it was 7% in 2003, 5% in 2004, and 6% in 2005."
These figures are interesting because there is often speculation about these numbers during conversations about the financial viability of being a spammer. The article suggests that these figures are "low" but they are much higher than the "back of the envelope" estimate of 1% that I usually see people use when guessing. It is going to be difficult to stop the spam problem when people keep buying things from spammers. Even if technical solutions like DKIM have some degree of success, such a high response rate to spam gives an obvious incentive to spammers to continue to find work-arounds.
Sorry you had a disappointing experience. Mine turned out much happier.
I wanted to see what Solaris 10 was like so I put it on an AthlonXP 2400 machine I had. The motherboard has onboard audio and network. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if Solaris could detect the network adapter and it didn't seem to be able to do so, so I put in an Intel EtherExpress Pro adapter I had in a box and it immediately recognized this. As for audio, I did a Google search for "Solaris 10 audio" and found a site that had drivers that I downloaded, installed with one or two commands that were pretty clearly indicated, and rebooted. Audio worked then.
My video card is a 2D Matrox card which was immediately recognized and configured by the X11 server used by Solaris 10 (this is called Xorg and is probably the same X11 server you use on Linux). I have seen people using accelerated NVidia video on Solaris 10 but I have not personally tried this. I know that there ARE drivers available from NVidia, so I am assuming that if I can follow the instructions to get them to work with Linux that I can probably also do so with Solaris. One advantage that Solaris has here (as far as I know) is that you don't have to keep relinking the driver to deal with ABI issues that Linux has when you upgrade your Linux kernel. I appreciate that because it makes my life simpler.
I don't have a SATA controller in my Athlon, so I cannot speak to that. However I believe that the machines coming from Sun have SATA so I assume that it must work.
I do not believe that Solaris 10 is supported on notebook computers, so I do not believe that wireless cards are typical hardware for Solaris. That said, during my Googling around I did see that someone has some experimental wireless drivers, but I have not looked at them in detail nor have I attempted to use them, so I cannot speak to how well they work.
I don't think my AthlonXP 2400+, EtherExpress, and Matrox card are too atypical to expect geeks to be able to easily get if someone was determined to try Solaris 10. It was certainly nowhere near as difficult for me to put together this system for experimenting as it was for me to put together my first Linux systems in the mid-1990's that required things like SCSI adapters to really work well.
I'm not sure that they really care much about CDE except for supporting legacy users. The default window system that Sun seems to be pushing now is called the Java Desktop System which is simply a repackaged version of an open source desktop management system called Gnome (http://www.gnome.org/). I myself am typically a fan of KDE but decided to give JDS a try and it seems to have its own merits that make it worthwhile. To that end, it hasn't been a big enough deal to me so far to spend the effort necessary to replace JDS with KDE on my Solaris 10 machine. I've also gained some perspective in allowing myself to get exposure to another desktop environment.
I have recently been engaged in a serious effort to learn about Solaris 10, and have been very pleasantly surprised at what I have found. While there may be valid reasons that some Linux users may dislike Solaris, I cannot agree that the criticism you cite about the userland tools being "basically unmodified from the early 1990s" is one of the valid reasons. Most of the GNU userland tools that you describe as missing are actually installed under /usr/sfw/bin in the *default* Solaris 10 install that you get right from the standard DVD. This is in addition to the same non-GNU tools being present in other locations on the default install. You simply need to adjust your PATH accordingly if you want the GNU tools to be found first.
If you want to prefer Linux over Solaris that's fine, but make sure that what you are criticizing is actually true. Otherwise you are misleading yourself and possibly missing out on some really cool technology. You point out the cool technology in ZFS and DTrace, and I agree that they are really fantastic reasons to use Solaris. In fact, I am right now thinking that Solaris offers a lot of technologies that Linux can't touch without giving up a lot of the characteristics that make Linux useful. Give it an honest chance and you might be surprised at what Solaris 10 can do!
And what makes sure the trains are on time?
Germans!
I am not sure that I can agree with your analogy. Like many analogies, it is flawed because the circumstance you describe is different from the circumstance to which you are making a comparison. For one thing, in your analogy, the BMW is physically stolen and I can no longer drive it. In the case of the students, no physical item is missing.
