I don't know anything about Lua, but portability is a concern for me. I don't use guile because it's next to impossible to compile a recent version on Windows with MinGW, when it should be a piece of cake.
It's a shame, as I'd really like to be able to use it. But an "extension" language that isn't as portable as the GUI toolkit I'm using (QT) isn't worth the effort IMHO.
From what little I've read, Lua seems as if it would be a bit more portable.
But seriously, the U.S. is huge and diverse. Maybe a move to a different state would be easier and have just as good a return as a move to another country.
Another reason is that Cisco holds patents on parts of their routers, so a legit business would have to pay licensing fees to Cisco for every compatible router they sell.
We can own military rifles here. The only difference between the civilian (AR-15) and military (M-16) rifle is the lack of a 3 round "burst" mode on the civilian version. Most professionals will tell you that the "burst" mode is fairly useless anyway. After the first round goes off, your aim will go all to hell.
You're also assuming that were there to be a revolution in the U.S., that at least half of the military wouldn't be on the "rebel" side. There are two reasons that this is quite unlikely. First, members of the U.S. military are sworn to protect the U.S. Constitution, not its government. (An interesting, and brilliant, idea.)
Also, a significant portion of people in the military are from Texas, and they care much more about their own state than some silly Federal union, and they'd be more than happy to dismantle the rest of the country's government if only to show everyone that people from Texas kick ass.:-)
Because nobody at Starbucks is going to be impressed by a thrift-store PC. This guy has memoirs to write. You can't write memoirs on a cheap PC. Sheesh.
Where did I say they deserve to be hungry? I don't think anyone "deserves" that, especially with food being as cheap as it is.
I did imply their values are misplaced, which is true, and I have no problem saying that. But you're missing the point.
My point was that if you think starvation is a problem among America's poor, you have your head up your ass. It's more a problem among teenage girls who starve themselves by choice.
It's amazing how many people will use "helping the poor" as an excuse for whatever tyranny-of-the-week political agenda they want to push.
Yeah, it sure is a good thing. YouTube has dotcom bubble written all over it.
But this is a smart move for Google. They're an ad company, and they've grabbed a huge new audience. I doubt the people who frequent YouTube are hostile to google, so it's just more eyeballs for their ads.
It's probably more a factor of his age and lack of interest in the latest musical trend.
I've found it's much easier and cheaper to find music that's good if you let a certain amount of time filter out the faddish stuff for you. (Although waiting 30 years might be a bit much, ten seems to work just fine. The principle holds, however.)
I've also realized that if I've never heard it before, it's new to me. It doesn't matter when it was recorded. So much music has been recorded that I could never touch anything from the last 20 years and still listen to new music every day.
It also helps to be beyond the years when your social status is defined by the type of music you listen to.
That, and nobody will ever, ever, ever produce a better album than Van Morrison. Any musician who thinks he can has no taste or is overestimating his own talent.:-)
It's an oversimplified view from a non-programmer.
There is always more than one way to do something on a computer. Even Linux has a number of different methods for drawing on the screen. You can use X, bypass it a bit and use OpenGL, use the framebuffer, etc. Each of these methods has benefits and drawbacks.
Just like any other non-trivial system, trade offs are made in the design to accomodate a certain type of user. At its heart, any unix-like operating system is designed for multiple users to share one system. Windows was designed as a single user system and still suffers/benefits from that design.
I have a project that runs under Linux and Windows with no changes to the source code. It's a BASIC IDE for kids. The Windows version runs like a dream, because Windows will devote nearly 99% of the CPU to it when it's a foreground process. Linux will not, and even if it did, it would have to share the CPU with X Window which does all the drawing.
The upshot of this is that animation under Windows, using my program, is crisp and responsive. Under Linux it's not (it used to be *horribly* slow). I've done a few things to mitigate this, so it's "good enough" under Linux, but solving the problem in a portable way is not really possible without system dependent code or major changes to the architecture. Adding FreeBSD into the mix makes things even more difficult, as the tradeoffs in that system seem to favor a multi-user server even more.
