Re:A button for switching main boot hard disk...
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 1
I have 3 HD's and 3 different operating system.
I, like many people who share Linux with Windows, am using GRUB as a boot loader...
Are these drives independent?
NO THEY ARENT and THAT is INSANE.
The only reason these drives arent independent is because bios makers are, and continue to be, fucking assholes. The fact that boot managers even exist is INSANE. There is obsolutely no reason for operating systems to SHARE a boot sector. Its FUCKING STUPID.
Joe P. Enduser wants stuff to work. He does not care about web standards or anything else. Just make it work! Pretty pretty please!
John Q. Webdev wants stuff to be easy. He does not care about other peoples web pages. He only cares about the ones he himself authored.
There is no happy middle ground and much to the mismay of John Q, Joe P. is the real product in the web development industry. Thats right.. the product is not Browsers and the product is not Web Pages. The product is people. "Standards" mean nothing in industries like that.
If the bank plays along, that law firm isnt going to be considerd successful when its financial state is completely upside down, and all of the lawyers will leave for firms that might actualy be able to pay them.
It is the fact that this lawfirm is successful that makes them a prime target. They have assets which the bank will be more than happy to aquire. In fact, the bank stands to get at least 2 times the value of the lawfirms assets, since they will also get all those 1SEK payments in the end.
Remember also that while this lawfirm will be struggling financialy, the bank surely has a well paid legal team on their side in which to ensure they get whats due them.
Actualy to be quite specific.. there is a simple solution and that is to decrease the size of flash blocks to something more sane so that a flash block size is also a reasonable logical sector size like something in the 512 to 4096 byte range
No, this solution isnt "feasable" yet, due to cost.. but eventualy either another solution will be developed, or this one will be implemented.
Furthermore, even without a header, most compression algorithms work by splitting compressed files up into repetitive chunks of some kind and building tables that index these. That pattern itself is detectable.
umm... no, unless you mean non-entropy encoders.
Perhaps you should take up your "theory" with Claude Shannon or any modern day information theorist, since you seem to think that you can find coherence in the output of an algorithm designed to reach the limit of entropy.
If you can find a pattern in the output of a decent entropy compressor using a particular model, then someone else can take your model and make a better compressor. Why havent they? Do you think that you are smarter than the hundreds of people who research this stuff?
I had read a blog post about that randomly generated network passcode...
It was observed that when users install the OS for the first time, many of them will put in the password they use for most things in, because its easy to rememeber
Later on they come to find out that they must share this password with everyone else in the house if they wish to enable basic home network sharing.. so that first password they chose was pretty much the worst possible one to have chosen, and they then have to muck about finding where to change it..
..hence, take away the choice during first install, since a randomly generated one suits the purpose.
Seems to me that sunspots, being cooler regions of the suns surface, would cause less energy to be recieved here on earth.
Now maybe I am wrong, but it sure as hell sounds like the conditions you just described are the ideal part of the sunspot cycle for measuring warming trends... yet no significant warming for 10 years now?
...citation only needed if you have been living under a rock with your fingers in your ears, while hugging a tree and drinking green koolade for the past 30 years. For christ sakes, this is even admitted to in the climatologist manifesto... the IPCC's Third Assessment Report.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is not unprecedented, and that in fact there is plenty of evidence for much higher levels, while simultaenously the earth being cooler.
Queue up the green folks who want to stress how long ago it was when levels were higher, as if how long ago prevents these facts from seriously questioning their crisis.
So it can't just be "just as easy" or even "a good bit easier". It pretty much needs to be a game changer.
That is exactly right.
Going on with some of your other points...
Even if cutting edge game developers wanted to dev for Linux, they couldnt. A good standards API just isnt there, and graphics drivers are quite frankly pathetic. Linux has no shot to offer a better gaming machine than Windows today, and there is also no sign that that will change any time soon. Yeah I know that there are some modern games running on Linux, and yes in some cases they run 'better', but many people have serious unsolvable issues with rigs that for all intents and purposes shouldn't have issues.
As far as office suites go.. an office suite as a 'collection of office programs' is very far behind the times. Microsoft Office really is better than everybody else and the amount of focused effort which would be required to rival Office will never materialize from a rag-tag group of loosely collaborating programmers. Sun gave it a good try with Open Office, but Good is less than Great, and very far away from Game Changing.
The best quality of Linux is price. Thats not enough for a species that pays steap markups for name brand clothing.
In the FOSS world there is a great disconnect between the people who program application and those demanding them. You cannot expect artists, musicians, and writers, to contribute to the tools they want... because they arent good programmers! Even if they contributed it would end up sucking.
