"But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; If I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am responsible for everything I do."
Microsoft may be taking a step forward by dropping the GUI, but they still don't get it.
What makes Unix so powerful isn't just the shell, it's the concept of pipes. The input and output of each program is text. You type the input at the keyboard, look at the output on the screen, that's what makes Unix so powerful.
Why? Because that way you can pipe the output of one program to the input of another. By using binary objects each program gets two additional levels of complexity, you need a utility to inspect the objects and another to enter data.
Since these two posts have got so much positive moderation one must assume there are moderators here who have absolutely no idea of how a server works.
Logging in remotely to a server has nothing to do with having a GUI. I do it routinely on my Linux servers using SSH. Using SSH my personal computer is working as a dumb text terminal, which is orders of magnitude faster than a VNC when you have a slow connection.
Having a GUI on the server will worsen your performance.
Perhaps they're remembering the near three decades of the Shah's rule in Iran, marked by murders, torture, SAVAK secret police
You didn't even try to read what I posted. If East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania underwent four decades of dictatorship much worse than anything the Shah did, how come Iran has so much trouble moving forward?
AFAIK, there was no wall surrounding Iran. People were free to move away if they wanted. Different from East Europe. Dictatorship was what they had in East Europe, the Shah was a more or less authoritarian regime, but not nearly as bad as the Communist regimes.
+5, Informative, really? That should be -5, Blind Fanatic, mods.
If you studied a little bit of history you'd know that calling Mossadegh "democratic" is a bit of a stretch. At the risk of invoking Godwin, let me remind you that Hitler was elected as well.
It was the Cold War, both the US and the USSR conducted thousands of secret operations all over the world. The simple fact that operation Ajax was a viable proposition means Iran wasn't a stable democracy.
Countries like those of Eastern Europe got fucked much harder than Iran, they were invaded militarily and kept in submission for fifty years, yet they are recovering. Why cannot Iran forget Mossadegh? Or, rather, why cannot the childish American leftists forget him?
If they were in a truly free market, GoDaddy could (and almost certainly would) simply refuse to transfer any domains away from themselves.
You seem to have fallen into the common mistake of thinking a free market is the same as anarchy.
Free market is composed of "free" and "market". Market assumes a certain set of rules, among them the right to property. If you have a domain hosted at GoDaddy the domain is yours.
GoDaddy refusing to accept transfer of domains would be like a commercial garage refusing to let people take their cars out. That would be theft, not freedom. What a free market means is that buyer and seller are free to negotiate among themselves the price and conditions of a sale. It does not mean someone is free to steal from someone else.
Where is it written that someone has the sacred duty to provide services to you for free? If you use someone else's toilet it's only fair that you pay for it.
What keeps the solar power industry from taking off is not the market. It's the subsidies that keep fossil fuels artificially cheap.
Subsidies like spending a trillion dollars to keep military control of producing countries, like fucking up the planet for the future generations, and so on.
I used to be a big Python fan, but Python 3 cured me of this disease. Python 3 was a big blunder from some theorists who never actually had to develop a complex software system. The most dangerous fuck-up was changing the way division works.
It used to be that (3 / 2) in Python returned 1, now it returns 1.5. That's a big no-no to everyone who works with professional software. If you work with toy systems like class assignments that will be run once and then forgotten, it's no problem changing the way an operator works. If your software does something important, you cannot accept a change that means you have to go through every line of code with a fine-toothed comb looking for every division and verifying if it will be affected or not by the new rules. Remember, Python has dynamically typed variables.
Yes, I know, there's a PEP somewhere that said to use// whenever you wanted an integer result from a division. This means that when you learn Python the first thing you must do is to read a collection of several hundreds of PEPs before you write your first line of code. Is that a great introductory programming language?
I think Python 3 was a blunder of first magnitude. A computer language should be about easing the use of the computer, not creating needless tasks. As a matter of fact, every single change introduced by Python 3 makes the language harder to use. Compare the old formatting operator with the new format method, for instance. How much more typing you need just on the off-chance that someday somewhere someone will want to use both position and name to locate the arguments.
Python now has walked very far from the "batteries included" principle. If I have to learn a programming language just to need to learn a new programming language when I start using a computer, what use is it? Better to start learning C instead.
The first computer language I learned was Fortran, I know people who never learned another language because Fortran was all an engineer used to need. Pascal was also used as an introductory language in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it's much better than Python in that respect. Knowing Pascal you can jump effortlessly to C.