But in the end it's all about tradeoffs. If I wanted to make an extremely high performance BASIC IDE, I could, but it would either limit the amount of systems I could run it on or require a huge effort porting it to each system. There comes a point where it's not economical, or where I run out of time. Since my target audience is children learning to program, I'm going for maximum portability and ease of development, since performance probably isn't too much of a concern, and I'm doing this myself in my spare time.
You're right in saying that Google didn't profit from this merger. But what did they use to pay for YouTube?
They bought YouTube with shares of Google stock. If the shares don't have any intrinsic value, then Google just got YouTube for nothing.
The odd thing about stock prices, just like fiat currency, is that the value holds as long as the transactions are small. If you owned a billion dollars worth of Google stock and tried to sell it all at once, odds are you'd decrease the price of the overall stock so much you'd end up with a lot less than a billion dollars.
This is because, while stock is still subject to the law of supply and demand, either the supply or demand for a stock can change rapidly over the course of a few seconds.
This is really true of just about anything, but in practice the dollar or gold does not change its value because the U.S. government will only print dollars so quickly and there is a near universal demand for them. Gold can only be mined so quickly too, and it also has a universal appeal.
But what would happen if, say, the Chinese government decided to cash in all those U.S. treasury bills it holds, all at once? Or if they just stopped buying them altogether? You'd see a recession in the U.S. that would make the dotcom bubble look like nothing at all.
Being "Food Insecure" means that "at least once in the past six months, you worried whether you were going to be able to afford food."
That's a far cry from starving. Answering that question honestly, that would have included me at various times in my life when I subsisted on peanut butter sandwiches after I graduated from college, making $40,000 a year. That's hardly impoverished.
Also during the time I was "food insecure," I lived among the people on welfare who were undoubtedly included in these surveys, and who seem to think McDonalds is a grocery store and were somehow driving Mercedes. These people were universally obese, sat around in the neighborhood common area all day and yelled at their numerous fat kids.
Anyone who thinks that there are starving children in the U.S. who are that way for purely economic reasons and not abuse has their head up their rear end. Haven't you heard about the "obesity epidemic" which "disproportionately affects poor children?"
So you can't tell me being poor in the U.S. is the same as being poor in North Korea.
- The Legend of Zelda - Can beat it in about two hours, which isn't even close to the half hour records. - Age of Mythology - this has got to be the best RTS ever, Age of Empires perfected. My wife loves it too, which is great. - Super Mario World - Another family favorite. - Lemmings - First got this on an Amiga. I didn't consider myself good until I beat the last SNES level, though. Whew! - Final Fantasy - never liked any of the sequels, but I love this one. Try playing with 4 Black Belts. Around level 20 or so, they're practically invincible.
The only way to change it is a massive public relations campaign that changes opinions so much that being an incumbent is seen as a liability.
The Congress is pretty much doing half the job already, more than %50 of the country doesn't believe either party represents their views.
Since third party politics in this country has a terrible track record, the only way to change the system is to flush it out. The American people need to vote incumbents out regularly until a single term limit rule is in place. There's absolutely no compelling reason for a representative to stay longer than one term. It's not the way it was intended to work, and all it does is infect the system with campaign "donations" that allow moneyed interest to buy favor.
"Leaders concede that differences between the versions are so significant they cannot reconcile them into a final bill that can be delivered to Bush before the Nov. 7 congressional elections."
translated:
"There's just no damn way we're going to go on record on either side of this one just before an election where both sides will attack anything they can spin as bad."
This is ridiculous. We need to start an anti-incumbent movement. Congressional control needs to shift sides every two years. There should be no "re" election. Been in Congress once? Thanks for playing, hope you had fun, make room for the new guy.
A basic strategy would be for the OS to devote each process to its own processor.
This would reduce the need for TLB/cache flushes or eliminate context switches entirely. The whole machine would be really snappy.
That said, for a desktop machine, this is a huge amount of overkill, but with economies of scale being what they are, we'll probably have this power available soon.
What I'd like to see more though, is extra functionality in hardware rather than more of it. Wouldn't it be great if hardware was able to handle some of the things an OS is now used for, like memory (de)allocation? Or if we could tag memory according to type? Or if there were finer-grained controls than page-level?
