I agree with you, I'd say that while Linux is easy to install, it isn't easy to configure the way you want it: I wanted to configure a QWERTY keyboard to put accents, KDE's documentation was poor and it didn't allow me to do the way I wanted it, X documentation on this topic was even worse (and only in English which could be a problem for some guys), I finally accepted the 'configuration by default' because it was too hard to change..
Currently I have a problem with KDE (on RHE3), when I want to iconify all window, all the window on the current workview are iconified, I would like to have all the window on all the workview to be iconified and have really no clue on how to do it.. and this is very annoying because of the windows which are open on all the workview (my email browser for example).
So Linux is easy to install but usually its default configuration is far from satisfying and when you want to change the configuration, it can be very easy if its something common, if for whatever reason this is a bit uncommon, this is *hell*, especially when you don't talk English!
When ATI or NVidia says that their GPU is 64bit, this means that the ARGB use 64bit which makes 16bit per component. 16 bit floating point number may be a problem due to the small precision.
I and many other hates Perl, while I recognize Perl's power, its syntax is so awful that it makes maintenance a pain whether it is written initially by a beginner (who doesn't use 'use strict' or 'use warning') or by an expert (who finds TMTOWTDI fun, he wrote two lines that took me 1/2h and one book to understand and then 30s to replace by also two lines that a beginner in Perl could understand).
Perl6's syntax doesn't look any better to me.
The only thing I miss in Ruby's language compared to Perl is the possibility to declare variable (a use strict equivalent).
>We noted an excess of counts in the neutron detectors only once, and that was during a thunderstorm when the electronics could be expected to be exposed to electrical noise.
Or due to the thunder? I've read that some have measured that thunder create fusion which release neutrons..
Take it with a *large* pint of salt: I'm not a scientist and don't remember where I've read it (maybe on an article linked by/.), maybe they have confused noise with the real stuff, but maybe you have dismissed something interesting (thunder producing neutrons) as 'electrical noise', funny no?
I think that you know it, but COW can sometimes be a loss: if you happen to copy the content of the memory, doing it a page at a time instead of all the page at once may incurr a loss.
So COW can be a big win if no copy occurs, a small win if some copy occur but also a small loss if many copy occur.
> I don't go to church, but I consider myself a Christian. It's a cultural thing. I think many Europeans don't understand this.
Uh, what makes you think that Europeans wouldn't understand? In France only something like 10% (don't know the exact figure but it is low) of Christians goes to Church.
For the US/Europe comparison, well let's just say that Europe is not homogenoeous in this respect: Italy or Ireland (where women don't have the right to do an IVG because of religion) are very different from France, for example.
I'm not sure about how to reconcile those two sentences in your post: > he made a small fortune after the fire of london, and: >ultimately hooke was the cool scientist a lot of us would like to be
I sure hope that "a lot us" are not wanting to make money by being corrupted!
Bah, you're inventing problems: any autoresponder worths its salt will not reply two times to the same user, so the ping-pong between autoresponders shouldn't occur.
And for the mailing lists, a simple solution would be for mailing list systems to add a tag indicating that this is a mailing list, this way autoresponders would simply ignores those emails.
And I beileive your post show only your lack of imagination / understanding of the users need.
In your vacation holiday message,there is the following information: - you're not here: so the sender know that he won't get an answer, this is very useful for him to plan his schedule. - until when you're on holiday which is another interesting information for your correspondant. - if urgent on this topic you can refer to person X, on that topic you can refer to person Y. - mobile phone in case of absolute emergency.
Your solution to have someone else look at your email would be sensible in a wold where one get few emails situation, but in the real world where everyone gets a lot of email everyday it is stupid: it takes a lot of work to filter emails of which you know only partially the context. The automated reply will act of a filter: if the sender judges that it is urgent, he will have the necessary information to move on (the first being that you're not here so he won't wait for an answer), so the level 2 contact will have to process only the important emails and provided with more information because the sender knows that he is treating with a new person (which may not know the context): much more easy to handle.
The mailing list problem is really a minor annoyance.
> Also, if they can compile to bytecode, that helps automagically close some of the interpreted vs. compiled performance gap due to the hotspot compilers and java interpreters.
For servers yes, but for clients/GUI apps? I've yet to see Java apps which can start fast and feel fast, which is necessary for (good) clients/GUI apps.
Even the administration tools of Solaris9 which were rewritten in Java by Sun suck (very slow), so if *Sun* is not able to make fast Java GUI app..
> Hello, in the PC market we all know how wonderfully horrible catridges work.
Yeah right, your floppy disk has a cartridge if you didn't notice, so cartridge have worked very well for PCs, as for the DVD burners I fail to see your point.
