I think you'd better prefer not to have the time and effort to analyse those different things: of course the more similar the choices the lesser risk to be wrong. But that's not freedom; it's lazyness. I disagree. Myself, I would try more distros, if I didn't have to spend the time learning a new way of thinking each time. Why? Because of lazy? No, I have a single computer that I use for my work. The more time spent on system tweaking/learning is less doing the work I have an interest in.
I believe Linux could be completely seamless between most all distros If they were so seemless among, what would be the segregating factor to choose one over the other? The community, preformance etc etc. Remember, your parent is discussing the interface... not the implementation. For example, yum and apt-get are pretty close in what they you can do with them. Why not try to unify the interface? What really matters is what's under the hood. Instead of people choosing a distro based on the pain of learning a new process, they can choose the distro for a better reason. Remember, we're all geeks here. The more stuff the same the more we'll fight over the smaller stuff;)
it's always worth it for a good discussion (that's why were here, right?).:) Agreed. I'd rather be modded off-topic and have a discussion I enjoy instead of some banal on-topic 'Does it run Linux';)
If you like RHEL or SLED, you might feel very comfortable with Solaris. I I'm currently running Fedora and like it so Solaris might be a good fit. Only thing is I'm in the middle of my spring semester and I don't do major changes to my development box during that time. Somehow I always discover new things I want to try at the worst time. I'll have to think about it. My next distro, I may want the ability to update it incrementally (I'm starting to get sick of installing 'from scratch'). Thanks for your information, it'll give me something to think about!
Flags of Our Fathers is quite good. There's a book by the same name that is is based off of, which the movie follows fairly closely. If you liked his Letters from Iwo Jima you'll likely enjoy the other. I enjoyed Letters from Iwo Jima more just because I (at least) found it more compelling with the viewpoint of the japanese soldiers.
Agreed. I've always been taught that you introduce the full meaning of an acronym before you use it. The acronym may make sense to you, but the reader may not have been exposed to it. This is especially applicable on a tech site, where acronyms are rampant. I'm not even including the acronyms seen only on slashdot (which are very off putting to a first time user by the way). Remember: EVERYONE started as a beginner.
... just a pet peeve of mine that I can do a mini-rant on without being off-topic;)
Eastwood, and others have turned to politics as their bread and butter. Eastwood has also put his considerable clout to directing. 'Letters from Iwo Jima', 'Flags of our Fathers', 'Million Dollar Baby', 'Mystic River' (just to name the ones in the past 5 years). It seems like his ability improves with each movie he makes.
I figured I'd got modded off-topic but I have karma to burn as well. And frankly, if the moderator(s) feel like wasting their points on this, instead of the stupid memes people post, that's their problem. Thanks for responding (and risking your karma).
The computer science department at my university has a unix box which runs Solaris on a sparc architecture. It's where we typically submit our programming assignments and such. It has always played well with my programs, including POSIX, (like you said) so when I saw that they have an open source distro available my interest was piqued. I don't know anyone that has it, so your response helped quite a bit. I'm pretty much set on switching to it when it's time to show Fedora the door.
I know this is getting slightly off topic but how does openSolaris compare to other Unix-like OSs? I'm kinda curious how it runs and am tempted to try it next time I need to upgrade.
Although I can hold my own with HTML, PHP and a couple SQL products, graphic design isn't one of my strengths. Going off the summary, graphic design isn't his strength.
"oh noez! ur IT man, u cant do grafix!" Ignoring the inflammatory phrasing*...
Let's assume his graphical design weakness is just because of inexperience. Does the submitter (and his business) really want his first foray into design to be his company's website? It would be more responsible, at the very least, to talk to someone experienced in website design. A designer can share his thoughts with the submitter and give some direction. He's obviously not sure what direction to go since he's asking slashdot. The best approach to take, in my view, is to talk face-to-face with a designer about the site in question.
* If you want to convince people, mocking them is counter-productive. It's just going to make people mad and possibly lead to a flame war. At the very least people are going to focus on the phrasing and not the content. The adage You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar is quite apt here.
I have not mass ordered from amazon so I never encountered that. Have you ever submitted a request to amazon to differentiate between the two? Those kind of things amazon may not think about, unless they get feedback from customers.
Just a quick question. Did you buy it *from amazon* or *from a merchant*? If from a merchant, it's between the merchant and you at that point.
Please note: any situations that may arise after an order is submitted must be resolved directly with the seller. here
Agreed. To me, it sounds like he's just shifting focus so that his bid for president doesn't ruin his chances of keeping his House seat.
The Texas congressman wrote on his Web site Friday that he is making cuts to his national campaign staff and that he must also stay focused on not losing the primary for his House seat. from here
Or is this just trying to salvage something you can't really use in order to create a solution for a problem that doesn't really exist? Bingo Bango Bongo! If you read the submitter's question, it simplies to:
a) Is there there something productive I can be doing?
b) How to do it?
Everything else is fluff that tends to lead slashdot readers off on tangents, flamewars, Emacs Vs Vi (emacs), KDE vs GNOME (gnome)
Now now. Here at slashdot we have balanced discussion where most people read the articles, keep the discussions on topic and don't bring up stupid 'memes' (that they think are clever).
