I almost felt like smacking you for asking that question, but perhaps not everyone knows this. Qt is dual-licensed. You can use it under GPL for free, or you can pay TrollTech money for a commercial license. Opera paid for the commercial license.
Oh, I'm not complaining about that. But it is important to understand your licenses and know what you legally can and cannot do.
I didn't mention this, but I did start out trying to use Qt, and when I could never get past all the completely useless compiler error messages, rather than trying to figure it out, I just dumped it and moved on to something else. I've been programming C++ for 10 years. I have used GUI toolkits before. When googling for answers as to why I was getting these errors, I found only brief and unhelpful answers. Would YOU waste your time?
I use KDE, but GTK is a very important toolkit
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Torvalds Says 'Use KDE'
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· Score: 2, Insightful
As a desktop environment, I prefer KDE, but when I develop GUIs, I use GTK. Actually, I use wxWidgets, which under Linux, uses GTK. The reason they wrap GTK for Linux is licensing.
When it comes to the Linux kernel, I am a firm believer in open source. Hardware should have open interfaces. This isn't idealism. The kernel needs to be STABLE, and the best way to ensure that is to have drivers open source. This makes the kernel portable and upgradable.
But when it comes to userland, where the kernel is able to isolate a process so that it can't damage anything else, there's less need to be so concerned. Plus, one of the things that's going to bring more open source software to Linux is the adoption of Linux by companies that produce closed-source applications. Oracle for Linux is important because more people will use Linux.
The issue with KDE is the Qt license. It's pure GPL. That means you can't write a Qt-based application without your entire application having to be under GPL. That isn't always favorable. So the wxWidgets people, wanting to be somewhat looser with their licensing, chose GTK, because it uses the LGPL license.
Of course, you can find this on other sites. And I did look at them in my effort to acquire more information on it when I was trying to learn about RSA encryption. But what makes Wikipedia do useful is that it's easy to search for this kind of information and it's so well-interconnected that even if you're a complete math idiot (which I feld like when reading that article), you can get the definitions you're after, find out what things are called, and then use that new information to make sense out of what you're reading from other sites.
I have found Wikipedia to be most useful in the areas where people are less likely to deface it. The less controvercial or more obscure topics. Math, biology, computer science, linguistics, and numerous other topics. Oh, and of course, if you want a massively detailed description of at Star Trek episode, it's right there.
You can't (or shouldn't) site Wikipedia in rigorous research. When I was taught research in high school, they strongly discouraged the use of ANY encyclopedia as source material, preferring that one find books and original research papers. Of course, the encyclopedia was the FIRST place I would look, but only as a means to get a clue about a topic and a sense for where to find other materials on it. There are actually better and more detailed web sites for reading about the areas I mentioned above. But Wikipedia is always the place I like to start to get my first clue. If Wikipedia is wrong, I'll find out (and probably correct the wikipedia article).
Having had my own wiki hacked quite a number of times before we switched over to TikiWiki, I'm fully aware of how easy it is to vandalize.
Microsoft did a lot of things besides bundling that were anticompetitive, like demanding a Windows license fee for every PC sold, regardless of the OS, specifically targetting competitors to put them out of business, charging PC makers more if they dared to sell PC's with another OS, etc. It's this kind of crap that has gotten them (and us) into this fix we're in. We're all suffering because of their bad behavior.
Someone there must have been paying attention to the Open Graphics Project. They're working on a design for an open source graphics card. Naturally, the drivers will be open source, but ultimately, so will the Verilog code to the internal GPU design.
Being an American, especially having lived in Florida, it seems like you can't get anywhere in a reasonable period without speeding, at least on the interstates.
However, there are times when I would like to go the speed limit. For instance, there are places where I know there are often speed traps. What I would like is a button to push that reminds me to go the speed limit, either by an alert or as something akin to cruise control. Usually, I remember that I'm about to get onto a speed-trap-prone road, so I'll remember to push the button, but sometimes my attention wanders from the speedometer (say, to paying attention to traffic), and I sometimes speed up. This way, I won't blow through speed traps. But I always want to be able to disable it.
You're missing my point. Those RHEL and SUSE updates you're talking about have been through several rounds of testing. Besides, even Microsoft gets patches out quickly SOMETIMES. You just can't patch things willy-nilly and not have problems sometimes. In Microsoft's case, the poor modularity and long test procedures make it hard to write the patch and time-consuming to test it.
