"Asshat blasts Google News for Not Playing Ball with Big Media"
A curmudgeonly newsjerk today blasted the cutting edge and 21st-century-thinking Google News today, saying that they were "meanies" or something like that. Industry experts agree that this person is not to be taken seriously. He will probably be rounded up for the nuthouse before day's end [. ..]
We use that word a little too freely. I deplore the deletion of posts, but let's call it what it is: an organizational entity spinning words it owns the rights to to best suit itself. In this case that might mean "stopping the disruption of the site", or it might mean "silencing critics". Personally, I only have a problem with the latter.
In legal terms, censorship can only be practiced by a public entity such as a government institution. It cannot be practiced by a private entity such as Groklaw; they are not required to defend the free speech rights of others.
I don't think IBM and RedHat are really "hiding" anything, since it's well known by anyone likely to pay for such things that this is how they make money. With that point out of the way, all large systems cost money to support and integrate.
Doesn't matter how much you pay for closed-source software, if you're intending to use it in even a small enterprise, you'll be paying more money to integrate it. And the company that sells you the software is probably also selling you the services to make it work. This was true when I worked for PeopleSoft, and it was the standard for the entire industry. The open source model is no different in that regard, except that it's probably cheaper to customize and integrate open source, because (a) integration is very important in open source for reasons I don't think I need to discuss and (b) you have the source.
http://gladewin32.sourceforge.net/ makes excellent GTK installers for windows, btw. Better than GAIM's imho, because it includes more things you need for Python development:-)
Cool game, but DAMN does the movie look and feel like it's about to turn into German porn at any time. You've got the cheesy lighting, the guy and the girl facing up, the German narrator who sounds like he's narrating god knows what kind of clothing-optional meetup.
And THEN the Atari guy, naked, shows up on screen. WTF???
The American car industry looked out their windows and saw nothing but American cars, sure. But they didn't lose their monopoly because of marketing, they lost their monopoly because American cars sucked and other countries eventually learned to make them better.
I don't care if you fill the air with marketing speak, as long as your product works. American software companies have long been in danger of losing to the Indian and German software industries for the same reason our automotive industries began losing ground, and we're standing here arguing about whether marketing people should use marketing words.
Maybe it'll all be moot when Open Source eats everyone's lunch, borders be damned. Start selling services, or die:-)
(copied by hand, not pasted, since the PDF is of a fax of a copy or somethign..)
The box below shows one of the reported matches from the lines of code cited by SCO. COMPARATOR reported a match between lines 588-591 in rclock.c and lines 1665-1667 from System V UW1.1/src/i386at/uts/io/target/sdi.c:
Lines 588-591 from rclock.c #endif/* RCLOCK_PROF */
return;
}
Lines 1665-1667 from sdi.c #endif
return;
}
The two "words"--endif and return--that appear in the two files are so common in code written in the C language that finding them together like this is purely an accident, of no significance in detecting copying. In particular, the code from each file above simply signifies the ending of a routine; it is as if we had found two bodies of unrelated English text that each happened to conclude with the words "the end".
I think that pretty much sums up this whole case from the beginning.
Not at all -- they want the slashdotters too
on
Google's Math Puzzle
·
· Score: 4, Funny
And here's why: The people who did the hard math to solve the problem--hey, they'll make great coders, welcome aboard.
Those of us who googled it or read the/. article successfully got other people to do the work for us, and then took credit for it.
I was able to build xchat 2.4.0 on windows, just now. I would like to be able to up a binary of it (perhaps on xchat-win32.berlios.de) but sadly, the binary crashes when you try to connect to a server so it's useless right now. The thing compiled with no errors or warnings, and the gui starts right up with no problems. In the hopes that someone can get past the seg fault that's stopping me, here are the build instructions. They are a slightly modifed version of the INSTALL.w32 inside the xchat sources. That file, alas, is somewhat out of date. Also, I've read here that there are mysterious secret patches required on win32. I didn't apply any such patches. If anyone has them, do post them. I'm interested in setting up an xchat-win32 site somewhere.
Scroll down to the bottom for the details of the crash.
---------------
0. Installed MSVC.NET 2003 from CDROM. This would probably work with freevc++ and.NET SDK, since only vc7/bin/, vc7/lib and vc7/include/ are necessary (not MSIDE).
