Does this mean all those binaries under/usr/bin/X11R6 are going to be moved to/usr/bin/X11R7?
Hopefully they will move where they belong:/usr/bin
For that matter, what was the criteria between whether something was put in/usr/bin or/usr/bin/X11R6?
My guess is that because slackware did it, everybody else did it too. Or maybe the sources just came packaged that way, and nobody bothered to edit the sources. Most likely, this happened long before the linux filesystem hierarchy standard. I have no idea why it has survived as long as it has. It is just annoying.
We have/usr/bin,/usr/X11R6/bin,/usr/bin/X11, and/etc/X11,/usr/X11R6/lib/X11, and/usr/share/fonts,/etc/X11/fonts,/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, and so on...
This statement is very myopic. The US is no more a place than Europe is.
Yes it is. It is a single country, with similar law, economy, culture, history, etc... There is the american dream, the american way of life, etc...
In Europe it is different. It is a continent of national states, who have spent the last 1000s of years fighting each other every few decades. USA is mostly about being united against a common enemy. Europe is mostly about endless bickering with the closest neighbours, to the point where you make alliances with other enemies to get at your neighbour. Being french is infinitely more important to a frenchman, than being texan is to a texan (both being pretty extreme examples on their respective continents...)
The culture in most european countries are many centuries older than the entire american history, and each is unique. This is why efforts such as EU bog down into a bureuacratic mess that never seems to get anywhere.
The US is geographically larger than Europe, plus it has a lot more cultural diversity with its immigrant heritage.
The cultural diversity of the US is mixed up. Thus USAs national identity, is to be a mix of different cultures. In Europe, the culture you'll find in Finland is very different from the culture you'll find in Spain (or even Sweden). (Ok, states differ in USA too, but they are all american, in a way that differs profoundly from european countries all being european, asian countries all being asian, or african countries all being african. There is the american way, there is no such thing as a european way).
Economics vary a lot within the US too, from the affluent suburban populations to the less affluent rural American regions.
Yes, but this is completely normal within any country.
Many countries in Europe are smaller than many US states. France for example is about the same size as Texas.
Actually, most european countries are smaller than any of the US states...
but X11 is moving more and more out of the main stream and into the non-user and highly geek distros only
So what are the main stream using these days? Fresco? Qt/Embedded? The Y Window System? rio?
and even there, I know many Debian users, for example, who are eager to switch to X.org.
Debian IS using xorg (only stable and maybe testing still uses Xfree86)
Since you are obviously confused, let me clarify. "X", "X11", and "The X Window System" all refers to the same thing. It is a specification for a way of displaying and interacting with graphics in windows on a computer and/or through a network.
X.org used to be the organization that coordinated that specification between various vendors of X11. It also maintained a "reference implementation" that nobody used. Then X11-innovation stagnated among the major unix vendors. X.org slowly died, and XFree86 (a "vendor", and a free implementation) became the defacto standard. Then XFree86 (the organization, not the implementation) did something stupid with their license, and the code was forked by mostly the same people that used to work on XFree86, and they decided to call themselves X.org (and their implementation xorg), since the name now was available).
Today, most everybody uses xorg, not XFree86. This is an update to xorg. To end-users it means zilch, apart from the fact that it's better for developers, and they can expect to see some innovation finally happen in the X11-world (well, in the long-term at least!)
I've been to Europe. They do not have a higher standard of living than the US. It's actually considerably lower.
You see, that's the problem with USians. They seem to think of Europe as some place. But in reality, if someone is saying "I've been to Europe", the only thing possible to conclude from that is that the speaker is ignorant, and most likely from US, because if (s)he were from anywhere else in the world, (s)he would say, "I've been to France/Iceland/Ukraine/Albania", or something like that.
I realize that europeans are no better. We say the same thing about US (which can be excused, as the US is at least one country), but we're also saying "I've been to Africa" which is about as meaningless as having been to Europe.
As for comparing the standard of living. Well, it's complicated. Having "been there" is not a good enough study. And comparing how nice cars you see isn't a good metric. First of all, you must find out who you are talking about: filthy rich people, mafia-bosses, succesfull entrepeneurs, well-educated career people, average middle-class, low-wage, minimum-wage, unemployed, or drug-addicts? Do you talk about money only, or do you also prefer to live in an area with low crime, low unemployment, low pollution, free healthcare, etc... How about the people there, are they racist pigs, thugs and gangsters, uppity snobs, religious zealots, friendly pub-goers, nice but boring middle-class, etc...