I think you have put the objective before the means and have thus harmed the objective. Correct me if I'm wrong Bruce, but that's the point that Bruce is trying to make. FSF has a different objective then Open Source movement. FSF is focused on freedom of software for the users. Open Source is focused on the idea that open source leads to better software for the users . The better software is only secondary in the FSF way of thinking, but is the core of Open Source. Ultimately it comes down to your belief, which one can't argue with (especially on an online forum).
I read these interviews before and of course the summary is misleading yet again;) The interview(s) is/are (not sure if it's two or they just split it to get more stories out of one) covers a much broader range of topics. It's not solely about Linux on the destkop, also it discusses Linus's views on the open source, his experience working with the kernel etc. The desktop question is one (or two) questions out of many and is not a major focus in the interview. I wonder if the submitter even read the article...
I'd suggest reading the interview (yeah right!), there's a lot of interesting insight from him. He's much more palatable then RMS. I particularly found his thoughts on getting involved interesting.
I get the question of "Where should I start?" fairly often and my advice is just don't even ask that question. It's more like if you're not interested enough in one particular area that you already know what you want to try to do, don't do it. Just let it go and then when you hit something where you say, "I could do this better" and you actually feel motivated enough that you go from saying that to doing that, you will have answered that question yourself.
They're both on the same basic theme. Just that Terminator's frame-of-reference is before 'the war' whereas Matrix is after so The Matrix is probably less relateable.
The year is estimated to be around 2199, and humanity is fighting a war against intelligent machines created in the early 21st century. The sky is covered in thick black clouds created by the humans in an attempt to cut off the machines' supply of solar power. The machines responded by using human beings as their energy source, growing countless people in pods and harvesting their bioelectrical energy and body heat. wiki
From the story you posted...
Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough. A researcher from IBM came to my university for a presentation. His area of research is in autonomic computer. It basically boils down to the phrase quoted above. That, coupled with the project mentioned in the summary, I could certainly see a multivac-type machine becoming a reality.
Writing a compiler is an undergraduate project. Writing a compiler for a real language is a non-trivial task. I'm in a two semester compiler class right now (first semester is upper level undergrad/lower level grad and second semester is purely grad level). Our 'toy' language, that we're working with, is fairly basic. (Ignores strings, floating point, dynamic memory etc). Even so, it's still a lot of work. I can't imagine having the free time available to devote my time to writing a real compiler.
Can you expand upon your statement of why you think writing a compiler is an undergraduate project?
Being from Dover PA I can say that these board members were, to use an software analogy, like a closed source software company. They did not give proper reportings of what they did in the school-board meetings held. Actually, one of the members resigned because of conflicts within the board. The Intelligent Design curriculum they tried to push through is just an example of their mismanagement. It just so happens that was also their most public...
For me the quicker starting/stopping of X sounds nice (provided by google since Fedora's server is overloaded right now). An interest of mine is in Operations Research and I typically turn off X when running simulations to remove some of the variability. It'd be nice to have a quicker response from X. I'm not sure if that's on everyone's list though...
New OS huh? Yes.
So they rewrote everything from scratch eh? Completely changed the way we use an operating system? No and no.
All OSes these days are an evolutionary process. I would argue all software is. This makes sense since re-inventing the wheel is a waste. Agreed
Take the old stuff, make some improvements. Depends.
You're right that a lot of software development is evolutionary. You try not to duplicate work that doesn't need duplicated. Just because don't write (anew) all the code does not imply that it's an update. You may have a good set of libaries that can be used. It's not all solely make improvements to old software. Sometimes the design of the system limits how well you can continue modifying it and then you have to redesign and rewrite it.
I do see where you're coming from, sometimes there's a fine line between if a piece of software is more of a redesign or more of an update. It can blurred, however I point you to here. I standby my opinion that Vista is more of a new product then an incremental update of XP.
And yet they managed to introduce many of the same bugs that exist in XP. Even though you're an Anonymous Coward I'll bite. Care to elaborate on these bugs?
In case you haven't noticed... Vista is a new OS and _not_ an incremental update of XP.
The overall design of it may be good but of course there is going to be bugs at this point in the game. It seems like everyone keeps forgetting how complicated an OS is.
Some software developers understand it as well (looking at myself). I know how buggy my small pieces of code can be before I remove memory leaks and make algorithms more efficient. (Not design issues, but implementation issues) Therefore I can understand how a complex piece of code like an OS can have flaws. Microsoft might have done a poor job with the marketing (maybe a longer beta period?) but that's not something I can direct towards the OS itself.
Now they can focus on the incremental upgrades and make it (and newer OSs) that much better. Note: I normally try to use Linux as much as I can. It's sad I have to say that but people on this site seem to be fanboys of whatever affiliation and it's hard to hear a balanced opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my take at least
KU as well. And yes, I'm quite familiar with SSHing into acad. ;)
Flags of Our Fathers is quite good. There's a book by the same name that is is based off of, which the movie follows fairly closely. If you liked his Letters from Iwo Jima you'll likely enjoy the other. I enjoyed Letters from Iwo Jima more just because I (at least) found it more compelling with the viewpoint of the japanese soldiers.