I have used Python a lot for what it does best, which is prototyping scientific calculations using NumPy and SciPy. It's much better than Matlab for this because it has a better syntax. Unfortunately, since I run the risk of getting new bugs from Python 3 or other future versions, now I feel I must convert all those programs I wrote in Python to C. My approach used to be that if a program is not used often enough for the lack of speed to bother me I left it in Python, alas, no more.
Whitespace by itself could be tolerable, or even a positive attribute sometimes.
Having two different whitespace characters is Hell.
There's absolutely no need to have a character that was intended to program mechanically a typewriter to write tables.
The tab character not only creates an unneeded extra whitespace character, it also has two different interpretations. In mechanical typewriters and in many alphanumeric terminals it was programmable, the user could set which columns would be tab stops. In many recent environments it represents only a fixed number of spaces.
In you old VT100 terminal, as in mechanical typewriters, pressing TAB could jump your cursor straight to column 27 then to column 39, or whatever set of columns you choose. In your modern editor all you can do is to program how many columns each tab press will jump.
TAB sucks. Allowing TAB characters in Python code is enough to make whitespace formatting suck as well.
Wal-Mart is a centrally planned economy, run from a headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Sure, but Target is not run from Bentonville. Neither is Sears or Amazon, or JCPenney. If you cannot find something you need on WalMart there are alternatives. The only alternative supplier they had in the Soviet Union was the black market, the Russian Mafia. WalMart is not a closed system like the Soviet Union was and Cuba still is.
WalMart is just one of many suppliers of common household items, it's nowhere close to the complexity of a modern industrial economy.
Efficient as modern data processing systems may be, they still fall short of what a country's economy needs. Take every single part in every single equipment there is. Consider the machines needed to make each of those parts. Then the parts in those machines. The machines needed to make the parts that make the machines.
If you count just the different types of fasteners on the market, bolts, rivets, screws, nails, there are millions of different types available. There's something in the order of ten thousand different parts in a modern automobile. In a jet plane the number may be in the hundred thousands.
Even with modern computers, the only way to track all those parts and make sure they will be made in the exact number needed is something only a distributed control system, a.k.a. a free market, is capable of.
There are people who don't realize how immensely detailed regulations must be to work. When regulations don't let recyclers release some toxic waste the result is that everything becomes toxic waste.
Unfortunately those people didn't learn from history. The theory was that a well planned and regulated economy would be more efficient than capitalism, and too many people cannot see that things don't work that way.
Countries with planned economies could never make detailed enough plans for it to work efficiently. If you do not produce enough six-millimeter bolts with hex heads you will not be able to make enough 1/4 HP electric motors so you will not have enough refrigerators.
When you consider all the different products an industrial economy needs you would need the whole population of the country working in the plans to make sure all the items needed will be available.
That's what's called "capitalism". A feedback system where the production of the economy is dynamically adjusted as needed. There's a control variable to allow one to compare the relative urgency in producing each item, this variable is called "price".
Government regulation should be limited to overall guiding principles, not detailed specifications.
They are connected in series in ORDER to fail. THAT'S THE POINT.
I wonder why should two different people waste mod points on an AC who spews bullshit like this.
They are in series because it saves a lot of copper. In series you use one thin wire and no transformer is needed. You add enough low-voltage bulbs in series to get the line voltage and the current is that of one single bulb.
If they were in parallel you'd need two wires thick enough to transmit the total current of all the bulbs added together, plus a transformer to lower the voltage. Those tiny bulbs cannot have too much voltage because the filament must fit inside them, the higher the voltage the longer the filament must be. There's a limit on how thin you can draw a tungsten filament, so ultimately it must be made longer to have the needed impedance.
When you have something like a telecommunications satellite that costs $250 million and has to last 15+ years without maintenance, you aren't looking at the cost of materials for making micro capsules.
You are paying upwards of $100 million / ton for the whole thing anyhow.
KDE 4 at this point is better than 3. It just took time.
Not for me. In KDE3 when I browsed a directory containing pictures in konqueror I could click on an image file to see it and there was a set of buttons to jump to the previous and next pictures in that directory. In KDE4 when I do that I must go back to see the directory because there are no next/previous buttons.
Also the taskbar shows the buttons for open windows in reverse order. In KDE3 when I opened a new window the corresponding button appeared to the right of the older running tasks. In KDE4 it appears to the left. I read from left to right, the natural order for me is that way.
This is something that happens way too often. KDE4, Amarok 2, Python 3, there are too many systems that were good and became fucked up in a new version.
