Strange... I thought that users could add in anything they wanted under the GPL... Is there something in CDDL that prevents a user from adding a ZFS package?
Personally I like the GPL, but I also support anyone who creates a product releasing it under whatever license they damn well please (or not at all, if that's what they want).
Also, aren't there quite a few distros that include proprietary software anyway? I believe it's only a few distros that get all anal about not including anything that's not GPL, but I could totally be wrong about that.
It appears to be more of a trend in youth than anything to do with our industry. New workers are refusing to take a lot of jobs or work hard (or often even think). They don't rank work very high on their list of important things in life.
I don't really care much one way or the other--if people would rather climb mountains than work--have at it!
I think, however, that it's going to be an interesting world the next time we encounter a depression or serious hard times...
I'm amazingly pissed off when I see stuff like this...
Not so much media companies buying laws but the fact that governments are able to address this somewhat questionable problem with such a "Final" solution and not stop the bullshit like botnets that are absolutely evil and destructive to all.
the world is going to become a swamp. Very nice for most forms of life. I expect giant mosquitoes, massive yellow jacket nests and killer ants like in that old movie where they had to hold them off with a ring of burning gas.
great for life and probably biodiversity in the long run, but maybe not as fun for me. I HATE yellow jackets.
Of course, Google Maps can zoom smoothly from earth orbit down to my house without downloading a technology that crashes my browser 4 times in two minutes. (More than doubled my total number of browser crashes).
But this is impressive guys. You can hardly see the pixilation until you get kinda close. It's almost as good as if those had all been separate high resolution photos with a thumbnail page.
Almost--but keep up the good work guys! Soon you may be as good as basic HTML, and who knows, in a few years you could even rival AJAX.
or at least were a few years ago. I didn't RTFA so I hope this isn't duplicated info, but next time you go to an older self-storage building (the kind with a keypad to open the gate), look to see what they use to program your new personal code into open the gate.
Last time I checked, they were model 100's. They have decent connectivity and are pretty easy to program. They have parallel and serial, and a nice enough display to do solve most problems that need solving.
The control relay made a really decent single-bit output.
The memory rarely goes away (almost never unless I was screwing around).
A really awesome little device for its time.
I'd love to see something similar today. A general system with a few input sensors and output relays, both analog and digital. No predefined purpose--just general hardware control that's fully programmable. Portable enough, but not "Pocket". Full keyboard. Amazingly cheap (would be now). Maybe even no OS to speak of--just throw Ruby or a JVM on there and call it good.
All I'd add is a few meg of ram, wireless network connection and a display the same size but with a resolution closer to that of a gameboy.
Considering the cost of it's features against those of a bottom of the line laptop, it should cost $50-80 each.
I'm also really uncomfortable with the idea of signing some box so my signature is in a computer. Not that it can't be scanned in, but when they test your signature they look at how hard you pressed the pen and stuff like that--undetectable through a digital medium...
And if they did record it, they could easily replicate it--even adding minor changes so it can't be detected as an obvious replica.
Email is even worse--Email is insecure, easy to spoof, is not guaranteed delivery, and shouldn't be used for anything official--ever.
Overall the fact is that the only advantage we have is obscurity. There are so many people you just have to hope that you aren't the one randomly chosen for identity theft or the target of some other shenanigans.
I don't trust bio signatures much yet either. Not that they couldn't be made reliable, but right now--nobody is willing to invest the money to do so.
The only thing I can imagine being valid is something like a USB Dongle you carry on your keychain that will encrypt anything sent to it with a gigantic private key (forget 1024 bits, how about 1M bit key?) It should be physically impossible to get the private key out of your keychain, but the public one can be pulled out for publishing at any time.
Use the same resin technology that they use to stop people from copying chips--or fill the damn thing with acid in a little glass vial like the theft-protection tags on clothes.
The software source must be available for review.
Readers wouldn't need protection because they couldn't actually "Steal" anything from the card, only feed it a one-time random string that the key encrypts, then compares the result against a published public key.
Maybe that wouldn't prevent it from being stolen, but at least you'd know that if it wasn't you were relatively safe, and if it was you could cancel it pretty easily...
They are getting close to this with some credit cards, but that's not a generic "Signature" mechanism, and I'm guessing that they are more hackable than I'd like.
Depends I suppose. There are multiple worlds at play here. In one corner, there are the new kids just coming into programming, those on small teams, web developers, thrill seekers. They are looking for languages that offer minimal keystrokes, neat features, quick prototyping (rails!), minimal configuration, etc.
