C++ still has pointers, and you have to use pointers regularly to get anywhere. Now I'm not a SmallTalk purist (although I work with a bunch of them), but IMHO, any decent OO language has to have made the complete switch from using pointers to using references. It's not a coding thing, it's a debugging thing. This is another failing with C#'s "unsafe" pragma. If the use of pointers can exist, then there's no proof of their absence and you have to debug the code in a mind to expect pointer problems. I write applications - I have better things to spend my coding time on than getting memory management secure - that's what my language environment is for.
Secondly, multiple inheritance. Interface-based programming is the way to go, to support multiply-sourced (sic) behaviours, not multiple inheritance. Even VB (FFS!) recognises this.
On both of these counts, I find Java a big improvement over C++.
Another huge advantage of Java over C++ (although this is a pragmatic advantage, not a theoretical one) is the fact that Open Source Java classes are freely available for almost anything, easy to integrate, and usable. C++ in comparison tends to be proprietary, inconsistent and crap (MFC - I rest my case).
What do I know ? Years of O-O Pascal, C++, J++/Java and VB, and even some SmallTalk. These days I write Java Servlets.
It's an OS, and the fact that it looks like an applet sandbox is because sandboxes look like OSes too. It's a better sandbox for browser applets.
Inferno is really pretty K00L(sic), and well worth taking a look at. It will probably die owing to Not Invented Here syndrome, but if M$oft had invented it instead of Bell Labs, the X-box would be running it and we'd all be looking at it very seriously as the next generation in mass-market home net-access devices.
Inferno would make a nice platform for building a TiVo-clone on.
Web retailers posting out paper catalogues is a technique invented by boo.com, and we know how well it worked for them. If I worked for these people, I'd want to start getting paid in cash.
Amazon sent me a Jenga set the other week. I think they intended it as a customer perk, but it had entirely the opposite effect. Instead of ordering the couple of (unusually expensive) books I was about to, I bought them from the high street instead - just in case Amazon really was about to fold.
Katz quoted a figure of 49 minutes (presumably a mean, the average time for which US children game) and described it as if it were the median (the time for which an "average child" games). There's a difference, and it's a significant difference as this article was concerned.
This sort of slapdash inaccuracy is something of a Katz trademark, and it's why he has a poor reputation with many Slashdot readers. In some ways he's the Germaine Greer of/. -- He's often absolutely right, but he argues the case so badly that you begin to disbelieve him anyway.
Your best hackers all have low attention spans, and will tinker with anything that can be tinkered with. Don't give them root - anywhere
I agree with your general point, but "anything that can be tinkered with" is much more enticing when it's something you shouldn't be tinkering with. If they don't have root, they'll try to get it by some other means.
I don't know if I have root on our servers. I think I do, but I've never used it. I'm lucky enough to work somewhere that takes admin seriously and I have someone else do it for me. If they make it work, make it work right, and don't screw it up, then there's just no reason why a developer like myself should ever need to be distracted by it. Suits me fine.
The idea of getting in a PFY with an MCSE and then locking others out of the boxes sounds like a disaster. The people who have access have no clue, and the people with the clue don't have access.
You do that by blackholing enough of their customers
Fine, go and take it out on Media3 if you want to, but why should you whack the innocent customers too ? This is like arresting a drunken driver, then charging everyone else who drives the same model of Ford.
The RBL has become a powerful weapon for causing havoc on the Net. It's useful, admittedly, but it also carries with it a responsibility to use it wisely. This scatter-gun approach is not wise. (If I were in an admin role to make such decisions) I'd pull my usage of RBL, because if that's their approach, I could no longer trust Vixie to use it properly.
Did Vixie ever serve in Vietnam ? It's that same "It was necessary to destroy the village, in order to save it" mentality.
Bet it wouldn't stand up to long term vibration. The connectors used to attach the lead are just normal square-pin headers (look at the photo), with no additional strain relief. These connectors don't have enough contact pressure for reliability, and in extreme cases (motor-racing) they'll walk their way clean off the pin.
Some years ago I used to instrument power presses. Getting strain gauge signals out through connectors on shop-floor tooling was alway a PITA.