It would be better if they tried to follow the example of people like Donald Ervin Knuth, who made TeX converge asymptotically to version pi. Or Nicklaus Wirth who created an entirely new language, Modula, when he wished to extend Pascal.
I've stripped those magnets out of hard drives many times and found no injury
YMMV. I've seen hard drive magnets that are quite safe, but I once opened a drive that had magnets so strong they were literally blown to pieces when they came near each other. I couldn't pry them apart with my fingers, when I used a screwdriver the steel plate that they were glued on came loose. I ended with a mess of magnet dust clung together in a lump.
It's just a consumer protection group issuing a warning to make people aware.
I think people who don't read the warnings that come in every product sold on the market will never take notice of a warning issued by a protection group. Let Darwin take care of those things.
I've had a hobby lathe at home for many years. Then one day I bought a milling machine. The first thing I found was that I couldn't walk barefoot at home anymore. The lathe creates chips that are like long spirals, the milling machine creates small, extremely sharp chips. You don't want one of those in your skin.
Now imagine those metal chips, smaller than grains of sand, flying around. Eye globes are much more sensitive than foot soles.
During the exceptionally hot 90's and early 2000's, the deserts in northern Africa actually receded. During the cooler 80's, the same area suffered droughts and desertification.
There are reasons to believe a hotter climate will cause expansion of deserts, although the effects aren't linear. The area you mentioned didn't have a known history of droughts before the twentieth century. The whole Sahara wasn't a desert until about 4000 years ago, it's not known exactly what caused the desert to appear.
Deserts around the world are situated around 30 to 40 degrees latitude, both north and south of the equator. Those limits could vary both north and south with changing temperatures.
There are many factors influencing which areas are wet and which ones are dry. A higher evaporation rate in oceans may not cause more rain over continents. Higher global temperatures could cause deserts to expand in both directions, north and south, at the same time.
Higher temperatures right now are causing more precipitation in Antarctica. A hotter atmosphere would cause stronger winds, shifting precipitation to distant areas. You cannot just assume every parameter would change linearly all over the globe.
Slashdot Mirror
As Heinlein said:
"But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; If I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am responsible for everything I do."
("The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", 1966)
BitTorrent exists for a purpose.
find . -depth 1 -size +20M
No need to know arcane details about where, measure, or select.
Microsoft may be taking a step forward by dropping the GUI, but they still don't get it.
What makes Unix so powerful isn't just the shell, it's the concept of pipes. The input and output of each program is text. You type the input at the keyboard, look at the output on the screen, that's what makes Unix so powerful.
Why? Because that way you can pipe the output of one program to the input of another. By using binary objects each program gets two additional levels of complexity, you need a utility to inspect the objects and another to enter data.
Since these two posts have got so much positive moderation one must assume there are moderators here who have absolutely no idea of how a server works.
Logging in remotely to a server has nothing to do with having a GUI. I do it routinely on my Linux servers using SSH. Using SSH my personal computer is working as a dumb text terminal, which is orders of magnitude faster than a VNC when you have a slow connection.
Having a GUI on the server will worsen your performance.
Perhaps they're remembering the near three decades of the Shah's rule in Iran, marked by murders, torture, SAVAK secret police
You didn't even try to read what I posted. If East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania underwent four decades of dictatorship much worse than anything the Shah did, how come Iran has so much trouble moving forward?
AFAIK, there was no wall surrounding Iran. People were free to move away if they wanted. Different from East Europe. Dictatorship was what they had in East Europe, the Shah was a more or less authoritarian regime, but not nearly as bad as the Communist regimes.
+5, Informative, really? That should be -5, Blind Fanatic, mods.
If you studied a little bit of history you'd know that calling Mossadegh "democratic" is a bit of a stretch. At the risk of invoking Godwin, let me remind you that Hitler was elected as well.
Puhleeeze, let go of that fucking Mossadegh!
It was the Cold War, both the US and the USSR conducted thousands of secret operations all over the world. The simple fact that operation Ajax was a viable proposition means Iran wasn't a stable democracy.
Countries like those of Eastern Europe got fucked much harder than Iran, they were invaded militarily and kept in submission for fifty years, yet they are recovering. Why cannot Iran forget Mossadegh? Or, rather, why cannot the childish American leftists forget him?
If they were in a truly free market, GoDaddy could (and almost certainly would) simply refuse to transfer any domains away from themselves.
You seem to have fallen into the common mistake of thinking a free market is the same as anarchy.
Free market is composed of "free" and "market". Market assumes a certain set of rules, among them the right to property. If you have a domain hosted at GoDaddy the domain is yours.