I can't speak to Apple's testing procedures, but I can take some guesses.
Both Microsoft and Linux suffer from some similar problems in that the development teams aren't well integrated with each other. Both Linux and Windows have a development culture that involves a lot of randomness and allows individual developers to impose decisions that can affect the whole system. From the outside, Microsoft looks like a cathedral, but inside, it's really more of a bazaar. In order for Microsoft to not take forever to release a patch, and in order for , they would each have to improve long-term high- and low-level planning, as well as have better communication between developers working on "unrelated" things.
Are you aware of how many things in Office are duplicated work from things available in the base OS? Like file, font, and color selector dialogs, for instance. Microsoft does not have a good culture of internal code sharing. The Office group has a "not invented here" attitude, even towards other parts of the company. And sometimes, that's unavoidable, because if you want Office 2003 to work on Windows Me, you have to build into Office the things that are missing from Windows Me.
Linux has some problems of its own. For instance, unlike BSD, the kernel isn't very well integrated with userland. For Linux, userland is mostly GNU that's designed to be portable across multiple platforms; it isn't part of "Linux". As a result, their Linux-specific stuff is sometimes either omitted or overly generic. Furthermore, with userland stuff coming from different groups (KDE, Apache, MySQL, etc.), there is little or no pre-planned integration between services and applications.
With Apple, I think the modularity is better and better planned. It's like good OO programming, where you design classes to be self-contained with good interfaces. If you change a class, but you still conform to the interface, and the dependents aren't reliant on quirks of the specific implementation (instead, they rely on documented behavior from the design docs), then fixing a bug in a class is very unlikely to affect other things adversely. This makes testing relatively simple and quick. And this means that Apple can release patches a lot faster.
Oh, I completely agree with you. But it would be suicide for a company to admit, even tacitly, that their products aren't "mission critical". So how do you not falsely claim that you're trustworthy and yet also not claim that you're not, thereby taking your sales and stock price?
Microsoft is evil, but from a purely "company" based perspective, there are certain things they HAVE to do. The only way out is to produce software that really IS reliable.
Microsoft would do well to take seriously their own Singularity project. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it has the spirit of designing a system around the idea of being secure. Plus, it centralizes the security mechanisms so that if there is a flaw, while it affects everything, it also only requires it be fixed in one place.
We're used to OSS products that can be patched in a day, but we're also used to seeing those patches break things in unanticipated ways, often making things worse.
We're also used to picking on Microsoft for having buggy software. But they have extensive and long testing procedures, without which MS software would be WAY buggier on release. Their software is massive (for some good reasons and some bad ones), so it's a huge undertaking to fully test it.
In order to avoid, as much as possible, unanticipated consequences of a patch, Microsoft cannot simple make the fix and release it. An argument could be made that if they were to do that, they would often create more vulnerabilities than they started with, so releasing too quickly would be a BAD thing to do. Windows 95 is an example of something that was released too quickly, lacking certain kinds of testing entirely; you can see the unfortunate results when you try to connect a Win95 box direcly to the internet and wait 5 minutes.
So, why can't Microsoft 'patch everything'? Here are the reasons:
(1) First, you have to FIND 'everything', and Windows is just massive. (2) When you make a change, you have to test it extensively, which takes a LOT of time. (3) Some patches are one-liners. Some affect large amounts of code that makes it even harder to anticipate consequences. (4) Sometimes, you have to test things one at a time. This serializes your patch process in such a way that it just takes a very long time. This is very hard to avoid.
The fact of the matter is that if Microsoft were to 'patch everything', we would have a lot more to complain about. People should stop asking for stupid things and be realistic.
Even OSS projects can't 'patch everything' successfully. Sure, many of them are better designed from the start, so there are fewer things to patch, but when a patch needs to happen, the same amount of testing is going to have to happen, one way or another (either you release a beta and let it get tested for a while, or you just stick it in and wait for the shit to hit the fan and end up fixing the consequences the same amount of time later anyhow).
Also, certain people forget that Microsoft did go on a 'patch everything' hunt and DID fix a huge number of bugs. They still didn't find everything.
Oh, and if we're just talking about patching everything that's currently known, my argument still stands. Patching a bug of vulnerability is often quite difficult.
