Greater than 99.99 percent of random mutations either have no effect (a mutation on one of the many "garbage" sections of our DNA), or result in a cell that is not viable. A mutation in protein production will kill off a cell pretty quick, for example.
Of the rest, some may result in a viable cell. However, the immune system tags it as a foreign cell and kills it.
Some may result in cancer.
And some small, small percent may result in a mutation that still leaves a viable cell that won't be destroyed by the immune system.
But for the most part, you have the same genetic material you started with.
There are many other factors (like the in-vitro environment) that have a significant effect upon development.
I don't think that RMS's point about promotion of progress can be emphasized enough.
One of the main goals in disclosing patentable ideas is to promote progress. The original intention was that you'd see something patented, and since the problem was solved, you'd go on to work on something bigger and better. That you'd be able to use the patent to help solve problems, because paying a license fee was much easier than developing your own solution.
However, the software patents I've seen or heard about seem to fall into one of two categories:
1) Blatently obvious. Any resonably skilled practitioner of the art would have found a similar solution to the same problem. How does this advance the state of the art?
2) Unusuably obtuse. I have tried reading though the legalese in some of the patents before, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. At any rate, if the public (or even practitioners of the art) can't understand what the patent's about, how does that advance the state of the art?
There are a few gems in there. Actually, I think most of the patents around public key crypto are indeed novel, and perhaps patent-worthy. At any rate, since software patents don't seem to advance the state of the art (at least in most instances), they shouldn't be allowed.
I have, in the past, built my own PCs from parts. Most of the time it was great, however I ran into glitches here and there. Like when I wanted use a RAID controller on an older fileserver machine. Turns out the PCI card required PCI 2.1, and the mobo was 2.0. Bomb-o!
I now prefer to buy pre-built system that have had their components tested together, and has been through a burn-in period. You pay extra up front, but it's worth it.
It would be really nice to buy PCs from people like Dell without OS software, or with Linux installed. Until then, I'll be shopping at places like Penguin Computing.
It might possibly not be bullshit, for some marginal situations.
Even POTS lines are twisted pairs to reduce emissions and interference. Most generic phone cable is flat, not twisted pair. This leads to a reduction in signal quality. For a six foot run, it's probably not a big deal. For a longer run it might start to make a difference.
I've only had Spamassassin going a couple weeks, but I've been very pleased so far.
My e-mail address is 7 years old, so I must be on nearly every spam list in existence. Without filters I'd get at least 10 spam messages a day. Spamassassin tags over 90% of it.
The only false-positives so far have been stupid auto notification crap from a final four pool website. It's not as if I really missed those anyway.
It would be nice to have two-level selection, so that e-mails that score over 10 (for example) get automatically deleted. E-mail that scores over 5 merely gets a warning attached.
Maybe I'll have a look at the code this weekend... It's not as if I have a date.:-)
Do you see the Wizards of the Coast edition as an improvement in this regard?
I've played 1st, 2nd, and now 3rd edition AD&D, though it's now just called D&D.
The 3rd edition is much, much better. It is so much more... orthogonal. Almost all the special cases and little-used rules have been eliminated or integrated. The combat system is more more realistic, and most abilities have been combined into skills and feats, which a bunch of new ones thrown in.
That said, all an RPG is supposed to do is help people to tell a story. I believe stories are better when they don't contradict themselves, so a good set of rules can provide a good structure to compose a story against.
So Gary is correct, in the sense that the GM is always right, and it's not the rules that can make a game enjoyable. But good, consistent rules can go a long ways towards making the game more comprehensible. And I completely disagree with him as to the merits of 1st ed vs. 3rd ed..
With the older editions, the GM would have to intervene frequently to restore sensibility to the game. But that can also frustrate the players, because they don't know what to expect. With the 3rd edition, the GM needs to intervene far, far less frequently, leading to smoother gameplay. I believe this can then allow everyone to concentrate more on the story, which is the most important part.
I don't know how accurate the article is, but it states that the reason we need mandatory copy-prevention is to encourage the major content distributors to put their wares in digital form. This, therefore, will drive the adoption of high speed Internet access and HDTV.