Flat works. Many of the reasons for being tall are either to be taller than competitors, or to gain gravitational potential energy. Both of these scale down pretty well - you can get the same effect, just by reducing everyone's height in the same proportions.
There's a superb book on similar subjects; "Newton Rules Biology" by C J Pennycuick. It's over-priced and keeps going out of print, but it's an essential read. What happens if you take an elephant and make it bigger ? How big can you make it before its legs simply collapse under its own weight ? How small can a hummingbird get before it can no longer keep warm ? Why can't bees fly ?
amazon.com have it in at present, but not amazon.co.uk.
There's also a classic of '50s cheeezy sci-fi (whose title I can't remember) of an extremely flat alien who was a "mariner" of sorts on the surface of a spinning neutron star (the spin was important).
They're actually extremely heavy, it's just that the local atmosphere is even more so. The Hindenburg was pretty heavy too, but it still had excess buoyancy.
The idea of floating critters on a gas giant is certainly an interesting one. If there's an argument against it, it's that although the "finished" creatures may be viable at that size, it's unclear how they could initially arise outside of a liquid medium. We're not too sure how life arises, but it would certainly need a medium that was fluid enough to let some chemistry take place, but not so energetic that the proto-critters were ripped apart as fast as they formed. Room-temperature water isn't a bad choice here.
One of my cow-orkers reserved a PS2 for his kids. Seems that sprog #1 was rather geeking-out with his DreamCast though, so he decided that Junior wasn't going to get that PS2 for Xmas after all. Another of my cow-orkers is very happy about this, as she bought the "surplus" PS2, as soon as it arrived.
Of course, in years to come when Junior finds out, he's going to be one pissed-off adolescent, "You won't believe what my parents did to me one Xmas !"
So why remove the author's credit from the image, if you're not ashamed of your crime ?
You stole this image, and you stole it from a good site that publishes a lot of amusing content for free. Do it often enough, and they'll stop publishing by that route.
First of all, I'm in favour of content control; parents should be able to control what their kids watch. I'm against mandating this in any way; adults should be able to choose what they want to watch.
Censorship is a two stage process; deciding what the content is (Is it obscene ?, Is it blasphemous ?), and deciding whether it's acceptable to the audience (Is something that is obscene to a homophobe acceptable to me ? Is $cientology blasphemy offensive to me ?). A rating scheme addresses the first part, but leaves the second choice up to me. Commercial censorware simply takes both choices on-board. My personal morals are not the same as those of the censorware author - why should I accept their choices as to what my kids should watch ?
Secondly, censorware typically applies ratings in an arbitrary and often naive manner -- the "Scunthorpe problem". Content authors are the best people to judge these ratings, and we should provide means for them to do so. OK, so the Trolls and the regular goatse.cx problem needs solving, but we should concentrate on this, not just abandon self-rating. After all, even a commercial Pr0n site wants a band of satisfied adult punters, not a bunch of under-age kids with stolen CC numbers, bringing the pr0n industry into disrepute (sic). Apart from the Trolls and a very few subversive sites, accurate self-labelling suits everyone's interests.
Finally, there's often no context to the decision made by censorware. Should every site full of pre-Holocaust anti-semitism be banned ? If you're a museum publisher (as I am) it's often a serious issue; how to have content that's related to an offensive subject not be confused with the offensive material itself.
This has been around for years now. PICS not only provides a rating scheme (such as RSAC or SafeSurf), but it allows anyone (including the site's own publishers) to invent their own rating schemes and allow users to install them in PICS capable browsers. If you want a rating scheme that excludes Evolutionary Science and favours Creationism, then you're quite at liberty to use one.
The same rating scheme can even be applied to sites publishing their metadata to search engines. It's practical, useful and an interesting development area to use this technology to state, "I'm a member of the Good Museums Guild, and when I say this page shows pictures of pandas and is especially suitable for children, then you can trust me."
Phone lines do not draw power from your powerlines. How else can the phones still work at times of emergencies when cable, and electricity dosn't
From the user info:
> 20 Year old Tcom Student
What's "Tcom" ? Please tell me it isn't telecomms.
