Ahh, thanks guys, I feel much younger now. Or at the very least I was a veritable late-bloomer.
The first machine my family owned was a Packard Bell 486SX/25 w/4MB RAM (Windows 3.11), which we got when I was in 6th grade. I eventually played around with QBASIC and later wrote some nifty programs to do my geometry homework with.
Since then:
Acer Aspire Pentium/100Mhz/16MB RAM (Win95)
DIY Pentium/120Mhz 64MB RAM (Win98)
DIY PentiumII/300Mhz 256MB RAM (Win2K/Many versions of Redhat 5.2 on up & SuSE 7.3 on up)
*eMachines Athlon/2.2Ghz 512Mb RAM (WinXP Home, Latest version of SuSE)
But, FWIW, my first experience with the internet was on a VT100 terminal using lynx. I thought it was about the coolest thing in the world when we went to the college one day and played on the computers with Netscape 3. The rest, of course, is history.
...DeLorean's are almost impossible to find now days
Heh, welcome to the 21st century. eBay makes it simple.;-)
FWIW, I am just a slashbot, not a total nerd (i.e. fat, basement-dwelling virgin), but if I had the 25K on me right now I would totally buy it;-) The BTTF movies were my fave as a kid, even if the plotline was raddled with grandfather-esque paradoxes.
BTW, is Christoper LLoyd still alive? I really think he and Michael J. Fox might as well do one more movie. Considering the rampant sequels and remakes coming out of Hollywoood lately, a new BTTF movie would probably do pretty well.
Heh, no because you can build your own ODF reader. And MSOffice will eventually support the format, so its really a moot point. Come to think of it, I wouldn't put it past MS to add ODF support via update to Office XP and Office 2003 and pretend like they invented ODF.;-)
Fortunately,.Net 2.0 supports some regression back to this mode to a degree..Net 2.0 apps don't touch the registry at all by default (they have their own 'registry' which resides in the install directory), but user-specific configurations and other variables do end up getting stored in/Documents and Settings/username or equivalent, which is Windows' standard way to keep the data inaccessible to other users.
A developer could forgo this and save user-specific settings in a subdirectory of the install directory, but to do that correctly you'd have to encrypt the data with a user-defined password to disallow other users from accessing the data. You could forgo encryption entirely, but then you run into security concerns. The downside to doing all of this is that the user is required to enter their password when they start the application. The upside is that if the.Net application can be run under Mono, then the.Net app is platform/filesystem independant. Apparently these few extra steps to avoid using/Documents and Settings wasn't worth the effort for VS.Net 2005, though I can't imagine why.
I would have to agree. Savannahs are possibly the least hospitable habitat on the face of the earth for the reasons you've mentioned. Its the one type of natural habitat that I can think of that features natural predators. Big cats will take down hominids in the open if they get the chance.
On the flip side, the savannah is an especially good setting for rapid evolution to take place because at some point, an animal must develop intelligence or communal mechanisms in order to survive long enough to reach sexual maturity. Elephants are known to have good memories, the big cats and pack amimals are efficient hunters, etc. If our ancestors really had it that easy, there wouldn't have been any diversification catalyst and instead of reading slashdot we'd still be swinging in trees eating 'nanners.
And I know Evolution v. Creati^H^H^H^H^H^HIntelligent Design is gonna come up in this thread, so I thought I'd share my old confirmation pastor's take on it (I was raised Lutheran)... Stop reading now if you aren't mature enough to handle it, if you are sick of that topic, or if you just plain get annoyed by offtopic posts. Thanks.
We, as a confirmation class, asked the pastor how could the traditional creation story in Genesis be true if there is significant evidence to suggest that mankind actually evolved from monkeys/apes rather than being made pretty much as we are today. He basically said that there is no telling how long the 7 "days" of creation actually were. A day for God could be a few billion years to us humans for all we know. Adam and Eve could simply represent the first generation of what we would consider homo sapien. Also we can't be certain that the year of Adam's creation is actually ~5500 years ago because we can't know for sure that the information used to generate this figure (typically the ancestry of Jesus) is in fact complete or accurate for a lot of reasons, loss in translation being the most plausable.