Consider the situation as being comprised of 3 groups: (A) The Programmers, (B) The Artists, and (C) Joe Public.
Programs like Photoshop were written by (A) for (B), while (C) benefits from (B) influencing the development direction.
Programs like Gimp were written by (A) for (A), and (B) and (C) are just bystanders who get to partake.
FOSS is what it is and it can't be what it isn't. Free is good.. but it is not enough.
The one word that best describes Photoshop in comparison to the alternatives is 'Professional.' The one word that best describes Office in comparison to the alternatives is 'Professional.' It is true that most people don't demand a Professional image editor. It is true that most people don't demand a Professional office suite. It is true that most people don't demand Professional games. But the group that demands a Professional FillInTheBank is very large, and Linux can't please any of them.
To boil it down to race is to oversimplify; [blah blah poor people blah]
Making things simple to understand is the point of education!
To claim that it is oversimplified is the same as claiming that the simplification is detrimental to the point.
I got news for you.. it isn't.
You are overcomplicating the issue. The poster described a very real, observable, problem. A problem that needs addressing.
Yes.. there is a seperate issue in regards to economic status, but don't for a second think its the same issue.
Bill Cosby has it right. The African American pop culture (music, literature, arts) glorifies some very detrimental modes of thinking, and while normally the education system might have a chance to undue this damage, that is not the case when one of the detriments is the distrust of, and disrespect for, that very education system.
A real challenger wont appear because above all else its DRIVERS DRIVERS DRIVERS.
What the hell am I going to do with an OS that doesnt support any of my shit? This is the real reason that Vista never took off. While lots of new hardware has Vista drivers, theres still plenty of old hardware. I wouldn't install Vista on some of my machines even if it was free because of it.
Linux is in the same boat. Open Source can't solve this problem, either.
The only real contender is Apple, because of the very few drivers actualy needed, but that is not exactly a selling point for I would ask the same question again: What the hell am I going to do with an OS that doesn't support any of my shit?
Dont listen to these people. VGA is very well documented, and the posters which hint at the "non-standard" video modes (the popular oines being 320x240, 320x400, and 360x480.. as well as 80x50 text mode) are incorrect. While the VGA BIOS may not have an INT call which sets those "non-standard" modes, they are fully predictable and part of the standard, which is why they were very well exploited back in the DOS days.
They are only "non-standard" in popular belief, but very well THE STANDARD.
It is true that not all VGA boards behave correctly, but that has NOTHING to do with THE STANDARD.
The key point is that they are PREDICTABLE based on the technical specs. Set certain timings, enable/disable graphics mode, enable or disable pixel planes, and bobs your uncle. A simple counter-example to the naysayers is a book I have in front of me right now: The Programmer Guide to the EGA/VGA, 2nd edition.. published in 1990, which explains quite clearly the low level programming details (i/o ports, range of values, memory map... no BIOS services required.. just port reads and writes, and a memory buffer)
Algorithmic changes don't normally provide a 5% speed boost.. they often turn an O(n) problem into an O(log n) problem, or an O(log n) problem into an O(log log n) problem.
The programmer used a List because his compiler has a nice List library of some kind, but no matter what a List cannot simultaneously offer both O(1) searching AND O(1) appending..
..and because the ignorant programmer doesnt know how lists are implemented he doesnt know that fact.. he probably knows that appending is cheap but doesnt know why.. doesnt even know that its O(1)..
He certainly will not know that there are structures which will trade the List's O(n) search + O(1) appending for O(log n) search + O(log n) append, and still other structures which offer O(1) search + O(n) append.
THAT is the difference between a half-assed programmer who doesnt even want to know about these algorithms and data structures, and a great programmer who is the master of algorithms. The great programmer also uses a profiler, but often doesnt need to because he did it right the first time.
Remember that changing data structures is often non-trivial, often prohibitive, once the project has matured.
Slashdot Mirror
I have 3 HD's and 3 different operating system.
I, like many people who share Linux with Windows, am using GRUB as a boot loader...
Are these drives independent?
NO THEY ARENT and THAT is INSANE.
The only reason these drives arent independent is because bios makers are, and continue to be, fucking assholes. The fact that boot managers even exist is INSANE. There is obsolutely no reason for operating systems to SHARE a boot sector. Its FUCKING STUPID.
IE: Bundled with OS. Managed to obtain marketshare due to anti-competitive behaviors that put Netscape out of business
They lost becase, as Joel Splosky put it, they made the "single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make...