Consider a different analogy. How about if you are sitting in a library (which, much like a school, is a place that you go to learn things) and I come in with my own personal book (which, much like a computer, is something you would expect to use to learn) and set it on a table while I go to the restroom. In my absence, you pick up my book and skim through it to see if it looks like something you might want to read and then put it back where you found it before I return. In this analogy, much like what the students really (reportedly) did, you didn't take anything physical and simply looked around. In a place like a library (or a school) where people go to learn, I'd expect curious people to harmlessly fulfill their curiousity.
Now, these students also reportedly used hacking tools to retrieve the administrator password even after it was changed. That was wrong. Further, they installed software on the machines that they were specifically told not to install. That was also wrong. Other articles I have read about this situation seem to suggest that they were warned many times that they would be punished if they continued to do this. (Which, I can appreciate the position of the school officials. However I think it is often not such a good idea to send a message to students that "learning outside of school time will not be tolerated".)
Kids' behavior is defined by doing things that are often well not thought out. This is why children are not allowed to vote or drive or use alcohol. I think that felony punishments for this transgression are extremely out of line with the crime. If you hand this many laptops to kids, you have to expect that some "creative examination" of them is likely to happen.
Thanks for the info, AC.
The complexity of the SMP code in FreeBSD 5.3 was what I was talking about. IMHO, the FreeBSD hackers have been working very hard to move forward with fine-grained locking and my main worry is that they're making such a complicated system that it's going to be hard to continue moving forward with it.
I am really interested to see what Matt comes up with in DragonFly and have read a lot of the design info that he has posted as well as taken a look at a fair amount of his source code. He's a smart guy, and I think the hackers working on this project stand a good chance of doing something that will get a lot of attention. I'm not sure how directly applicable the technique is to any of the other BSDs without major work, though.
What is the condition of the SMP support in the upcoming NetBSD 2.0 release?
I know that SMP has been present in -current, at least for architectures like Alpha (and others?), for several years. My impression is that 2.0 is intended to be the first release where SMP is a real priority. I have been a longtime FreeBSD user and have watched their progress (and struggles) as the state of the art has moved from SMP in the 4.x kernels into the 5.x kernels where they are trying to squash down the BGL. How does the SMP work in NetBSD compare to this effort? Is it more akin to the FreeBSD 4.x efforts, are they trying to do something more along the lines of the FreeBSD 5.x work, or something else entirely?
The reason that I ask is that NetBSD has this reputation for not doing something until they figure out the "right" way to do it. So I guess what I'm really asking is what their take is on the "right" way to do SMP. I really want to look at the source code to figure this out, but haven't had the time to invest in this, so I'm wondering if someone else who has might share their impressions.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
-George Orwell, "1984" Chapter 1
When you are running on battery, try turning the display brightness down to ~7-8 instead of running it at 10. To my eyes, the difference is not very perceptible, but the improvement in battery life is pretty big.
Actually, I immediately thought of the USL v. BSDI case when I heard about SCO's recent filing. My OS of choice tends to lean towards the BSD side (simply due to my background as a CS Ph.D. student, I suppose) but I certainly use Linux for many projects. I used FreeBSD back in ca. 1992 when it seemed that it might be encumbered due to licensing difficulties from USL.
I think the important thing to realize is that while different open source software camps may at times compete against each other (Linux vs. BSD, Gnome vs. KDE, etc.), in the end the diversity we have within our ranks is a very powerful asset. Had the lawsuit in 1992 turned out differently, Linux would have been an unencumbered alternative that would have allowed the movement to continue forward. Likewise, in the extremely off chance that SCO did do something to encumber Linux today, the open source community has many other fine operating systems that are alternatives and which could be a basis to continue moving forward.
IMHO, an important lesson to realize from this after it finally settles down (and I have no doubt that SCO will end up appearing kind of stupid in the end) is that the diversity in open source software is the biggest benefit and allows it to overcome these kinds of things.
This is perhaps the best comment I have ever read on this topic. Very well reasoned and discussed in a non-biased way.
A gold star for you!