This is a completely circular argument, that doesn't make any sense to me. The media companies want to take away my ability to own a PC that does what I want, in return for services I also don't want.
So basically, the media companies basically want to own everything, and we should just turn over control of our networks and computers to them so that they can more easily make money from us.
If you want to go after the illegal distribution of your wares, fine, go ahead, I won't stop you. But just because you want to make money doesn't mean that you now have the right to take away our freedoms.
Actually, they do that there too. If you work for the Yakuza, and mess up bad (but not bad enough for them to kill you immediately), you're expected to make a sacrifice. Usually just a pinky... unless you've been really bad.
Yup, yup, yup. It was a good machine. I kinda wish now I hadn't sold mine.
I first learned machine language programming on my CoCo. It made my EE microprocessors class a breeze when I found out that they were also used the 6809 for the embedded target.
It was quite a shock using a 6808 a while back, because the registers and instruction set were so limited. I briefly dabbled with the 8088 back in the day, but the concept of segment registers offended me. Thankfully, I've since moved on to flat address space architectures like the M68K for my embedded work. They also run Linux.
Can anyone explain to an old hardware engineer why "it's impossible to write bug-free code", but we design bug-free hardware all the time.
I wouldn't be so sure.
A) Take a look at the errata list for any microprocessor sold in the last 20 years. It's quite an eye-opener. However, most/all the problems are worked around by the compiler writers and kernel developers, so you never hear about them.
B) With cars, they only issue recall notices for show-stopping, car-catches-on-fire design bugs. There's lots of minor bugs with cars all over the place. Things like the front suspension design on my '92 Mazda. I've had the mounting plates on top of the struts replaced 3 times now. You can stop by your dealership to look at all the notices that have been issued for your car model over the years.
This is false. XP, based on NT, has security built in.
Eh, not quite. Did you read all of the article?
One of the big issues I have with Windoze is that it's not easy to disable and remove the parts I don't want, which is what Bruce talks about.
On a server connected to the Internet, I'd want to remove anything that's not strictly needed for running the application, like the web browser. Microsoft's attitude is: "Opps, sorry, that's part of the OS now, live with it." However, with other operating systems, I do have a choice.
Sure, you can argue that I'm being paranoid, and what possible harm could come from having some extra software installed. Maybe you're right. And maybe some dumbass junior admin (that I didn't get a chance to interview) needs to surf the web to look up an answer while he's putzing with the server. Maybe because there's a browser (which can't be gotten rid of) on the red-zone server, and he uses that, rather than the one on his desktop computer. Maybe the security permissions are still the default (lax), and he downloads a virus or worm. Maybe it infects the system, because he was logged in as Administrator.
And if there's no browser on the red-zone server, he'd haul his lazy ass back to his desk to look up the answer, thus preventing, or at least containing, a whole host of problems.
As for SOAP, from a network administrator's point of view, it's easy to hate it, seeing as how it was expressly designed to evade the firewall. If someone's got a new RMI protocol, I should damn well be able to easily block it, if that's the policy.
Now with SOAP, instead of simply blocking a port, which just about any stupid firewall can do, you need a firewall that can look inside HTTP requests to see which ones are from browsers, and which ones are SOAP requests. More processing power, and therefore less throughput on the firewall. And probably a more expensive firewall to boot.
Wearing my enterprise application developer hat, I think SOAP is pretty cool. Wearing my network administrator hat, I would like to kick in the nuts of whoever thought it up.
Yes, I realize that I'm paranoid, it comes with the job. If you don't believe me now, check back with me in 5 years. If you last that long.
Yeah, everyone was thinking a huge "first day pop" was a good thing, but really it was bad for the company with the IPO. At the very least, they could have issued far less stock to raise the same amount of money.
I guess the top management of those companies bought into it because it made them paper millionares (or even billionares). That's very seductive. Sabotaging the long-term for short-term gain... now where have I heard that before?
Frontline is usually a good show, and "Dot Con" was excellent, IMHO.
It's a sad thing that the JVM also sucks for non-Java-like languages.