Power is provided from the phone company itself That's right. Inside every TXE, there's a little cold-fusion reactor to power it.
Where do you think telcos get their power from ? Barring the odd solar phonebox in Arizona, they get it from the grid, same as the rest of us. Rooms of lead bathtubs and standby generators are just that; standbys in case of power loss.
"Its all about the caffine" Caff E ine
Get it right, idiot, that's a religious sacrament you're talking about.
Most of us will never end up as the next Larry Ellison. Few of us will ever get real geek-homes. In the meantime, it's just perfectly normal jealousy and sour grapes.
I always enjoy reading the Innovations catalogue. After the 50th page of ads for personalised carrot embossers, I realise that I just don't need this crap, and I feel much happier about myself.
Larry Ellison might be super-rich, and has two of the playthings I'd most like out of life (a Mig jet and the Oracle corporation), but he's still just a brat who loses his rag with a remote control handset.
How reliable do you think a fridge would be, if it were a PC ? Just as the designer finishes working on a spec with a workable interior light that has the colours of "on" and "off", the market decides FridgeTetris players need more colours and so the 24-bit colour lamp becomes available as a plug-in. Then when the fridge has been installed for a week, the owner decides they need more space to store beer and they plug in a second door that's 16 times bigger than the first.
Newton 2.0's handwriting recognition [...] was/is really amazing.
Amazing, yes. Useful, no.
It's the handwriting that's broken, not the tech. I just can't write fast enough, or flexibly enough to use handwriting as a control device for the PDA that I want.
It certainly shouldn't be limited. There should be no government interference that states, "You can't have simple IP-only connectivity, unless you also sign up for the Moron Channel". OTOH, commercial operators should be perfectly free to offer IP access "with strings attached", maybe access and a free WebTeeVee to anyone who does sign up to the Moron Channel.
The existence of bundled deals does not mandate the removal of all unbundled deals. We should guard against this occurring, rather than shouting down anything and everything that looks the least commercial.
Do you own any of their apps ? If you work in an office (driving Word or Excel), or you sell eServices over the (.)Net, then M$oft want a piece of you as a market. If you're a hypothetical Slashdot reader with a blagged copy of Win98 that you only ever use for games playing, then they don't really care that much about you anyway.
Stop a typical small business pirating Word and they'll buy it. Stop a home geek pirating it and they'll just stop using it.
IMHO, M$oft recognise that the "home computer" is dead. A population that can't set the clock on its video is just too stupid to need a PC anyway. They bought them previously because they needed them as games machines or web browsers, but no longer. As M$oft does depend a lot on OEM Windows sales, then this is a big problem for them.
Cue the X-box....
You'll keep using Borgware. When you read the cable TV guide on-line (using the X-box's browser), it will be.Net code that serves it up to your local cable co. (and charges them per-view to do so). The cable co. hosts it on a web page running on Win2K++ (and gets charged a per-hour licence for using it) and when you put your CC details in to order the night's pr0n viewing, it's another.Net service that validates the CC details. You might not "own a copy of Word", but M$oft will still be getting its slice of your pie.
This is Big Blue Iron we're talking about, not a bunch of individual PCs that just happen to be stuffed into a single rack.
30,000 Linux OS images on a 390 is no harder to manage than those as MVS images, and not that much (sic) harder than a single one. Sure, there's a lot of user accounts to manage, and a mainframe port brings in complexity issues that aren't important for a one-per-desktop box, but you certainly don't have issues like 30,000 individual root passwords. It's a hell of a lot easier to admin than a Beowulf cluster.
Lots of users with their own image of a shared (and protected) OS is what mainframes are all about.
Slashdot Mirror
Please show me how its OO design is crap
C++ still has pointers, and you have to use pointers regularly to get anywhere. Now I'm not a SmallTalk purist (although I work with a bunch of them), but IMHO, any decent OO language has to have made the complete switch from using pointers to using references. It's not a coding thing, it's a debugging thing. This is another failing with C#'s "unsafe" pragma. If the use of pointers can exist, then there's no proof of their absence and you have to debug the code in a mind to expect pointer problems. I write applications - I have better things to spend my coding time on than getting memory management secure - that's what my language environment is for.