Then again If you like having your recording being unreadable thanks to scratches..
I'm not blasting you for having read-only support, I'm blasting you for saying that you have support without precising that it is read-only.
And yes, I imagine that it is quite some work, in fact, I find that having even read-only support very impressive, but I'm not impressed by what I call "marketing volontary lack of precision": if you say support, by default readers expect read AND write support, so please avoid deceiving the readers and use precise sentence.
>If you teach them to fish with a huge fishing vessel, you still have to show them how to power it. And to be responsible with the usage of the fishing vessel to avoid destroying too much the ocean ground or to reduce to much the number of fish, which is not infinite either.
But yes, cheap energy in third world would preserve the tree, help with the communications, pump water, etc, and clean energy would preserve the planet, now the only problem is that nobody has a clue on how to have clean energy cheaper than oils.
> All of Western Europe is currently experiencing population decline so sharp that it is threatening their social welfare programs (too many people using, not enough working).
Actually, this is also due to life expectancy increase, not only due to population decline: France have an increase of population (small), but its welfare program has problem like anyother place due to life expectancy increase.
As for: > What exactly is it you advocate? Some authoritarian solution inflicted upon the already impoverished and repressed nations of the world?
A freedom of access to cheap condom, pills and an education program to explain sexuality, protections, etc would be a good start, no need to resort to extreames measure, if those people have the choices to have baby or not many will reduce the number of child they will have but that's not easy to do with those fucking religions.
You support Open document as read only, I've seen on the internet with maybe an export filter sometimes later. Now I understand that an export filter is difficult/expensive to make but claiming that you support a file format while you support it read only is a marketing lie if I ever saw one.
> Do you think bacteria could evolve to disguise or alter their "smell" to avoid extermination?
This is quite possible, if there are two strains existing with different odor and the synthetic nose helps to eradicate one strain, the other strain will be selected. This is no different than 'anti-biotic' resistance (which is growing)..
You realize that what your saying is "a bit" contradictory? If the US produces mines only for North/South Korea separation, why don't the US have laws/policies/whatever to prevent the selling of mines?
Nothing is, I was just pointing that thinking about defending only against plane slammed into a space elevator is short sighed. Missiles could be just as effective (and harder to defend against).
But anyway, before thinking about how to defend it against other, being able to build even 10m of a material with enough strength is the first step, and it won't be easy.
And US are still using cluster bombs last I looked, and there still producing mines, I haven't heard of the US using mines recently (except in North/South Korea delimitation) but I don't know if they can sell those mines to other party, they can probably.
Spending money on all these high-tech high-precision weapon is not enough to claim 'caring about the civilian': you must also NOT sell or use those old but very effective 'kill everybody in sight' weapons (even after the war is over for mines and cluster bombs).
Franly producing a spec from OpenBSD reference implementation is not a big problem. Where is the standard spec which describe asprintf?
For the C99 being as old as strlcat paper, sorry I tend to forget how old C99 is, because I've only be really "aware" of it recently (a year or too).
And yes for the next C standard, a secure string library would be very useful, because as you may have noticed there are still quite a few buffer overflow bugs found, and unfortunately while secure solution exists none is widespread so 'standardising' one would be a real help (for example glibc developpers would be compelled to implement it at last).
Because obviously you use the md5sum for the original website, not from the site you're downloading!
And that's why it is impossible to fully automatise.. Now some users won't ever understand why you cannot use the md5sum from the same website so in my opinion there are currently only three safe possibilities: 1- the user cannot install anything and do not know root password. 2- the user uses a centralised installation software and only install what is available from his distribution. 3- the users know md5sum and also know that it must use the sum from the original site, not from the mirror site.
The difference betweem 2 and 3 is quite large.. But as said before, a tool which would check the md5sum (under the hood) would require that 1) all softwares have a well known public 'trusted' website. 2) on these websites, the checksums would be kept at a predictable location in a common format.
I'll beleive it's possible when I see it, giving that Linux's distribitions couldn't even settle on a common packaging format (I'm not even talking about the tools)
While you're right normally one installing software as root, installing software from a FTP site without checking at least the md5sum from a trusted origin is dumb.
Unfortunately this part can't be fully automatised, because you would rely on the untrusted package to find the originator sources which can be facked, obviously..
If the installation on Linux was standardised maybe just asking the user where is the originator website of the software. But Linux's distribution can't even standardised on a common packaging format, so standardising on a common installation tool is a pipe dream..
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I agree with you, I'd say that while Linux is easy to install, it isn't easy to configure the way you want it: I wanted to configure a QWERTY keyboard to put accents, KDE's documentation was poor and it didn't allow me to do the way I wanted it, X documentation on this topic was even worse (and only in English which could be a problem for some guys), I finally accepted the 'configuration by default' because it was too hard to change..