Well, not quite. If you're familiar with Python, check out Jython at jython.org. Same great taste, different VM. If you're writing pure Python code, there's only a few minor differences (outlined at the site), and half of those are bugs that C-Python should fix.
Jython also makes use of Java classes a snap. Some people use Jython to dynamically test components they're writing in Java. It can be good for just figuring out how stuff works, you can just pull up the Jython command prompt, start manually instantiating objects, and examining the results. That's a lot more convenient than writing noddy test programs.
But the fundamental problem for other languages (with different conceptions of OO) make a poor fit to the JVM, and likely the CLR too.
Warning: I haven't looked closely at the CLR or the Python "VM".
I don't see why it's going to much harder targeting the CLR than it is to target the existing VMs out there. For example, Python already compiles to byte-code, and runs on the equivalent of a VM. They've already re-targeted it to the Java VM, I don't see why targeting the CLR would be much more difficult.
Unless there are some seriously funky parts to the spec, it shouldn't be that bad for some languages like Python/Jython, Perl, Smalltalk, and such.
I don't buy the fact that junk mail is subsidising regular mail. Junk mail makes up the majority (by size and weight) of the mail sent. If there were no junk mail, the post office would need less machines to sort the mail, and less trucks to deliver it. Less people too.
Of course, it know for sure, we'd need to take a long hard look at the accounting books to see which way the costs would really go.
I tend to sympathize with the write-once-run-anywhere (WORA) advocates.
I haven't seen single cross-platform programming language that didn't have some platform-specific idiosyncrasies. You either have to avoid those areas completely, or try to code around them.
If you need those features, then you have to fix things for the specific platform at either compile-time or run-time. Compile-time means some kind of hack like the C pre-processor. Run-time means dynamically loading the correct version of some class. Either way, I say: "Ugh." That's not to say that either approach won't work, but it isn't as pleasant.
It keeps things simplier and saner when you're just targeting the same VM and standard libraries. You still have to have a bunch of conformance tests to make sure the particular JVM is compliant, but that's easier to maintain than platform-specific code in every application you write.
I've been doing mostly Java programming for the last couple months, and while there are a number of features in the language that annoy me, the overall development process is more pleasant than in other environments.
In the past he's said he doesn't want to work for a company like RedHat or SuSE because it might seem that he is 'blessing' one of them in preference to other Linux companies.
With a separate Linus fund, he remains independent of all the companies. Further, we might want to arrange it so that he doesn't know how much any particular party is contributing, so he doesn't feel any special obligation if IBM, for example, chucks in $50K for next year.
I try to donate $100/year to OpenBSD, and I usually buy 4 sets of CDs as well. I'm sure we can scare up at least $100K USD per year from individuals and companies that benefit from Linux. How much does he really need to live on anyway?
How about we set up a fund so that Linus can work on Linux full-time, instead of needing a day job? That's not a permanent fix, but it would help for a while.
I've been using Mylex RAID cards (mostly the AcceleRAID 150 and 250s) for over 2 years without any problems. Very solid.
Many, if not most of the problems I've heard about with RAID and SCSI in general are cable-related. If you're experiencing problems, check to see if you're using the correct type of SCSI cable, that it's not too long, and you're using the correct type of terminators (preferably forced-perfect).
Though I've been able to work out SCSI-related problems in the past, but don't think I want to deal with that anymore. The next low-end server I build will probably use IDE-RAID. If I have to build a high-end server, I'd rather use FC-AL.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, no.
Greater than 99.99 percent of random mutations either have no effect (a mutation on one of the many "garbage" sections of our DNA), or result in a cell that is not viable. A mutation in protein production will kill off a cell pretty quick, for example.
Of the rest, some may result in a viable cell. However, the immune system tags it as a foreign cell and kills it.
Some may result in cancer.
And some small, small percent may result in a mutation that still leaves a viable cell that won't be destroyed by the immune system.
But for the most part, you have the same genetic material you started with.
There are many other factors (like the in-vitro environment) that have a significant effect upon development.
And what world currently has an underpopulation problem?
Uhhhh... Mars?
Sheesh. Seriously, if we (the west) were really worried about underpopulation, we could just loosen the restrictions on immigration a little.