An important difference between european countries and USA is the regulation of the workplace. Typically, europeans work a lot less, and have some protection from getting sacked at the employers whim. This should also count when you evaluate the standard of living. In short, having "been there" is not enough.
If Europe was so much better, why isn't everyone going from the US to there? Instead the flow is reversed.
Really? Can you back it up with numbers?
Ok, it's probably correct, but I don't think it has anything to do with living standard. The most important factors are probably (1) "The American Dream" --- if you dream about being succesfull, you go to USA, (2) Language --- most people already know English, thus it's easier than to move to e.g. Sweden, and (3) Size --- more people have heard of USA than any given european country (and this goes especially for USians)
As an aside, necks are tougher than most people think. In movies, the hero grabs the villian by the head and makes a severe twisting motion accompanied by a loud "CRACK". In real life, the amount of force needed to break a neck seems to exceed the amoount of force that a SUV traveling at 35 mph imparts to a stopped vehicle at a stoplight.
Ever tried pulling a bolt? Even a small one would need several tons of pulling power in order to pull it loose from the nut. Yet, using my bare hands, I am able to separate the bolt from the nut by using a rotational motion.
The neck is pretty solid too. But if you know how to do it, it's not that hard to break it. All you have to do is to pull in the right direction.
Now try to put a bolt and nut in a colliding car, and see if they separate...
That being said, I agree with your point. If someone were shooting at my head, my immediate concern would not be that if the armor held, my neck might break from the impact. Unless I could get one of those sci-fi forcefields...
Shouldn't all information sources be corroborated? (dic. def. link provided for the average/. user)
Yes, and you should also exercise regularly, keep your house clean, and brush your teeth. But nobody's perfect.
Most users use wikipedia because it's convenient, and just don't care enough about the subject that they bother to check another source. This means occationally they will learn something incorrect from wikipedia. That's ok, because most of what they learn from wikipedia is correct, so it's better with wikipedia than without wikipedia.
If I were Seigenthaler, I would be pretty pissed off, though...
Personally, I don't think the biggest problem here is wikipedia. Wikipedia pretty clairly states what it is on its frontpage. And an erroneous article can be corrected pretty easily. But, as the first article explained, once the incorrect article was in wikipedia, it found its way into gazillions of other online "articles", "dictionaries" and "encyclopedias" on the Internet. The problem isn't so much that users put to much trust in wikipedia, the problem is that certain other content providers seem to trust wikipedia blindly!
First, the Chinese government sees all religious groups in their country as a threat to the government and, by extension, to the people. Are they right in supressing all religious expression?
The chinese government is right in seeing all religious groups as a threat to the government. After all, their government is based on the idea that they are, so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether they are right in supressing all religious expression? I would like to say yes, but I think religious behaviour is inherently human, and that it would be hard to suppress entirely, thus my answer would be "no".
Not all religious fundamentalists are trying to destroy the educational system.
No, but all religious fundamentalists are nonetheless dangerous people. That's why we call them "fundamentalists" (or "fundies").
Comments such as his could offend Christians even if they were opposed to the recent educational reforms.
A professor is supposed to speak with authority on subjects in which (s)he is an expert. His/her opinion might be unpopular among some people, but science is (luckily) not based on consensus.
But seriously, even most christians are reasonable people, and not fundamentalists (even in Kansas, I suppose...). Bashing fundamentalists shouldn't make you too unpopular anywhere, or something is seriously wrong!
Yes, this is another valid interpretation, that God can break the rules of logic. I usually don't introduce that one, because people who insist in believing in God is able to find that one themselves. And I'm certainly not going to help them in strengthening their irrational beliefs. I much prefer them to struggle a bit explaining why the believe in a totally illogical thing, so they at least know it's an irrational belief.
PS: in case you were wondering, the non-existance of contradictions is an axiom of logic (ie, we believe...).
I think you have misunderstood the foundations of logic. That something is an "axiom", doesn't mean that we're less sure of it, then of anything else. It simply means that we choose it as something we don't have to prove, because we feel it's "obvious".
