Wow, so many comments I've seen scoffing at the idea of global warming. It would almost make you think that educated people disregard the environmentalists.
Actually, that's pretty far from the truth. Check out the IPCC report and the NAS report. Both say that global warming is happening, and that it is likely to be partially caused by human activities.
Some selections from the NAS report:
Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last few decades are most likely due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability
Quite simply, those who know (the climatoligists) agree this is significant.
WARNING: When using this software, do NOT talk about disconnecting your computer in front of it, if your plan to operate heavy machinery in outer space afterwards.
However, this release certainly does not constitute an endorsement. They released it only to demonstrate certain security improvements that should be made to Linux. They admit it is still not secure in any meaningful way (read the FAQ).
I think this is a good thing. Linux undoubtedly needs better security.
Look, if you don't understand the case, please refrain from commenting about it. If you do understand the case, tell me why either anti-trust legislation is wrong, or why it doesn't apply to Microsoft.
Who would have thought that these crackers are so jolly! I can imagine when the police catch up with them:
"The police are at my front door. LOL. They look really mad! LOL! You'll never take me alive coppers! LOL. Oh, now they're shooting at me, what morons LOL. Hey, what's this red stuff coming from my chest? LOL!!"
If you want a new console system soon, here are the choices as I see them:
Dreamcast: Out of business. Cheap, though.
PlayStation 2: It may be out, but no one knows when this will be available. You want one? Wait for a few months and check again.
XBox: Supposedly coming out this year. Probably Christmas-time! I'm sure it'll be easy to get! Sarcasm aside, this one probably won't be available until some time next year.
Nintendo Game Cube: Not much hype around this one, despite some great screen shots. Same deal as with x-box, who knows when you will be able to get it. Probably some time next year.
Anyway, in my mind, if you don't want to wait more than a year for your system, either get a Dreamcast for cheap, or wait a few months for the more expensive Playstation 2. It's actually a difficult choice to make now.
For me, the dc2xx driver does not autonomatically load. It did, once upon a time, but my version (a pre-2.4 kernel that's about a few months old) does not autodetect it.
The Author DOES Know What An OS is...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 1
Yes, you are right: "the purpose of an operating system is to provide an environment in which a user can execute programs".
In the old days it means reading punch cards and printing out lines of output. Later it grew to embrace terminals. Now GUI's, video, the web, a 3d api, and sound are all part of the popular programs people run. Any modern OS has to provide an environment for this.
The minimum amount of code to run "Quake III" successfully is... well it looks more like Mac OS X than, say, BSD.
The points of his articles are true - in fact, unfortunately for open-sourcers, it's sometimes too true. Yes,open-source programmers have a lot of pride in their work, and therefore may write better code. But often, they have too much pride - that's why you see so many useless projects like "this is my new web-browser project, which is based on slightly different and better concepts than Mozilla, so I think we should just rewrite the whole thing now". Closed-source programmers are more likely to do the most efficient thing, which in the end is often the best way to work.
It should be noted that excessive perfection hurts many projects. There's no use in creating a perfectly coded, extendable, modular, object-oriented,.wav file player for Linux, say... it just has to work.
I think that adding a CLI to Nautilus is subversive to the end goal here. The point is - you shouldn't HAVE to know "cat" or ">>" to do this operation. It should be obvious how to do it, through a GUI.
I could see a way this, and other like it, could be done. I haven't tried Nautilus, but at least in Windows Explorer, I could see a system where you drag a file to another file - you could have several options at that point from a pop-up menu: Replace, Append, Prepend...
I'm somewhat sympathetic to posting before trying out the software. If you had to try out the software before posting, those of us with 56k modems or less would never get to participate - since by the time you downloaded a 20+ meg file the discussion has pretty much already happened...
ANd that's assuming it works out of the box, which Linux apps seldom do...