Currently I have a problem with KDE (on RHE3), when I want to iconify all window, all the window on the current workview are iconified, I would like to have all the window on all the workview to be iconified and have really no clue on how to do it.. and this is very annoying because of the windows which are open on all the workview (my email browser for example).
So Linux is easy to install but usually its default configuration is far from satisfying and when you want to change the configuration, it can be very easy if its something common, if for whatever reason this is a bit uncommon, this is *hell*, especially when you don't talk English!
When ATI or NVidia says that their GPU is 64bit, this means that the ARGB use 64bit which makes 16bit per component.
16 bit floating point number may be a problem due to the small precision.
Nice one, it took me about 1min to solve (without reading the hint).
So nice but not too hard either.
I and many other hates Perl, while I recognize Perl's power, its syntax is so awful that it makes maintenance a pain whether it is written initially by a beginner (who doesn't use 'use strict' or 'use warning') or by an expert (who finds TMTOWTDI fun, he wrote two lines that took me 1/2h and one book to understand and then 30s to replace by also two lines that a beginner in Perl could understand).
Perl6's syntax doesn't look any better to me.
The only thing I miss in Ruby's language compared to Perl is the possibility to declare variable (a use strict equivalent).
>We noted an excess of counts in the neutron detectors only once, and that was during a thunderstorm when the electronics could be expected to be exposed to electrical noise.
/.), maybe they have confused noise with the real stuff, but maybe you have dismissed something interesting (thunder producing neutrons) as 'electrical noise', funny no?
Or due to the thunder? I've read that some have measured that thunder create fusion which release neutrons..
Take it with a *large* pint of salt: I'm not a scientist and don't remember where I've read it (maybe on an article linked by
I think that you know it, but COW can sometimes be a loss: if you happen to copy the content of the memory, doing it a page at a time instead of all the page at once may incurr a loss.
So COW can be a big win if no copy occurs, a small win if some copy occur but also a small loss if many copy occur.
> I don't go to church, but I consider myself a Christian. It's a cultural thing. I think many Europeans don't understand this.
Uh, what makes you think that Europeans wouldn't understand?
In France only something like 10% (don't know the exact figure but it is low) of Christians goes to Church.
For the US/Europe comparison, well let's just say that Europe is not homogenoeous in this respect: Italy or Ireland (where women don't have the right to do an IVG because of religion) are very different from France, for example.
I'm not sure about how to reconcile those two sentences in your post:
> he made a small fortune after the fire of london,
and:
>ultimately hooke was the cool scientist a lot of us would like to be
I sure hope that "a lot us" are not wanting to make money by being corrupted!
Bah, you're inventing problems: any autoresponder worths its salt will not reply two times to the same user, so the ping-pong between autoresponders shouldn't occur.
And for the mailing lists, a simple solution would be for mailing list systems to add a tag indicating that this is a mailing list, this way autoresponders would simply ignores those emails.
And I beileive your post show only your lack of imagination / understanding of the users need.
In your vacation holiday message,there is the following information:
- you're not here: so the sender know that he won't get an answer, this is very useful for him to plan his schedule.
- until when you're on holiday which is another interesting information for your correspondant.
- if urgent on this topic you can refer to person X, on that topic you can refer to person Y.
- mobile phone in case of absolute emergency.
Your solution to have someone else look at your email would be sensible in a wold where one get few emails situation, but in the real world where everyone gets a lot of email everyday it is stupid: it takes a lot of work to filter emails of which you know only partially the context.
The automated reply will act of a filter: if the sender judges that it is urgent, he will have the necessary information to move on (the first being that you're not here so he won't wait for an answer), so the level 2 contact will have to process only the important emails and provided with more information because the sender knows that he is treating with a new person (which may not know the context): much more easy to handle.
The mailing list problem is really a minor annoyance.
"Fast enough" with how many GB of memory?
AFAIK Eclipse has the reputation to be a memory hog, does-it start in less than 2s?
> Also, if they can compile to bytecode, that helps automagically close some of the interpreted vs. compiled performance gap due to the hotspot compilers and java interpreters.
For servers yes, but for clients/GUI apps?
I've yet to see Java apps which can start fast and feel fast, which is necessary for (good) clients/GUI apps.
Even the administration tools of Solaris9 which were rewritten in Java by Sun suck (very slow), so if *Sun* is not able to make fast Java GUI app..
> Hello, in the PC market we all know how wonderfully horrible catridges work.
Yeah right, your floppy disk has a cartridge if you didn't notice, so cartridge have worked very well for PCs, as for the DVD burners I fail to see your point.