Using "axioms" and "inference rules" we can go on to prove or disprove other logic statements. But the "inference rules" used aren't proven either, so you can look at them as "axioms" too!
The beauty of logic isn't that we can prove everything in it. The beauty is that everything we prove, we can be as sure of, as we were about the axioms and inference rules themselves, when we (or someone else) defined the logic we use.
You are of course free to state that any given set of axioms and inference rules will be arbitrary, and therefore, that any logic is as good as the other. But if you take this position, you may as well become a full-blown idealist. Practically, we don't use logic because it's beautiful, we use it because we find that with a carefully selected set of axioms and inference rules, it lets us solve problems that occur in nature, in a way that makes the answers correspond to what we see in nature. This is the essence of all scientific progress.
I assume it's a written test anyway. So why would you need to know how to do any of this in practice anyway? Do you expect the others with this kind of certification to have any practical experience?
So he resigned as chairman of religious studies, and he cancelled the course, but he still teaches at the University. I'm certainly not condoning the physical assault, and I'm not even religious, but I have to say this guy used pretty poor judgement for a chairman of a religious studies department.
Why? Doesn't a professor of religious studies posess the necessary qualifications to critique a fringe group of fundamentalists trying to destroy the school system?
If a professor of East Asian studies referred to Buddhist monks as a bunch of chanting idiots running around in bath robes, that wouldn't be tolerated, and his statements shouldn't either.
In the real world, we have a case where a professor is opposing a fringe group of fundamentalists that is trying to harm the education of thousands of students. In your example, there is a professor that speaks unrespectfully about a group that does no harm to anybody.
You are terribly confused. You're assuming that because one particular strain of "Creationism" which has been popularly rejected (the 8k years nonsense - or whatever it is) for quite a while being false means that all creationistic science is false.
Well, but it is. All creationistic junk-science is false. Note that I do not use the phrase "creationistic science", because there is nothing scientific about creationism. It is simply apologetics, a way of coming up with excuses for a position that they can't explain in a rational way why they're holding.
I really don't know where to start with your analogy, because it's simply flawed. A better analogy to modern evolutionary teaching would be to take two beakers , put corks in them, and then burry them for someone to come around and find 2 million years later, and for the person that finds them to conclude that one was derived from the other - simply because they were chemically similar and found in the same place. There's no way to verify it, just an assumption.
No, his analogy was completely justified. Insisting that evolution is "just a theory", is as stupid as insisting that gravitation or the chemical "law of constant composition" is "just a theory".
As for your example. Now, suppose that you found two intact beakers with corks, containing a similar chemical compound, in the ground somewhere. It would be quite natural to assume that the mechanisms that put those two beakers there, are similar, and related, and perhaps even that they were put there by the same person. Only a creationist would insist that they had been created by God at the exact same time he created the universe, and that it would be impossible to create new kinds of beakers because God created all the "species" of beakers when he created the universe.
Are you on crack? The article discusses an analog encryption scheme for transfer of information along physical lines. On the other hand, VIA Padlock is a hardware implementation of a random number generator and some encryption algorithms.
Apart from having used the word "encryption" in the description of both of them, they have about as much to do with each other as a shoe and a condom (both are pieces of "clothing").
The real question is, why was Ou using a spreadsheet when a database was called for
Why? If a user wants to have a really big spreadsheet, there shouldn't be a policy to stop him/her from doing it. Ooo2 calc should do what the user asks. And if the test has shown that Ooo2 calc is much slower at loading large spreadsheets than microsoft excel, then there clearly is room for improvement.
While I agree that this doesn't in any way show that ooo2 calc is generally worse than microsoft excel in every way, it is one valid datapoint, and if I were an Ooo2 developer, I would make sure that problem was filed as a bug/wishlist, with a really low priority.
Browns other criticisms can be as easily dismissed. By relying on Ou's slanted work to prop up his smear of OOo, Open Source and the Baazar, Brown has unmasked himself as a Microsoft shill of the worst kind... Mimiking the wolf who wore grandma's clothing in his attempt to kill Little Red Riding Hood, Brown is trying to kill FOOS while wearing a Penquin suit.
And people complain about why open source enthusiasts are increasingly being viewed as zealots... While I agree that Andrew Browns article wasn't particulary insightful, he is just as entitled to form an opinion as the rest of us. It's not like he is the devil (or the wolf from little red riding hood), just because he forms an opinion different from yours.