Anyway I thought it was cool that the pastor didn't have a problem reconciling evolution with his faith. He also didn't believe that religious teaching had a place in schools. That is what the church is for, and if you want religion mixed in your everyday schooling, we already have that. Its called parochial school. I am sure plenty of people can poke holes in his explanation, but the moral of the story is that it satisfied our curiousity on the topic and allowed us to continue to be strong in our faith while all of us got A's in biology. Good enough for me. To this day I still don't have a problem with my faith or scientific evidence.
And, for my own 2 cents on that topic -- I don't object to children being taught their religeon's creation beliefs or intelligent design (or whatever you want to call it) in addition to darwin's theory of evolution, but if I was that concerned about my children learning some of both, I sure as hell wouldn't trust a public school teacher to relate the theory of intelligent design without putting the religeous beliefs I have already instilled in my children in jeopardy. And besides, from past experience I can tell you that most of us in high school biology were really only interested in actual human procreation anyway;-)
Seriously? Many people would say that they support a woman's right to chose, and they are a proponent of freedom, but very few have the balls to say they are actually in favor of abortions
Hrm, well maybe that is because such assertions generally result in the real-life equivalent of a (-1;Troll). I will tell you my personal belief is that there is a time and place for everything, including abortions. There are situations where it is an ethically viable (or at least justifiable) course of action, and there are other situations where it maybe isn't. Only those living the situation can make that absolute judgement call, so I wouldn't go so far as to question someone who decided to have an abortion. With that said, I am 24 years old single, and don't have my financial shit together, but if I got a gal pregnant and she wanted to abort it I would do everything I could possibly do to change her mind. I wouldn't allow my partner to have an abortion, but its not for me to judge people who do.
So, I am actually in favor of abortions.
Just not on my children.
then you set up a wireless router on your end of the line, with no encryption. Then claim you know nothing about it. They can't prove someone didn't use your wireless connection without your permission.
But, they will probably still hold you responsible. hmmm...
Luckily, a lot of your appearance comes not from the soft tissue of the face, but from the underlying bone structure>
This has been mentioned several times in this thread, and figured I'd submit my own anecdotal evidence supporting this claim... This summer my friend got in a fight and ended up with a concussion, and as such had to have an head X-Ray / MRI, etc. Believe it or not, there was absolutely NO mistaking that the pictures were of my friend. It was most evident in the the cheekbones and jawline. Really sort of creepy, actually. Even from the alignment of the teeth it was evident. Especially the one that got chipped in half from the force of a concussive blow from the fight!
Bar brawls are cool. Its even cooler cuz my friend is a chick;-)
I have noticed a drastic increase in memory footprint (~30MB to ~ 80MB) over the last few RC releases and now 1.5, but I did also install Java and Macromedia plugins recently, so this could account for some of it. If I don't happen to hit any sites that use Java or Flash, the memory footprint tends to hover just under 30MB. I do have quite a few extensions installed though. Almost double the footprint of Explorer, but that's not exactly a fair comparison.
Well as a matter of fact, it sounds like VS.Net 2007 is to be the bugfix for all the horrid bugs left unfixed before the VS.Net 2005 release earlier this month.
I have been using it for around a month on and off, and boy, there are sub bad bugs. VS 2003 is much more stable. Unfortunately my client wants their web-applications coded in ASP.Net /.Net 2.0
The 2.0 framework is fine, but VS 2005 has some SERIOUS usability issues. SP1 is scheduled for June, so VS 2005 is crippled till then.
Me no likey.
And for any other closet.Net developers out there who know what I am talkin about, please tell me why, oh why, MS found it necessary to remove design-time support for typed datasets (especially in ASP.Net applications)? Databinding is a frickin nightmare with those dumb datasource types. SqlDataSource makes creating typed datasets redundant. ObjectDataSource uses the Typed Dataset's TableAdapter but not the typed dataset itself... rrrr. Just dumb. After having to fool with all that you may as well manually do the databinding anyway.
Bleh...