The problem from my perspective, however, is that not only do people who want to use my stuff now have to download it, but also autopackage.
I'd love for that to become a standard, but it's not. It's a shame.
What would be REALLY cool is an app that produced a distro specific package based on source. I think that's the kind of thing that would really help Linux as a distribution platform.
Oh, most definitely for *users* both systems are pretty much equivalent, once everything is packaged.
I'm talking about for me, the developer, deploying for all the distros under the Linux umbrella is much more difficult than it is to deploy on Windows or FreeBSD.
It's funny that whenever anyone brings this up, they get attacked, but really what developers want to concentrate on is writing code that's interesting to them. I can do that on any platform. I do that on Windows now because it's just so easy to share stuff. My source code is almost always portable to Linux with few or no changes, but I can't be bothered spending the few days learning each package management system for every distro. I'll expect that Linux users just compile my source.
This means, that for every beginner out there who doesn't know how to compile from source, there's going to be a large class of applications unavailable to him when using Linux, simply because there's no standard method for deploying an app that will work with most distros.
I'm not talking about installation as a user. I'm talking about the time it takes to set up the software for distribution as a DEVELOPER.
With windows, I can distribute an app as a zip file, confident it will run without adjustment on a majority of windows systems. The.dlls can be included in the directory of the app. It's five minutes of development time to create the binary, zip it up with.dlls, and ship it off to other people who'd want to use it. Or I can use NSIS as I get more advanced.
The thing is, I have a limited amount of time as a developer of open-source software. I can afford to package for *maybe* three systems. So there's windows which is a piece of cake, FreeBSD which is a piece of cake, and then we come to Linux. ..let's pick a distro, learn its package management system, ok, we're out of valuable time I'd rather spend developing.
This isn't a technological problem, it's an organizational one. Yet another package manager won't help.
No jokes from me. I typically use FreeBSD, and the compile from source idea is just fantastic. The problem is that only Gentoo uses it, so unless every other Linux distro adopts that, the problem remains.
What FreeBSD gets right that Gentoo really doesn't focus on is binary compatibility, such that I can download a package for a specific release of FreeBSD that's the same as if I had compiled the port with default settings. I'm sure Gentoo will get there someday.
It's still much, much easier to deploy applications on Windows, even when you're using the GNU toolchain. With windows you're guaranteed binary compatibility on a majority of systems, with Linux, it's pretty much expected that your users are advanced enough to be able to compile from source.
It's a huge pain to distribute binaries for every different distro, so unless your app becomes popular enough for other people to do that work for you, (or the distros do it themselves) then a significant amount of development time is spent just on packaging and deployment.
Ironically, Windows with mingw et. al. seems to be a more hospitable environment toward deployment of open-source software than "Linux" is.
The machine isn't useless, but modern distros are probably going to be too heavy to run acceptably.
A safe bet for a window manager is FVWM, which has an extremely small memory footprint without sacrificing functionality.
Yes, Wine will run under any window manager, you don't need KDE.
If you're feeling a bit adventerous, I'd recommend FreeBSD, as opposed to Linux, because it's easy to set up very minimal installs of FreeBSD that will really run well on old machines. The installer is not as simple as most Linux distros, but if you've got experience with slackware, it should be a piece of cake.
That's because you're assuming I'm trying argue that Lisp is better than all other languages because it has macros. I'm not. I'm simply saying that learning Lisp or Scheme by implementing them is a great way to learn about how programming languages, in general, work.
You don't have to master macros to do that. You can write a simple s-expression to assembly compiler in less than 100 lines of scheme or lisp, never touching a macro. It would be much more difficult to do in any other language, because you'd get bogged down in the details of lexical analysis, which is no fun.
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I don't know anything about Lua, but portability is a concern for me. I don't use guile because it's next to impossible to compile a recent version on Windows with MinGW, when it should be a piece of cake.
It's a shame, as I'd really like to be able to use it. But an "extension" language that isn't as portable as the GUI toolkit I'm using (QT) isn't worth the effort IMHO.