A Russian friend of mine told me that in Russia, people are very happy to program in English because in Russian, there are a lot of different ways to say "put" (or "set") and "get", according to gramattical rules involving verb conjucations. In English it's much more straighforward, so naming functions is more easy - and guessing function names is also more easy.
Of course theoretically, you can program in English and not even know the language. However, I suspect that when using 3rd party libraries and system functions, some knowledge of English comes in handy. Since English is fairly close to an international language, and, as noted above, the grammer is well suited to writing function and variable names, I think it's fair that most libraries use English.
Taking the syntax of C++ is not inconsistent with starting with a clean sheet of paper. Next you'll be saying "Aha, the code is written in ENGLISH! Ha ha ha, and they said they were going to start with a clean slate!"
Too many inhibitions? THe same problem haunted Raymond Chandler (created of the Phillip Marlowe character) - in fact he found he could not write quickly unless he was drunk.
You may not want to go to such extremes, but many coders will say the getting a few beers in them loosens them up if they need it.
i fail to see your point. ORBS crashes some mail servers? How is that ORBS fault, it seems like a bug in the mail server. After all, ORBS is not designed to crash systems, merely to test them.
You complain that ORBS lists servers that do not cooperate. Well, if they didn't, obviously the system would be totally ineffective.
You claim that ORBS blacklists people who complain about them. How is that possible? Anyone can go to the ORBS site and have their system tested and taken off the list if the test passes.
The point of ORBS is they are a big bully with a stick. If you have a misconfigured mail server, they whack you. Yeah, it's tough. But it's the only way to do things. Saying "please" doesn't cut it. Everyone acknowledges that open relays are a problem - someone has to put pressure on companies, indivuals, and ISP's to put forth the effort to change them. If you are an IS guy, ORBS can be your friend. If you need a better mail server, telling your boss that it would be nice if they spent money and time and got a new mail server because your current one may allow spam is usually ineffective. Your boss doesn't care about spam. But telling your boss that the company could be blacklisted if they don't upgrade is a different story. You'll get what you need to do a proper job.
So Silicon Valley has gotten so bad? It seems to me that it saved this place. Downtown Mountain View used to nearly abandonded in the 70's... now it's one of the nicest places in the Valley. There's much better restuarants, mass transit and the highway system is improving. According to some old-timers talking on ba.transportation, in the old days even though there were less people, it was a lot harder to get around due to the lack of infrastructure.
People complain about San Francisco too - how the "dot-commers" are taking over. Heaven forbid, they are actually building high-density residences in the boring, dingy, near-abandonded South of Market area. I guess it's better just to have parking lots.
Silicon Valley is somewhere special now. It's not hard to find a small-town rural area to live in, although I can't imagine why anyone would choose to. Why would you want to live in a small-town with nothing to do except socialize with farmers when you could be in a place with educated people, tons of interesting jobs, great universities, great restuarants and a huge selection of things to do?
Things are much better now.
Re:A lovely summary of all that's wrong with X
on
X Windows Must Die!
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· Score: 1
The problem isn't that X11 doesn't make it impossible for my vendor to misconfigure my system. The problem is that when it is misconfigured, it's not easy to fix. You have to read a HOWTO (does the novice user even know where the HOWTO's are?) and implement several different changes. Why is it the X server's job to cater to lusers who don't read manuals? Because no one of any experience level wants to waste time reading manuals for things that should be obvious if the software was well-designed. Although this wasn't my point, the misconfiguration of RedHat shows how EASY it is to misconfigure X. That's a problem! And the fix is so awful - totally unlike something semi-nice like BeOS's way to switch key behavior. Actually, the backspace problem haults all variants of UNIX to this very day, so I can't lay all the blame on X. To the user, though, it's a simple problem whose solution is needlessly complex.
Re:A lovely summary of all that's wrong with X
on
X Windows Must Die!
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· Score: 1
Oh, how nice, the user can read HOWTO's, man pages, and search for clues on the WWW! That's Linux's idea for good usability. I guess expecting that things just work right off the bat is too much.