GoDaddy refusing to accept transfer of domains would be like a commercial garage refusing to let people take their cars out. That would be theft, not freedom. What a free market means is that buyer and seller are free to negotiate among themselves the price and conditions of a sale. It does not mean someone is free to steal from someone else.
Where is it written that someone has the sacred duty to provide services to you for free? If you use someone else's toilet it's only fair that you pay for it.
The market is working exactly as it should. No need to regulate GoDaddy away.
What keeps the solar power industry from taking off is not the market. It's the subsidies that keep fossil fuels artificially cheap.
Subsidies like spending a trillion dollars to keep military control of producing countries, like fucking up the planet for the future generations, and so on.
Whoever said that Python is the best tool for every problem?
Guido van Rossum. Next question, please?
I used to be a big Python fan, but Python 3 cured me of this disease. Python 3 was a big blunder from some theorists who never actually had to develop a complex software system. The most dangerous fuck-up was changing the way division works.
It used to be that (3 / 2) in Python returned 1, now it returns 1.5. That's a big no-no to everyone who works with professional software. If you work with toy systems like class assignments that will be run once and then forgotten, it's no problem changing the way an operator works. If your software does something important, you cannot accept a change that means you have to go through every line of code with a fine-toothed comb looking for every division and verifying if it will be affected or not by the new rules. Remember, Python has dynamically typed variables.
Yes, I know, there's a PEP somewhere that said to use // whenever you wanted an integer result from a division. This means that when you learn Python the first thing you must do is to read a collection of several hundreds of PEPs before you write your first line of code. Is that a great introductory programming language?
I think Python 3 was a blunder of first magnitude. A computer language should be about easing the use of the computer, not creating needless tasks. As a matter of fact, every single change introduced by Python 3 makes the language harder to use. Compare the old formatting operator with the new format method, for instance. How much more typing you need just on the off-chance that someday somewhere someone will want to use both position and name to locate the arguments.
Python now has walked very far from the "batteries included" principle. If I have to learn a programming language just to need to learn a new programming language when I start using a computer, what use is it? Better to start learning C instead.
The first computer language I learned was Fortran, I know people who never learned another language because Fortran was all an engineer used to need. Pascal was also used as an introductory language in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it's much better than Python in that respect. Knowing Pascal you can jump effortlessly to C.
I have used Python a lot for what it does best, which is prototyping scientific calculations using NumPy and SciPy. It's much better than Matlab for this because it has a better syntax. Unfortunately, since I run the risk of getting new bugs from Python 3 or other future versions, now I feel I must convert all those programs I wrote in Python to C. My approach used to be that if a program is not used often enough for the lack of speed to bother me I left it in Python, alas, no more.
Whitespace by itself could be tolerable, or even a positive attribute sometimes.
Having two different whitespace characters is Hell.
There's absolutely no need to have a character that was intended to program mechanically a typewriter to write tables.
The tab character not only creates an unneeded extra whitespace character, it also has two different interpretations. In mechanical typewriters and in many alphanumeric terminals it was programmable, the user could set which columns would be tab stops. In many recent environments it represents only a fixed number of spaces.
In you old VT100 terminal, as in mechanical typewriters, pressing TAB could jump your cursor straight to column 27 then to column 39, or whatever set of columns you choose. In your modern editor all you can do is to program how many columns each tab press will jump.
TAB sucks. Allowing TAB characters in Python code is enough to make whitespace formatting suck as well.
Wal-Mart is a centrally planned economy, run from a headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Sure, but Target is not run from Bentonville. Neither is Sears or Amazon, or JCPenney. If you cannot find something you need on WalMart there are alternatives.
The only alternative supplier they had in the Soviet Union was the black market, the Russian Mafia. WalMart is not a closed system like the Soviet Union was and Cuba still is.
WalMart is just one of many suppliers of common household items, it's nowhere close to the complexity of a modern industrial economy.
Efficient as modern data processing systems may be, they still fall short of what a country's economy needs. Take every single part in every single equipment there is. Consider the machines needed to make each of those parts. Then the parts in those machines. The machines needed to make the parts that make the machines.
If you count just the different types of fasteners on the market, bolts, rivets, screws, nails, there are millions of different types available. There's something in the order of ten thousand different parts in a modern automobile. In a jet plane the number may be in the hundred thousands.
Even with modern computers, the only way to track all those parts and make sure they will be made in the exact number needed is something only a distributed control system, a.k.a. a free market, is capable of.