From what little I've read, Lua seems as if it would be a bit more portable.
If I ever leave the U.S., I'm moving to Texas.
But seriously, the U.S. is huge and diverse. Maybe a move to a different state would be easier and have just as good a return as a move to another country.
Another reason is that Cisco holds patents on parts of their routers, so a legit business would have to pay licensing fees to Cisco for every compatible router they sell.
> Note that in Iraq they can at lease own AK47s.
:-)
There's your answer.
We can own military rifles here. The only difference between the civilian (AR-15) and military (M-16) rifle is the lack of a 3 round "burst" mode on the civilian version. Most professionals will tell you that the "burst" mode is fairly useless anyway. After the first round goes off, your aim will go all to hell.
You're also assuming that were there to be a revolution in the U.S., that at least half of the military wouldn't be on the "rebel" side. There are two reasons that this is quite unlikely. First, members of the U.S. military are sworn to protect the U.S. Constitution, not its government. (An interesting, and brilliant, idea.)
Also, a significant portion of people in the military are from Texas, and they care much more about their own state than some silly Federal union, and they'd be more than happy to dismantle the rest of the country's government if only to show everyone that people from Texas kick ass.
Because nobody at Starbucks is going to be impressed by a thrift-store PC. This guy has memoirs to write. You can't write memoirs on a cheap PC. Sheesh.
Where did I say they deserve to be hungry? I don't think anyone "deserves" that, especially with food being as cheap as it is.
I did imply their values are misplaced, which is true, and I have no problem saying that. But you're missing the point.
My point was that if you think starvation is a problem among America's poor, you have your head up your ass. It's more a problem among teenage girls who starve themselves by choice.
It's amazing how many people will use "helping the poor" as an excuse for whatever tyranny-of-the-week political agenda they want to push.
Yeah, it sure is a good thing. YouTube has dotcom bubble written all over it.
But this is a smart move for Google. They're an ad company, and they've grabbed a huge new audience. I doubt the people who frequent YouTube are hostile to google, so it's just more eyeballs for their ads.
It's probably more a factor of his age and lack of interest in the latest musical trend.
:-)
I've found it's much easier and cheaper to find music that's good if you let a certain amount of time filter out the faddish stuff for you. (Although waiting 30 years might be a bit much, ten seems to work just fine. The principle holds, however.)
I've also realized that if I've never heard it before, it's new to me. It doesn't matter when it was recorded. So much music has been recorded that I could never touch anything from the last 20 years and still listen to new music every day.
It also helps to be beyond the years when your social status is defined by the type of music you listen to.
That, and nobody will ever, ever, ever produce a better album than Van Morrison. Any musician who thinks he can has no taste or is overestimating his own talent.
It's an oversimplified view from a non-programmer.
There is always more than one way to do something on a computer. Even Linux has a number of different methods for drawing on the screen. You can use X, bypass it a bit and use OpenGL, use the framebuffer, etc. Each of these methods has benefits and drawbacks.
Just like any other non-trivial system, trade offs are made in the design to accomodate a certain type of user. At its heart, any unix-like operating system is designed for multiple users to share one system. Windows was designed as a single user system and still suffers/benefits from that design.
I have a project that runs under Linux and Windows with no changes to the source code. It's a BASIC IDE for kids. The Windows version runs like a dream, because Windows will devote nearly 99% of the CPU to it when it's a foreground process. Linux will not, and even if it did, it would have to share the CPU with X Window which does all the drawing.
The upshot of this is that animation under Windows, using my program, is crisp and responsive. Under Linux it's not (it used to be *horribly* slow). I've done a few things to mitigate this, so it's "good enough" under Linux, but solving the problem in a portable way is not really possible without system dependent code or major changes to the architecture. Adding FreeBSD into the mix makes things even more difficult, as the tradeoffs in that system seem to favor a multi-user server even more.
But in the end it's all about tradeoffs. If I wanted to make an extremely high performance BASIC IDE, I could, but it would either limit the amount of systems I could run it on or require a huge effort porting it to each system. There comes a point where it's not economical, or where I run out of time. Since my target audience is children learning to program, I'm going for maximum portability and ease of development, since performance probably isn't too much of a concern, and I'm doing this myself in my spare time.