1. from http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/downloads.html downloaded: atk-1.6.0.zip atk-dev-1.6.0.zip dir ent.zip gettext-runtime-0.13.1.zip gettext-tools -0.13.1.zip glib-2.4.5.zip glib-dev-2.4.5.zip g tk+-2.4.7.zip gtk+-dev-2.4.7.zip libiconv-1.9.1. bin.woe32.zip (labeled "GNU libiconv for Win32") pango-1.4.1.zip pango-dev-1.4.1.zip pkg config-0.15.zip zlib121-dll.zip (labeled "Zlib 1.2., official Windows DLL distribution")
3. Unzipped all this crap as-is into c:/xchat-devtools Directories bin, contrib, src, include, share, test, man, manifest should have been created. Also, zlib1.dll will be here, and a few text files.
4. Fixed the placement of 2 header files: mv c:/xchat-devtools/include/libintl.h c:/xchat-devtools/include/dirent.h c:/xchat-devtools/include/glib-2.0 (This is Cygwin's mv. Drag and drop would work fine too..)
5. Added several things to path: C:\xchat-devtools;c:\xchat-devtools\bin
6. run vcvars32.bat or visual studio command prompt
7. Do these: cd xchat-2.4.0/src nmake -f makefile.msc clean nmake -f makefile.msc
Output is in fe-gtk/xchat.exe
--------------------
Crash occurs when you try to connect to any server. It breaks at: vc7\crt\src\open.c line 181 in _tsopen().
Teenagers can still be taught. They're still impressionable, as it is normally phrased. They can learn the proper way to use a computer. Sure, they'll be more irresponsible for a while, but the training will stay with them and they can build habits on it; for adults, it just won't stick as well if they're not used to thinking of their computer as a dangerous object.
It becomes more and more ridiculous even to measure the outcomes of the short races. I watched a swim meet that was decided by 0.01s! Ultra-sensitive touch pads can detect this difference, sure. But who the hell cares? Is the athlete who was 0.01s faster in a 60s race really a better athlete? A million factors, none of them related to his athleticism or dedication or training or the degree to which he overcame personal hardship would have decided this race. Especially in swimming. Water turbulance caused by the swimmer in the next lane must have a tremendous effect; putting you next to a different swimmer could therefore change the outcome. Water temperature differences could have an effect, the wind overhead could have an effect. I see no point in giving the gold medal and all the glory to someone and denying it to another based on a 0.1s difference.
Therefore we should make all these races longer. If you double the length of the race, it stands to reason that the difference between the winner and loser will be twice as large; then maybe you can say with some confidence that the race was decided by athleticism and not pure luck. Sure it's a different sport, but at least you'd be measuring something meaningful.
What about simply tethering one to the earth and using its continuous, fuel-less thrust to generate the force needed to turn a turbine? Sounds like free energy to me.
<Logan> Although I'm fighting for it, my boss thinks the customer wants it done in C++ or, even worse, Java. <Logan> But I told him it'd quadruple the cost.:P <PenguinOfDoom> Logan: What does the customer care, anyway? <Logan> PenguinOfDoom: That's what I said. It's like dictating what brand of toothpaste your plumber brushes his teeth with.
A dedicated QA staff. You should have as many testers as you have developers.
Tools for the QA staff to create their own automation. They don't like doing manual testing much, either, so they'll have incentive to use the tools.:-) I'll talk about the tools we use in a bit.
Training for the QA staff on the tools. Hire QA people capable of at least a little shell programming. And the tools they use should be not much harder than writing shell scripts.
A good SCM (source code management) system that provides atomic commits, so that when you fix a bug, you can tell your testers exactly what revision number it's fixed in, and they can get exactly that revision verify it in the same system you had when you fixed it.
A bug tracker. It doesn't have to integrate with the SCM, but if it doesn't, you should make it a hard policy that your commit log messages should say what bug number they are a fix for, and when you resolve a bug, you must say what revision the fix went into. I can't even estimate how much time this policy saves.
Automated rebuilds of every revision of the software. Spend a lot of time on this, it's key. It lets your testers test things the minute you fix them. That means, if you failed to fix it correctly, you'll find out SOON while the fix is still fresh in your mind, and you'll save even more time by not having to get back into the mindset of that bug. You will need special software to do it, so read on.
So here's how those break down:
For us, our project has had 1-2 developers working full time (me, plus one additional deveoper at various times). We've also had 1-2 testers working full time. That sounds like a small project, but after two years of dev it is a lot of code, and all that code needs testing. The fulltime test staff available right from the start was absolutely not money wasted.
The development is done in Python, with Twisted, and so we used a combination of unit tests written by the developers and black box tests written by the testers. Because our app is primarily web, I developed my own web test system (having found no others that were suitable for use by non-programmers). This system is PBP, which is a shell-like scriptable web browser.
Our main tester had a little bit of C in school (she actually had forgotten most of it;-) and a little bit of unix command line experience. This was more than enough to be able to design and build tests with PBP. Then I spent about one full day showing her how to use it and brainstorming testmaking strategies with her.