This is the thing that concerns me most.
How well is this software written? Are there buffer overflows or other security problems?
Massive potential for security problems.
I don't think that RMS's point about promotion of progress can be emphasized enough.
One of the main goals in disclosing patentable ideas is to promote progress. The original intention was that you'd see something patented, and since the problem was solved, you'd go on to work on something bigger and better. That you'd be able to use the patent to help solve problems, because paying a license fee was much easier than developing your own solution.
However, the software patents I've seen or heard about seem to fall into one of two categories:
1) Blatently obvious. Any resonably skilled practitioner of the art would have found a similar solution to the same problem. How does this advance the state of the art?
2) Unusuably obtuse. I have tried reading though the legalese in some of the patents before, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. At any rate, if the public (or even practitioners of the art) can't understand what the patent's about, how does that advance the state of the art?
There are a few gems in there. Actually, I think most of the patents around public key crypto are indeed novel, and perhaps patent-worthy. At any rate, since software patents don't seem to advance the state of the art (at least in most instances), they shouldn't be allowed.
Yes, but what about integration testing?
I have, in the past, built my own PCs from parts. Most of the time it was great, however I ran into glitches here and there. Like when I wanted use a RAID controller on an older fileserver machine. Turns out the PCI card required PCI 2.1, and the mobo was 2.0. Bomb-o!
I now prefer to buy pre-built system that have had their components tested together, and has been through a burn-in period. You pay extra up front, but it's worth it.
It would be really nice to buy PCs from people like Dell without OS software, or with Linux installed. Until then, I'll be shopping at places like Penguin Computing.
It might possibly not be bullshit, for some marginal situations.
Even POTS lines are twisted pairs to reduce emissions and interference. Most generic phone cable is flat, not twisted pair. This leads to a reduction in signal quality. For a six foot run, it's probably not a big deal. For a longer run it might start to make a difference.
I've only had Spamassassin going a couple weeks, but I've been very pleased so far.
My e-mail address is 7 years old, so I must be on nearly every spam list in existence. Without filters I'd get at least 10 spam messages a day. Spamassassin tags over 90% of it.
The only false-positives so far have been stupid auto notification crap from a final four pool website. It's not as if I really missed those anyway.
It would be nice to have two-level selection, so that e-mails that score over 10 (for example) get automatically deleted. E-mail that scores over 5 merely gets a warning attached.
Maybe I'll have a look at the code this weekend... It's not as if I have a date. :-)
Do you see the Wizards of the Coast edition as an improvement in this regard?
I've played 1st, 2nd, and now 3rd edition AD&D, though it's now just called D&D.
The 3rd edition is much, much better. It is so much more... orthogonal. Almost all the special cases and little-used rules have been eliminated or integrated. The combat system is more more realistic, and most abilities have been combined into skills and feats, which a bunch of new ones thrown in.
That said, all an RPG is supposed to do is help people to tell a story. I believe stories are better when they don't contradict themselves, so a good set of rules can provide a good structure to compose a story against.
So Gary is correct, in the sense that the GM is always right, and it's not the rules that can make a game enjoyable. But good, consistent rules can go a long ways towards making the game more comprehensible. And I completely disagree with him as to the merits of 1st ed vs. 3rd ed..
With the older editions, the GM would have to intervene frequently to restore sensibility to the game. But that can also frustrate the players, because they don't know what to expect. With the 3rd edition, the GM needs to intervene far, far less frequently, leading to smoother gameplay. I believe this can then allow everyone to concentrate more on the story, which is the most important part.
As the Purple One (no, not Barney the Dinosaur) has said before:
Forever is a mighty long time.
I give Java only a few more years before capability-based distributed programming languages become widespread.
I don't know how accurate the article is, but it states that the reason we need mandatory copy-prevention is to encourage the major content distributors to put their wares in digital form. This, therefore, will drive the adoption of high speed Internet access and HDTV.
This is a completely circular argument, that doesn't make any sense to me. The media companies want to take away my ability to own a PC that does what I want, in return for services I also don't want.
So basically, the media companies basically want to own everything, and we should just turn over control of our networks and computers to them so that they can more easily make money from us.