Looks like KDE is short on funds!
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KDE 3.5 Released
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· Score: 1
Because it appears that their Pentium II 233 box with 32 megs of RAM isn't quite cutting it as their web server for kde.org.:)
First of all, the idea that introverts get their energy from being alone (and are therefore overloaded around others) and that extraverts get their energy from being around others (because they are understimulated when alone) is OLD OLD OLD OLD news. I think I read about this in "Please Understand Me", the original book by the original Myers-Briggs people. Indeed, Carl Jung may have recognized this even earlier than that.
Secondly, people seem to want to be overly binary about this. I know people who get most of their energy from being alone. Those are introverts. I know people who get most of their energy from being with other people. Those are extraverts. I know people who seem to require a balance. What are THEY called?
Look, I think getting Linux running on some random platform is interesting, and the Xbox 360 may actually have a fair amount of horsepower. But aren't there better things for people to be spending their time and money on that would contribute more to the future of open source? So, instead of hacking the Xbox, how about developing hardware that's open by design?
If people took the money they're going to spend on reverse engineering the Xbox and spent it instead on open hardware development, we'd already have open GPU's, sound cards, motherboards, you name it.
At the same time, open source is borne out of everyone doing whatever they find to be most fascinating, and it's that freedom that has resulted in many people developing open source software that is useful to everyone, whether intentionally or by accident.
No mention of a changelog? If you're going to announce something, it sure would be nice to have a link to a page that explains some interesting stuff about what's new in it. I've tried looking at their wiki, but its 'news' section and its stuff on 4.1 hasn't been updated since like March.
Of course I know that. It just seemed to me that if Windows had a way to decide not to use both virtual processors because the only two runnable threads were of different priorities (or run the lower-pri thread only part of the time), then the people complaining would never have noticed a problem.
I remember early discussions from LKML where developers realized that if you were to run a high-priority thread on one virtual processor and a low-priority thread on the other VP, you'd have a priority imbalance and a situation that you'd want to avoid. The developers solved the problem by adding a tunable parameter that indicated the assumed amount of "extra" performance you could get out of the CPU from HT. In other words, with 1 CPU, max load is 100%; with two physical CPU's, max load is 200%; with one HT CPU, max load would be set to something on the order of 115% to 130%. So, when your hi-pri thread is running and the lo-pri thread wants to run, we let the low-pri thread only run 15% of the time (or something like that), resulting in only a modest impact on the hi-pri thread but an improvement in over-all system throughput.
That being said, I infer from the article that Windows does not do any such priority fairness checking. Consider the example they gave in the article. The DB is running, and then some disk-cache cleaner process comes along and competes for CPU cache. If the OS were SMART, it would recognize that the system task is of a MUCH lower priority and either not run it or only run it for a small portion of the time.
As said by others commenting on this article, the complainers are being stupid for two reasons. One, Intel already admitted that there are lots of cases where HT can hurt performance, so shut up. And Two, there are ways to ameliorate the problem in the OS, but since Windows isn't doing it, they should be complaining to Microsoft, not misdirecting the blame at Intel, so shut up.
(Note that I don't like Intel too terribly much either. Hey, we all hate Microsoft, but when someone is an idiot and blames them for something they're not responsible for, it doesn't help anyone.)
This program generates ARBITRARY collisions. Given a tarball of a Linux kernel, you can generate some other file with the same MD5 hash. But can you generate a collision that is also a valid tarball that unpacks cleanly and compiles? The chances of that are so remote that I don't see it happening any time soon.
Here's the real trick. Take your kernel tarball X, and your hacked version Y. Using this collision finder, can you find some garbage Z such that Y appended with Z has the same hash as X? (Tar will, however, complain about extra stuff at the end of the tarball, but it would unpack and compile.) That's a MUCH harder problem than finding arbitrary collisions and would take a HELL of a lot longer to produce than 45 minutes on a PC.
How do we feel about Sony now? (BMG vs. PSP)
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Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 1
I've bought a fair number of Sony products, and I have generally been satisfied with them. Electronics are good quality, tend not to break, are almost never fault out of the box, etc. I haven't had many dealings with their customer service, however, but I have generally had a good impression of them.