For these people, maintainability isn't really even a remote consideration. For them the critical measurement seems to be the ratio of:
(functionality * fun cleaver features) / (keystrokes * prototype dev time)
They often get bogged down in their own code after the first few releases, but the people who started the project and chose the language are often off to another by this time, and if not they rarely even recognize the additional time spent to repair something later. (and to tell you the truth, if you used prototype development speed to sell the project and delivered the initial prototype and the customer bought it, there is a valid argument that they did the right thing even if it moved time and problems to later in the project cycle)
Another very large (and very quiet) group is more interested in a formula like this:
Note that there is absolutely no concern for how much you type here. Typing speed has no relationship whatsoever for how long it takes a large project to come out--it's an inverse relationship in fact. Having to learn something new just to save a few keystrokes is a huge negative (multiply learning time by the 500 people on your team, it becomes like a manyear per feature easily)
This group is huge--it's virtually every team I've worked with, and, of the ones I've known, maybe 2% twitter, blog, read blogs or listen to podcasts. They are not involved in the community, they just work and go home to their families. They are typically comfortable with Unix and A few read/. (the exception that makes the rule)
They are generally developing in pre java-6, and often pre java-5. Sometimes because they have to, but often because of stability and huge retesting requirements to ceritfy a new development tool.
In my realm they are almost always Java or C++, although the latter is getting more rare. I'm sure in windows they are almost all using C#.
They usually aren't interested in learning about other languages or complicating the one they are using (although they will use the features if available).
This group ranges from uncreative programmers who struggle with concepts like OO or Generics or (in some cases) pointers and boolean math to are excellent all-around programmers; and many used to be in the first group.
Most are just good programmers that want to go home at 5:00 and spend the night with their families instead of jumping straight on the computer to learn a new technology.
Personally I think this latter group is quiet enough that the industry writers, bloggers and podcasters don't realize they exist, but I'd guess that they are at least 70% of the programmers out there.
If it wasn't for Java and C#, they would probably be using ADA or C++. Ruby and Python would never be considered.
Yeah, that was it. Amazing, it's like every piece of software that I really dislike ends up in their hands.
Although I'm sure FrameMaker has improved a lot since then--I remember it being quite powerful, but that was lost to me since I never needed anything more powerful than word.
(Well, actually the large document handling was nice, word would just roll over and die if you fed it a large enough document)
Real didn't crash, but it was unpleasant in many other ways. As for reading PDFs online; if it's a short document I might view it in the browser, but I almost always r-click to download and view it once it's all there, rather than try to view inline. Correct, you just forgot to add "I got into this habit because the Adobe reader plugin is a piece of crap and my pain/response mechanism took over".
So why use the browser plugin if it was so much hassle? I Generally uninstall it (as I have said) but since most browsers seem to come pre-corrupted, you will eventually accidentally click on a link.
Print-to-PDF allowed many documents originally designed for print to be easily repurposed as downloads.... Sometimes PDFs are gratuitous, but often the alternative would be nothing at all Yes, and Print-to-Text actually does the same thing but in a more world-friendly format. Are you saying it couldn't have been used anywhere print-to-PDF could?
If you do any DTP, Adobe products are essential. Absolutely. I never said adobe products weren't absolutely necessary for self publishing, they are pretty much the only answer--and they do a good job at it from what I've seen.
I was very careful when I decided to mention the technology was problematic when "Used on the web" not in general. In a mostly vertical niche such as DTP, you expect poor, glitchy software that doesn't have competition. You become willing to ignore flaws--heck you often don't even see them.
I vaguely remember another vertical DTP app that was really bad--way back in the early 90's There used to be this absolutely terrifying GUI word processor for Unix called "Frame" or something like that. It had the silliest menu system you ever saw. I finally figured it out, they came up with this "Trick" of tear-off menus that you could set beside the window--this meant, however, that all the useful functions were buried at the bottom leaves of the menu. I don't know exactly how to describe it but it was virtually impossible to find typically used functionality. If this piece of garbage had survived, it might have given Adobe a run for their money--both in the decent DTP and the crappiest app ever departments.
I believe it handled large collections of "Chapters" in a huge document MUCH MUCH better than word did though, and did have some kind of real send-to-the-printer rendering IIRC...
---- My wife and I were talking the other day while she was looking something up on the web, suddenly she said "Oh Crap", I said what, she said "This document is PDF." I know she's heard me bitch about Adobe, but I also know she, like everyone who uses computers (and apparently you mr. parent) dread bringing up that plugin.
Isn't that dread alone enough to give it at least the "Most hated web-rendering technology" award? When even the plugin's defenders say "Don't use it".
iPhone did the second-best thing. The screen is really easy to wipe clean--it doesn't seem to retain even the most greasy fingerprints.
It seems to be hard as nails as well. Is it actual glass?
The only thing I'm dreading is the day a grain of sand gets into my cleaning cloth--I do wipe pretty hard.
Also, what's with those cloths that Apple puts into the notebook/iPhones? Those things are absolutely perfect. I've never seen a better "Wiping Cloth". Use it all the time for my glasses, screens and phone. I think it's some kind of a fine-mesh, soft felt.
Since I got those, seriously, I have had no need to use liquid glass cleaner on my iphone, glasses or LCD screens. I did breathe on my iPhone once to get a drop of something off.
