A while back my wife had to go to Jeruslaem on the same day George W. Bush was visiting there. I let her know she was going to spend the day sitting in stand-still traffic.

Turns out, I was wrong. So many people assumed the same thing that nobody travelled to/from the city that day. The roads, when not blocked, were empty.

Shachar

So how did the court case end?

Shachar

Yeah, I heard that claim before. Aside from the Novel Wordperfect stink, that is just not so.

What people fail to consider when saying this is that, even if it were still true (and I don't think it is), it is immaterial. Wine does not need to, and does not do so, implement every one of Windows' APIs. It just needs to implement those APIs that programs are actually using.

MS cannot change interfaces to existing APIs. That will break application compatibility (without which, MS has no monopoly). They can add new functionality all they want. Until applications start using them (i.e. - after release), they are immaterial to Wine.

Also, you simply assumed everything else I said was the same. Linux interfaces in BSD are not subject to the same rules, and yet they did very little to drive adoption of BSD based OSes.

It all boils down to this. If you want to run Windows apps, you are going to do so on Windows. If you want to run Linux apps, you are going to do so on Linux. If you want to run Android apps, you are going to do so on Android. Every so often, you will want 90% from your native OS, and the support for those extra 10% would be great. It is not, however, something that drives large scale market shifts.

Shachar

P.S.
Judge Jackson's finding of facts had everything to do with IE integration, some to do with Java embrace and extend, and nothing at all to do with private APIs.

Actually, Wine does a surprisingly good job on a surprisingly large number of applications.

But also, and I cannot stress this enough, whoosh. In your haste to spew unfounded ridicule, you completely missed the sarcasm.

Shachar

I mean, OS/2 running Windows apps was a huge push forward for IBM. Wine completely changed the Linux desktop picture, and BSD's Linux binary compatibility made it an effective super set of Linux, to the point nobody bothers to install the later (not to mention the similar capability of SCO Unix: they wouldn't be where they are today without it).

I hear that ChromOS is a nice platform and is doing well. I'm glad, in a "diversity is good" non-committed sort of way. I don't think this particular feature will change much.

Shachar

El Al are trying it. They have a few coach type called "economy plus". What the link doesn't say is that you can buy the regular seat, and then participate in an auction to upgrade that might prove cheaper than buying it straight out.

I took a flight to France a month ago. Flight there was almost completely empty, and they let us move there at no cost. I can't say for sure whether there is more leg room, but it is the exact experiment you were talking about either way.

Then again, I'm fairly heavy set, and the flight back (regular coach) went fine without this upgrade. Maybe they just haven't completely jumped on to the "no leg room" band wagon yet.

Shachar

That's the wrong question.

The real question is "How many jobs need you to understand what the metal does when you write code in order for you to be any good". The answer is "almost all of them".

Sure, there are rapid application development (RAD) environments that allow you to create a TCP server in three lines of code with a scale out of 5,000..... assuming you don't actually want to do anything with each connecting client. If you do, the scale out suddenly drops to 5 unless you know what you're doing.

And here's the sore point - most programmers don't. They don't differentiate between capabilities given by their environment which are expensive and those that are cheap. They were never trained to think that the commands they operate have a cost, and that this cost needs to be weighed and considered.

So, yeah, CS studies are not the place to learn how to use RADs. Pick them up on your own later. You should learn about bare metal programming, about how a garbage collector is actually implemented and what are its costs, about the limits and capabilities of your compiler's optimizer. This way, if you end up using RADs, at least you will not be a shitty RAD programmer.

Shachar

You really should look up how Unix does its stuff. In particular, how the page cache works, and how inode ref-counting work.

The short answer is that you are wrong. Everything is erased.

Of course, this is, strictly speaking, false also. Some things are on read only file systems, or on pseudo file systems that do not allow erasing (such as /proc). Those, as well as the path leading there, will not be erased. Everything else, however, is gone by the time "rm" finishes.

Shachar

Whoosh.

I'm not sure that's correct. "Truth in advertising" and "misleading contract" are two terms that come to mind.

IANAL
Shachar

No.

