Personally, when I look at Microsoft's corporate practices, I only wonder whether they think they sell a product or a service. If its' "product", why does it go out the door in such crappy shape (remember the thousands of known bugs at Win2K release?); on the other hand, can you really call an OS a "service"? It's much clearer for RedHat, Mandrake & Co. where they give away the code and sell their support services.
Well - the much aclaimed Mandrake 8.2 is so full of bugs it looks like an entomologists lab. It bombs like crazy (just try the administration tool root gets when starting gnome. but there are many more things that are clearly in unstable beta). In view of that you seem to propose a modell where you get a defective product for free and pay for it to be repaired. That is twisted.
Don't get me wrong - I only use linux, and belive in the OSS movement. But what mandrake is starting to become scares me big time: A flagship of the linux comunity which in reality is barely more than a rusty barge.
Users are the ones that matter here. As a first time Linux installer I don't really care about most of the things a developer cares about.
I am a User and am happy with that. You are talking about the clueless user. If you don't have an idea what a network card is, and you don't have the patience to find out if your disk is SCSI or whatever you simply are bound to have problems even with your windows box.
I haven't installed Debian, but let me compare my last Linux install (Mandrake 8.something) to WinXP...
First of all, I don't give a shit if WindexPee is happy with asking you for the wheather - we are talking about debian here, remember?
But anyways:
All WinXP asked me was, essentially, "What is your Country and TimeZone".
What you forgot to mention was that WinXP asked you also to agree with the fact that Micro$oft has the right to modify your system at whatever point in time it sees fit and in whatever ways they find apropriate and that this might restrict your abilities to browse media. Oh - you did not read the EULA? Great! Congrats!
Debian should not be soliciting people in the know - they know far more than the average first time user and are, consequently, useless for developing interfaces for newbies.
(Besides that it is not debian asking for anything, but Linux User Germany) Do you propose newbies writing user interfaces? I will not use that, and newbies won't either, because it will be so incredibly crappy.
And hey, install yourself your WindexPee where the sun won't shine, okey?
Getting rid of this is now going to be seriously difficult. Repealing the DMCA [...] will equal the US pulling out of a ratified international agreement.
Hey, it's not unheard of. They did it with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and they snubbed their nose at Kyoto. Why not this, too?
And don't forget they introduced a tax on steel from outside the us, clearly violating WTO agreements. This was, like, two days ago?
If this turns out to be so, then the DMCA can be hacked like this:
1. Build your circumvention method for fair use (maybe as in your example by erasing the decryppled copy)
2. Include some fairly braindead way of ensuring that the copy gets deleted. I don't know, use your fantasy. For example, make your main executable a script which ends with
I'm not quite sure IE is free. It comes with the OS, and you pay for that. It is more like the update is free. If you could download IE for linux, then it would be free.
What incentive is there to put region coding in a DVD player?
Oh, that's right - it's part of the spec. If you want to license the DVD technology you have to agree that you'll honor region coding.
Don't underestimate the incentive to do it deficiently. A lot of DVD players are sold exactly because they allow you to mess with the region coding. A lot of sale clerks will tell you which players can do it and how. At least here in germany. You have to ask, of course, but the fact that this is so seems to sugest that people want that ''feature''.
As far as I know, it has never been healthy for any economy to allow monopolies to flourish freely. The main reason being that a monopoly dictates the rules in their niche, and while doing that, ends up being a hindrance of the economic processes.
Cited often as a counterexample is cisco. They are what you might call a clean monopoly, and they are where they are mainly because of superior products, not because of dirty tricks, like The Beast.
In the case we are referring to, there is an aditional problem: an institution ends up depending crutially on their comunications infrastructure. It is definatly unwise to depend on the closed proprietary products of any company, and more so if this company has a record of ruthless behavior.
...Or where the registry is, and in particular, how do I get the line-noise out of it. A book on how to really secure your windows system would also be quite handy. For many developers it would be also very interesting to know how to write and test device drivers without rebooting 10^8 times.