Ignoring the aspect of FBI agents sneaking around and installing sneaky devices in peoples' keyboards, this means one of three things:
1. Nobody in the government (FBI, CIA, NSA) has the capability of easily decrypting PGP-encrypted files.
2. The FBI cannot easily decrypt PGP-encrypted files, but other government agencies (CIA, NSA) can but will not share.
3. The government can routinely decrypt PGP-encrypted files, but don't want to tip their hand to this ability. Therefore in order to explain how they have access to such encrypted files they have to install a device that could give them access to the files through a means other than decrypting them with sheer computing power.
The IR port is obviously there to allow the government to download a copy of your paging history as they fly past in their black helicopters.
A REAL hacker would modify their pager to encrypt all data sent/received over the IR port to prevent such a thing from happening!
Due to the merger between BSDi and Walnut Creek, FreeBSD will soon be getting the benefit of fine-grained SMP from BSD/OS. When this code becomes available in the FreeBSD codebase, do you think it will have a large impact on the deployment of SMP in OpenBSD? That is, would you expect to be able to directly leverage much of this code for use within the OpenBSD codebase?
You might call Dr. Gray a researcher. He won the Turing Award in 1998 for his many contributions to the field of computer science.
. html
http://www. inf ormatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/journals/cacm/turing
Sheesh.
I don't know if you'll read this follow-up or even actually care to know this, but...
Goedel's theorem doesn't have anything to do with this situation. His theorem says that any system that starts with a set of axioms and laws and then uses these to prove theorems is inherently incomplete. Back around the turn of the century a mathematician named Hilbert proposed that the mathematics world should try to tie all mathematics together into a sort of "grand unified theory of mathematics", but a few years later Goedel's insight and subsequent theorem proved that this was impossible.
I don't know what level you are at in school, but if you are in college, check out classes from your local computer science department about the Theory of Computation. Turing theory is one of the topics in this class and is closely related to the Incompleteness Theorem.
Look at the web pages for this "degree" and you find out that it is actually an "option" on another degree program. That is, one actually gets a Ph.D. in physics or chemistry or another related field (they're listed) "with a nanotechnology option". This means that you fulfill the requirements of the Ph.D. program of your choice plus take additional coursework and fulfill extra requirements for the nanotechnology option.
Also, take a look at the courses listed on the web page. The only ones that mention nanotechnology are seminar-type courses. As a graduate student, I can tell you that these seminar courses usually involve sitting around and reading/discussing papers and ideas in your field of study. The remaining balance of courses are taken from physics, chemistry, etc. and are courses that majors in these fields are probably already taking.
That said, this is the way new graduate programs often start up. That is, they start by being options on traditional degree programs. Then, as the field expands and the amount of knowledge in the field grows, the options turn into true degree-granting programs of their own. See, for example, the many Computational Science programs in the United States. A few years ago these were all options on more traditional degrees from computer science or physics or chemistry or other related field. Now they are turning into real degree-granting departments at some schools.
The number of connections that you are describing assumes a fully-connected network. Gnutella is not.
Think: if there are 3000 nodes connected to GnutellaNet, does your machine have 3000 socket connections open simultaneously? No.
People WILL always choose to see the dancing bear. :-)
Yes, a free (speech, beer) Eiffel compiler exists, but (at least the last time I looked at it) it is nowhere near as good as the commercial Eiffel compiler that Meyer's company sells. I had actually meant to include this in my original post but forgot.
I don't think that the GNU Eiffel compiler is going to sway that many people towards Eiffel as a reasonable language to code in instead of C/C++ unless the free compiler is equivalent to what you would get with a commercial compiler. GCC is as good as commercial C compilers. The last time I checked, GNU Eiffel was not as good as ISE's Eiffel.
Boy, this was certainly a long article. In some ways this is good because it gives the reader a significant chance to understand the author's viewpoints on the subject very well. I've certainly been interested in this since I started following Meyer's work around the time when the first edition of Object Oriented Software Construction came out. The long article is unfortunate, though, because I'm not sure many people will read the entire thing and try to suck all the nuances out; some of the message will get lost in the noise.
One thing that I noticed is that Meyer seems to confuse "free software" (as in free speech) with "open source software" which simply means that you can obtain the source code for the software you are using. I'm not positive yet if I think this is significant in what he is saying in this essay.