Actually, your accusations mimics perfectly the tactics used by opponents of free speech (such as dictators, communists, McCarthyists, etc...). Instead of attacking what Brown says because you find there are flaws in his reasoning, you accuse Brown of being a bad person with a hidden and dangerous agenda, and that because of that nobody should listen to him.
Seriously... it may simulate thought freakishly accurately. But it still doesn't think.
This is a matter of philosophy. If you are to take this standpoint, you can just as well say that you don't believe AI is possible. An AI will never be human, but it could be something that is capable of appearing freakishly similar to human. The interesting thing is whether it is "intelligent", we already know it's "artificial". This is analogous to the chinese room argument among armchair AI philosophers.
By my standards, we'll have achieved creating a digital/robotic, sentient being when the original code is entirely basic, but develops its knowledge and personality by using senses/experiences in order to learn and develop itself.
I must disagree. There's absolutely no reason to insist on the original code being "entirely basic". And I would be very surprised if it turned out to be so. Neither do I believe that the "original code" of the human brain is "entirely basic". If it was, we would already have figured it out. More likely, the "original code" of the human brain is freakishly complicated, and close to impossible to understand. As most psychologists have long since figured out, we are not born "tabula rasa", with the brain in a "blank slate". Our behaviour is preprogrammed, although we have the ability to change that behaviour to some extent through learning.
What we seem to agree upon is that it must "develop its knowledge and personality by using senses/experiences in order to learn and develop itself". Untill we have something like that, it is not "intelligent".
And even then, emotions are going to be a really hard one to put in there. It's a little more difficult than just saying, If bot.senses(touch) = poked then bot.speach(yell) = "OW!" End If
I'm not convinced emotions are that important. Well, of course it would need to have some kind of emotions. Emotions would guide it's behaviour, and one important emotion would be curiosity. But it doesn't need to have emotions that mimic human behaviour, for us to call it "intelligent". Although it would make it easier for us to communicate with it, if it did. I can easily imagine an intelligent alien lifeform somewhere in the universe, having totally different emotions from us, so why not an AI?
In fact, if I were to develop an AI (assuming I had the abilities to do it), I would choose my emtotions with care. Anger? No, I don't want an angry AI/robot, anger is needed in nature as a defense mechanism, but I don't want an AI to start defending itself. Love? It complicates our lives so much, and part of the reason for an AI would be to create something without those problems, so the answer is still no. Friendship? Possibly... Hunger? Definitely not. And so on...
Which is kind of the point, isn't it. If you're a shopowner, you obviously don't want dogs, cats are birds right outside your shop either... You simply want your entrance clean and inviting...
From my experience, the way to write comments, is to make them say exactly the things you want to know when you inherit some other bozos code after 10 years...
Here's my list of the MOST important things to make clear in code:
WHAT is this shit supposed to do?
WHY do we need to do that?
Of course, there are other things that could be valuable as comments, such as:
HOW does this shit do whatever it's supposed to
do?
WHERE does this shit get its data from, and WHERE does it put it?
WHO came up with this braindead design anyway?
...but these are less important than the two above...
Obviously, I'm the kind of guy who thinks a short README.txt is infinitely more interesting than thousands of "x++;// increase x by 1" lines...
If you can't even understand what some code is supposed to do, or why anyone would want to do that, then you really have a problem understanding the code. And to tell you the truth, it happens pretty much all time for me... While a program might have a documented purpose, an individual class, or even function or method has a documented purpose, very often you will have to dig pretty deep before you even find out the major components and interfaces of a big program (I.e. which files should I hunt in for changing how part foo behaves...).
Numerical computing can deal with the 32-bit floating point issue pretty easily.
I am no numerical analyst. But it seems to me that when you really need 8x4Ghz, you are doing some spiffy stuff. The more spiffy stuff you do, the higher precision you are going to need. While I agree that there are plenty of literature on "stable" numerical algorithms, after enough iterations, anything will become less accurate. Add to that the extra cost of developing the program for the cell (lots of workarounds for weak precision and non-ieee floating point semantics, as well as the (intended) complexity of developing for the cell), very few people are going to get interested.
Do you think no one did high precision mathematics on 16-bit CPUs?