When I started using RedHat 5.2, X-windows by default did not deal with the backspace key correctly. Probably one of the most important keys on the keyboard, and by default, it was wrong! But I guess that's not a problem, because a HOWTO told me what I had to do (change several files).
Searching the WWW or help files about bugs is one thing. But for basic functionality? Give me a break - if a user has to go to those lengths just to use the damn software, the software is not doing it's job.
Of course you are right. But it's not all economics. Like I said, it's possible for people to affect supply at the city-government level, and they do. So it's not just economics, it's also politics.
It only takes a minute of perusal to see why housing is so expensive: it's the fault of the homeowner's.
Imagine you are a homeowner. You obviously want to see your investment grow as much as possible. The basic laws of supply and demand state that the way to do this is increase demand or decrease supply. Well, you can't do either. But you can advocate for no new housing, and thus limit any growth of supply. The result: housing becomes scarce, people become homeless, and the homeowners get rich (on paper). If you look at the actions of homeowner's, that exactly how they behave at city council meetings - always complaining "this development is too dense - it'll ruin our suburban character. etc, etc..."
If you ask me, the property tax loophole (property tax can only rise some percentage a year, regardless of how much your property value rises) is killing Silicon Valley. That tax is the only disincentive for rising property values for the homeowner. If it reflected the true cost of housing, the homeowners would probably act differently.
Using a COM DLL in Windows does the same thing. You can load the DLL at any time by CoCreateInstance, and then if it fails, it's no big deal, you can inform the user gracefully, or disable whatever functionality. Also, you don't need to know even about any particular DLL, just ask for the COM class, and whatever DLL is responsible for it will be loaded (or not, if it's already loaded).
DLL's do not require the computer to be rebooted after an install. It is only required when upgrading a DLL that the system is using. But, yes, Apple's method should avoid the need to ever reboot (at the expense of disk space).
As far as registering DLL's, a name - location registry is essential to allow use the loading of DLL's by name(or GUID, in the case of COM). It's a great feature of DLL's, not a hinderance.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's pretty far from the truth. Check out the IPCC report and the NAS report. Both say that global warming is happening, and that it is likely to be partially caused by human activities.
Some selections from the NAS report:
Quite simply, those who know (the climatoligists) agree this is significant.WARNING: When using this software, do NOT talk about disconnecting your computer in front of it, if your plan to operate heavy machinery in outer space afterwards.
Agreed.
However, this release certainly does not constitute an endorsement. They released it only to demonstrate certain security improvements that should be made to Linux. They admit it is still not secure in any meaningful way (read the FAQ).
I think this is a good thing. Linux undoubtedly needs better security.
Look, if you don't understand the case, please refrain from commenting about it. If you do understand the case, tell me why either anti-trust legislation is wrong, or why it doesn't apply to Microsoft.
I'm not going to like it when Microsoft publishes "The Insider Guide to Avumede's Address Book".
Who would have thought that these crackers are so jolly! I can imagine when the police catch up with them:
"The police are at my front door. LOL. They look really mad! LOL! You'll never take me alive coppers! LOL. Oh, now they're shooting at me, what morons LOL. Hey, what's this red stuff coming from my chest? LOL!!"
Just like the Playstation 2 is out now?
If you want a new console system soon, here are the choices as I see them:
Dreamcast: Out of business. Cheap, though.
PlayStation 2: It may be out, but no one knows when this will be available. You want one? Wait for a few months and check again.
XBox: Supposedly coming out this year. Probably Christmas-time! I'm sure it'll be easy to get! Sarcasm aside, this one probably won't be available until some time next year.
Nintendo Game Cube: Not much hype around this one, despite some great screen shots. Same deal as with x-box, who knows when you will be able to get it. Probably some time next year.
Anyway, in my mind, if you don't want to wait more than a year for your system, either get a Dreamcast for cheap, or wait a few months for the more expensive Playstation 2. It's actually a difficult choice to make now.