Now, they go and do this. In an overzealous attempt to 'protect copyrights', they so something with results they did not anticipate. Could they have anticipated their results? Even smart people screw up. How about that guy who wrote the first major worm in the 80's? He was just having fun, but it totally got out of hand. If he'd known, he wouldn't have done it.
The real problem isn't the rootkit. Yes, using a rootkit is bad, and we now have painfully clean evidence of the fact that it's just a terrible idea, but more important is the underlying reasoning that lead to their decision to develop it. Protecting copyrights is a good thing. We on slashdot love the GPL, and without copyright law, the GPL would be nothing. It's important for people to be able to control their own works (for a limited period of time!!!). The problem is the idea that underhanded tactics (and they had to know that hacking your computer is underhanded) are the wrong approach to dealing with piracy.
The correct approach to dealing with piracy is to stop the Asian piracy trade, because the amount of piracy there FAR outstrips anything going on on P2P networks. But I digress.
Will Sony learn from their mistakes? Well, certainly, they'll learn that rootkits are a bad idea. But if Sony is going to employ technical means to stop piracy, they're going to have to be a lot more clever. Ideas have been thrown around about inserting bogus files into P2P networks. While that is annoying to those pirating music, it doesn't infect their computers with viruses and cause millions of dollars in damage.
Rather than trying to make it IMPOSSIBLE to pirate music, the more successful forms of DRM have simply made it inconvenient; for instance, to P2P share something from iTunes, you'd have to first burn it to CD, and then rip it back off, thereby requiring extra steps and reducing resultant audio quality. That seems to have been an effective deterrent.
There's a small chance that Sony will mature a little bit and realize that DRM, or at least certain forms of it, costs more than the money lost on piracy. But we'll see.
And also, keep in mind that Sony is a big company. Maybe BMG sucks, but the PSP absolutely ROCKS, and you can't deny it.:)
The article said that the caps are only designed to last 7 years. Doesn't that kinda suck? Even with good capacitors, your computer is designed to die on you. Now, maybe you think that 7 years is a long time for a computer, but in many places, computers stay in use longer than that.
An I don't mean to say the obvious that scientific theories are not the same as mathematical theorems.
What I mean to say is that just because the ID people are crackpots doesn't mean that there aren't evolutionists with an equally nefarious ulterior motive. With peer review, even biased scientist have to do good science to get published, but that doesn't erase the bias or change how the scientific results are used philosophically or politically.
The fact of the matter is that evolution shows how life can be formed through purely natural means. It does not require God because, idealy, it does not assume anything that can't be directly observed or inferred from observation. Nevertheless, people can twist this into being interpreted as evidence against the existence of God.
Many ID proponents (laymen, that is) believe they see an anti-God bias in science and want to balance that with a pro-God bias. This is really the result of poor science education and lazy scientist and science journalists who do not always qualify their hypotheses clearly as something falsifiable. Many people, particularly school children, see science education as a bunch of hard-to-understand things being thrown at them that they are to accept blindly. That is no better than sunday school. Although the scientific method is explained, they do not always understand it or how the scientific method was used in arriving at many of the things they are taught.
For instance, you cannot prove that mutations are random. You can show that some are not (perhaps programmed DNA alterations), but by the definition of being random, you are admitting to not have observed the cause. The converse of this is also being asserted to imply that lacking an observed cause, there is therefore no determinstic cause to be observed. You can't tell if the mutation was caused by cosmic rays, God, aliens, or the devil. Going any further isn't science, because it's not testable, but the the fact that a nondeterminstic cause is what's being taught is not science either.
Re:Children, grow up and admit that OSS isn't perf
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OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
Oh, and I neglected to comment on your last point ("Yes, OSS isn't perfect, however it's strengths (and weaknesses) are not measured in load times and/or memory footprints."). This is the crux of my argument.
FOSS advocates use load times and memory footprints as a means to measure proprietary software, and they do it all the time. And what I'm saying is that since those things matter then, then they also matter now, and the comparison has to be made fairly for all software.
Re:Children, grow up and admit that OSS isn't perf
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OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
If you read Gödel, Escher, Bach, you'll read about this idea of a record that cannot be played by a certain record player. If you change the record player to play that record, you can still find another record that the new player can't play.
So, yes, I agree that it's certainly possible to make a spreadsheet that works well with Excel but not with Calc. And I also agree that it may not be a fair test.
But I was more interested in the memory usage for empty documents.