Real Player never crashed my machine (That I remember, at least I can say it never became enough of a pattern for me to recognize it as one). Adobe Reader used to almost every time I hit a PDF file--if it was a large file over dialup--guaranteed.
Not only that, but typically it would hang your entire browser--not just that one window--while it loaded a PDF; I'm not sure how they pulled that off.
I began to dread encountering pdf files.
Type manager was deeply wired into windows. A single bug (and it had many) would screw up your entire system. It never worked and played well with other apps, and lots of crap would make you install it for no reason. Nobody but marketing dweebs care that a font is rendered exactly as their font was, and beyond the flakeyness, I was somewhat annoyed at them allowing that kind of "Push" onto my machine--I want "Read as TEXT" so I could wrap to my screen size, adjust the font, and simply read--Adobe insisted on huge downloads for ugly, unmanagable text with awkward zooming/scrolling instead. The whole concept is anti-web... (ATM and Reader both)
If it hadn't been for Adobe, we would have had nice, simple, readable HTML-based documents instead. Sure I could blame incompetent companies for using Adobe in the first place, but can you blame a baby if you give it a lollipop-shaped gun and it shoots itself in the head?
Flash also bothers me conceptually, it's overused but has some very valid uses and I believe it's pretty stable these days--most of my bitching about flash is legacy.
Windows 3.1 used to crash all the time, when I removed ATM, it crashed significantly less. Well, not remove so much as re-install windows without it.
My argument is that Adobe Type Manager broke PCs constantly and was pointless. Adobe Acrobat is the only app that pretty regularly crashed my browser.
They still tend to lock up browsers when downloading a long document, and if your connection is slow, it probably still crashes them--luckily few have to deal with that any more.
They try to force their crappy software onto every machine I use. Often preloaded. Honestly, since the windows 3.1 days I have been crashed more often by Adobe than probably every other cause combined.
I have to admit less often lately, but then I try to keep their garbage off my machines, but maybe it's gotten better and people who have only used them for the past couple years (esp. with fast internet connections) don't have a problem with them.
Lucky they bought Flash--the OTHER great bane of the web.
I would have said: Situation Normal, Adobe's Fucked Up
Adobe has to be the worst company ever to supply popular software for the web, and it has always been a horrid company--at least since "ATM" started destroying my PCs back in the ole Windows 3.0 days.
At one point, they had some competition from some other terribly flashy web software, but they quickly rectified that by buying the company so they could retain their title of Extreme Web Fuckups and earn the SNAFU title.
(Second use of the F was quite gratuitous, but in for a penny, in for a pound)
A cyberpunk common theme is multinational industrial concerns having equal or more power than the governments. In fact, the governments seem to have been broken of most power and now are nothing more than location-based unions.
The first time I saw this was actually Max Headroom (I suppose that show could be called the grandfather of cyberpunk).
It always seemed like fantasy to me (a pretty horrifying one), but nothing that could come true.
What's going on these days though feels like the first battles. Industries placing people in top government positions, controlling votes, manipulating laws and standards, Chevron killing villagers who are protesting, all the private police forces protecting industrial concerns in Iraq (and being better equipped than the solders to do so)...
I'm surprised they were as accurate as they were, and I trust their predictions for our future in a corporate-run world if we let it go on--not that I know what to do about it...
We've always been able to overthrow governments that became too problematic. How do you overthrow a multinational conglomerate that is in control of multiple governments? How do you even know who to fight?
Because all the other distros are "Just another Distro"
I know people are going to disagree (mod away, points to burn) but without Ubuntu, Linux would still be for techies only.
I've used quite a few distros. I love some of the concepts behind DSL and have used it quite a bit, Knoppix rocks, but when it comes down to "Could I give this to some random person to use", I wouldn't do any but Ubuntu.
Part of it is that the Debian package manager puts all the others to shame. The precompiled installs make a huge difference in how often it works vs fails (I don't believe I've ever had an add/remove program fail in Ubuntu. Can't say that about non-debian distros I've used for half that amount of time)
An other issue is that Ubuntu works out of the box. Give an ubuntu disk and pretty much any other distro to a techophobe and see which one sends him screaming from the room.
All the tools in Ubuntu act like they are meant to be there, not just some pile of programs that were stuffed in. Things generally don't fail, and most hardware drivers auto-install correctly and just work.
I'm sorry, but to put it bluntly, none of the others rate much of a mention in non-techie press. On slashdot, maybe a little, but most will even admit that they simply do not have an interest in users that aren't technical (those that will give up before going to the net to find a solution for a device driver or X11 config problem).
For those who work on other distros, please don't read me wrong. Your work is valuable, and what you do is damn impressive... but most of the other distros are made to scratch some programmers itch--not to support grandma's web-porn and solitaire needs.
Ubuntu just has a different target, so please don't get offended if you didn't hit a target you weren't aiming for; and don't be surprised if you aren't mentioned in as many articles, because "The Masses" are really more interested in products for "The Masses" than those for "techies"--even "the masses" on slashdot.