Of course somebody did them. But most people doing numerical work back then would buy a better computer (or at least a floating point co-processor).
The techniques are old and well understood. Sure it costs some extra cycles, but when you have 8x4ghz going for you, you can easily afford it.
So what good is 8x4GHz going to do you if you have to use a software emulation of an FPU? Are you even sure that the SPU can be used efficiently for emulating FPU instructions? Add to that the extra cost of converting your algorithms from a normal computer, and any gains seems pretty small.
So, I believe that the Cell will find wider and wider popularity as people get around to thinking about their problems a bit differently, and as the tools begin to automate that process.
So do I. But markets are hard to predict. At the very least, someone must offer it to normal computer users in a more convenient form than a playstation console (such as a PCI-express card). And the architecture must be evolved to give people what they want, which is a line of binary-compatible cell-processors with different price/performance ratios, giving at least some hope of further evolution so people can justify the initial costs of developing software for it.
when the speed is fast enough that the single threaded applications run fast enough, even if technically crippled, will it matter?
If performance doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. The discussion is moot. Go and buy a cheap 386.
If cell is what what it claims to be, developers will create new applications use multi threaed applications. Compared to 15 years ago, multi-threading is a snap.
There seems to be a difference between that the cell claims to be, and what you perceives it to be. The SPUs of the cell will make some specialized things go fast. Gamers will love it. It could also be a musicians- or video-editors dream machine. And quite likely we'll find it in a lot of specialized embedded hardware... But the SPUs of the cell are not designed as, and can not be used as general purpose CPUs. No matter how many SPUs are in the cell processor, it won't make your builds go any faster, allow you to serve more webpages, database-clients, or whatever... For that we need general purpose CPUs.
Even the supercomputing people won't be able to use the cell (yet), as it's only got 32-bit floating point.
The architectures are so dissimilar that even innovative emulator techniques like dynamic recompilation wouldn't be able to achieve reasonable performance.
I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly enhanced by limiting access to compilers/assemblers (by means of pricing and with the cooperation of the open source community)
Ok, you've proved you're a troll. Now, go away!
It makes more sense than trying to go out and educate every user. Think about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"? We don't try to educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform as a licensed electrician. We don't "educate" passengers and let anyone who cares be a bus driver give it a try. Why are things always so difficult when it comes to computers?
We "educate" our users in nearly every other field. We teach people to prepare food in a way that does not result in a house fire. We teach people to lock their doors. We teach people not to smoke on the bed, and not to leave candles burning when they go away. We teach people to cross the street in a safe manner. We teach, and even license, people to drive. We teach people not to put two nails into electrical outlets and see what happens, and we teach them that they should not do repairs on electrical equipment when the power is on, and we teach them that some repairs even needs a licensed electrician. And we do teach bus passengers to sit down and not disturb the driver.
This is the solution. If you doubt me, look here for an article about it.
It works. Reliably. In my previous job, we pretty much depended on it. A single faulty tape could cost us from $50k and up. And we didn't do backups of data on it... The tape drives were used continuosly 24/7.
If you can afford it, is an entirely different question. I think it's about $30k...
People worry too much about VMEM, IMHO. If I write a program that allocates 1G of memory, but then spins around using only 10k for the next hour, it'll have basically zero impact on the OS. Only ~10k if real RAM is actually getting used.
Not true. Say that after that hour, your program needs to access all of its memory again (because you deiconified it, or whatever...). And that you have done other stuff during the last hour, that caused the rest of your gargantuan memory hog program to be paged out to disk. That means 1GB needs to be loaded from disk.
At about 18 MB per second (which is what I measured when trying "time cat somemovie.avi >/dev/null"), that would take about a minute.
Paging to disk is no longer a solution to the problem of running out of memory. With most users having >512MB RAM, it just takes too long to reload memory from disk. Swapspace is obsolete! Besides, linux paging and disk scheduling isn't that smart. Try to do something productive at the same time as updatedb is running.
In the future, we may be able to swap to some cheaper slower memory, a solid state diskdrive, or something else. But untill then, both memory usage and disk time is a scarce resource. On the other hand, multicore has already arrived. CPU is going to get cheap!
I don't know about your box, but mine (Athlon XP2000+) can decompress JPEGs at a rate of around only 3MB per second. My disk drives, OTOH, are a hell of a lot faster than that.