Re:Only one thing could make this worse
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 1
thats a really good idea. hope the skript kiddies get on this one and really much things up. maybe the exploit could just set the default browser home page to http://www.sonyjust0wn3dj00.com/ and explain to the end user why and how their machine was 0wn3d.
On the other hand, I smoke cigarettes, drink more than 5 drinks a week and smoke marijuana. And more-or-less don't take very good care of myself at all. I don't excercise or eat properly and am exposed to all sorts of virulent disease.
I can't remember the last time I even had a cold. I've never had any disease worse than influenza (not even chickenpox), and I haven't had the flu in over 10 years.
So, in my eyes at least, a person's resistance to disease matters very little with "taking care" of yourself and much more with your body's ability to fight off disease before it gets a chance to replicate in your body. Apparently these 2 things aren't mutually inclusive.
Or, I guess you could just say that there are some conditions even too inhospitable for bacteria and viruses;-)
Ideally, the answer would be no. The theory with Vista is that it supposedly is going to be heavily fused with the.Net 2.xx Framework, which itself is supposedly an upgrade to less-tidy and loose COM/MFC code.
If.Net 2.xx has such advantage, the target Vista platform ought to use less cpu-time and memory for analygous operations. Or so I've heard.
Whether or not it pans out real life, we'll have to wait and see. XP performs pretty well on my 3 home machines, it is hard to imagine that the next iteration of windows will run even better on the same hardware. I've created and run some sample.Net 2.0 applications on these same machines and the apps run just fine. If the next generation of commercial software uses.Net 2.0 components, those should run fine on XP as well, so there really is no compelling reason to switch to Vista in the forseeable future.
The one exception to that may be the Vista shell UI. The only reason I upgraded from 2000 to XP was because of the UI, and that was after XP had been out a few years. On the other hand, the right killer app available only on Vista would probably make me upgrade.
So, I guess I'd have to agree that there's no reason to upgrade right away, but phase vista in with your purchase of a new machine with Vista pre-loaded. There's won't be much reason to head to upgrade existing machines unless it is incredibly cheap to do so.
Yeah I am really bummed about it. I switched to SuSE back about 3.5 - 4 years ago. I liked that they sort of built around KDE. I went to great pains to have KDE even on my old redhat boxes. I just like it better, and I am disappointed that Novell is doing just what I hoped they wouldn't. To their credit, the latest releases have been good (your point about the website is right-on, though), I just get the feeling it might be a downward spiral from here.
I know there are other distros out there that may be more to my liking, but I prefer YaST for dirty work because I just don't have the time or desire to edit configs all day anymore. I wonder if Novell will keep the YaST source open so it can be used by other distros based on SuSE SuSE (as opposed to Novell Suse)?
That said, am I the only one out there who wants a cell phone that acts... like a cell phone?
My sentiments exactly! I am only 24 and consider myself a technophile, but hell, I thought it was stupid when they started putting cameras in cell phones. I just want my cell to be a cell, no more, no less. Besides, I have found that phones w/built-in cameras, mp3 players, etc tend to be well, not "hard" to use, but a pain in the ass.
OTOH, the only time I really use my phone at all is on the commute to/from work, and even then rarely (no reception most of the way, none at home).
Now, what would be cool is an all in one unit, a real "personal" compuer combining a high-end PDA, cell phone, camera, with say a heads-up display with a human interface that is simple and makes sense. I am still holding out for direct connection to the nervous system;-)
I have thought about this as well, though I am not a scientist.
In your example, we'd need to have good hard data on environmental factors that may impact survival, such as a inhospitible climate shift or short food supply, for example. The correct factors must be determined. Then it would be necessary to analyze data on those factors and how likely they were to impact survival at any given time.
This analysis would have to be done covering the entire 4 million years. At some point though, one has to add additional factors, such as social/cultural culling and technological advance, which can negate environmental factors. You don't need thick fur and/or fat to live in an extremely cold climate if you can reliably make fire. Where the cold weather would have been an evolutional factor before, now is a moot point.