Agreed. I've always been taught that you introduce the full meaning of an acronym before you use it. The acronym may make sense to you, but the reader may not have been exposed to it. This is especially applicable on a tech site, where acronyms are rampant. I'm not even including the acronyms seen only on slashdot (which are very off putting to a first time user by the way). Remember: EVERYONE started as a beginner.
;)
... just a pet peeve of mine that I can do a mini-rant on without being off-topic
I figured I'd got modded off-topic but I have karma to burn as well. And frankly, if the moderator(s) feel like wasting their points on this, instead of the stupid memes people post, that's their problem. Thanks for responding (and risking your karma).
The computer science department at my university has a unix box which runs Solaris on a sparc architecture. It's where we typically submit our programming assignments and such. It has always played well with my programs, including POSIX, (like you said) so when I saw that they have an open source distro available my interest was piqued. I don't know anyone that has it, so your response helped quite a bit. I'm pretty much set on switching to it when it's time to show Fedora the door.
I know this is getting slightly off topic but how does openSolaris compare to other Unix-like OSs? I'm kinda curious how it runs and am tempted to try it next time I need to upgrade.
Let's assume his graphical design weakness is just because of inexperience. Does the submitter (and his business) really want his first foray into design to be his company's website? It would be more responsible, at the very least, to talk to someone experienced in website design. A designer can share his thoughts with the submitter and give some direction. He's obviously not sure what direction to go since he's asking slashdot. The best approach to take, in my view, is to talk face-to-face with a designer about the site in question.
* If you want to convince people, mocking them is counter-productive. It's just going to make people mad and possibly lead to a flame war. At the very least people are going to focus on the phrasing and not the content. The adage You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar is quite apt here.
I have not mass ordered from amazon so I never encountered that. Have you ever submitted a request to amazon to differentiate between the two? Those kind of things amazon may not think about, unless they get feedback from customers.
a) Is there there something productive I can be doing?
b) How to do it?
Everything else is fluff that tends to lead slashdot readers off on tangents, flamewars, Emacs Vs Vi (emacs), KDE vs GNOME (gnome)
Now now. Here at slashdot we have balanced discussion where most people read the articles, keep the discussions on topic and don't bring up stupid 'memes' (that they think are clever).
I'd suggest reading the interview (yeah right!), there's a lot of interesting insight from him. He's much more palatable then RMS. I particularly found his thoughts on getting involved interesting. I get the question of "Where should I start?" fairly often and my advice is just don't even ask that question. It's more like if you're not interested enough in one particular area that you already know what you want to try to do, don't do it. Just let it go and then when you hit something where you say, "I could do this better" and you actually feel motivated enough that you go from saying that to doing that, you will have answered that question yourself.
I always enjoyed the multivac stories. Thanks.
Can you expand upon your statement of why you think writing a compiler is an undergraduate project?
Being from Dover PA I can say that these board members were, to use an software analogy, like a closed source software company. They did not give proper reportings of what they did in the school-board meetings held. Actually, one of the members resigned because of conflicts within the board. The Intelligent Design curriculum they tried to push through is just an example of their mismanagement. It just so happens that was also their most public. ..
For me the quicker starting/stopping of X sounds nice (provided by google since Fedora's server is overloaded right now). An interest of mine is in Operations Research and I typically turn off X when running simulations to remove some of the variability. It'd be nice to have a quicker response from X. I'm not sure if that's on everyone's list though ...
This makes sense since re-inventing the wheel is a waste. Agreed Take the old stuff, make some improvements. Depends.
You're right that a lot of software development is evolutionary. You try not to duplicate work that doesn't need duplicated. Just because don't write (anew) all the code does not imply that it's an update. You may have a good set of libaries that can be used. It's not all solely make improvements to old software. Sometimes the design of the system limits how well you can continue modifying it and then you have to redesign and rewrite it.
I do see where you're coming from, sometimes there's a fine line between if a piece of software is more of a redesign or more of an update. It can blurred, however I point you to here. I standby my opinion that Vista is more of a new product then an incremental update of XP.
In case you haven't noticed ... Vista is a new OS and _not_ an incremental update of XP.
The overall design of it may be good but of course there is going to be bugs at this point in the game. It seems like everyone keeps forgetting how complicated an OS is.
Some software developers understand it as well (looking at myself). I know how buggy my small pieces of code can be before I remove memory leaks and make algorithms more efficient. (Not design issues, but implementation issues) Therefore I can understand how a complex piece of code like an OS can have flaws. Microsoft might have done a poor job with the marketing (maybe a longer beta period?) but that's not something I can direct towards the OS itself.
Now they can focus on the incremental upgrades and make it (and newer OSs) that much better. Note: I normally try to use Linux as much as I can. It's sad I have to say that but people on this site seem to be fanboys of whatever affiliation and it's hard to hear a balanced opinion.