I'd sugest that if you choose linux you have more options, more parameters, more background info, and also a large troubleshooting section. And knowing linux, I'd say you seldom have do much troubleshooting. But on a mac, if something goes wrong, thats it, you are screwed.
And under linux, if you choose the default configuration, you are done after one page too.
Well - I think the single most important feature are macros. They are a quite powerfull resource because they can really transform code before it gets compiled. I can give you an example that is quite concrete: evaluation of polynomials.
I wrote a small macro that takes as its first arument a list of coeficients and as a second arument a number. The code that ends up being executed is the evaluation of the polynomial using the horner scheme. That is, instead of
1 + 3 x + x^2 + 7 x^3
the code executes
1 + x*(3 +x*(1 + x*7))
and the invocation is
(horner-eval (1 3 1 7) x)
The point is that all the coficients end up as immediates.
Another example is a transformation of notation. If the prefix notation pisses you off, you can write a macro that evaluates infix notation. So insted of writing
(+ (* a b c (- 5 (/ d 2))) 4)
you write
(infix (a * b * c * (5 - d / 2) + 4))
Now try to mess with the syntax in C.
Another thing that is quite interesting is the posibility to change running code. You stop (with contol-C) the simulation that has been running for a week and substitute the function darn-inner-loop (compiled, mind you) with the faster version you've been working on. Then you let it continue. I think hot-swappable code is a nice way to describe this.
Now do *that* in C.
Last but not least, I can write a program that writes the code for a function (for example, the evluation of N5(x), the 5th order b-spline at x), with all the constants that would usually depend on the parameter (order), as immediates, compile it, and return it as a value to be used in the rest of the program (the compiled & optimized function!).
In Scheme the branches of the let statement may be evaluated and bound in any order. A Scheme compiler that supported parallel programming might actually have a parallel let statement that could compile this so as to execute both branches simultaneously. This function would then execute in a time proportional to the depth of the tree, given sufficient processors. No need to bother with explicit thread code, starting and stoping, locking, semaphores etc. The compiler could manage that for you and allow you to easily parallelize a program.
Ok! That sounds actually great, and I really dig it. But where is something like that? Where are at least working MPI bindings so I can try to write a let like that myself?
NIL
As far as a GUI system goes, there are at least several implementations of Scheme and Lisp with GTK bindings and Smalltalk had one of the first GUI systems.
'nother woan that sound kinda cool. Now, WHERE ON EARTH ARE THEY? I would not be doing the crap I'm doing if I knew where they are.
currently high-level languages like Lisp are good for early prototyping and development stages, but lack the library hooks and other trappings needed for real, industrial strength application development. what i'd like to see Lisp and Smalltalk and Eiffel develop is a good compiler and a good interface to the system and GUI code.
Too damn right. And try parallel programing with lisp. There simply isn't such a thing. Sad, sad.
No, hey: I mean it, ok? It is really sad. Tell you more another day.
You open a new window in your editor & write a C program. Then you remember how nice life was before fascist pedantic arseholes decided to take over the world.
The authors slant seems to be pretty harshly critical.
I must confess, I thought he was drunk when writing the article. But still...
He seemed to be implying that the genes
mix or something else outside of our current understanding. If thats true, which no one seriosly suggests, then our current understanding would
have to be waaaaaay off, and there would need to be some other genetic material other than DNA.
That is what is actually being seriously sugested. That the data in the genes is only alegoric to what actually happens. And so yes, our current model would be way off (which isn't that terrible, think 'bout it). The biologists with whom I've talked about this did not really believe that it was that simple. As the article sugests, practical experience contradicted the simple model all the time.
You say that there would be need for some other genetic material other than DNA. For storing the information that is missing? Only if you assume that the genetic code must have the information to start from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
It just makes business sense.
Does anybody know if they plan releasing a download edition at some point?
rmstar
This must be the first distro shipping KDE3, or am I mistaken?
If you take the word "shipping" literally, maybe.