If you look at the roadmap, and scroll down to the "OUT FOR 1.0" area, you'll see that they did in fact consider doing just that. I believe it was originally targetted for 0.9. It's probably out due to lack of resources, so contribute some time to the project and they may put it in.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
We use that word a little too freely. I deplore the deletion of posts, but let's call it what it is: an organizational entity spinning words it owns the rights to to best suit itself. In this case that might mean "stopping the disruption of the site", or it might mean "silencing critics". Personally, I only have a problem with the latter.
In legal terms, censorship can only be practiced by a public entity such as a government institution. It cannot be practiced by a private entity such as Groklaw; they are not required to defend the free speech rights of others.
Kaboom.
I don't think IBM and RedHat are really "hiding" anything, since it's well known by anyone likely to pay for such things that this is how they make money. With that point out of the way, all large systems cost money to support and integrate.
Doesn't matter how much you pay for closed-source software, if you're intending to use it in even a small enterprise, you'll be paying more money to integrate it. And the company that sells you the software is probably also selling you the services to make it work. This was true when I worked for PeopleSoft, and it was the standard for the entire industry. The open source model is no different in that regard, except that it's probably cheaper to customize and integrate open source, because (a) integration is very important in open source for reasons I don't think I need to discuss and (b) you have the source.
Duh, he fathered the guy who would one day lead the resistance and bring down SkyNet.
It doesn't get much more technology-influencing than that.
http://gladewin32.sourceforge.net/ makes excellent GTK installers for windows, btw. Better than GAIM's imho, because it includes more things you need for Python development :-)
1. What the fuck is wrong with you, giving tax cuts only to rich people in a recession? Are you trying to push us into a depression?
2. What the fuck is wrong with you, sending America's sons and daughters to die in an illegal war, encouraging even more terrorism?
3. Have you no soul?
Your observation about Shaft isn't so far off. It comes from 70's porn.
Cool game, but DAMN does the movie look and feel like it's about to turn into German porn at any time. You've got the cheesy lighting, the guy and the girl facing up, the German narrator who sounds like he's narrating god knows what kind of clothing-optional meetup.
And THEN the Atari guy, naked, shows up on screen. WTF???
Maybe it's just me?
I read his every day as well. Sadly he'll be leaving the game after the election..
s /w eek_2004_09_12.html#001752
http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchive
The American car industry looked out their windows and saw nothing but American cars, sure. But they didn't lose their monopoly because of marketing, they lost their monopoly because American cars sucked and other countries eventually learned to make them better.
:-)
I don't care if you fill the air with marketing speak, as long as your product works. American software companies have long been in danger of losing to the Indian and German software industries for the same reason our automotive industries began losing ground, and we're standing here arguing about whether marketing people should use marketing words.
Maybe it'll all be moot when Open Source eats everyone's lunch, borders be damned. Start selling services, or die
I think that pretty much sums up this whole case from the beginning.
And here's why: The people who did the hard math to solve the problem--hey, they'll make great coders, welcome aboard.
/. article successfully got other people to do the work for us, and then took credit for it.
Those of us who googled it or read the
Welcome aboard, manager!
Hallelujah
I was able to build xchat 2.4.0 on windows, just now. I would like to be able to up a binary of it (perhaps on xchat-win32.berlios.de) but sadly, the binary crashes when you try to connect to a server so it's useless right now. The thing compiled with no errors or warnings, and the gui starts right up with no problems. In the hopes that someone can get past the seg fault that's stopping me, here are the build instructions. They are a slightly modifed version of the INSTALL.w32 inside the xchat sources. That file, alas, is somewhat out of date. Also, I've read here that there are mysterious secret patches required on win32. I didn't apply any such patches. If anyone has them, do post them. I'm interested in setting up an xchat-win32 site somewhere.
.NET SDK, since only
l downloaded:r ent.zips -0.13.1.zip
g tk+-2.4.7.zip. bin.woe32.zip (labeled "GNU libiconv for Win32")g config-0.15.zip
Scroll down to the bottom for the details of the crash.
---------------
0. Installed MSVC.NET 2003 from CDROM. This would probably work with freevc++ and
vc7/bin/, vc7/lib and vc7/include/ are necessary (not MSIDE).