For me, the dc2xx driver does not autonomatically load. It did, once upon a time, but my version (a pre-2.4 kernel that's about a few months old) does not autodetect it.
Yes, you are right: "the purpose of an operating system is to provide an environment in which a user can execute programs".
In the old days it means reading punch cards and printing out lines of output. Later it grew to embrace terminals. Now GUI's, video, the web, a 3d api, and sound are all part of the popular programs people run. Any modern OS has to provide an environment for this.
The minimum amount of code to run "Quake III" successfully is... well it looks more like Mac OS X than, say, BSD.
The points of his articles are true - in fact, unfortunately for open-sourcers, it's sometimes too true. Yes,open-source programmers have a lot of pride in their work, and therefore may write better code. But often, they have too much pride - that's why you see so many useless projects like "this is my new web-browser project, which is based on slightly different and better concepts than Mozilla, so I think we should just rewrite the whole thing now". Closed-source programmers are more likely to do the most efficient thing, which in the end is often the best way to work.
.wav file player for Linux, say... it just has to work.
It should be noted that excessive perfection hurts many projects. There's no use in creating a perfectly coded, extendable, modular, object-oriented,
I think that adding a CLI to Nautilus is subversive to the end goal here. The point is - you shouldn't HAVE to know "cat" or ">>" to do this operation. It should be obvious how to do it, through a GUI.
I could see a way this, and other like it, could be done. I haven't tried Nautilus, but at least in Windows Explorer, I could see a system where you drag a file to another file - you could have several options at that point from a pop-up menu: Replace, Append, Prepend...
I'm somewhat sympathetic to posting before trying out the software. If you had to try out the software before posting, those of us with 56k modems or less would never get to participate - since by the time you downloaded a 20+ meg file the discussion has pretty much already happened...
ANd that's assuming it works out of the box, which Linux apps seldom do...
Because it is fairly simple in certain ways.
A Russian friend of mine told me that in Russia, people are very happy to program in English because in Russian, there are a lot of different ways to say "put" (or "set") and "get", according to gramattical rules involving verb conjucations. In English it's much more straighforward, so naming functions is more easy - and guessing function names is also more easy.
Of course theoretically, you can program in English and not even know the language. However, I suspect that when using 3rd party libraries and system functions, some knowledge of English comes in handy. Since English is fairly close to an international language, and, as noted above, the grammer is well suited to writing function and variable names, I think it's fair that most libraries use English.
Give me a break...
Taking the syntax of C++ is not inconsistent with starting with a clean sheet of paper. Next you'll be saying "Aha, the code is written in ENGLISH! Ha ha ha, and they said they were going to start with a clean slate!"
Too many inhibitions? THe same problem haunted Raymond Chandler (created of the Phillip Marlowe character) - in fact he found he could not write quickly unless he was drunk.
You may not want to go to such extremes, but many coders will say the getting a few beers in them loosens them up if they need it.
i fail to see your point. ORBS crashes some mail servers? How is that ORBS fault, it seems like a bug in the mail server. After all, ORBS is not designed to crash systems, merely to test them.
You complain that ORBS lists servers that do not cooperate. Well, if they didn't, obviously the system would be totally ineffective.
You claim that ORBS blacklists people who complain about them. How is that possible? Anyone can go to the ORBS site and have their system tested and taken off the list if the test passes.
The point of ORBS is they are a big bully with a stick. If you have a misconfigured mail server, they whack you. Yeah, it's tough. But it's the only way to do things. Saying "please" doesn't cut it. Everyone acknowledges that open relays are a problem - someone has to put pressure on companies, indivuals, and ISP's to put forth the effort to change them. If you are an IS guy, ORBS can be your friend. If you need a better mail server, telling your boss that it would be nice if they spent money and time and got a new mail server because your current one may allow spam is usually ineffective. Your boss doesn't care about spam. But telling your boss that the company could be blacklisted if they don't upgrade is a different story. You'll get what you need to do a proper job.