Is it OK to hunt humans then?
well-meaning but often moronic regulations
There are people who don't realize how immensely detailed regulations must be to work. When regulations don't let recyclers release some toxic waste the result is that everything becomes toxic waste.
Unfortunately those people didn't learn from history. The theory was that a well planned and regulated economy would be more efficient than capitalism, and too many people cannot see that things don't work that way.
Countries with planned economies could never make detailed enough plans for it to work efficiently. If you do not produce enough six-millimeter bolts with hex heads you will not be able to make enough 1/4 HP electric motors so you will not have enough refrigerators.
When you consider all the different products an industrial economy needs you would need the whole population of the country working in the plans to make sure all the items needed will be available.
That's what's called "capitalism". A feedback system where the production of the economy is dynamically adjusted as needed. There's a control variable to allow one to compare the relative urgency in producing each item, this variable is called "price".
Government regulation should be limited to overall guiding principles, not detailed specifications.
They are connected in series in ORDER to fail. THAT'S THE POINT.
I wonder why should two different people waste mod points on an AC who spews bullshit like this.
They are in series because it saves a lot of copper. In series you use one thin wire and no transformer is needed. You add enough low-voltage bulbs in series to get the line voltage and the current is that of one single bulb.
If they were in parallel you'd need two wires thick enough to transmit the total current of all the bulbs added together, plus a transformer to lower the voltage. Those tiny bulbs cannot have too much voltage because the filament must fit inside them, the higher the voltage the longer the filament must be. There's a limit on how thin you can draw a tungsten filament, so ultimately it must be made longer to have the needed impedance.
When you have something like a telecommunications satellite that costs $250 million and has to last 15+ years without maintenance, you aren't looking at the cost of materials for making micro capsules.
You are paying upwards of $100 million / ton for the whole thing anyhow.
KDE 4 at this point is better than 3. It just took time.
Not for me. In KDE3 when I browsed a directory containing pictures in konqueror I could click on an image file to see it and there was a set of buttons to jump to the previous and next pictures in that directory. In KDE4 when I do that I must go back to see the directory because there are no next/previous buttons.
Also the taskbar shows the buttons for open windows in reverse order. In KDE3 when I opened a new window the corresponding button appeared to the right of the older running tasks. In KDE4 it appears to the left. I read from left to right, the natural order for me is that way.
This is something that happens way too often. KDE4, Amarok 2, Python 3, there are too many systems that were good and became fucked up in a new version.
It would be better if they tried to follow the example of people like Donald Ervin Knuth, who made TeX converge asymptotically to version pi. Or Nicklaus Wirth who created an entirely new language, Modula, when he wished to extend Pascal.
I've stripped those magnets out of hard drives many times and found no injury
YMMV. I've seen hard drive magnets that are quite safe, but I once opened a drive that had magnets so strong they were literally blown to pieces when they came near each other. I couldn't pry them apart with my fingers, when I used a screwdriver the steel plate that they were glued on came loose. I ended with a mess of magnet dust clung together in a lump.
It's just a consumer protection group issuing a warning to make people aware.
I think people who don't read the warnings that come in every product sold on the market will never take notice of a warning issued by a protection group. Let Darwin take care of those things.
The 1990s called. They want their VCR clocks back.
I've had a hobby lathe at home for many years. Then one day I bought a milling machine. The first thing I found was that I couldn't walk barefoot at home anymore. The lathe creates chips that are like long spirals, the milling machine creates small, extremely sharp chips. You don't want one of those in your skin.
Now imagine those metal chips, smaller than grains of sand, flying around. Eye globes are much more sensitive than foot soles.
During the exceptionally hot 90's and early 2000's, the deserts in northern Africa actually receded. During the cooler 80's, the same area suffered droughts and desertification.
There are reasons to believe a hotter climate will cause expansion of deserts, although the effects aren't linear. The area you mentioned didn't have a known history of droughts before the twentieth century. The whole Sahara wasn't a desert until about 4000 years ago, it's not known exactly what caused the desert to appear.
Deserts around the world are situated around 30 to 40 degrees latitude, both north and south of the equator. Those limits could vary both north and south with changing temperatures.
There are many factors influencing which areas are wet and which ones are dry. A higher evaporation rate in oceans may not cause more rain over continents. Higher global temperatures could cause deserts to expand in both directions, north and south, at the same time.
Higher temperatures right now are causing more precipitation in Antarctica. A hotter atmosphere would cause stronger winds, shifting precipitation to distant areas. You cannot just assume every parameter would change linearly all over the globe.