I don't think there is necessarily a mathematical formula can be derived from all of this to reliably predict exact evolutional paths, though I suppose it is possible to come up with one that will give a narrow range of probable evolutional paths.
With that said, such an equation could predict a species' evolutional path until that species reach the point where purely environmental factors cease to wholly impact survival. Apes are social creatures. The society itself can provide other culling factors, such as competition for a mate. Present-day sociotechnological and evironmental analysis could probably predict a simian species' evolutional upgrade paths within a vary narrow range of result. Assuming no undue intervention from other species (humans, via deforestation), that is.
And then you have dominant species with no natural predators that has social structure which is used to almost completely negate purely environmental factors. There is no telling in what way homo.sapiens.sapiens will branch, because human procreation and survival is mostly dependant on social acceptance and the ability to coexist in that society. What will our decendants look like in 10,000 years? 50,000? A million? Assuming we don't become extinct through some environmental (Earth collides with asteroid) or social (nuclear war) impetus, that is. Perhaps nerds in general will get the opportunity to procreate even less than we do now(due to society's obsession with beauty and daily showering), and our analogues in the future will beautiful, smell good, and very stupid. Perhaps then homo.sapiens.regressus will dig up a 10,000 year old nuke and accidentally blow the world up with it. Mapping an evolutional upgrade path past that point in time wouldn't make sense. Or perhaps nerds will get to procreate more and 10,000 years from now our decendants have a fantastically advanced society and unimaginable technology, but are horribly, horribly ugly, antisocial, and have habitually poor personal hygiene. Who can say?;-)
Anyway, such a mathmatical construct should work fairly reliably for tracking a present-day species back to the past for 'simple' organisms that are most likely to have evolved under 'pure' environmental paradigm. For species with the sociotechnological element, I suppose a fairly accurate and unbiased culture history could accurate reasons why species Y is derived from species X or even A. To use a programming analogy: It'll generate a species' changelog and developement roadmap. Changelogs contain detailed information about what changed from one version to the next. Development roadmaps lay out a framework for the developmental direction, but contain few specifics and cannot accurately be used to predict line 10,234,234 of DNA.homo.sapiens.sapiens.c sixty thousand years from now, though the roadmap may or may not outline that line's general area of modification.
Well, speaking as a SuSE user, I am a bit disappointed in this move. I just can't stand GNOME, sorry. The only good thing I can say about it is that it gives KDE healthy competition.
As others have pointed out, I am concerned that KDE support in SuSE will lag.
As an aside, I've been using SuSE through the last 3 major versions and have bought and paid for a copy of each to support the distro. When I found out Novell was to acquire SuSE, I commented that I didn't care who made the distro, as long as they didn't screw it up.
I really really dislike using GNOME, so the last time I bought a copy of the distro will be the last.
... and its a funny thing about the 'begats'... each generation (with a couple exceptions) has a somewhat shorter life expectancy, starting at 900-some odd years and gradually declining...
Creationists can't swallow evolution, but 1000 year old men sounds plausable?
By any sane measure (heh, ironic) using the 'begats', the world is only about 15-20 generations older than it was when christ was born, which would make it much YOUNGER than the creationists believe. I say a branch of science aughtta lay that one out on the table;-)
Then there is the little problem that even with super high-resolution spy satellites, we still haven't found Eden or that big flaming sword that guards its entrance... heh.
And the number 1 least logical thing about this post? I am a protestant christian;-)
What would stop these smaller countries from simply enacting legislation that requires all links in/out of the country to be fitted with routing rules to enforce such censorship? They don't need control of root servers to do that. Any company operating such a link within that country would be subject to whatever penalty is in place if they fail to comply with the law.