You're right in saying that Google didn't profit from this merger. But what did they use to pay for YouTube?
They bought YouTube with shares of Google stock. If the shares don't have any intrinsic value, then Google just got YouTube for nothing.
The odd thing about stock prices, just like fiat currency, is that the value holds as long as the transactions are small. If you owned a billion dollars worth of Google stock and tried to sell it all at once, odds are you'd decrease the price of the overall stock so much you'd end up with a lot less than a billion dollars.
This is because, while stock is still subject to the law of supply and demand, either the supply or demand for a stock can change rapidly over the course of a few seconds.
This is really true of just about anything, but in practice the dollar or gold does not change its value because the U.S. government will only print dollars so quickly and there is a near universal demand for them. Gold can only be mined so quickly too, and it also has a universal appeal.
But what would happen if, say, the Chinese government decided to cash in all those U.S. treasury bills it holds, all at once? Or if they just stopped buying them altogether? You'd see a recession in the U.S. that would make the dotcom bubble look like nothing at all.
Read the study, and the survey questions.
Being "Food Insecure" means that "at least once in the past six months, you worried whether you were going to be able to afford food."
That's a far cry from starving. Answering that question honestly, that would have included me at various times in my life when I subsisted on peanut butter sandwiches after I graduated from college, making $40,000 a year. That's hardly impoverished.
Also during the time I was "food insecure," I lived among the people on welfare who were undoubtedly included in these surveys, and who seem to think McDonalds is a grocery store and were somehow driving Mercedes. These people were universally obese, sat around in the neighborhood common area all day and yelled at their numerous fat kids.
Anyone who thinks that there are starving children in the U.S. who are that way for purely economic reasons and not abuse has their head up their rear end. Haven't you heard about the "obesity epidemic" which "disproportionately affects poor children?"
So you can't tell me being poor in the U.S. is the same as being poor in North Korea.
I only have time for "comfort games."
- The Legend of Zelda - Can beat it in about two hours, which isn't even close to the half hour records.
- Age of Mythology - this has got to be the best RTS ever, Age of Empires perfected. My wife loves it too, which is great.
- Super Mario World - Another family favorite.
- Lemmings - First got this on an Amiga. I didn't consider myself good until I beat the last SNES level, though. Whew!
- Final Fantasy - never liked any of the sequels, but I love this one. Try playing with 4 Black Belts. Around level 20 or so, they're practically invincible.
Woooo.
I guess everybody knows exactly what you're talking about.
The only way to change it is a massive public relations campaign that changes opinions so much that being an incumbent is seen as a liability.
The Congress is pretty much doing half the job already, more than %50 of the country doesn't believe either party represents their views.
Since third party politics in this country has a terrible track record, the only way to change the system is to flush it out. The American people need to vote incumbents out regularly until a single term limit rule is in place. There's absolutely no compelling reason for a representative to stay longer than one term. It's not the way it was intended to work, and all it does is infect the system with campaign "donations" that allow moneyed interest to buy favor.
Vote your incumbent out today.
"Leaders concede that differences between the versions are so significant they cannot reconcile them into a final bill that can be delivered to Bush before the Nov. 7 congressional elections."
translated:
"There's just no damn way we're going to go on record on either side of this one just before an election where both sides will attack anything they can spin as bad."
This is ridiculous. We need to start an anti-incumbent movement. Congressional control needs to shift sides every two years. There should be no "re" election. Been in Congress once? Thanks for playing, hope you had fun, make room for the new guy.
Yay, someone who gets it.
;-)
The funniest ads on TV now are the pro-87 ones that claim "the cost of gasoline will be reduced."
I don't know why we just don't vote to lower the cost of everything. It's so simple, it just might work!
Exactly :-)
How many processes are running on your machine?
A basic strategy would be for the OS to devote each process to its own processor.
This would reduce the need for TLB/cache flushes or eliminate context switches entirely. The whole machine would be really snappy.