Slashdot Mirror
I almost felt like smacking you for asking that question, but perhaps not everyone knows this. Qt is dual-licensed. You can use it under GPL for free, or you can pay TrollTech money for a commercial license. Opera paid for the commercial license.
Oh, I'm not complaining about that. But it is important to understand your licenses and know what you legally can and cannot do.
I didn't mention this, but I did start out trying to use Qt, and when I could never get past all the completely useless compiler error messages, rather than trying to figure it out, I just dumped it and moved on to something else. I've been programming C++ for 10 years. I have used GUI toolkits before. When googling for answers as to why I was getting these errors, I found only brief and unhelpful answers. Would YOU waste your time?
As a desktop environment, I prefer KDE, but when I develop GUIs, I use GTK. Actually, I use wxWidgets, which under Linux, uses GTK. The reason they wrap GTK for Linux is licensing.
When it comes to the Linux kernel, I am a firm believer in open source. Hardware should have open interfaces. This isn't idealism. The kernel needs to be STABLE, and the best way to ensure that is to have drivers open source. This makes the kernel portable and upgradable.
But when it comes to userland, where the kernel is able to isolate a process so that it can't damage anything else, there's less need to be so concerned. Plus, one of the things that's going to bring more open source software to Linux is the adoption of Linux by companies that produce closed-source applications. Oracle for Linux is important because more people will use Linux.
The issue with KDE is the Qt license. It's pure GPL. That means you can't write a Qt-based application without your entire application having to be under GPL. That isn't always favorable. So the wxWidgets people, wanting to be somewhat looser with their licensing, chose GTK, because it uses the LGPL license.
I didn't quite catch your explanation of how math, biology, computer science, and linguistics were "worthless trivia."
Check out this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_theorem
Of course, you can find this on other sites. And I did look at them in my effort to acquire more information on it when I was trying to learn about RSA encryption. But what makes Wikipedia do useful is that it's easy to search for this kind of information and it's so well-interconnected that even if you're a complete math idiot (which I feld like when reading that article), you can get the definitions you're after, find out what things are called, and then use that new information to make sense out of what you're reading from other sites.
I have found Wikipedia to be most useful in the areas where people are less likely to deface it. The less controvercial or more obscure topics. Math, biology, computer science, linguistics, and numerous other topics. Oh, and of course, if you want a massively detailed description of at Star Trek episode, it's right there.
You can't (or shouldn't) site Wikipedia in rigorous research. When I was taught research in high school, they strongly discouraged the use of ANY encyclopedia as source material, preferring that one find books and original research papers. Of course, the encyclopedia was the FIRST place I would look, but only as a means to get a clue about a topic and a sense for where to find other materials on it. There are actually better and more detailed web sites for reading about the areas I mentioned above. But Wikipedia is always the place I like to start to get my first clue. If Wikipedia is wrong, I'll find out (and probably correct the wikipedia article).
Having had my own wiki hacked quite a number of times before we switched over to TikiWiki, I'm fully aware of how easy it is to vandalize.
Sober cracked code, and I don't care. Sober cracked code, and I don't care. Sober cracked code, and I don't caaaaaaaaare. And the hacker's gone away.
(Note: I apologize to anyone who is aware of the origins of the song I'm parodying.)
Microsoft did a lot of things besides bundling that were anticompetitive, like demanding a Windows license fee for every PC sold, regardless of the OS, specifically targetting competitors to put them out of business, charging PC makers more if they dared to sell PC's with another OS, etc. It's this kind of crap that has gotten them (and us) into this fix we're in. We're all suffering because of their bad behavior.
Someone there must have been paying attention to the Open Graphics Project. They're working on a design for an open source graphics card. Naturally, the drivers will be open source, but ultimately, so will the Verilog code to the internal GPU design.
Being an American, especially having lived in Florida, it seems like you can't get anywhere in a reasonable period without speeding, at least on the interstates.
However, there are times when I would like to go the speed limit. For instance, there are places where I know there are often speed traps. What I would like is a button to push that reminds me to go the speed limit, either by an alert or as something akin to cruise control. Usually, I remember that I'm about to get onto a speed-trap-prone road, so I'll remember to push the button, but sometimes my attention wanders from the speedometer (say, to paying attention to traffic), and I sometimes speed up. This way, I won't blow through speed traps. But I always want to be able to disable it.