Secondly, multiple inheritance. Interface-based programming is the way to go, to support multiply-sourced (sic) behaviours, not multiple inheritance. Even VB (FFS!) recognises this.
On both of these counts, I find Java a big improvement over C++.
Another huge advantage of Java over C++ (although this is a pragmatic advantage, not a theoretical one) is the fact that Open Source Java classes are freely available for almost anything, easy to integrate, and usable. C++ in comparison tends to be proprietary, inconsistent and crap (MFC - I rest my case).
What do I know ? Years of O-O Pascal, C++, J++/Java and VB, and even some SmallTalk. These days I write Java Servlets.
It's an OS, and the fact that it looks like an applet sandbox is because sandboxes look like OSes too. It's a better sandbox for browser applets.
Inferno is really pretty K00L(sic), and well worth taking a look at. It will probably die owing to Not Invented Here syndrome, but if M$oft had invented it instead of Bell Labs, the X-box would be running it and we'd all be looking at it very seriously as the next generation in mass-market home net-access devices.
Inferno would make a nice platform for building a TiVo-clone on.
Web retailers posting out paper catalogues is a technique invented by boo.com, and we know how well it worked for them. If I worked for these people, I'd want to start getting paid in cash.
Amazon sent me a Jenga set the other week. I think they intended it as a customer perk, but it had entirely the opposite effect. Instead of ordering the couple of (unusually expensive) books I was about to, I bought them from the high street instead - just in case Amazon really was about to fold.
(You know the valleys of cleavage, the thin waists and the high pitched giggles...)
Yes, boys everywhere are growing up to be corset-wearing Goths
8-)
Katz quoted a figure of 49 minutes (presumably a mean, the average time for which US children game) and described it as if it were the median (the time for which an "average child" games). There's a difference, and it's a significant difference as this article was concerned.
This sort of slapdash inaccuracy is something of a Katz trademark, and it's why he has a poor reputation with many Slashdot readers. In some ways he's the Germaine Greer of /. -- He's often absolutely right, but he argues the case so badly that you begin to disbelieve him anyway.
Your best hackers all have low attention spans, and will tinker with anything that can be tinkered with. Don't give them root - anywhere
I agree with your general point, but "anything that can be tinkered with" is much more enticing when it's something you shouldn't be tinkering with. If they don't have root, they'll try to get it by some other means.
I don't know if I have root on our servers. I think I do, but I've never used it. I'm lucky enough to work somewhere that takes admin seriously and I have someone else do it for me. If they make it work, make it work right, and don't screw it up, then there's just no reason why a developer like myself should ever need to be distracted by it. Suits me fine.
The idea of getting in a PFY with an MCSE and then locking others out of the boxes sounds like a disaster. The people who have access have no clue, and the people with the clue don't have access.
A big word that's very like 'superscaler' is 'superscalar'. I find it much more useful.
You do that by blackholing enough of their customers
Fine, go and take it out on Media3 if you want to, but why should you whack the innocent customers too ? This is like arresting a drunken driver, then charging everyone else who drives the same model of Ford.
The RBL has become a powerful weapon for causing havoc on the Net. It's useful, admittedly, but it also carries with it a responsibility to use it wisely. This scatter-gun approach is not wise. (If I were in an admin role to make such decisions) I'd pull my usage of RBL, because if that's their approach, I could no longer trust Vixie to use it properly.
Did Vixie ever serve in Vietnam ? It's that same "It was necessary to destroy the village, in order to save it" mentality.
Bet it wouldn't stand up to long term vibration. The connectors used to attach the lead are just normal square-pin headers (look at the photo), with no additional strain relief. These connectors don't have enough contact pressure for reliability, and in extreme cases (motor-racing) they'll walk their way clean off the pin.
Some years ago I used to instrument power presses. Getting strain gauge signals out through connectors on shop-floor tooling was alway a PITA.
It's just an ego-massage for the poor spanner. What a R4D H4X0R D00D he must be.
Never mind. If he backs up to videotape, the site won't be around for much longer.