I said (Or meant to say) executable files. None should be modified typically.
Dealing with scripts can be tricky though. I guess that developers might need a flag that says "Ignore this ruby script, I change it all the time".
Also, identifying to the system that scripts are executable and not text files might be interesting, but not overly difficult.
It might be reasonable to confine a program to data in its own directory and a specific subdirectory of your home directory in 90% of the cases... Any changes outside those two would be of interest, but even that is beyond the case I'm talking about...
All I'm talking about is identifying changed executables. Why does that take "Scanning for signatures"?
Tripwire does that as well. What you want to look out for is a program in your system that is updated when you are not loading an application (when you don't expect one to be updated)
Currently we have no way of knowing this has happened (which is why products like NAV seem to be useful)
If you were on a website and something said "Someone is trying to update some_program.exe, do you approve?", then it would get your attention.
how about someone patents "Detecting changed files" as an indication of a virus. Too obvious? I guess there is prior art (tripwire), but why the HELL can't they implement such a no-brainer?
If they wanted to, they could even put a hardware-locked little USB drive to store the checksums. If you update an executable, you press a button on your little drive to allow a single write (or maybe a limited number of writes over the next 2 seconds.)
Code either on the add-on drive or in ROM checks the checksum of every executable loaded before it's started--even during bootup (guess that means it's in rom). Hell as long as I'm designing their app for them, Only this unchangeable rom routine can write to the USB drive. (Routine should be so simple as to never require updates, and should be stored in ROM, flash ram)
Oh, I see, they don't want to solve the problem... I see, they want to sell "antivirus updates" for the rest of eternity.
There, somebody go off and make that for me please. Or if you have the ability to do the hardware part, contact me and I'll do the software. We'll make millions (but not as much as people who can trick you into actually "Subscribing" to software, that's genius. no wonder their brain blocks out any more permanent solution)
I am kind of seeing one potentially good outcome. Perhaps they planned it, or fell into it accidentally.
You spend all this money coming up with an OS that can run on a simple laptop, and the hardware research to build the laptop.
Now like with software development, everything is much easy and much better the second time, but you've got all this debt and all this baggage and can't start over.
So you see Microsoft in the corner trying to figure out how to stop you--you hand the company over to them but slip the important stuff out the back window. You get to start over and shrug off all the debt and baggage.
(I don't know that there is debt, just guessing).
Then you start over with the REAL OLPC program. You might even partner with one of the new ultra-cheap laptop companies this time.
You take and compete with the original which (perhaps due to some "guidance" by the moles you left behind) has been gutted so bad it can't compete.
This time you are at least as well funded and you have a better product and a huge following. Microsoft has shot it's wad as well in destroying the first attempt.
Overall perhaps they couldn't have carried it out better if they had planned it.
Sorry, but I'm so pissed off about the whole thing I've decided to live in a fantasy world for a little while.
> But - turns out bytecode directly executed is in the same ballpark as "regular" instructions. Doesn't really gain much. (sorry, can't cite)
Not sure what you mean. If you are saying that a CPU running bytecode tends to run your code as fast as a CPU running assembly, that's what I'm assuming. But the CPUs running bytecode haven't been optimized as much as the intel CPUs..
Also, we could put more powerful instructions into the bytecode if they tend to execute too quickly. Stuff like complete control over memory management, garbage collection, etc. Each feature that would be "Kernel" could be moved into the CPU allowing even more for the hardware engineers to optimize.
You would start to lose C-style pointer functionality at some point, but you could even gain speed doing so because now the CPU can actually optimize things a compiler used to have to optimize.
We already have cases where Java can outperform C and even unoptimized assembly because they don't know enough about the code they are running.
for instance, if Java is calling a routine and that routine's data hasn't changed, java can flag that routine and stop calling it until it's data changes. Of course you could do that in assembly, but java will do it automatically for every routine in your program who's data it can isolate.
I believe that Scala could even do more with this kind of optimization.
Same with garbage collection. In C you allocate, use, then de-allocate. In Java, the VM never wastes time on the de-allocation step for the vast majority of its allocations. (See "eden" in any recent garbage collection white-paper).
Microsoft has always coded part of Excel in bytecode. Not for speed but for code-size. If it makes that much of a difference, wouldn't code-size eventually become a transfer issue?
I just think RISC is going the wrong way when you take processor improvements into consideration.
> That's one area where windows really does do better, obviously due to the massive adoption of windows around the world.
You want to rethink that statement? Is there any other possible reason?
There is no reason the VM solution has to be slower. It could actually suspend the host OS and simply take direct access to a window, or bank-switch the entire screen. You realize all games are multitasking with your OS, right?
Think of the little BIOS things like the way the volume control often tunnels through the OS to the screen...