You're missing my point. Those RHEL and SUSE updates you're talking about have been through several rounds of testing. Besides, even Microsoft gets patches out quickly SOMETIMES. You just can't patch things willy-nilly and not have problems sometimes. In Microsoft's case, the poor modularity and long test procedures make it hard to write the patch and time-consuming to test it.
I can't speak to Apple's testing procedures, but I can take some guesses.
Both Microsoft and Linux suffer from some similar problems in that the development teams aren't well integrated with each other. Both Linux and Windows have a development culture that involves a lot of randomness and allows individual developers to impose decisions that can affect the whole system. From the outside, Microsoft looks like a cathedral, but inside, it's really more of a bazaar. In order for Microsoft to not take forever to release a patch, and in order for , they would each have to improve long-term high- and low-level planning, as well as have better communication between developers working on "unrelated" things.
Are you aware of how many things in Office are duplicated work from things available in the base OS? Like file, font, and color selector dialogs, for instance. Microsoft does not have a good culture of internal code sharing. The Office group has a "not invented here" attitude, even towards other parts of the company. And sometimes, that's unavoidable, because if you want Office 2003 to work on Windows Me, you have to build into Office the things that are missing from Windows Me.
Linux has some problems of its own. For instance, unlike BSD, the kernel isn't very well integrated with userland. For Linux, userland is mostly GNU that's designed to be portable across multiple platforms; it isn't part of "Linux". As a result, their Linux-specific stuff is sometimes either omitted or overly generic. Furthermore, with userland stuff coming from different groups (KDE, Apache, MySQL, etc.), there is little or no pre-planned integration between services and applications.
With Apple, I think the modularity is better and better planned. It's like good OO programming, where you design classes to be self-contained with good interfaces. If you change a class, but you still conform to the interface, and the dependents aren't reliant on quirks of the specific implementation (instead, they rely on documented behavior from the design docs), then fixing a bug in a class is very unlikely to affect other things adversely. This makes testing relatively simple and quick. And this means that Apple can release patches a lot faster.
Oh, I completely agree with you. But it would be suicide for a company to admit, even tacitly, that their products aren't "mission critical". So how do you not falsely claim that you're trustworthy and yet also not claim that you're not, thereby taking your sales and stock price?
Microsoft is evil, but from a purely "company" based perspective, there are certain things they HAVE to do. The only way out is to produce software that really IS reliable.
Microsoft would do well to take seriously their own Singularity project. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it has the spirit of designing a system around the idea of being secure. Plus, it centralizes the security mechanisms so that if there is a flaw, while it affects everything, it also only requires it be fixed in one place.
We're used to OSS products that can be patched in a day, but we're also used to seeing those patches break things in unanticipated ways, often making things worse.
We're also used to picking on Microsoft for having buggy software. But they have extensive and long testing procedures, without which MS software would be WAY buggier on release. Their software is massive (for some good reasons and some bad ones), so it's a huge undertaking to fully test it.
In order to avoid, as much as possible, unanticipated consequences of a patch, Microsoft cannot simple make the fix and release it. An argument could be made that if they were to do that, they would often create more vulnerabilities than they started with, so releasing too quickly would be a BAD thing to do. Windows 95 is an example of something that was released too quickly, lacking certain kinds of testing entirely; you can see the unfortunate results when you try to connect a Win95 box direcly to the internet and wait 5 minutes.
So, why can't Microsoft 'patch everything'? Here are the reasons:
(1) First, you have to FIND 'everything', and Windows is just massive.
(2) When you make a change, you have to test it extensively, which takes a LOT of time.
(3) Some patches are one-liners. Some affect large amounts of code that makes it even harder to anticipate consequences.
(4) Sometimes, you have to test things one at a time. This serializes your patch process in such a way that it just takes a very long time. This is very hard to avoid.
The fact of the matter is that if Microsoft were to 'patch everything', we would have a lot more to complain about. People should stop asking for stupid things and be realistic.
Even OSS projects can't 'patch everything' successfully. Sure, many of them are better designed from the start, so there are fewer things to patch, but when a patch needs to happen, the same amount of testing is going to have to happen, one way or another (either you release a beta and let it get tested for a while, or you just stick it in and wait for the shit to hit the fan and end up fixing the consequences the same amount of time later anyhow).