...they decided to rewrite the code from scratch."
Exactly.
Joe P. Enduser wants stuff to work. He does not care about web standards or anything else. Just make it work! Pretty pretty please!
John Q. Webdev wants stuff to be easy. He does not care about other peoples web pages. He only cares about the ones he himself authored.
There is no happy middle ground and much to the mismay of John Q, Joe P. is the real product in the web development industry. Thats right.. the product is not Browsers and the product is not Web Pages. The product is people. "Standards" mean nothing in industries like that.
If the bank plays along, that law firm isnt going to be considerd successful when its financial state is completely upside down, and all of the lawyers will leave for firms that might actualy be able to pay them.
It is the fact that this lawfirm is successful that makes them a prime target. They have assets which the bank will be more than happy to aquire. In fact, the bank stands to get at least 2 times the value of the lawfirms assets, since they will also get all those 1SEK payments in the end.
Remember also that while this lawfirm will be struggling financialy, the bank surely has a well paid legal team on their side in which to ensure they get whats due them.
Either way, it's a sticky situation.
I don't think its C# they love as much as it is the .NET framework as combined with Visual Studio.
It is awesome to program with and for.... Thats all there is to it.
There was no context from which that quote was seperated. The GP's post was nothing but mind-numbed drivel echoing the standard MS bashings.
Don't be a drone your whole life.
Actualy to be quite specific.. there is a simple solution and that is to decrease the size of flash blocks to something more sane so that a flash block size is also a reasonable logical sector size like something in the 512 to 4096 byte range
No, this solution isnt "feasable" yet, due to cost.. but eventualy either another solution will be developed, or this one will be implemented.
BxAxTxMxAxN.mpg
rename *.mp3 *.doc
Furthermore, even without a header, most compression algorithms work by splitting compressed files up into repetitive chunks of some kind and building tables that index these. That pattern itself is detectable.
umm... no, unless you mean non-entropy encoders.
Perhaps you should take up your "theory" with Claude Shannon or any modern day information theorist, since you seem to think that you can find coherence in the output of an algorithm designed to reach the limit of entropy.
If you can find a pattern in the output of a decent entropy compressor using a particular model, then someone else can take your model and make a better compressor. Why havent they? Do you think that you are smarter than the hundreds of people who research this stuff?
Which statement is that?
I had read a blog post about that randomly generated network passcode...
..hence, take away the choice during first install, since a randomly generated one suits the purpose.
It was observed that when users install the OS for the first time, many of them will put in the password they use for most things in, because its easy to rememeber
Later on they come to find out that they must share this password with everyone else in the house if they wish to enable basic home network sharing.. so that first password they chose was pretty much the worst possible one to have chosen, and they then have to muck about finding where to change it..
...there is also an international panel being funded by members of the U.N.
Seems to me that sunspots, being cooler regions of the suns surface, would cause less energy to be recieved here on earth.
Now maybe I am wrong, but it sure as hell sounds like the conditions you just described are the ideal part of the sunspot cycle for measuring warming trends... yet no significant warming for 10 years now?
Perhaps a scientist can interject...
...citation only needed if you have been living under a rock with your fingers in your ears, while hugging a tree and drinking green koolade for the past 30 years. For christ sakes, this is even admitted to in the climatologist manifesto... the IPCC's Third Assessment Report.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is not unprecedented, and that in fact there is plenty of evidence for much higher levels, while simultaenously the earth being cooler.
Queue up the green folks who want to stress how long ago it was when levels were higher, as if how long ago prevents these facts from seriously questioning their crisis.
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Governments normally do not let a good crisis go to waste, even if the crisis might in fact be real.
So it can't just be "just as easy" or even "a good bit easier". It pretty much needs to be a game changer.
That is exactly right.
Going on with some of your other points...
Even if cutting edge game developers wanted to dev for Linux, they couldnt. A good standards API just isnt there, and graphics drivers are quite frankly pathetic. Linux has no shot to offer a better gaming machine than Windows today, and there is also no sign that that will change any time soon. Yeah I know that there are some modern games running on Linux, and yes in some cases they run 'better', but many people have serious unsolvable issues with rigs that for all intents and purposes shouldn't have issues.
As far as office suites go.. an office suite as a 'collection of office programs' is very far behind the times. Microsoft Office really is better than everybody else and the amount of focused effort which would be required to rival Office will never materialize from a rag-tag group of loosely collaborating programmers. Sun gave it a good try with Open Office, but Good is less than Great, and very far away from Game Changing.