I agree you have a point here. I'm not advocating decompressing jpegs on the fly when scrolling. Memory is scarce, but not *that* scarce. But saving memory by discarding uncompressed images from closed windows and tabs, and "back" pages, would be a good start. You only need speed for common operations. Wasting tons of memory on things rarely done, will eventually slow the whole system down.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully they will move where they belong: /usr/bin
For that matter, what was the criteria between whether something was put in /usr/bin or /usr/bin/X11R6?
My guess is that because slackware did it, everybody else did it too. Or maybe the sources just came packaged that way, and nobody bothered to edit the sources. Most likely, this happened long before the linux filesystem hierarchy standard. I have no idea why it has survived as long as it has. It is just annoying.
We have /usr/bin, /usr/X11R6/bin, /usr/bin/X11, and /etc/X11, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11, and /usr/share/fonts, /etc/X11/fonts, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, and so on...
Yes it is. It is a single country, with similar law, economy, culture, history, etc... There is the american dream, the american way of life, etc...
In Europe it is different. It is a continent of national states, who have spent the last 1000s of years fighting each other every few decades. USA is mostly about being united against a common enemy. Europe is mostly about endless bickering with the closest neighbours, to the point where you make alliances with other enemies to get at your neighbour. Being french is infinitely more important to a frenchman, than being texan is to a texan (both being pretty extreme examples on their respective continents...)
The culture in most european countries are many centuries older than the entire american history, and each is unique. This is why efforts such as EU bog down into a bureuacratic mess that never seems to get anywhere.
The US is geographically larger than Europe, plus it has a lot more cultural diversity with its immigrant heritage.
The cultural diversity of the US is mixed up. Thus USAs national identity, is to be a mix of different cultures. In Europe, the culture you'll find in Finland is very different from the culture you'll find in Spain (or even Sweden). (Ok, states differ in USA too, but they are all american, in a way that differs profoundly from european countries all being european, asian countries all being asian, or african countries all being african. There is the american way, there is no such thing as a european way).
Economics vary a lot within the US too, from the affluent suburban populations to the less affluent rural American regions.
Yes, but this is completely normal within any country.
Many countries in Europe are smaller than many US states. France for example is about the same size as Texas.
Actually, most european countries are smaller than any of the US states...
And so on...
Of course, this discriminates against users not knowing english, and users of very low intelligence...
So what are the main stream using these days? Fresco? Qt/Embedded? The Y Window System? rio?
and even there, I know many Debian users, for example, who are eager to switch to X.org.
Debian IS using xorg (only stable and maybe testing still uses Xfree86)
Since you are obviously confused, let me clarify. "X", "X11", and "The X Window System" all refers to the same thing. It is a specification for a way of displaying and interacting with graphics in windows on a computer and/or through a network.
X.org used to be the organization that coordinated that specification between various vendors of X11. It also maintained a "reference implementation" that nobody used. Then X11-innovation stagnated among the major unix vendors. X.org slowly died, and XFree86 (a "vendor", and a free implementation) became the defacto standard. Then XFree86 (the organization, not the implementation) did something stupid with their license, and the code was forked by mostly the same people that used to work on XFree86, and they decided to call themselves X.org (and their implementation xorg), since the name now was available).
Today, most everybody uses xorg, not XFree86. This is an update to xorg. To end-users it means zilch, apart from the fact that it's better for developers, and they can expect to see some innovation finally happen in the X11-world (well, in the long-term at least!)
You see, that's the problem with USians. They seem to think of Europe as some place. But in reality, if someone is saying "I've been to Europe", the only thing possible to conclude from that is that the speaker is ignorant, and most likely from US, because if (s)he were from anywhere else in the world, (s)he would say, "I've been to France/Iceland/Ukraine/Albania", or something like that.
I realize that europeans are no better. We say the same thing about US (which can be excused, as the US is at least one country), but we're also saying "I've been to Africa" which is about as meaningless as having been to Europe.
As for comparing the standard of living. Well, it's complicated. Having "been there" is not a good enough study. And comparing how nice cars you see isn't a good metric. First of all, you must find out who you are talking about: filthy rich people, mafia-bosses, succesfull entrepeneurs, well-educated career people, average middle-class, low-wage, minimum-wage, unemployed, or drug-addicts? Do you talk about money only, or do you also prefer to live in an area with low crime, low unemployment, low pollution, free healthcare, etc... How about the people there, are they racist pigs, thugs and gangsters, uppity snobs, religious zealots, friendly pub-goers, nice but boring middle-class, etc...