Flat works. Many of the reasons for being tall are either to be taller than competitors, or to gain gravitational potential energy. Both of these scale down pretty well - you can get the same effect, just by reducing everyone's height in the same proportions.
There's a superb book on similar subjects; "Newton Rules Biology" by C J Pennycuick. It's over-priced and keeps going out of print, but it's an essential read. What happens if you take an elephant and make it bigger ? How big can you make it before its legs simply collapse under its own weight ? How small can a hummingbird get before it can no longer keep warm ? Why can't bees fly ?
amazon.com have it in at present, but not amazon.co.uk.
There's also a classic of '50s cheeezy sci-fi (whose title I can't remember) of an extremely flat alien who was a "mariner" of sorts on the surface of a spinning neutron star (the spin was important).
They're actually extremely heavy, it's just that the local atmosphere is even more so. The Hindenburg was pretty heavy too, but it still had excess buoyancy.
The idea of floating critters on a gas giant is certainly an interesting one. If there's an argument against it, it's that although the "finished" creatures may be viable at that size, it's unclear how they could initially arise outside of a liquid medium. We're not too sure how life arises, but it would certainly need a medium that was fluid enough to let some chemistry take place, but not so energetic that the proto-critters were ripped apart as fast as they formed. Room-temperature water isn't a bad choice here.
One of my cow-orkers reserved a PS2 for his kids. Seems that sprog #1 was rather geeking-out with his DreamCast though, so he decided that Junior wasn't going to get that PS2 for Xmas after all. Another of my cow-orkers is very happy about this, as she bought the "surplus" PS2, as soon as it arrived.
Of course, in years to come when Junior finds out, he's going to be one pissed-off adolescent,
"You won't believe what my parents did to me one Xmas !"
So why remove the author's credit from the image, if you're not ashamed of your crime ? You stole this image, and you stole it from a good site that publishes a lot of amusing content for free. Do it often enough, and they'll stop publishing by that route.
If it is on the internet it is free
Moron
First of all, I'm in favour of content control; parents should be able to control what their kids watch. I'm against mandating this in any way; adults should be able to choose what they want to watch.
Censorship is a two stage process; deciding what the content is (Is it obscene ?, Is it blasphemous ?), and deciding whether it's acceptable to the audience (Is something that is obscene to a homophobe acceptable to me ? Is $cientology blasphemy offensive to me ?). A rating scheme addresses the first part, but leaves the second choice up to me. Commercial censorware simply takes both choices on-board. My personal morals are not the same as those of the censorware author - why should I accept their choices as to what my kids should watch ?
Secondly, censorware typically applies ratings in an arbitrary and often naive manner -- the "Scunthorpe problem". Content authors are the best people to judge these ratings, and we should provide means for them to do so. OK, so the Trolls and the regular goatse.cx problem needs solving, but we should concentrate on this, not just abandon self-rating. After all, even a commercial Pr0n site wants a band of satisfied adult punters, not a bunch of under-age kids with stolen CC numbers, bringing the pr0n industry into disrepute (sic). Apart from the Trolls and a very few subversive sites, accurate self-labelling suits everyone's interests.
Finally, there's often no context to the decision made by censorware. Should every site full of pre-Holocaust anti-semitism be banned ? If you're a museum publisher (as I am) it's often a serious issue; how to have content that's related to an offensive subject not be confused with the offensive material itself.
This has been around for years now. PICS not only provides a rating scheme (such as RSAC or SafeSurf), but it allows anyone (including the site's own publishers) to invent their own rating schemes and allow users to install them in PICS capable browsers. If you want a rating scheme that excludes Evolutionary Science and favours Creationism, then you're quite at liberty to use one.
The same rating scheme can even be applied to sites publishing their metadata to search engines. It's practical, useful and an interesting development area to use this technology to state, "I'm a member of the Good Museums Guild, and when I say this page shows pictures of pandas and is especially suitable for children, then you can trust me."
Insightful ? Get a clue, moderators....
Your MP3 image is stolen from Modern Humorist, with the credits zapped.