I don't really see this as logical justification for arguing that the US should relinquish control of the root servers. I guess I could see a reason if we were farting around with DNS so that legitimate requests get mapped to 127.0.0.1 or something. heh.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, thanks guys, I feel much younger now. Or at the very least I was a veritable late-bloomer. The first machine my family owned was a Packard Bell 486SX/25 w/4MB RAM (Windows 3.11), which we got when I was in 6th grade. I eventually played around with QBASIC and later wrote some nifty programs to do my geometry homework with. Since then: Acer Aspire Pentium/100Mhz/16MB RAM (Win95) DIY Pentium/120Mhz 64MB RAM (Win98) DIY PentiumII/300Mhz 256MB RAM (Win2K/Many versions of Redhat 5.2 on up & SuSE 7.3 on up) *eMachines Athlon/2.2Ghz 512Mb RAM (WinXP Home, Latest version of SuSE) But, FWIW, my first experience with the internet was on a VT100 terminal using lynx. I thought it was about the coolest thing in the world when we went to the college one day and played on the computers with Netscape 3. The rest, of course, is history.
...DeLorean's are almost impossible to find now days
;-)
;-) The BTTF movies were my fave as a kid, even if the plotline was raddled with grandfather-esque paradoxes.
Heh, welcome to the 21st century. eBay makes it simple.
FWIW, I am just a slashbot, not a total nerd (i.e. fat, basement-dwelling virgin), but if I had the 25K on me right now I would totally buy it
BTW, is Christoper LLoyd still alive? I really think he and Michael J. Fox might as well do one more movie. Considering the rampant sequels and remakes coming out of Hollywoood lately, a new BTTF movie would probably do pretty well.
Heh, no because you can build your own ODF reader. And MSOffice will eventually support the format, so its really a moot point. Come to think of it, I wouldn't put it past MS to add ODF support via update to Office XP and Office 2003 and pretend like they invented ODF. ;-)
Fortunately, .Net 2.0 supports some regression back to this mode to a degree. .Net 2.0 apps don't touch the registry at all by default (they have their own 'registry' which resides in the install directory), but user-specific configurations and other variables do end up getting stored in /Documents and Settings/username or equivalent, which is Windows' standard way to keep the data inaccessible to other users.
A developer could forgo this and save user-specific settings in a subdirectory of the install directory, but to do that correctly you'd have to encrypt the data with a user-defined password to disallow other users from accessing the data. You could forgo encryption entirely, but then you run into security concerns. The downside to doing all of this is that the user is required to enter their password when they start the application. The upside is that if the .Net application can be run under Mono, then the .Net app is platform/filesystem independant. Apparently these few extra steps to avoid using /Documents and Settings wasn't worth the effort for VS.Net 2005, though I can't imagine why.
I would have to agree. Savannahs are possibly the least hospitable habitat on the face of the earth for the reasons you've mentioned. Its the one type of natural habitat that I can think of that features natural predators. Big cats will take down hominids in the open if they get the chance.
;-)
On the flip side, the savannah is an especially good setting for rapid evolution to take place because at some point, an animal must develop intelligence or communal mechanisms in order to survive long enough to reach sexual maturity. Elephants are known to have good memories, the big cats and pack amimals are efficient hunters, etc. If our ancestors really had it that easy, there wouldn't have been any diversification catalyst and instead of reading slashdot we'd still be swinging in trees eating 'nanners.
And I know Evolution v. Creati^H^H^H^H^H^HIntelligent Design is gonna come up in this thread, so I thought I'd share my old confirmation pastor's take on it (I was raised Lutheran)... Stop reading now if you aren't mature enough to handle it, if you are sick of that topic, or if you just plain get annoyed by offtopic posts. Thanks.
We, as a confirmation class, asked the pastor how could the traditional creation story in Genesis be true if there is significant evidence to suggest that mankind actually evolved from monkeys/apes rather than being made pretty much as we are today. He basically said that there is no telling how long the 7 "days" of creation actually were. A day for God could be a few billion years to us humans for all we know. Adam and Eve could simply represent the first generation of what we would consider homo sapien. Also we can't be certain that the year of Adam's creation is actually ~5500 years ago because we can't know for sure that the information used to generate this figure (typically the ancestry of Jesus) is in fact complete or accurate for a lot of reasons, loss in translation being the most plausable.