I kind of wonder if we could move towards a box not having a single "OS", but a set of appropriate systems. Kind of like the way a Kernel might run a GUI--Windows could be another GUI, games could be another GUI, etc.
As I said, it won't happen, but actually it would work quite well.
Slashdot Mirror
...of these asshats I just get this feeling that our country is run by a bunch of highschool kids.
Well, except that the kids would have the respect to actually try a little.
"A complete history of almost everything."
It's just as advertised, and yet a great read.
Strange... I thought that users could add in anything they wanted under the GPL... Is there something in CDDL that prevents a user from adding a ZFS package?
Personally I like the GPL, but I also support anyone who creates a product releasing it under whatever license they damn well please (or not at all, if that's what they want).
Also, aren't there quite a few distros that include proprietary software anyway? I believe it's only a few distros that get all anal about not including anything that's not GPL, but I could totally be wrong about that.
It appears to be more of a trend in youth than anything to do with our industry. New workers are refusing to take a lot of jobs or work hard (or often even think). They don't rank work very high on their list of important things in life.
I don't really care much one way or the other--if people would rather climb mountains than work--have at it!
I think, however, that it's going to be an interesting world the next time we encounter a depression or serious hard times...
I'm amazingly pissed off when I see stuff like this...
Not so much media companies buying laws but the fact that governments are able to address this somewhat questionable problem with such a "Final" solution and not stop the bullshit like botnets that are absolutely evil and destructive to all.
the world is going to become a swamp. Very nice for most forms of life. I expect giant mosquitoes, massive yellow jacket nests and killer ants like in that old movie where they had to hold them off with a ring of burning gas.
great for life and probably biodiversity in the long run, but maybe not as fun for me. I HATE yellow jackets.
That's pretty neat.
Of course, Google Maps can zoom smoothly from earth orbit down to my house without downloading a technology that crashes my browser 4 times in two minutes. (More than doubled my total number of browser crashes).
But this is impressive guys. You can hardly see the pixilation until you get kinda close. It's almost as good as if those had all been separate high resolution photos with a thumbnail page.
Almost--but keep up the good work guys! Soon you may be as good as basic HTML, and who knows, in a few years you could even rival AJAX.
or at least were a few years ago. I didn't RTFA so I hope this isn't duplicated info, but next time you go to an older self-storage building (the kind with a keypad to open the gate), look to see what they use to program your new personal code into open the gate.
Last time I checked, they were model 100's. They have decent connectivity and are pretty easy to program. They have parallel and serial, and a nice enough display to do solve most problems that need solving.
The control relay made a really decent single-bit output.
The memory rarely goes away (almost never unless I was screwing around).
A really awesome little device for its time.
I'd love to see something similar today. A general system with a few input sensors and output relays, both analog and digital. No predefined purpose--just general hardware control that's fully programmable. Portable enough, but not "Pocket". Full keyboard. Amazingly cheap (would be now). Maybe even no OS to speak of--just throw Ruby or a JVM on there and call it good.
All I'd add is a few meg of ram, wireless network connection and a display the same size but with a resolution closer to that of a gameboy.
Considering the cost of it's features against those of a bottom of the line laptop, it should cost $50-80 each.
that signatures are meaningless.
I'm also really uncomfortable with the idea of signing some box so my signature is in a computer. Not that it can't be scanned in, but when they test your signature they look at how hard you pressed the pen and stuff like that--undetectable through a digital medium...
And if they did record it, they could easily replicate it--even adding minor changes so it can't be detected as an obvious replica.
Email is even worse--Email is insecure, easy to spoof, is not guaranteed delivery, and shouldn't be used for anything official--ever.
Overall the fact is that the only advantage we have is obscurity. There are so many people you just have to hope that you aren't the one randomly chosen for identity theft or the target of some other shenanigans.
I don't trust bio signatures much yet either. Not that they couldn't be made reliable, but right now--nobody is willing to invest the money to do so.
The only thing I can imagine being valid is something like a USB Dongle you carry on your keychain that will encrypt anything sent to it with a gigantic private key (forget 1024 bits, how about 1M bit key?) It should be physically impossible to get the private key out of your keychain, but the public one can be pulled out for publishing at any time.
Use the same resin technology that they use to stop people from copying chips--or fill the damn thing with acid in a little glass vial like the theft-protection tags on clothes.
The software source must be available for review.
Readers wouldn't need protection because they couldn't actually "Steal" anything from the card, only feed it a one-time random string that the key encrypts, then compares the result against a published public key.
Maybe that wouldn't prevent it from being stolen, but at least you'd know that if it wasn't you were relatively safe, and if it was you could cancel it pretty easily...
They are getting close to this with some credit cards, but that's not a generic "Signature" mechanism, and I'm guessing that they are more hackable than I'd like.
Depends I suppose. There are multiple worlds at play here. In one corner, there are the new kids just coming into programming, those on small teams, web developers, thrill seekers. They are looking for languages that offer minimal keystrokes, neat features, quick prototyping (rails!), minimal configuration, etc.