If you want to go after the illegal distribution of your wares, fine, go ahead, I won't stop you. But just because you want to make money doesn't mean that you now have the right to take away our freedoms.
Actually, they do that there too. If you work for the Yakuza, and mess up bad (but not bad enough for them to kill you immediately), you're expected to make a sacrifice. Usually just a pinky... unless you've been really bad.
Yeah, I've been looking at that too. I'll be talking to my ISP about setting up the daemon.
Most of the spam I receive would seem to already fall into one of their filter categories. I like the auto-whitelist feature too.
Anyone here have some experience with Spam Assassin?
System partitioning isn't the same as IBM's VM technology.
With your E15K, you're dividing up processors and memory between various partitions, each running an instance of the OS.
IBM's running multiple OSs as virtual machines on the same system.
With Sun, if partition A is really busy, and partition B is idle, you can't make use of those idle processors unless you re-allocate your partitions.
With IBM, the processes in VM1 can use all the processors of the mainframe, unless VM2 also needs processing time.
With either one, if one OS instance crashes, it shouldn't affect the other instances.
Yup, yup, yup. It was a good machine. I kinda wish now I hadn't sold mine.
I first learned machine language programming on my CoCo. It made my EE microprocessors class a breeze when I found out that they were also used the 6809 for the embedded target.
It was quite a shock using a 6808 a while back, because the registers and instruction set were so limited. I briefly dabbled with the 8088 back in the day, but the concept of segment registers offended me. Thankfully, I've since moved on to flat address space architectures like the M68K for my embedded work. They also run Linux.
Can anyone explain to an old hardware engineer why "it's impossible to write bug-free code", but we design bug-free hardware all the time.
I wouldn't be so sure.
A) Take a look at the errata list for any microprocessor sold in the last 20 years. It's quite an eye-opener. However, most/all the problems are worked around by the compiler writers and kernel developers, so you never hear about them.
B) With cars, they only issue recall notices for show-stopping, car-catches-on-fire design bugs. There's lots of minor bugs with cars all over the place. Things like the front suspension design on my '92 Mazda. I've had the mounting plates on top of the struts replaced 3 times now. You can stop by your dealership to look at all the notices that have been issued for your car model over the years.
This is false. XP, based on NT, has security built in.
Eh, not quite. Did you read all of the article?
One of the big issues I have with Windoze is that it's not easy to disable and remove the parts I don't want, which is what Bruce talks about.
On a server connected to the Internet, I'd want to remove anything that's not strictly needed for running the application, like the web browser. Microsoft's attitude is: "Opps, sorry, that's part of the OS now, live with it." However, with other operating systems, I do have a choice.
Sure, you can argue that I'm being paranoid, and what possible harm could come from having some extra software installed. Maybe you're right. And maybe some dumbass junior admin (that I didn't get a chance to interview) needs to surf the web to look up an answer while he's putzing with the server. Maybe because there's a browser (which can't be gotten rid of) on the red-zone server, and he uses that, rather than the one on his desktop computer. Maybe the security permissions are still the default (lax), and he downloads a virus or worm. Maybe it infects the system, because he was logged in as Administrator.
And if there's no browser on the red-zone server, he'd haul his lazy ass back to his desk to look up the answer, thus preventing, or at least containing, a whole host of problems.
As for SOAP, from a network administrator's point of view, it's easy to hate it, seeing as how it was expressly designed to evade the firewall. If someone's got a new RMI protocol, I should damn well be able to easily block it, if that's the policy.
Now with SOAP, instead of simply blocking a port, which just about any stupid firewall can do, you need a firewall that can look inside HTTP requests to see which ones are from browsers, and which ones are SOAP requests. More processing power, and therefore less throughput on the firewall. And probably a more expensive firewall to boot.
Wearing my enterprise application developer hat, I think SOAP is pretty cool. Wearing my network administrator hat, I would like to kick in the nuts of whoever thought it up.
Yes, I realize that I'm paranoid, it comes with the job. If you don't believe me now, check back with me in 5 years. If you last that long.