But I've been using KDE3 for a while on my laptop, running Gentoo 1.1, which, btw, is the best distro I've ever tried.
rmstar
Personally, when I look at Microsoft's corporate practices, I only wonder whether they think they sell a product or a service. If its' "product", why does it go out the door in such crappy shape (remember the thousands of known bugs at Win2K release?); on the other hand, can you really call an OS a "service"? It's much clearer for RedHat, Mandrake & Co. where they give away the code and sell their support services.
Well - the much aclaimed Mandrake 8.2 is so full of bugs it looks like an entomologists lab. It bombs like crazy (just try the administration tool root gets when starting gnome. but there are many more things that are clearly in unstable beta). In view of that you seem to propose a modell where you get a defective product for free and pay for it to be repaired. That is twisted.
Don't get me wrong - I only use linux, and belive in the OSS movement. But what mandrake is starting to become scares me big time: A flagship of the linux comunity which in reality is barely more than a rusty barge.
rmstar
DCMA = Digital Content Monopolization Act
Users are the ones that matter here. As a first time Linux installer I don't really care about most of the things a developer cares about.
I am a User and am happy with that. You are talking about the clueless user. If you don't have an idea what a network card is, and you don't have the patience to find out if your disk is SCSI or whatever you simply are bound to have problems even with your windows box.
I haven't installed Debian, but let me compare my last Linux install (Mandrake 8.something) to WinXP...
First of all, I don't give a shit if WindexPee is happy with asking you for the wheather - we are talking about debian here, remember?
But anyways:
All WinXP asked me was, essentially, "What is your Country and TimeZone".
What you forgot to mention was that WinXP asked you also to agree with the fact that Micro$oft has the right to modify your system at whatever point in time it sees fit and in whatever ways they find apropriate and that this might restrict your abilities to browse media. Oh - you did not read the EULA? Great! Congrats!
Debian should not be soliciting people in the know - they know far more than the average first time user and are, consequently, useless for developing interfaces for newbies.
(Besides that it is not debian asking for anything, but Linux User Germany) Do you propose newbies writing user interfaces? I will not use that, and newbies won't either, because it will be so incredibly crappy.
And hey, install yourself your WindexPee where the sun won't shine, okey?
rmstar
Complete Idiots Guide to Publishing Science Fiction.
is that online? or is it on kazaa B-)
Thats right. But rendering the DMCA useless would be a first step in winning against it, and it would help you limit the damage too.
Getting rid of this is now going to be seriously difficult. Repealing the DMCA [...] will equal the US pulling out of a ratified international agreement.
Hey, it's not unheard of. They did it with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and they snubbed their nose at Kyoto. Why not this, too?
And don't forget they introduced a tax on steel from outside the us, clearly violating WTO agreements. This was, like, two days ago?
If this turns out to be so, then the DMCA can be hacked like this:
1. Build your circumvention method for fair use (maybe as in your example by erasing the decryppled copy)
2. Include some fairly braindead way of ensuring that the copy gets deleted. I don't know, use your fantasy. For example, make your main executable a script which ends with
rm -f $temp # DONT YOU DARE REMOVE THIS LINE!!!
or whatever.
3. Distribute (no problem 'cos of point 1)
Now anybody with half a clue can rip legally.
Use their own weapons!
rmstar
I'm not quite sure IE is free. It comes with the OS, and you pay for that. It is more like the update is free. If you could download IE for linux, then it would be free.
rmstar
Hey I think it's great. Media files should not be tied to an operating system.
Now we need something that is able to play realmedia stuff.
rmstar
What incentive is there to put region coding in a DVD player?
Oh, that's right - it's part of the spec. If you want to license the DVD technology you have to agree that you'll honor region coding.
Don't underestimate the incentive to do it deficiently. A lot of DVD players are sold exactly because they allow you to mess with the region coding. A lot of sale clerks will tell you which players can do it and how. At least here in germany. You have to ask, of course, but the fact that this is so seems to sugest that people want that ''feature''.
Im so surprised.
More like asking Xerox to only sell copy machines that don't copy printed matter.