For these people, maintainability isn't really even a remote consideration. For them the critical measurement seems to be the ratio of:
(functionality * fun cleaver features) / (keystrokes * prototype dev time)
They often get bogged down in their own code after the first few releases, but the people who started the project and chose the language are often off to another by this time, and if not they rarely even recognize the additional time spent to repair something later. (and to tell you the truth, if you used prototype development speed to sell the project and delivered the initial prototype and the customer bought it, there is a valid argument that they did the right thing even if it moved time and problems to later in the project cycle)
Another very large (and very quiet) group is more interested in a formula like this:
(Maintainability * Stability * Consistency * Comprehensibility) / (cleaver features ^ 2)
Note that there is absolutely no concern for how much you type here. Typing speed has no relationship whatsoever for how long it takes a large project to come out--it's an inverse relationship in fact. Having to learn something new just to save a few keystrokes is a huge negative (multiply learning time by the 500 people on your team, it becomes like a manyear per feature easily)
This group is huge--it's virtually every team I've worked with, and, of the ones I've known, maybe 2% twitter, blog, read blogs or listen to podcasts. They are not involved in the community, they just work and go home to their families. They are typically comfortable with Unix and A few read
They are generally developing in pre java-6, and often pre java-5. Sometimes because they have to, but often because of stability and huge retesting requirements to ceritfy a new development tool.
In my realm they are almost always Java or C++, although the latter is getting more rare. I'm sure in windows they are almost all using C#.
They usually aren't interested in learning about other languages or complicating the one they are using (although they will use the features if available).
This group ranges from uncreative programmers who struggle with concepts like OO or Generics or (in some cases) pointers and boolean math to are excellent all-around programmers; and many used to be in the first group.
Most are just good programmers that want to go home at 5:00 and spend the night with their families instead of jumping straight on the computer to learn a new technology.
Personally I think this latter group is quiet enough that the industry writers, bloggers and podcasters don't realize they exist, but I'd guess that they are at least 70% of the programmers out there.
If it wasn't for Java and C#, they would probably be using ADA or C++. Ruby and Python would never be considered.
Who do you think "The Rulers" are?
If you think it's the people you vote for and not the people that pay them to buy your votes, you're pretty naive.
"The Rulers" are actually doing a fantastic job at making money for their companies.
GTG, my tin-foil hat fell off and the xrays are gettig s*(@&NO CARRIER
Yeah, that was it. Amazing, it's like every piece of software that I really dislike ends up in their hands.
Although I'm sure FrameMaker has improved a lot since then--I remember it being quite powerful, but that was lost to me since I never needed anything more powerful than word.
(Well, actually the large document handling was nice, word would just roll over and die if you fed it a large enough document)
But the usability--ugh.
I was very careful when I decided to mention the technology was problematic when "Used on the web" not in general. In a mostly vertical niche such as DTP, you expect poor, glitchy software that doesn't have competition. You become willing to ignore flaws--heck you often don't even see them.
I vaguely remember another vertical DTP app that was really bad--way back in the early 90's There used to be this absolutely terrifying GUI word processor for Unix called "Frame" or something like that. It had the silliest menu system you ever saw. I finally figured it out, they came up with this "Trick" of tear-off menus that you could set beside the window--this meant, however, that all the useful functions were buried at the bottom leaves of the menu. I don't know exactly how to describe it but it was virtually impossible to find typically used functionality. If this piece of garbage had survived, it might have given Adobe a run for their money--both in the decent DTP and the crappiest app ever departments.
I believe it handled large collections of "Chapters" in a huge document MUCH MUCH better than word did though, and did have some kind of real send-to-the-printer rendering IIRC...
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My wife and I were talking the other day while she was looking something up on the web, suddenly she said "Oh Crap", I said what, she said "This document is PDF." I know she's heard me bitch about Adobe, but I also know she, like everyone who uses computers (and apparently you mr. parent) dread bringing up that plugin.
Isn't that dread alone enough to give it at least the "Most hated web-rendering technology" award? When even the plugin's defenders say "Don't use it".
iPhone did the second-best thing. The screen is really easy to wipe clean--it doesn't seem to retain even the most greasy fingerprints.
It seems to be hard as nails as well. Is it actual glass?
The only thing I'm dreading is the day a grain of sand gets into my cleaning cloth--I do wipe pretty hard.
Also, what's with those cloths that Apple puts into the notebook/iPhones? Those things are absolutely perfect. I've never seen a better "Wiping Cloth". Use it all the time for my glasses, screens and phone. I think it's some kind of a fine-mesh, soft felt.
Since I got those, seriously, I have had no need to use liquid glass cleaner on my iphone, glasses or LCD screens. I did breathe on my iPhone once to get a drop of something off.
Real Player never crashed my machine (That I remember, at least I can say it never became enough of a pattern for me to recognize it as one). Adobe Reader used to almost every time I hit a PDF file--if it was a large file over dialup--guaranteed.