Then again If you like having your recording being unreadable thanks to scratches..
I'm not blasting you for having read-only support, I'm blasting you for saying that you have support without precising that it is read-only.
And yes, I imagine that it is quite some work, in fact, I find that having even read-only support very impressive, but I'm not impressed by what I call "marketing volontary lack of precision": if you say support, by default readers expect read AND write support, so please avoid deceiving the readers and use precise sentence.
>If you teach them to fish with a huge fishing vessel, you still have to show them how to power it.
And to be responsible with the usage of the fishing vessel to avoid destroying too much the ocean ground or to reduce to much the number of fish, which is not infinite either.
But yes, cheap energy in third world would preserve the tree, help with the communications, pump water, etc, and clean energy would preserve the planet, now the only problem is that nobody has a clue on how to have clean energy cheaper than oils.
> All of Western Europe is currently experiencing population decline so sharp that it is threatening their social welfare programs (too many people using, not enough working).
Actually, this is also due to life expectancy increase, not only due to population decline: France have an increase of population (small), but its welfare program has problem like anyother place due to life expectancy increase.
As for:
> What exactly is it you advocate? Some authoritarian solution inflicted upon the already impoverished and repressed nations of the world?
A freedom of access to cheap condom, pills and an education program to explain sexuality, protections, etc would be a good start, no need to resort to extreames measure, if those people have the choices to have baby or not many will reduce the number of child they will have but that's not easy to do with those fucking religions.
You support Open document as read only, I've seen on the internet with maybe an export filter sometimes later.
Now I understand that an export filter is difficult/expensive to make but claiming that you support a file format while you support it read only is a marketing lie if I ever saw one.
> Do you think bacteria could evolve to disguise or alter their "smell" to avoid extermination?
This is quite possible, if there are two strains existing with different odor and the synthetic nose helps to eradicate one strain, the other strain will be selected.
This is no different than 'anti-biotic' resistance (which is growing)..
You realize that what your saying is "a bit" contradictory?
If the US produces mines only for North/South Korea separation, why don't the US have laws/policies/whatever to prevent the selling of mines?
Nothing is, I was just pointing that thinking about defending only against plane slammed into a space elevator is short sighed.
Missiles could be just as effective (and harder to defend against).
But anyway, before thinking about how to defend it against other, being able to build even 10m of a material with enough strength is the first step, and it won't be easy.
And US are still using cluster bombs last I looked, and there still producing mines, I haven't heard of the US using mines recently (except in North/South Korea delimitation) but I don't know if they can sell those mines to other party, they can probably.
Spending money on all these high-tech high-precision weapon is not enough to claim 'caring about the civilian': you must also NOT sell or use those old but very effective 'kill everybody in sight' weapons (even after the war is over for mines and cluster bombs).
>if it flies, it dies
Good quote, for planes..
Now, let's imagine a missile (or several) aimed at the elevator..
Suddendly it seems more difficult to defend, doesn't it?
Yes, there exist anti-missile missiles, but I doubt they will ever be 100% secure..
Franly producing a spec from OpenBSD reference implementation is not a big problem.
Where is the standard spec which describe asprintf?
For the C99 being as old as strlcat paper, sorry I tend to forget how old C99 is, because I've only be really "aware" of it recently (a year or too).
And yes for the next C standard, a secure string library would be very useful, because as you may have noticed there are still quite a few buffer overflow bugs found, and unfortunately while secure solution exists none is widespread so 'standardising' one would be a real help (for example glibc developpers would be compelled to implement it at last).
Because obviously you use the md5sum for the original website, not from the site you're downloading!
And that's why it is impossible to fully automatise..
Now some users won't ever understand why you cannot use the md5sum from the same website so in my opinion there are currently only three safe possibilities:
1- the user cannot install anything and do not know root password.
2- the user uses a centralised installation software and only install what is available from his distribution.
3- the users know md5sum and also know that it must use the sum from the original site, not from the mirror site.
The difference betweem 2 and 3 is quite large..
But as said before, a tool which would check the md5sum (under the hood) would require that
1) all softwares have a well known public 'trusted' website.
2) on these websites, the checksums would be kept at a predictable location in a common format.
I'll beleive it's possible when I see it, giving that Linux's distribitions couldn't even settle on a common packaging format (I'm not even talking about the tools)
While you're right normally one installing software as root, installing software from a FTP site without checking at least the md5sum from a trusted origin is dumb.
Unfortunately this part can't be fully automatised, because you would rely on the untrusted package to find the originator sources which can be facked, obviously..
If the installation on Linux was standardised maybe just asking the user where is the originator website of the software.
But Linux's distribution can't even standardised on a common packaging format, so standardising on a common installation tool is a pipe dream..