Off by ones are much easier to fix than to prove safe. The amounts of bugs called "unexploitable" until an exploit was provided is staggering. No mildly security aware person will avoid fixing a buffer overflow because it is unexploitable.

Shachar

Please provide source to that claim.

As far as I know, a great majority of acquaintance rapes are by either family member or neighbor. Then again, I haven't been keeping track, so I might be confusing things (for example, this might be the statistics for minor's rape, and thus irrelevant for the date rape discussion).

Still, if you can back your claim, please do.

Shachar

I have a firend who came to me, eyes all glowing, about this new feature his shining new CPU has. I listened in and was skeptical.

He then tried, for over a month, to get this feature to produce better results than traditional synchronization methods. This included a lot of dead ends due to simple misunderstandings (try to debug your transation by adding prints: no good - a system call is guaranteed to cancel the transaction).

We had, for example, a lot of hard times getting proper benchmarks for the feature. Most actual use cases include a relatively low contention rate. Producing a benchmark that will have low contention on the one hand, but allow you to actually test how efficient a synchronized algorhtm is on the other is not an easy task.

After a lot of going back and forth, as well as some nagging to people at Intel (who, suprisingly, answered him), he came across the following conclusion (shared with others):
Many times a traditional mutex will, actually, be faster. Other times, it might be possible to gain a few extra nanoseconds using transactions, but the speed difference is, by no means, mind blowing. Either way, the amount you pay in code complexity (i.e. bugs) and reduced abstraction hardly seems worth it.

At least as it is implemented right now (but I, personally, fail to see how this changes in the future. Then again, I have been known to miss things in the past), the speed difference isn't going to be mind blowing.

Shachar

Finally managed to send an email. Got it. Thanks.

Shachar

Since you live in France, it may yet happen :-(. It is anyone's guess what will be that country's charter in a decade. If the danger becomes imminent, at least you have a country whose charter it is to give you sanctuary, no questions asked.

I think I have written this elsewhere already. I don't think you are biased against Israel. I think you are being fed by news sources that are biased. Most of them are biased simply because this is a very complicated conflict and news outlets favor simple "good vs. bad" stories. The precise reasons aren't important, however. The media coverage of the conflict in Europe in general, and in France in particular, gives a highly filtered image of things. It is quite natural for moral people to reach far-reaching conclusions that are, simply put, wrong.

Snipped out a bunch of stuff because you asked to wind the discussion down....

Partly this is because world leaders are not above the bias of their own media. More to the point, world leaders listen to what their citizens have to say. That's why it is important to me to try and convince those critics/bashers that are not working from inherent bias.

Then again, there is the other reason. Israel's leadership of late is not confidence inspiring. Neither Netanyahu nor Liberman understand diplomacy, and do not carry out any well defined long term plan. They are both a little too fond of using arm wrestling to solve personal conflicts. I understand why the world leaders don't like Netanyahu. Nobody likes Netanyahu. He's only still prime minister because of a sore deficiency in worthy alternatives.

But merely because Netanyahu is a jerk (and he is), doesn't mean everything said about him or the country he's leading is correct. Add to that the complete lack of understanding of the conflict by most of the intermediaries self-appointed to solve it and you've got yourself a royal mess. Add to that a UN body that seemed to have zero interest in impartiality (it appointed a committee to investigate "Israel's violations of Human Rights". In essence, the committee's charter precludes it from investigating Israel's main defense. Then, as if the chances of getting a fair investigation were not slim enough, one of the three members was born and raised in Lebanon. Of course the UN secretery is going to condemn Israel when this committee is over).

No, the article you sent bears the title "Palestinians to abandon Gaza truce talks unless Israeli team returns", and has no mention of any US stance of any kind. I am willing to believe you sent me the wrong article by mistake, but will non the less refuse to take responsibility for it.

Hard as it is to believe, I did not plan to visit the Israeli embassy. Despite my current cell phone number being a temporary one until the end of the trip, I still don't feel comfortable publishing it here. Drop me an email if you're serious, and we'll see if it pans out.

Shachar