Yeah, everyone was thinking a huge "first day pop" was a good thing, but really it was bad for the company with the IPO. At the very least, they could have issued far less stock to raise the same amount of money.
I guess the top management of those companies bought into it because it made them paper millionares (or even billionares). That's very seductive. Sabotaging the long-term for short-term gain... now where have I heard that before?
Frontline is usually a good show, and "Dot Con" was excellent, IMHO.
It's a sad thing that the JVM also sucks for non-Java-like languages.
Well, not quite. If you're familiar with Python, check out Jython at jython.org. Same great taste, different VM. If you're writing pure Python code, there's only a few minor differences (outlined at the site), and half of those are bugs that C-Python should fix.
Jython also makes use of Java classes a snap. Some people use Jython to dynamically test components they're writing in Java. It can be good for just figuring out how stuff works, you can just pull up the Jython command prompt, start manually instantiating objects, and examining the results. That's a lot more convenient than writing noddy test programs.
But the fundamental problem for other languages (with different conceptions of OO) make a poor fit to the JVM, and likely the CLR too.
Warning: I haven't looked closely at the CLR or the Python "VM".
I don't see why it's going to much harder targeting the CLR than it is to target the existing VMs out there. For example, Python already compiles to byte-code, and runs on the equivalent of a VM. They've already re-targeted it to the Java VM, I don't see why targeting the CLR would be much more difficult.
Unless there are some seriously funky parts to the spec, it shouldn't be that bad for some languages like Python/Jython, Perl, Smalltalk, and such.
I don't buy the fact that junk mail is subsidising regular mail. Junk mail makes up the majority (by size and weight) of the mail sent. If there were no junk mail, the post office would need less machines to sort the mail, and less trucks to deliver it. Less people too.
Of course, it know for sure, we'd need to take a long hard look at the accounting books to see which way the costs would really go.
I tend to sympathize with the write-once-run-anywhere (WORA) advocates.
I haven't seen single cross-platform programming language that didn't have some platform-specific idiosyncrasies. You either have to avoid those areas completely, or try to code around them.
If you need those features, then you have to fix things for the specific platform at either compile-time or run-time. Compile-time means some kind of hack like the C pre-processor. Run-time means dynamically loading the correct version of some class. Either way, I say: "Ugh." That's not to say that either approach won't work, but it isn't as pleasant.
It keeps things simplier and saner when you're just targeting the same VM and standard libraries. You still have to have a bunch of conformance tests to make sure the particular JVM is compliant, but that's easier to maintain than platform-specific code in every application you write.
I've been doing mostly Java programming for the last couple months, and while there are a number of features in the language that annoy me, the overall development process is more pleasant than in other environments.
In the past he's said he doesn't want to work for a company like RedHat or SuSE because it might seem that he is 'blessing' one of them in preference to other Linux companies.
With a separate Linus fund, he remains independent of all the companies. Further, we might want to arrange it so that he doesn't know how much any particular party is contributing, so he doesn't feel any special obligation if IBM, for example, chucks in $50K for next year.
I try to donate $100/year to OpenBSD, and I usually buy 4 sets of CDs as well. I'm sure we can scare up at least $100K USD per year from individuals and companies that benefit from Linux. How much does he really need to live on anyway?
How about we set up a fund so that Linus can work on Linux full-time, instead of needing a day job? That's not a permanent fix, but it would help for a while.
I've been using Mylex RAID cards (mostly the AcceleRAID 150 and 250s) for over 2 years without any problems. Very solid.
Many, if not most of the problems I've heard about with RAID and SCSI in general are cable-related. If you're experiencing problems, check to see if you're using the correct type of SCSI cable, that it's not too long, and you're using the correct type of terminators (preferably forced-perfect).
Though I've been able to work out SCSI-related problems in the past, but don't think I want to deal with that anymore. The next low-end server I build will probably use IDE-RAID. If I have to build a high-end server, I'd rather use FC-AL.
Unfortunately for use small guys, 3ware is discontinuing their 32-bit PCI cards, in favor of 64-bit.
Well, if I ever decide to build a server based on IDE RAID, maybe I'll buy a 64-bit mobo.