Not only that, but typically it would hang your entire browser--not just that one window--while it loaded a PDF; I'm not sure how they pulled that off.
I began to dread encountering pdf files.
Type manager was deeply wired into windows. A single bug (and it had many) would screw up your entire system. It never worked and played well with other apps, and lots of crap would make you install it for no reason. Nobody but marketing dweebs care that a font is rendered exactly as their font was, and beyond the flakeyness, I was somewhat annoyed at them allowing that kind of "Push" onto my machine--I want "Read as TEXT" so I could wrap to my screen size, adjust the font, and simply read--Adobe insisted on huge downloads for ugly, unmanagable text with awkward zooming/scrolling instead. The whole concept is anti-web... (ATM and Reader both)
If it hadn't been for Adobe, we would have had nice, simple, readable HTML-based documents instead. Sure I could blame incompetent companies for using Adobe in the first place, but can you blame a baby if you give it a lollipop-shaped gun and it shoots itself in the head?
Flash also bothers me conceptually, it's overused but has some very valid uses and I believe it's pretty stable these days--most of my bitching about flash is legacy.
Windows 3.1 used to crash all the time, when I removed ATM, it crashed significantly less. Well, not remove so much as re-install windows without it.
My argument is that Adobe Type Manager broke PCs constantly and was pointless.
Adobe Acrobat is the only app that pretty regularly crashed my browser.
They still tend to lock up browsers when downloading a long document, and if your connection is slow, it probably still crashes them--luckily few have to deal with that any more.
They try to force their crappy software onto every machine I use. Often preloaded. Honestly, since the windows 3.1 days I have been crashed more often by Adobe than probably every other cause combined.
I have to admit less often lately, but then I try to keep their garbage off my machines, but maybe it's gotten better and people who have only used them for the past couple years (esp. with fast internet connections) don't have a problem with them.
Lucky they bought Flash--the OTHER great bane of the web.
I would have said: Situation Normal, Adobe's Fucked Up
Adobe has to be the worst company ever to supply popular software for the web, and it has always been a horrid company--at least since "ATM" started destroying my PCs back in the ole Windows 3.0 days.
At one point, they had some competition from some other terribly flashy web software, but they quickly rectified that by buying the company so they could retain their title of Extreme Web Fuckups and earn the SNAFU title.
(Second use of the F was quite gratuitous, but in for a penny, in for a pound)
A cyberpunk common theme is multinational industrial concerns having equal or more power than the governments. In fact, the governments seem to have been broken of most power and now are nothing more than location-based unions.
The first time I saw this was actually Max Headroom (I suppose that show could be called the grandfather of cyberpunk).
It always seemed like fantasy to me (a pretty horrifying one), but nothing that could come true.
What's going on these days though feels like the first battles. Industries placing people in top government positions, controlling votes, manipulating laws and standards, Chevron killing villagers who are protesting, all the private police forces protecting industrial concerns in Iraq (and being better equipped than the solders to do so)...
I'm surprised they were as accurate as they were, and I trust their predictions for our future in a corporate-run world if we let it go on--not that I know what to do about it...
We've always been able to overthrow governments that became too problematic. How do you overthrow a multinational conglomerate that is in control of multiple governments? How do you even know who to fight?
Because all the other distros are "Just another Distro"
I know people are going to disagree (mod away, points to burn) but without Ubuntu, Linux would still be for techies only.
I've used quite a few distros. I love some of the concepts behind DSL and have used it quite a bit, Knoppix rocks, but when it comes down to "Could I give this to some random person to use", I wouldn't do any but Ubuntu.
Part of it is that the Debian package manager puts all the others to shame. The precompiled installs make a huge difference in how often it works vs fails (I don't believe I've ever had an add/remove program fail in Ubuntu. Can't say that about non-debian distros I've used for half that amount of time)
An other issue is that Ubuntu works out of the box. Give an ubuntu disk and pretty much any other distro to a techophobe and see which one sends him screaming from the room.
All the tools in Ubuntu act like they are meant to be there, not just some pile of programs that were stuffed in. Things generally don't fail, and most hardware drivers auto-install correctly and just work.
I'm sorry, but to put it bluntly, none of the others rate much of a mention in non-techie press. On slashdot, maybe a little, but most will even admit that they simply do not have an interest in users that aren't technical (those that will give up before going to the net to find a solution for a device driver or X11 config problem).
For those who work on other distros, please don't read me wrong. Your work is valuable, and what you do is damn impressive... but most of the other distros are made to scratch some programmers itch--not to support grandma's web-porn and solitaire needs.
Ubuntu just has a different target, so please don't get offended if you didn't hit a target you weren't aiming for; and don't be surprised if you aren't mentioned in as many articles, because "The Masses" are really more interested in products for "The Masses" than those for "techies"--even "the masses" on slashdot.
I said (Or meant to say) executable files. None should be modified typically.