That said, for a desktop machine, this is a huge amount of overkill, but with economies of scale being what they are, we'll probably have this power available soon.
What I'd like to see more though, is extra functionality in hardware rather than more of it. Wouldn't it be great if hardware was able to handle some of the things an OS is now used for, like memory (de)allocation? Or if we could tag memory according to type? Or if there were finer-grained controls than page-level?
Thanks, I'll check into that.
The problem from my perspective, however, is that not only do people who want to use my stuff now have to download it, but also autopackage.
I'd love for that to become a standard, but it's not. It's a shame.
What would be REALLY cool is an app that produced a distro specific package based on source. I think that's the kind of thing that would really help Linux as a distribution platform.
Oh, most definitely for *users* both systems are pretty much equivalent, once everything is packaged.
I'm talking about for me, the developer, deploying for all the distros under the Linux umbrella is much more difficult than it is to deploy on Windows or FreeBSD.
It's funny that whenever anyone brings this up, they get attacked, but really what developers want to concentrate on is writing code that's interesting to them. I can do that on any platform. I do that on Windows now because it's just so easy to share stuff. My source code is almost always portable to Linux with few or no changes, but I can't be bothered spending the few days learning each package management system for every distro. I'll expect that Linux users just compile my source.
This means, that for every beginner out there who doesn't know how to compile from source, there's going to be a large class of applications unavailable to him when using Linux, simply because there's no standard method for deploying an app that will work with most distros.
I'm not talking about installation as a user. I'm talking about the time it takes to set up the software for distribution as a DEVELOPER.
.dlls can be included in the directory of the app. It's five minutes of development time to create the binary, zip it up with .dlls, and ship it off to other people who'd want to use it. Or I can use NSIS as I get more advanced.
.let's pick a distro, learn its package management system, ok, we're out of valuable time I'd rather spend developing.
With windows, I can distribute an app as a zip file, confident it will run without adjustment on a majority of windows systems. The
The thing is, I have a limited amount of time as a developer of open-source software. I can afford to package for *maybe* three systems. So there's windows which is a piece of cake, FreeBSD which is a piece of cake, and then we come to Linux. .
This isn't a technological problem, it's an organizational one. Yet another package manager won't help.
No jokes from me. I typically use FreeBSD, and the compile from source idea is just fantastic. The problem is that only Gentoo uses it, so unless every other Linux distro adopts that, the problem remains.
What FreeBSD gets right that Gentoo really doesn't focus on is binary compatibility, such that I can download a package for a specific release of FreeBSD that's the same as if I had compiled the port with default settings. I'm sure Gentoo will get there someday.
It's still much, much easier to deploy applications on Windows, even when you're using the GNU toolchain. With windows you're guaranteed binary compatibility on a majority of systems, with Linux, it's pretty much expected that your users are advanced enough to be able to compile from source.
It's a huge pain to distribute binaries for every different distro, so unless your app becomes popular enough for other people to do that work for you, (or the distros do it themselves) then a significant amount of development time is spent just on packaging and deployment.
Ironically, Windows with mingw et. al. seems to be a more hospitable environment toward deployment of open-source software than "Linux" is.
The machine isn't useless, but modern distros are probably going to be too heavy to run acceptably.
A safe bet for a window manager is FVWM, which has an extremely small memory footprint without sacrificing functionality.
Yes, Wine will run under any window manager, you don't need KDE.
If you're feeling a bit adventerous, I'd recommend FreeBSD, as opposed to Linux, because it's easy to set up very minimal installs of FreeBSD that will really run well on old machines. The installer is not as simple as most Linux distros, but if you've got experience with slackware, it should be a piece of cake.
I find it very odd you made this a parenthetical.
That's because you're assuming I'm trying argue that Lisp is better than all other languages because it has macros. I'm not. I'm simply saying that learning Lisp or Scheme by implementing them is a great way to learn about how programming languages, in general, work.
You don't have to master macros to do that. You can write a simple s-expression to assembly compiler in less than 100 lines of scheme or lisp, never touching a macro. It would be much more difficult to do in any other language, because you'd get bogged down in the details of lexical analysis, which is no fun.