Also, certain people forget that Microsoft did go on a 'patch everything' hunt and DID fix a huge number of bugs. They still didn't find everything.
Oh, and if we're just talking about patching everything that's currently known, my argument still stands. Patching a bug of vulnerability is often quite difficult.
Because it appears that their Pentium II 233 box with 32 megs of RAM isn't quite cutting it as their web server for kde.org. :)
First of all, the idea that introverts get their energy from being alone (and are therefore overloaded around others) and that extraverts get their energy from being around others (because they are understimulated when alone) is OLD OLD OLD OLD news. I think I read about this in "Please Understand Me", the original book by the original Myers-Briggs people. Indeed, Carl Jung may have recognized this even earlier than that.
Secondly, people seem to want to be overly binary about this. I know people who get most of their energy from being alone. Those are introverts. I know people who get most of their energy from being with other people. Those are extraverts. I know people who seem to require a balance. What are THEY called?
Look, I think getting Linux running on some random platform is interesting, and the Xbox 360 may actually have a fair amount of horsepower. But aren't there better things for people to be spending their time and money on that would contribute more to the future of open source? So, instead of hacking the Xbox, how about developing hardware that's open by design?
If people took the money they're going to spend on reverse engineering the Xbox and spent it instead on open hardware development, we'd already have open GPU's, sound cards, motherboards, you name it.
At the same time, open source is borne out of everyone doing whatever they find to be most fascinating, and it's that freedom that has resulted in many people developing open source software that is useful to everyone, whether intentionally or by accident.
No mention of a changelog? If you're going to announce something, it sure would be nice to have a link to a page that explains some interesting stuff about what's new in it. I've tried looking at their wiki, but its 'news' section and its stuff on 4.1 hasn't been updated since like March.
Of course I know that. It just seemed to me that if Windows had a way to decide not to use both virtual processors because the only two runnable threads were of different priorities (or run the lower-pri thread only part of the time), then the people complaining would never have noticed a problem.
I remember early discussions from LKML where developers realized that if you were to run a high-priority thread on one virtual processor and a low-priority thread on the other VP, you'd have a priority imbalance and a situation that you'd want to avoid. The developers solved the problem by adding a tunable parameter that indicated the assumed amount of "extra" performance you could get out of the CPU from HT. In other words, with 1 CPU, max load is 100%; with two physical CPU's, max load is 200%; with one HT CPU, max load would be set to something on the order of 115% to 130%. So, when your hi-pri thread is running and the lo-pri thread wants to run, we let the low-pri thread only run 15% of the time (or something like that), resulting in only a modest impact on the hi-pri thread but an improvement in over-all system throughput.
That being said, I infer from the article that Windows does not do any such priority fairness checking. Consider the example they gave in the article. The DB is running, and then some disk-cache cleaner process comes along and competes for CPU cache. If the OS were SMART, it would recognize that the system task is of a MUCH lower priority and either not run it or only run it for a small portion of the time.
As said by others commenting on this article, the complainers are being stupid for two reasons. One, Intel already admitted that there are lots of cases where HT can hurt performance, so shut up. And Two, there are ways to ameliorate the problem in the OS, but since Windows isn't doing it, they should be complaining to Microsoft, not misdirecting the blame at Intel, so shut up.
(Note that I don't like Intel too terribly much either. Hey, we all hate Microsoft, but when someone is an idiot and blames them for something they're not responsible for, it doesn't help anyone.)
This program generates ARBITRARY collisions. Given a tarball of a Linux kernel, you can generate some other file with the same MD5 hash. But can you generate a collision that is also a valid tarball that unpacks cleanly and compiles? The chances of that are so remote that I don't see it happening any time soon.
Here's the real trick. Take your kernel tarball X, and your hacked version Y. Using this collision finder, can you find some garbage Z such that Y appended with Z has the same hash as X? (Tar will, however, complain about extra stuff at the end of the tarball, but it would unpack and compile.) That's a MUCH harder problem than finding arbitrary collisions and would take a HELL of a lot longer to produce than 45 minutes on a PC.
I've bought a fair number of Sony products, and I have generally been satisfied with them. Electronics are good quality, tend not to break, are almost never fault out of the box, etc. I haven't had many dealings with their customer service, however, but I have generally had a good impression of them.