Anyway I thought it was cool that the pastor didn't have a problem reconciling evolution with his faith. He also didn't believe that religious teaching had a place in schools. That is what the church is for, and if you want religion mixed in your everyday schooling, we already have that. Its called parochial school. I am sure plenty of people can poke holes in his explanation, but the moral of the story is that it satisfied our curiousity on the topic and allowed us to continue to be strong in our faith while all of us got A's in biology. Good enough for me. To this day I still don't have a problem with my faith or scientific evidence.
And, for my own 2 cents on that topic -- I don't object to children being taught their religeon's creation beliefs or intelligent design (or whatever you want to call it) in addition to darwin's theory of evolution, but if I was that concerned about my children learning some of both, I sure as hell wouldn't trust a public school teacher to relate the theory of intelligent design without putting the religeous beliefs I have already instilled in my children in jeopardy. And besides, from past experience I can tell you that most of us in high school biology were really only interested in actual human procreation anyway
Or, to quote Meatwad, "You got any dip to go with this chip, or am I lookin' at him?"
Seriously? Many people would say that they support a woman's right to chose, and they are a proponent of freedom, but very few have the balls to say they are actually in favor of abortions
Hrm, well maybe that is because such assertions generally result in the real-life equivalent of a (-1;Troll). I will tell you my personal belief is that there is a time and place for everything, including abortions. There are situations where it is an ethically viable (or at least justifiable) course of action, and there are other situations where it maybe isn't. Only those living the situation can make that absolute judgement call, so I wouldn't go so far as to question someone who decided to have an abortion. With that said, I am 24 years old single, and don't have my financial shit together, but if I got a gal pregnant and she wanted to abort it I would do everything I could possibly do to change her mind. I wouldn't allow my partner to have an abortion, but its not for me to judge people who do.
So, I am actually in favor of abortions.
Just not on my children.
...uh, you must be new here...
then you set up a wireless router on your end of the line, with no encryption. Then claim you know nothing about it. They can't prove someone didn't use your wireless connection without your permission.
But, they will probably still hold you responsible. hmmm...
What better way to undermine democracy in the West?
Elect G.W to a second term in the white house?
Oh wait...
Luckily, a lot of your appearance comes not from the soft tissue of the face, but from the underlying bone structure>
;-)
This has been mentioned several times in this thread, and figured I'd submit my own anecdotal evidence supporting this claim... This summer my friend got in a fight and ended up with a concussion, and as such had to have an head X-Ray / MRI, etc. Believe it or not, there was absolutely NO mistaking that the pictures were of my friend. It was most evident in the the cheekbones and jawline. Really sort of creepy, actually. Even from the alignment of the teeth it was evident. Especially the one that got chipped in half from the force of a concussive blow from the fight!
Bar brawls are cool. Its even cooler cuz my friend is a chick
I have noticed a drastic increase in memory footprint (~30MB to ~ 80MB) over the last few RC releases and now 1.5, but I did also install Java and Macromedia plugins recently, so this could account for some of it. If I don't happen to hit any sites that use Java or Flash, the memory footprint tends to hover just under 30MB. I do have quite a few extensions installed though. Almost double the footprint of Explorer, but that's not exactly a fair comparison.
Well as a matter of fact, it sounds like VS.Net 2007 is to be the bugfix for all the horrid bugs left unfixed before the VS.Net 2005 release earlier this month.
.Net 2.0
.Net developers out there who know what I am talkin about, please tell me why, oh why, MS found it necessary to remove design-time support for typed datasets (especially in ASP.Net applications)? Databinding is a frickin nightmare with those dumb datasource types. SqlDataSource makes creating typed datasets redundant. ObjectDataSource uses the Typed Dataset's TableAdapter but not the typed dataset itself... rrrr. Just dumb. After having to fool with all that you may as well manually do the databinding anyway.
I have been using it for around a month on and off, and boy, there are sub bad bugs. VS 2003 is much more stable. Unfortunately my client wants their web-applications coded in ASP.Net /
The 2.0 framework is fine, but VS 2005 has some SERIOUS usability issues. SP1 is scheduled for June, so VS 2005 is crippled till then.
Me no likey.