1. from http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/downloads.htm
atk-1.6.0.zip
atk-dev-1.6.0.zip
di
gettext-runtime-0.13.1.zip
gettext-tool
glib-2.4.5.zip
glib-dev-2.4.5.zip
gtk+-dev-2.4.7.zip
libiconv-1.9.1
pango-1.4.1.zip
pango-dev-1.4.1.zip
pk
zlib121-dll.zip (labeled "Zlib 1.2., official Windows DLL distribution")
2. from http://gnuwin32.sf.net/packages/libpng.htm downloaded:
libpng-1.2.5-1-bin.zip (Binaries link)
libpng-1.2.5-1-lib.zip (Developer files link)
3. Unzipped all this crap as-is into c:/xchat-devtools
Directories bin, contrib, src, include, share, test, man, manifest should have been created. Also,
zlib1.dll will be here, and a few text files.
4. Fixed the placement of 2 header files:
mv c:/xchat-devtools/include/libintl.h c:/xchat-devtools/include/dirent.h c:/xchat-devtools/include/glib-2.0
(This is Cygwin's mv. Drag and drop would work fine too..)
5. Added several things to path:
C:\xchat-devtools;c:\xchat-devtools\bin
6. run vcvars32.bat or visual studio command prompt
7. Do these:
cd xchat-2.4.0/src
nmake -f makefile.msc clean
nmake -f makefile.msc
Output is in fe-gtk/xchat.exe
--------------------
Crash occurs when you try to connect to any server. It breaks at:
vc7\crt\src\open.c line 181 in _tsopen().
re unlikely in that timeframe.
The whole question is how unlikely? Clearly, somewhat unlikely. Is it 100:1 unlikely? Sounds about right to me.
Teenagers can still be taught. They're still impressionable, as it is normally phrased. They can learn the proper way to use a computer. Sure, they'll be more irresponsible for a while, but the training will stay with them and they can build habits on it; for adults, it just won't stick as well if they're not used to thinking of their computer as a dangerous object.
I played this game as the female avatar. This made the passionate kiss at the end even hotter... ;-)
It becomes more and more ridiculous even to measure the outcomes of the short races. I watched a swim meet that was decided by 0.01s! Ultra-sensitive touch pads can detect this difference, sure. But who the hell cares? Is the athlete who was 0.01s faster in a 60s race really a better athlete? A million factors, none of them related to his athleticism or dedication or training or the degree to which he overcame personal hardship would have decided this race. Especially in swimming. Water turbulance caused by the swimmer in the next lane must have a tremendous effect; putting you next to a different swimmer could therefore change the outcome. Water temperature differences could have an effect, the wind overhead could have an effect. I see no point in giving the gold medal and all the glory to someone and denying it to another based on a 0.1s difference.
Therefore we should make all these races longer. If you double the length of the race, it stands to reason that the difference between the winner and loser will be twice as large; then maybe you can say with some confidence that the race was decided by athleticism and not pure luck. Sure it's a different sport, but at least you'd be measuring something meaningful.
What about simply tethering one to the earth and using its continuous, fuel-less thrust to generate the force needed to turn a turbine? Sounds like free energy to me.
<Logan> Although I'm fighting for it, my boss thinks the customer wants it done in C++ or, even worse, Java. :P
;-)
<Logan> But I told him it'd quadruple the cost.
<PenguinOfDoom> Logan: What does the customer care, anyway?
<Logan> PenguinOfDoom: That's what I said. It's like dictating what brand of toothpaste your plumber brushes his teeth with.
(Disclaimer: no, I'm not either of these guys
The correct URL for Trac is http://www.edgewall.com/products/trac/ sorry.
-
A dedicated QA staff. You should have as many testers as you have developers.
- Tools for the QA staff to create their own automation. They don't like doing manual testing much, either, so they'll have incentive to use the tools.
:-) I'll talk about the tools we use in a bit.
- Training for the QA staff on the tools. Hire QA people capable of at least a little shell programming. And the tools they use should be not much harder than writing shell scripts.
- A good SCM (source code management) system that provides atomic commits, so that when you fix a bug, you can tell your testers exactly what revision number it's fixed in, and they can get exactly that revision verify it in the same system you had when you fixed it.
- A bug tracker. It doesn't have to integrate with the SCM, but if it doesn't, you should make it a hard policy that your commit log messages should say what bug number they are a fix for, and when you resolve a bug, you must say what revision the fix went into. I can't even estimate how much time this policy saves.
- Automated rebuilds of every revision of the software. Spend a lot of time on this, it's key. It lets your testers test things the minute you fix them. That means, if you failed to fix it correctly, you'll find out SOON while the fix is still fresh in your mind, and you'll save even more time by not having to get back into the mindset of that bug. You will need special software to do it, so read on.
So here's how those break down:If you look at the roadmap, and scroll down to the "OUT FOR 1.0" area, you'll see that they did in fact consider doing just that. I believe it was originally targetted for 0.9. It's probably out due to lack of resources, so contribute some time to the project and they may put it in. :-)
is slashdot. Everyone knows what bukkakke means.