:)
Now, they go and do this. In an overzealous attempt to 'protect copyrights', they so something with results they did not anticipate. Could they have anticipated their results? Even smart people screw up. How about that guy who wrote the first major worm in the 80's? He was just having fun, but it totally got out of hand. If he'd known, he wouldn't have done it.
The real problem isn't the rootkit. Yes, using a rootkit is bad, and we now have painfully clean evidence of the fact that it's just a terrible idea, but more important is the underlying reasoning that lead to their decision to develop it. Protecting copyrights is a good thing. We on slashdot love the GPL, and without copyright law, the GPL would be nothing. It's important for people to be able to control their own works (for a limited period of time!!!). The problem is the idea that underhanded tactics (and they had to know that hacking your computer is underhanded) are the wrong approach to dealing with piracy.
The correct approach to dealing with piracy is to stop the Asian piracy trade, because the amount of piracy there FAR outstrips anything going on on P2P networks. But I digress.
Will Sony learn from their mistakes? Well, certainly, they'll learn that rootkits are a bad idea. But if Sony is going to employ technical means to stop piracy, they're going to have to be a lot more clever. Ideas have been thrown around about inserting bogus files into P2P networks. While that is annoying to those pirating music, it doesn't infect their computers with viruses and cause millions of dollars in damage.
Rather than trying to make it IMPOSSIBLE to pirate music, the more successful forms of DRM have simply made it inconvenient; for instance, to P2P share something from iTunes, you'd have to first burn it to CD, and then rip it back off, thereby requiring extra steps and reducing resultant audio quality. That seems to have been an effective deterrent.
There's a small chance that Sony will mature a little bit and realize that DRM, or at least certain forms of it, costs more than the money lost on piracy. But we'll see.
And also, keep in mind that Sony is a big company. Maybe BMG sucks, but the PSP absolutely ROCKS, and you can't deny it.
The article said that the caps are only designed to last 7 years. Doesn't that kinda suck? Even with good capacitors, your computer is designed to die on you. Now, maybe you think that 7 years is a long time for a computer, but in many places, computers stay in use longer than that.
An I don't mean to say the obvious that scientific theories are not the same as mathematical theorems.
What I mean to say is that just because the ID people are crackpots doesn't mean that there aren't evolutionists with an equally nefarious ulterior motive. With peer review, even biased scientist have to do good science to get published, but that doesn't erase the bias or change how the scientific results are used philosophically or politically.
The fact of the matter is that evolution shows how life can be formed through purely natural means. It does not require God because, idealy, it does not assume anything that can't be directly observed or inferred from observation. Nevertheless, people can twist this into being interpreted as evidence against the existence of God.
Many ID proponents (laymen, that is) believe they see an anti-God bias in science and want to balance that with a pro-God bias. This is really the result of poor science education and lazy scientist and science journalists who do not always qualify their hypotheses clearly as something falsifiable. Many people, particularly school children, see science education as a bunch of hard-to-understand things being thrown at them that they are to accept blindly. That is no better than sunday school. Although the scientific method is explained, they do not always understand it or how the scientific method was used in arriving at many of the things they are taught.
For instance, you cannot prove that mutations are random. You can show that some are not (perhaps programmed DNA alterations), but by the definition of being random, you are admitting to not have observed the cause. The converse of this is also being asserted to imply that lacking an observed cause, there is therefore no determinstic cause to be observed. You can't tell if the mutation was caused by cosmic rays, God, aliens, or the devil. Going any further isn't science, because it's not testable, but the the fact that a nondeterminstic cause is what's being taught is not science either.
Oh, and I neglected to comment on your last point ("Yes, OSS isn't perfect, however it's strengths (and weaknesses) are not measured in load times and/or memory footprints."). This is the crux of my argument.
FOSS advocates use load times and memory footprints as a means to measure proprietary software, and they do it all the time. And what I'm saying is that since those things matter then, then they also matter now, and the comparison has to be made fairly for all software.
If you read Gödel, Escher, Bach, you'll read about this idea of a record that cannot be played by a certain record player. If you change the record player to play that record, you can still find another record that the new player can't play.
So, yes, I agree that it's certainly possible to make a spreadsheet that works well with Excel but not with Calc. And I also agree that it may not be a fair test.
But I was more interested in the memory usage for empty documents.