I, mean...
With the result that setting your clock is illegal. There are some funny laws comming our way...
As far as I know, it has never been healthy for any economy to allow monopolies to flourish freely. The main reason being that a monopoly dictates the rules in their niche, and while doing that, ends up being a hindrance of the economic processes.
Cited often as a counterexample is cisco. They are what you might call a clean monopoly, and they are where they are mainly because of superior products, not because of dirty tricks, like The Beast.
In the case we are referring to, there is an aditional problem: an institution ends up depending crutially on their comunications infrastructure. It is definatly unwise to depend on the closed proprietary products of any company, and more so if this company has a record of ruthless behavior.
rmstar
rmstar
Software vendors as insurance companies. Interesting point of view. I wonder what oracle's eula looks like...
And under linux, if you choose the default configuration, you are done after one page too.
rmstar
Well - I think the single most important feature are macros. They are a quite powerfull resource because they can really transform code before it gets compiled. I can give you an example that is quite concrete: evaluation of polynomials.
I wrote a small macro that takes as its first arument a list of coeficients and as a second arument a number. The code that ends up being executed is the evaluation of the polynomial using the horner scheme. That is, instead of
1 + 3 x + x^2 + 7 x^3
the code executes
1 + x*(3 +x*(1 + x*7))
and the invocation is
(horner-eval (1 3 1 7) x)
The point is that all the coficients end up as immediates.
Another example is a transformation of notation. If the prefix notation pisses you off, you can write a macro that evaluates infix notation. So insted of writing
(+ (* a b c (- 5 (/ d 2))) 4)
you write
(infix (a * b * c * (5 - d / 2) + 4))
Now try to mess with the syntax in C.
Another thing that is quite interesting is the posibility to change running code. You stop (with contol-C) the simulation that has been running for a week and substitute the function darn-inner-loop (compiled, mind you) with the faster version you've been working on. Then you let it continue. I think hot-swappable code is a nice way to describe this.
Now do *that* in C.
Last but not least, I can write a program that writes the code for a function (for example, the evluation of N5(x), the 5th order b-spline at x), with all the constants that would usually depend on the parameter (order), as immediates, compile it, and return it as a value to be used in the rest of the program (the compiled & optimized function!).
Just some examples.
Cheers
rmstar
It seem to be remote cousin of that faked interview with strourstrup that popped up somewhere some years ago...
Ok! That sounds actually great, and I really dig it. But where is something like that? Where are at least working MPI bindings so I can try to write a let like that myself?
NIL
As far as a GUI system goes, there are at least several implementations of Scheme and Lisp with GTK bindings and Smalltalk had one of the first GUI systems.
'nother woan that sound kinda cool. Now, WHERE ON EARTH ARE THEY? I would not be doing the crap I'm doing if I knew where they are.
N I know how to google, sire.
Too damn right. And try parallel programing with lisp. There simply isn't such a thing. Sad, sad.
No, hey: I mean it, ok? It is really sad. Tell you more another day.
rmstar.
Jesus Christ, tell me it is not true... you're talkin' 'bout ... what?? WISDOM?!?
Are you *INSANE* or what????
cheers
rmstar
You open a new window in your editor & write a C program. Then you remember how nice life was before fascist pedantic arseholes decided to take over the world.
C++ is disgusting.
rmstar
I must confess, I thought he was drunk when writing the article. But still...
He seemed to be implying that the genes mix or something else outside of our current understanding. If thats true, which no one seriosly suggests, then our current understanding would have to be waaaaaay off, and there would need to be some other genetic material other than DNA.
That is what is actually being seriously sugested. That the data in the genes is only alegoric to what actually happens. And so yes, our current model would be way off (which isn't that terrible, think 'bout it). The biologists with whom I've talked about this did not really believe that it was that simple. As the article sugests, practical experience contradicted the simple model all the time.
You say that there would be need for some other genetic material other than DNA. For storing the information that is missing? Only if you assume that the genetic code must have the information to start from scratch.
rmstar