And for any other closet
Bleh...
thats a really good idea. hope the skript kiddies get on this one and really much things up. maybe the exploit could just set the default browser home page to http://www.sonyjust0wn3dj00.com/ and explain to the end user why and how their machine was 0wn3d.
;-)
Think the DOJ will go easy on Sony then?
On the other hand, I smoke cigarettes, drink more than 5 drinks a week and smoke marijuana. And more-or-less don't take very good care of myself at all. I don't excercise or eat properly and am exposed to all sorts of virulent disease.
;-)
I can't remember the last time I even had a cold. I've never had any disease worse than influenza (not even chickenpox), and I haven't had the flu in over 10 years.
So, in my eyes at least, a person's resistance to disease matters very little with "taking care" of yourself and much more with your body's ability to fight off disease before it gets a chance to replicate in your body. Apparently these 2 things aren't mutually inclusive.
Or, I guess you could just say that there are some conditions even too inhospitable for bacteria and viruses
Ideally, the answer would be no. The theory with Vista is that it supposedly is going to be heavily fused with the .Net 2.xx Framework, which itself is supposedly an upgrade to less-tidy and loose COM/MFC code.
If .Net 2.xx has such advantage, the target Vista platform ought to use less cpu-time and memory for analygous operations. Or so I've heard.
.Net 2.0 applications on these same machines and the apps run just fine. If the next generation of commercial software uses .Net 2.0 components, those should run fine on XP as well, so there really is no compelling reason to switch to Vista in the forseeable future.
Whether or not it pans out real life, we'll have to wait and see. XP performs pretty well on my 3 home machines, it is hard to imagine that the next iteration of windows will run even better on the same hardware. I've created and run some sample
The one exception to that may be the Vista shell UI. The only reason I upgraded from 2000 to XP was because of the UI, and that was after XP had been out a few years. On the other hand, the right killer app available only on Vista would probably make me upgrade.
So, I guess I'd have to agree that there's no reason to upgrade right away, but phase vista in with your purchase of a new machine with Vista pre-loaded. There's won't be much reason to head to upgrade existing machines unless it is incredibly cheap to do so.
Yeah I am really bummed about it. I switched to SuSE back about 3.5 - 4 years ago. I liked that they sort of built around KDE. I went to great pains to have KDE even on my old redhat boxes. I just like it better, and I am disappointed that Novell is doing just what I hoped they wouldn't. To their credit, the latest releases have been good (your point about the website is right-on, though), I just get the feeling it might be a downward spiral from here.
I know there are other distros out there that may be more to my liking, but I prefer YaST for dirty work because I just don't have the time or desire to edit configs all day anymore. I wonder if Novell will keep the YaST source open so it can be used by other distros based on SuSE SuSE (as opposed to Novell Suse)?
So long and thanks for all the SuSE!
(Apologies to both NOFX and the late Douglas Adams)
That said, am I the only one out there who wants a cell phone that acts... like a cell phone?
;-)
My sentiments exactly! I am only 24 and consider myself a technophile, but hell, I thought it was stupid when they started putting cameras in cell phones. I just want my cell to be a cell, no more, no less. Besides, I have found that phones w/built-in cameras, mp3 players, etc tend to be well, not "hard" to use, but a pain in the ass.
OTOH, the only time I really use my phone at all is on the commute to/from work, and even then rarely (no reception most of the way, none at home).
Now, what would be cool is an all in one unit, a real "personal" compuer combining a high-end PDA, cell phone, camera, with say a heads-up display with a human interface that is simple and makes sense. I am still holding out for direct connection to the nervous system
I have thought about this as well, though I am not a scientist.
;-)
In your example, we'd need to have good hard data on environmental factors that may impact survival, such as a inhospitible climate shift or short food supply, for example. The correct factors must be determined.
Then it would be necessary to analyze data on those factors and how likely they were to impact survival at any given time.
This analysis would have to be done covering the entire 4 million years. At some point though, one has to add additional factors, such as social/cultural culling and technological advance, which can negate environmental factors. You don't need thick fur and/or fat to live in an extremely cold climate if you can reliably make fire. Where the cold weather would have been an evolutional factor before, now is a moot point.
