He wasn't trying to create a square circle, he was trying to find a method for constructing a square with the same area as a given circle. It's a classic unsolvable problem from geometry.
It is very misleading to call OS X microkernel based. It does run on a microkernel, but all of the normal drivers run in kernel mode so it is not a true microkernel.
Your ubuntu linux box is probably just rearranging inodes, while the windows box (vista I presume) is likely creating shadow copies so that you can arbitrarily roll back your filesystem after you do something stupid.
You're comparing apples to..candied apples. Yeah, they're both the same thing kinda, but one does other stuff too and you shouldn't blame the candied apple for being worse for your weight.
It still shouldn't take 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file. I use a linux system thats spread across 6 partitions so I have to copy files all the time. It only takes a few seconds to copy a 17MB file between two separate partions so even if Vista is making a copy it shouldn't take that long.
True, but it's the de facto solution to wireless functionality on Linux. The fact that it's the de facto solution AND relies on a massive hack (and Windows drivers) says an awful lot about the state of hardware support in Linux.
No, it's not. ndiswrapper is only the defacto solution for Broadcom wireless cards. Get a supported card, like an Intel or an Atheros and you can use a stable, native driver. I have an Atheros that works perfectly with a mostly open source driver with a small binary blob, that is currently being replaced.
There's a difference between allowing duplication and requiring it.
In fact, there already are a few notable instances of this -- NTFS being the obvious example. The userspace NTFS implementation is actually much more robust and featureful.
NTFS is also notable as a filesystem that no one running Linux wants to use for a root filesystem. The same cannot be said of ext3, ext4, reiserfs, or even relatively obscure filesystems such as JFS or XFS.
More likely, ReiserFS would only be implemented in userspace. It's irrelevant -- using filesystems other than ext3 (or ext4) for your root filesystem is just wanking with settings, remember? You only need ReiserFS if some poor, uneducated soul happened to format their system with Reiser, then you have to use the userspace driver to back it up.
Unlikely. Many people use reiserfs for their root filesystem. In fact, I believe it was the default in SUSE until recently.
Consider if we only supported, say, ext3 for the root filesystem, and the only filesystem supported for mounting. Anyone who wanted to work on new and exciting stuff, like, say, ext4, would do so with a fork. Access to other filesystems, like network, ISO/UDF, and FAT/NTFS, can be done in userspace -- see the various userspace VFS projects -- they don't have to be fast anyway, since they're generally removable media, or stuff rarely accessed. Anyone booting from the network is probably running a custom kernel anyway.
That would lead to major duplication of code. There would probably be a userspace implementation and a kernel implementation of every major filesystem. For instance, the people working on ext4 would most likely create a kernel implementation, because they eventually want it to be a replacement for ext3 on root partition but until it was mature enough to be widely used, there would still need to be a userspace implementation of it. The same would likely happen for many other filesystems, such as reiserfs, as well.
We have all kinds of other things pluggable that don't need to be, and plenty of other cruft in the kernel -- think binary formats other than ELF, old filesystems that nobody uses, and completely depricated systems like OSS for sound.
Those things definitely need to be modular. Unlike a scheduler, you can use multiple binary formats or filesystem types at the same time, you can't use two schedulers at the same time. What if someone comes up with a binary format that's much better than ELF? You probably want to support the new one without getting rid of the old one. For instance, modularity was obviously needed while people were switching from a.out to ELF. As for filesystems, there are so many filesystems that people do need that it would be crazy to try to support them all without modularity. As for sound, some systems don't even need sound, you need modularity to allow them to remove support for it. If you need plugability anyway, why get rid of modules just because few people use them. If no one uses them, no one will compile them, so they won't hurt anybody.
Eighty percent of species have been undiscovered by science, but that doesn't mean they're unknown to humans, because the people who live in those ecosystems know the species intimately and they often have more sophisticated ways of classifying them than science does
Most of those are insects. Insects species are very difficult to identify. Many common names for insects refer to classes or families of insects, not individual species, so it seems unlikely that these cultures have named any large portion of them.
The bug you linked to was an error of less than.0001 and it still caused problems. This Excel bug is off by almost 35000, and it's not even consistent with the value in the cell. I think pretty much everyone knows the difference between 65535 and 100000.
How is touch sexist. It's used to change the timestamp on a file. The only time it's even vaguely sexist is in the rare occasion that a file happens to have someone's name.
As for finger, few computers even accept remote finger requests since it's a security risk and locally, its usefulness has greatly declined with the proliferation of PCs.
Traditional Unix(TM) based operating systems are notorious for being highly proprietary, and their sources closely guarded secrets. Recently, of course, some unix-like vendors such as Sun have decided to open-source those OSes, but this is the exception, not the rule.
The original Unix sources were widely available. Only later did Unix and most derivatives have secret source code. I agree that it's silly to call all Unix operating systems open source though.
Are you seriously going to raise your kids with the philosophy of total lack of privacy and "someone's always watching?" That's a totally dystopian idea, and it's horrifying to hear that you'll force your kids to accept it! Privacy is a right, and while a healthy amount of parental discretion is available in enforcing household rules by looking at logs and things, you shouldn't be telling them "from the day you're born to the day you die someone's watching, so get used to it." Rather teach your kids that privacy is the ideal, the right thing, and that evil men have taken it away, and take that perspective to telling your kids someone's watching. The reality is that you have no privacy, but that's not how it should be, and that's not how it needs to be.
You need to teach them to defend their right to privacy. Teach them about encryption, even if the government does classify encryption algorithms as munitions.
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Yeah, what an idiot. Didn't even think to use a technique that was invented 20 years after he died.
He wasn't trying to create a square circle, he was trying to find a method for constructing a square with the same area as a given circle. It's a classic unsolvable problem from geometry.
It is very misleading to call OS X microkernel based. It does run on a microkernel, but all of the normal drivers run in kernel mode so it is not a true microkernel.
No, Quirks mode is one of the two previously existing modes. It is used when the document doesn't have a DOCTYPE declaration.
He's talking about Gandhi in Sid Meier's Civilization. Try actually reading the comment.
But if the only evidence for the existence of dogs is the feeling you get while you're on drugs, it kind of casts doubt on it.
I agree, Windows does have excellent tools for configuring the kernel.
Plugable doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be a module. Almost everything in the kernel can be built directly into the kernel.
If you're referring to pre-compilation, I believe Torvalds already signs the kernel sources.
I doubt Kerberos or NTP care what the local time is, they probably use UTC which is unaffected by this update.
If it's done at the choice of the box's owner then it's security, otherwise it's DRM.
The problem is that you didn't even read the title. It's Excel 2007.
Apparently, someone's never read the The Restaurant at the End of The Universe.
The bug you linked to was an error of less than .0001 and it still caused problems. This Excel bug is off by almost 35000, and it's not even consistent with the value in the cell. I think pretty much everyone knows the difference between 65535 and 100000.
How is touch sexist. It's used to change the timestamp on a file. The only time it's even vaguely sexist is in the rare occasion that a file happens to have someone's name.
As for finger, few computers even accept remote finger requests since it's a security risk and locally, its usefulness has greatly declined with the proliferation of PCs.
Microsoft doesn't 500 times Apple's resources. Microsoft's annual revenue is 2-3 times Apple's. You're off buy several orders of magnitude.