Dealing with scripts can be tricky though. I guess that developers might need a flag that says "Ignore this ruby script, I change it all the time".
Also, identifying to the system that scripts are executable and not text files might be interesting, but not overly difficult.
It might be reasonable to confine a program to data in its own directory and a specific subdirectory of your home directory in 90% of the cases... Any changes outside those two would be of interest, but even that is beyond the case I'm talking about...
All I'm talking about is identifying changed executables. Why does that take "Scanning for signatures"?
Tripwire does that as well. What you want to look out for is a program in your system that is updated when you are not loading an application (when you don't expect one to be updated)
Currently we have no way of knowing this has happened (which is why products like NAV seem to be useful)
If you were on a website and something said "Someone is trying to update some_program.exe, do you approve?", then it would get your attention.
how about someone patents "Detecting changed files" as an indication of a virus. Too obvious? I guess there is prior art (tripwire), but why the HELL can't they implement such a no-brainer?
If they wanted to, they could even put a hardware-locked little USB drive to store the checksums. If you update an executable, you press a button on your little drive to allow a single write (or maybe a limited number of writes over the next 2 seconds.)
Code either on the add-on drive or in ROM checks the checksum of every executable loaded before it's started--even during bootup (guess that means it's in rom). Hell as long as I'm designing their app for them, Only this unchangeable rom routine can write to the USB drive. (Routine should be so simple as to never require updates, and should be stored in ROM, flash ram)
Oh, I see, they don't want to solve the problem... I see, they want to sell "antivirus updates" for the rest of eternity.
There, somebody go off and make that for me please. Or if you have the ability to do the hardware part, contact me and I'll do the software. We'll make millions (but not as much as people who can trick you into actually "Subscribing" to software, that's genius. no wonder their brain blocks out any more permanent solution)
Completely gutted.
I am kind of seeing one potentially good outcome. Perhaps they planned it, or fell into it accidentally.
You spend all this money coming up with an OS that can run on a simple laptop, and the hardware research to build the laptop.
Now like with software development, everything is much easy and much better the second time, but you've got all this debt and all this baggage and can't start over.
So you see Microsoft in the corner trying to figure out how to stop you--you hand the company over to them but slip the important stuff out the back window. You get to start over and shrug off all the debt and baggage.
(I don't know that there is debt, just guessing).
Then you start over with the REAL OLPC program. You might even partner with one of the new ultra-cheap laptop companies this time.
You take and compete with the original which (perhaps due to some "guidance" by the moles you left behind) has been gutted so bad it can't compete.
This time you are at least as well funded and you have a better product and a huge following. Microsoft has shot it's wad as well in destroying the first attempt.
Overall perhaps they couldn't have carried it out better if they had planned it.
Sorry, but I'm so pissed off about the whole thing I've decided to live in a fantasy world for a little while.
> But - turns out bytecode directly executed is in the same ballpark as "regular" instructions. Doesn't really gain much. (sorry, can't cite)
Not sure what you mean. If you are saying that a CPU running bytecode tends to run your code as fast as a CPU running assembly, that's what I'm assuming. But the CPUs running bytecode haven't been optimized as much as the intel CPUs..
Also, we could put more powerful instructions into the bytecode if they tend to execute too quickly. Stuff like complete control over memory management, garbage collection, etc. Each feature that would be "Kernel" could be moved into the CPU allowing even more for the hardware engineers to optimize.
You would start to lose C-style pointer functionality at some point, but you could even gain speed doing so because now the CPU can actually optimize things a compiler used to have to optimize.
We already have cases where Java can outperform C and even unoptimized assembly because they don't know enough about the code they are running.
for instance, if Java is calling a routine and that routine's data hasn't changed, java can flag that routine and stop calling it until it's data changes. Of course you could do that in assembly, but java will do it automatically for every routine in your program who's data it can isolate.
I believe that Scala could even do more with this kind of optimization.
Same with garbage collection. In C you allocate, use, then de-allocate. In Java, the VM never wastes time on the de-allocation step for the vast majority of its allocations. (See "eden" in any recent garbage collection white-paper).
Microsoft has always coded part of Excel in bytecode. Not for speed but for code-size. If it makes that much of a difference, wouldn't code-size eventually become a transfer issue?
I just think RISC is going the wrong way when you take processor improvements into consideration.
> That's one area where windows really does do better, obviously due to the massive adoption of windows around the world.
You want to rethink that statement? Is there any other possible reason?
There is no reason the VM solution has to be slower. It could actually suspend the host OS and simply take direct access to a window, or bank-switch the entire screen. You realize all games are multitasking with your OS, right?
Think of the little BIOS things like the way the volume control often tunnels through the OS to the screen...
I kind of wonder if we could move towards a box not having a single "OS", but a set of appropriate systems. Kind of like the way a Kernel might run a GUI--Windows could be another GUI, games could be another GUI, etc.
As I said, it won't happen, but actually it would work quite well.