I don't think there is necessarily a mathematical formula can be derived from all of this to reliably predict exact evolutional paths, though I suppose it is possible to come up with one that will give a narrow range of probable evolutional paths.
With that said, such an equation could predict a species' evolutional path until that species reach the point where purely environmental factors cease to wholly impact survival. Apes are social creatures. The society itself can provide other culling factors, such as competition for a mate. Present-day sociotechnological and evironmental analysis could probably predict a simian species' evolutional upgrade paths within a vary narrow range of result. Assuming no undue intervention from other species (humans, via deforestation), that is.
And then you have dominant species with no natural predators that has social structure which is used to almost completely negate purely environmental factors. There is no telling in what way homo.sapiens.sapiens will branch, because human procreation and survival is mostly dependant on social acceptance and the ability to coexist in that society. What will our decendants look like in 10,000 years? 50,000? A million? Assuming we don't become extinct through some environmental (Earth collides with asteroid) or social (nuclear war) impetus, that is. Perhaps nerds in general will get the opportunity to procreate even less than we do now(due to society's obsession with beauty and daily showering), and our analogues in the future will beautiful, smell good, and very stupid. Perhaps then homo.sapiens.regressus will dig up a 10,000 year old nuke and accidentally blow the world up with it. Mapping an evolutional upgrade path past that point in time wouldn't make sense. Or perhaps nerds will get to procreate more and 10,000 years from now our decendants have a fantastically advanced society and unimaginable technology, but are horribly, horribly ugly, antisocial, and have habitually poor personal hygiene. Who can say?
Anyway, such a mathmatical construct should work fairly reliably for tracking a present-day species back to the past for 'simple' organisms that are most likely to have evolved under 'pure' environmental paradigm. For species with the sociotechnological element, I suppose a fairly accurate and unbiased culture history could accurate reasons why species Y is derived from species X or even A. To use a programming analogy: It'll generate a species' changelog and developement roadmap. Changelogs contain detailed information about what changed from one version to the next. Development roadmaps lay out a framework for the developmental direction, but contain few specifics and cannot accurately be used to predict line 10,234,234 of DNA.homo.sapiens.sapiens.c sixty thousand years from now, though the roadmap may or may not outline that line's general area of modification.
Well, speaking as a SuSE user, I am a bit disappointed in this move. I just can't stand GNOME, sorry. The only good thing I can say about it is that it gives KDE healthy competition.
As others have pointed out, I am concerned that KDE support in SuSE will lag.
As an aside, I've been using SuSE through the last 3 major versions and have bought and paid for a copy of each to support the distro. When I found out Novell was to acquire SuSE, I commented that I didn't care who made the distro, as long as they didn't screw it up.
I really really dislike using GNOME, so the last time I bought a copy of the distro will be the last.
... and its a funny thing about the 'begats'... each generation (with a couple exceptions) has a somewhat shorter life expectancy, starting at 900-some odd years and gradually declining...
;-)
;-)
Creationists can't swallow evolution, but 1000 year old men sounds plausable?
By any sane measure (heh, ironic) using the 'begats', the world is only about 15-20 generations older than it was when christ was born, which would make it much YOUNGER than the creationists believe. I say a branch of science aughtta lay that one out on the table
Then there is the little problem that even with super high-resolution spy satellites, we still haven't found Eden or that big flaming sword that guards its entrance... heh.
And the number 1 least logical thing about this post? I am a protestant christian
What would stop these smaller countries from simply enacting legislation that requires all links in/out of the country to be fitted with routing rules to enforce such censorship? They don't need control of root servers to do that. Any company operating such a link within that country would be subject to whatever penalty is in place if they fail to comply with the law.
I don't really see this as logical justification for arguing that the US should relinquish control of the root servers. I guess I could see a reason if we were farting around with DNS so that legitimate requests get mapped to 127.0.0.1 or something. heh.
Didn't someone try this a few years back with DIVX? If I recall correctly, it was a miserable failure.
...has had this for a long time.
But, let me be one of the first to say - "Its about freakin' TIME!"