An important difference between european countries and USA is the regulation of the workplace. Typically, europeans work a lot less, and have some protection from getting sacked at the employers whim. This should also count when you evaluate the standard of living. In short, having "been there" is not enough.
If Europe was so much better, why isn't everyone going from the US to there? Instead the flow is reversed.
Really? Can you back it up with numbers?
Ok, it's probably correct, but I don't think it has anything to do with living standard. The most important factors are probably (1) "The American Dream" --- if you dream about being succesfull, you go to USA, (2) Language --- most people already know English, thus it's easier than to move to e.g. Sweden, and (3) Size --- more people have heard of USA than any given european country (and this goes especially for USians)
Ever tried pulling a bolt? Even a small one would need several tons of pulling power in order to pull it loose from the nut. Yet, using my bare hands, I am able to separate the bolt from the nut by using a rotational motion.
The neck is pretty solid too. But if you know how to do it, it's not that hard to break it. All you have to do is to pull in the right direction.
Now try to put a bolt and nut in a colliding car, and see if they separate...
That being said, I agree with your point. If someone were shooting at my head, my immediate concern would not be that if the armor held, my neck might break from the impact. Unless I could get one of those sci-fi forcefields...
Yes, and you should also exercise regularly, keep your house clean, and brush your teeth. But nobody's perfect.
Most users use wikipedia because it's convenient, and just don't care enough about the subject that they bother to check another source. This means occationally they will learn something incorrect from wikipedia. That's ok, because most of what they learn from wikipedia is correct, so it's better with wikipedia than without wikipedia.
If I were Seigenthaler, I would be pretty pissed off, though...
Personally, I don't think the biggest problem here is wikipedia. Wikipedia pretty clairly states what it is on its frontpage. And an erroneous article can be corrected pretty easily. But, as the first article explained, once the incorrect article was in wikipedia, it found its way into gazillions of other online "articles", "dictionaries" and "encyclopedias" on the Internet. The problem isn't so much that users put to much trust in wikipedia, the problem is that certain other content providers seem to trust wikipedia blindly!
The chinese government is right in seeing all religious groups as a threat to the government. After all, their government is based on the idea that they are, so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether they are right in supressing all religious expression? I would like to say yes, but I think religious behaviour is inherently human, and that it would be hard to suppress entirely, thus my answer would be "no".
Not all religious fundamentalists are trying to destroy the educational system.
No, but all religious fundamentalists are nonetheless dangerous people. That's why we call them "fundamentalists" (or "fundies").
Comments such as his could offend Christians even if they were opposed to the recent educational reforms.
A professor is supposed to speak with authority on subjects in which (s)he is an expert. His/her opinion might be unpopular among some people, but science is (luckily) not based on consensus.
But seriously, even most christians are reasonable people, and not fundamentalists (even in Kansas, I suppose...). Bashing fundamentalists shouldn't make you too unpopular anywhere, or something is seriously wrong!
PS: in case you were wondering, the non-existance of contradictions is an axiom of logic (ie, we believe...).
I think you have misunderstood the foundations of logic. That something is an "axiom", doesn't mean that we're less sure of it, then of anything else. It simply means that we choose it as something we don't have to prove, because we feel it's "obvious".
Using "axioms" and "inference rules" we can go on to prove or disprove other logic statements. But the "inference rules" used aren't proven either, so you can look at them as "axioms" too!
The beauty of logic isn't that we can prove everything in it. The beauty is that everything we prove, we can be as sure of, as we were about the axioms and inference rules themselves, when we (or someone else) defined the logic we use.
You are of course free to state that any given set of axioms and inference rules will be arbitrary, and therefore, that any logic is as good as the other. But if you take this position, you may as well become a full-blown idealist. Practically, we don't use logic because it's beautiful, we use it because we find that with a carefully selected set of axioms and inference rules, it lets us solve problems that occur in nature, in a way that makes the answers correspond to what we see in nature. This is the essence of all scientific progress.