Phone lines do not draw power from your powerlines. How else can the phones still work at times of emergencies when cable, and electricity dosn't
From the user info:
> 20 Year old Tcom Student
What's "Tcom" ? Please tell me it isn't telecomms.
Power is provided from the phone company itself
That's right. Inside every TXE, there's a little cold-fusion reactor to power it.
Where do you think telcos get their power from ? Barring the odd solar phonebox in Arizona, they get it from the grid, same as the rest of us. Rooms of lead bathtubs and standby generators are just that; standbys in case of power loss.
"Its all about the caffine"
Caff E ine
Get it right, idiot, that's a religious sacrament you're talking about.
Most of us will never end up as the next Larry Ellison. Few of us will ever get real geek-homes. In the meantime, it's just perfectly normal jealousy and sour grapes.
I always enjoy reading the Innovations catalogue. After the 50th page of ads for personalised carrot embossers, I realise that I just don't need this crap, and I feel much happier about myself.
Larry Ellison might be super-rich, and has two of the playthings I'd most like out of life (a Mig jet and the Oracle corporation), but he's still just a brat who loses his rag with a remote control handset.
How reliable do you think a fridge would be, if it were a PC ? Just as the designer finishes working on a spec with a workable interior light that has the colours of "on" and "off", the market decides FridgeTetris players need more colours and so the 24-bit colour lamp becomes available as a plug-in. Then when the fridge has been installed for a week, the owner decides they need more space to store beer and they plug in a second door that's 16 times bigger than the first.
Newton 2.0's handwriting recognition [...] was/is really amazing.
Amazing, yes. Useful, no.
It's the handwriting that's broken, not the tech. I just can't write fast enough, or flexibly enough to use handwriting as a control device for the PDA that I want.
Why should TCP/IP access be free (as in speech) ?
It certainly shouldn't be limited. There should be no government interference that states, "You can't have simple IP-only connectivity, unless you also sign up for the Moron Channel". OTOH, commercial operators should be perfectly free to offer IP access "with strings attached", maybe access and a free WebTeeVee to anyone who does sign up to the Moron Channel.
The existence of bundled deals does not mandate the removal of all unbundled deals. We should guard against this occurring, rather than shouting down anything and everything that looks the least commercial.
Once Bush gets firmly ensconced in office, it will be latent homosexual tendency testing, liberal testing, and differently thinking testing.
Why stop at "thinking differently" ? Bush will be after anyone who can think, out of sheer jealousy
they won't own any of my apps
Do you own any of their apps ? If you work in an office (driving Word or Excel), or you sell eServices over the (.)Net, then M$oft want a piece of you as a market. If you're a hypothetical Slashdot reader with a blagged copy of Win98 that you only ever use for games playing, then they don't really care that much about you anyway.
Stop a typical small business pirating Word and they'll buy it.
Stop a home geek pirating it and they'll just stop using it.
IMHO, M$oft recognise that the "home computer" is dead. A population that can't set the clock on its video is just too stupid to need a PC anyway. They bought them previously because they needed them as games machines or web browsers, but no longer. As M$oft does depend a lot on OEM Windows sales, then this is a big problem for them.
Cue the X-box....
You'll keep using Borgware. When you read the cable TV guide on-line (using the X-box's browser), it will be .Net code that serves it up to your local cable co. (and charges them per-view to do so). The cable co. hosts it on a web page running on Win2K++ (and gets charged a per-hour licence for using it) and when you put your CC details in to order the night's pr0n viewing, it's another .Net service that validates the CC details. You might not "own a copy of Word", but M$oft will still be getting its slice of your pie.
This is Big Blue Iron we're talking about, not a bunch of individual PCs that just happen to be stuffed into a single rack.
30,000 Linux OS images on a 390 is no harder to manage than those as MVS images, and not that much (sic) harder than a single one. Sure, there's a lot of user accounts to manage, and a mainframe port brings in complexity issues that aren't important for a one-per-desktop box, but you certainly don't have issues like 30,000 individual root passwords. It's a hell of a lot easier to admin than a Beowulf cluster.
Lots of users with their own image of a shared (and protected) OS is what mainframes are all about.