So Silicon Valley has gotten so bad? It seems to me that it saved this place. Downtown Mountain View used to nearly abandonded in the 70's... now it's one of the nicest places in the Valley. There's much better restuarants, mass transit and the highway system is improving. According to some old-timers talking on ba.transportation, in the old days even though there were less people, it was a lot harder to get around due to the lack of infrastructure.
People complain about San Francisco too - how the "dot-commers" are taking over. Heaven forbid, they are actually building high-density residences in the boring, dingy, near-abandonded South of Market area. I guess it's better just to have parking lots.
Silicon Valley is somewhere special now. It's not hard to find a small-town rural area to live in, although I can't imagine why anyone would choose to. Why would you want to live in a small-town with nothing to do except socialize with farmers when you could be in a place with educated people, tons of interesting jobs, great universities, great restuarants and a huge selection of things to do?
Things are much better now.
The problem isn't that X11 doesn't make it impossible for my vendor to misconfigure my system. The problem is that when it is misconfigured, it's not easy to fix. You have to read a HOWTO (does the novice user even know where the HOWTO's are?) and implement several different changes. Why is it the X server's job to cater to lusers who don't read manuals? Because no one of any experience level wants to waste time reading manuals for things that should be obvious if the software was well-designed. Although this wasn't my point, the misconfiguration of RedHat shows how EASY it is to misconfigure X. That's a problem! And the fix is so awful - totally unlike something semi-nice like BeOS's way to switch key behavior. Actually, the backspace problem haults all variants of UNIX to this very day, so I can't lay all the blame on X. To the user, though, it's a simple problem whose solution is needlessly complex.
Oh, how nice, the user can read HOWTO's, man pages, and search for clues on the WWW! That's Linux's idea for good usability. I guess expecting that things just work right off the bat is too much.
When I started using RedHat 5.2, X-windows by default did not deal with the backspace key correctly. Probably one of the most important keys on the keyboard, and by default, it was wrong! But I guess that's not a problem, because a HOWTO told me what I had to do (change several files).
Searching the WWW or help files about bugs is one thing. But for basic functionality? Give me a break - if a user has to go to those lengths just to use the damn software, the software is not doing it's job.
The headline makes sense if the story was about Xerox Parc's or E-Ink's electronic paper...
Of course you are right. But it's not all economics. Like I said, it's possible for people to affect supply at the city-government level, and they do. So it's not just economics, it's also politics.
It only takes a minute of perusal to see why housing is so expensive: it's the fault of the homeowner's.
Imagine you are a homeowner. You obviously want to see your investment grow as much as possible. The basic laws of supply and demand state that the way to do this is increase demand or decrease supply. Well, you can't do either. But you can advocate for no new housing, and thus limit any growth of supply. The result: housing becomes scarce, people become homeless, and the homeowners get rich (on paper). If you look at the actions of homeowner's, that exactly how they behave at city council meetings - always complaining "this development is too dense - it'll ruin our suburban character. etc, etc..."
If you ask me, the property tax loophole (property tax can only rise some percentage a year, regardless of how much your property value rises) is killing Silicon Valley. That tax is the only disincentive for rising property values for the homeowner. If it reflected the true cost of housing, the homeowners would probably act differently.
Using a COM DLL in Windows does the same thing. You can load the DLL at any time by CoCreateInstance, and then if it fails, it's no big deal, you can inform the user gracefully, or disable whatever functionality. Also, you don't need to know even about any particular DLL, just ask for the COM class, and whatever DLL is responsible for it will be loaded (or not, if it's already loaded).
DLL's do not require the computer to be rebooted after an install. It is only required when upgrading a DLL that the system is using. But, yes, Apple's method should avoid the need to ever reboot (at the expense of disk space).
As far as registering DLL's, a name - location registry is essential to allow use the loading of DLL's by name(or GUID, in the case of COM). It's a great feature of DLL's, not a hinderance.