The biggest thing that I notice is that some of Meyer's views have certainly had impact on the success of the Eiffel programming language. For those of you who don't know Meyer, he is a Ph.D. who wrote a very large tome called Object Oriented Software Construction now in its second edition. This book, at over 1100 pages, lays the groundwork for his views on how one should construct object-oriented software. He adopts a very conservative view (use strong declared types for variables, cause the compiler to catch as many errors as possible during compilation of the source code, etc.) and makes many strong points that are useful particularly for building extremely large software systems. Although his views go against some compelling ideas from other sides of the object-oriented software camp (such as Smalltalkers), his treatment of the subject in an almost academic manner have made a lot of people pay attention to him.
One vehicle Meyer uses to promote his ideas is the Eiffel programming language. Eiffel is actually used as a "pseudocode" in OOSC and at the end of the text he reveals that it is actually a true programming language that you can get compilers for and use in real development. In my opinion, as a community, computer professionals do too much coding with low-level tools and languages such as C/C++ and I would like to see a higher level language such as Eiffel succeed as a way of allowing developers to consider problems at a higher level, which I think will result in better-quality code. Unfortunately, Meyer's company charges money for all versions of its Eiffel compiler. While the cost isn't prohibitive (it's less than $100 I believe) I don't think anybody is going to buy the compiler to "try it out" on the outside chance than it may be better than what they are using when they can just continue to use GCC for free. The consequence of this is that as a community, developers will keep using the same stupid low-level tools for building EVERYTHING when they could be using more sophisticated higher-level tools for building many pieces of software. I believe that if Meyer could just see this and offer free (beer) ways to get their tools, Eiffel could really take off.
How can they do this and stay in business? (And this touches on the topic Meyer was writing about.) Easy. The base Eiffel compiler could be free (beer, or even speech). Students and individuals would be able to try it out and see that it really is cool and that they can code much more effectively with it. Eiffel would become more popular. Companies would start building software with it, and for this they would like tools such as profilers, safety checkers, etc. These could cost money. Meyer's company could make money off of these more advanced tools that companies will want anyway when building large software systems. Everybody wins.
Another poster suggested Python, and I would like to agree with that suggestion.
On NT, Python can access any COM object that you can script with, say, Visual Basic. Since nearly every application on NT is also accessible via COM, this opens many possibilities.
On NT, Python also includes the ability to talk to ODBC data sources. I believe there is direct access via ODBC class libraries. If not, you can definitely use the ADO COM objects (I have done this to access SQLServer).
Python has good access to system calls on whatever platform it is running on via its rich class libraries. This is also the case with NT.
Python has a CORBA ORB, called FNORB, available that should be able to interoperate with Visibroker.
Check out www.python.org for more information about Python. There is a link from the main page to Mark Hammond's extensions to allow Python to run on Win32. You need to get two things for this: the base Python package for Windows, plus a package of extensions.
Finally, Python is undergoing a transition from the current version (1.5.2) to the new version (1.6) due out by the beginning of June. Any 1.6 stuff you see will be alpha/beta quality code.
Best of luck to you. I hope you find Python as enjoyable to work with as I have!
Thanks for the mirror link.
The comparisons to Design Patterns aren't very surprising. The two authors of the paper are students of Ralph Johnson, one of the original GoF.
Except from what I understand, the range of Bluetooth is pretty limited. Like, it works in ranges of much less than 10 meters, more like 1-2 meters.
But this thread is pretty interesting to me because it's exactly what I have been thinking for at least a year. As the original poster says, I'd like to be able to be sitting in a meeting and pull out my Pilot and check to see if I have new email, or to see if my long-running job has finished, or to check on my stock quotes. And then without changing anything, be able to go home and have the same configuration of software connect to my LAN at home so I can do the same things while I'm watching TV without having to go into the computer room. It's only a secondary concern of mine to be able to have cellular-type access where I can be sitting in a coffee shop and access the network. Most of the time I'm in a location that would be wired to the LAN anyway.
Plus, like the original poster pointed out, all sorts of cool applications would ensue. My Pilot could exchange information with your Pilot if we were close enough to each other. One can envision all sorts of interesting applications.
The only concern I'd have is that the wireless connectivity might trash battery lifetime.