The best quality of Linux is price. Thats not enough for a species that pays steap markups for name brand clothing.
In the FOSS world there is a great disconnect between the people who program application and those demanding them. You cannot expect artists, musicians, and writers, to contribute to the tools they want... because they arent good programmers! Even if they contributed it would end up sucking.
Consider the situation as being comprised of 3 groups: (A) The Programmers, (B) The Artists, and (C) Joe Public.
Programs like Photoshop were written by (A) for (B), while (C) benefits from (B) influencing the development direction.
Programs like Gimp were written by (A) for (A), and (B) and (C) are just bystanders who get to partake.
FOSS is what it is and it can't be what it isn't. Free is good.. but it is not enough.
The one word that best describes Photoshop in comparison to the alternatives is 'Professional.' The one word that best describes Office in comparison to the alternatives is 'Professional.' It is true that most people don't demand a Professional image editor. It is true that most people don't demand a Professional office suite. It is true that most people don't demand Professional games. But the group that demands a Professional FillInTheBank is very large, and Linux can't please any of them.
I don't know about the last two, but the first two pay plenty of U.S. taxes...
Did you know that?
Did you care?
I wonder.
To boil it down to race is to oversimplify; [blah blah poor people blah]
Making things simple to understand is the point of education!
To claim that it is oversimplified is the same as claiming that the simplification is detrimental to the point.
I got news for you.. it isn't.
You are overcomplicating the issue. The poster described a very real, observable, problem. A problem that needs addressing.
Yes.. there is a seperate issue in regards to economic status, but don't for a second think its the same issue.
Bill Cosby has it right. The African American pop culture (music, literature, arts) glorifies some very detrimental modes of thinking, and while normally the education system might have a chance to undue this damage, that is not the case when one of the detriments is the distrust of, and disrespect for, that very education system.
A real challenger wont appear because above all else its DRIVERS DRIVERS DRIVERS.
What the hell am I going to do with an OS that doesnt support any of my shit? This is the real reason that Vista never took off. While lots of new hardware has Vista drivers, theres still plenty of old hardware. I wouldn't install Vista on some of my machines even if it was free because of it.
Linux is in the same boat. Open Source can't solve this problem, either.
The only real contender is Apple, because of the very few drivers actualy needed, but that is not exactly a selling point for I would ask the same question again: What the hell am I going to do with an OS that doesn't support any of my shit?
Dont listen to these people. VGA is very well documented, and the posters which hint at the "non-standard" video modes (the popular oines being 320x240, 320x400, and 360x480 .. as well as 80x50 text mode) are incorrect. While the VGA BIOS may not have an INT call which sets those "non-standard" modes, they are fully predictable and part of the standard, which is why they were very well exploited back in the DOS days.
They are only "non-standard" in popular belief, but very well THE STANDARD.
It is true that not all VGA boards behave correctly, but that has NOTHING to do with THE STANDARD.
The key point is that they are PREDICTABLE based on the technical specs. Set certain timings, enable/disable graphics mode, enable or disable pixel planes, and bobs your uncle. A simple counter-example to the naysayers is a book I have in front of me right now: The Programmer Guide to the EGA/VGA, 2nd edition.. published in 1990, which explains quite clearly the low level programming details (i/o ports, range of values, memory map... no BIOS services required.. just port reads and writes, and a memory buffer)
Algorithmic changes don't normally provide a 5% speed boost.. they often turn an O(n) problem into an O(log n) problem, or an O(log n) problem into an O(log log n) problem.
..
..and because the ignorant programmer doesnt know how lists are implemented he doesnt know that fact.. he probably knows that appending is cheap but doesnt know why.. doesnt even know that its O(1)..
The programmer used a List because his compiler has a nice List library of some kind, but no matter what a List cannot simultaneously offer both O(1) searching AND O(1) appending
He certainly will not know that there are structures which will trade the List's O(n) search + O(1) appending for O(log n) search + O(log n) append, and still other structures which offer O(1) search + O(n) append.
THAT is the difference between a half-assed programmer who doesnt even want to know about these algorithms and data structures, and a great programmer who is the master of algorithms. The great programmer also uses a profiler, but often doesnt need to because he did it right the first time.
Remember that changing data structures is often non-trivial, often prohibitive, once the project has matured.
That doesn't mean that my files are kiddie pron or directions to make a dirty bomb.
of course not.. you are a terrorist..
You have dirty porn and kiddie bombs, not kiddie porn and dirty bombs.
Such files are likely to be either (a) the output of a random number generator, or (b) encrypted.