I assume it's a written test anyway. So why would you need to know how to do any of this in practice anyway? Do you expect the others with this kind of certification to have any practical experience?
The question is linguistic nonsense. Don't agonize over it. God can't make a square circle, either.
Why not? If God is omnipotent, he ought to be able to make a square circle.
Which means that either God (or anyone else for that matter) can't be omnipotent, because "omnipotence" is itself is a contradiction in terms.
Why? Doesn't a professor of religious studies posess the necessary qualifications to critique a fringe group of fundamentalists trying to destroy the school system?
If a professor of East Asian studies referred to Buddhist monks as a bunch of chanting idiots running around in bath robes, that wouldn't be tolerated, and his statements shouldn't either.
In the real world, we have a case where a professor is opposing a fringe group of fundamentalists that is trying to harm the education of thousands of students. In your example, there is a professor that speaks unrespectfully about a group that does no harm to anybody.
I just fail to see the connection!
Well, but it is. All creationistic junk-science is false. Note that I do not use the phrase "creationistic science", because there is nothing scientific about creationism. It is simply apologetics, a way of coming up with excuses for a position that they can't explain in a rational way why they're holding.
I really don't know where to start with your analogy, because it's simply flawed. A better analogy to modern evolutionary teaching would be to take two beakers , put corks in them, and then burry them for someone to come around and find 2 million years later, and for the person that finds them to conclude that one was derived from the other - simply because they were chemically similar and found in the same place. There's no way to verify it, just an assumption.
No, his analogy was completely justified. Insisting that evolution is "just a theory", is as stupid as insisting that gravitation or the chemical "law of constant composition" is "just a theory".
As for your example. Now, suppose that you found two intact beakers with corks, containing a similar chemical compound, in the ground somewhere. It would be quite natural to assume that the mechanisms that put those two beakers there, are similar, and related, and perhaps even that they were put there by the same person. Only a creationist would insist that they had been created by God at the exact same time he created the universe, and that it would be impossible to create new kinds of beakers because God created all the "species" of beakers when he created the universe.
Apart from having used the word "encryption" in the description of both of them, they have about as much to do with each other as a shoe and a condom (both are pieces of "clothing").
Obviously what we need, is lot's of skyscrapers around the fold.
Why? If a user wants to have a really big spreadsheet, there shouldn't be a policy to stop him/her from doing it. Ooo2 calc should do what the user asks. And if the test has shown that Ooo2 calc is much slower at loading large spreadsheets than microsoft excel, then there clearly is room for improvement.
While I agree that this doesn't in any way show that ooo2 calc is generally worse than microsoft excel in every way, it is one valid datapoint, and if I were an Ooo2 developer, I would make sure that problem was filed as a bug/wishlist, with a really low priority.
Browns other criticisms can be as easily dismissed. By relying on Ou's slanted work to prop up his smear of OOo, Open Source and the Baazar, Brown has unmasked himself as a Microsoft shill of the worst kind... Mimiking the wolf who wore grandma's clothing in his attempt to kill Little Red Riding Hood, Brown is trying to kill FOOS while wearing a Penquin suit.
And people complain about why open source enthusiasts are increasingly being viewed as zealots... While I agree that Andrew Browns article wasn't particulary insightful, he is just as entitled to form an opinion as the rest of us. It's not like he is the devil (or the wolf from little red riding hood), just because he forms an opinion different from yours.
Actually, your accusations mimics perfectly the tactics used by opponents of free speech (such as dictators, communists, McCarthyists, etc...). Instead of attacking what Brown says because you find there are flaws in his reasoning, you accuse Brown of being a bad person with a hidden and dangerous agenda, and that because of that nobody should listen to him.
Welcome, opinion police!
This is a matter of philosophy. If you are to take this standpoint, you can just as well say that you don't believe AI is possible. An AI will never be human, but it could be something that is capable of appearing freakishly similar to human. The interesting thing is whether it is "intelligent", we already know it's "artificial". This is analogous to the chinese room argument among armchair AI philosophers.
By my standards, we'll have achieved creating a digital/robotic, sentient being when the original code is entirely basic, but develops its knowledge and personality by using senses/experiences in order to learn and develop itself.
I must disagree. There's absolutely no reason to insist on the original code being "entirely basic". And I would be very surprised if it turned out to be so. Neither do I believe that the "original code" of the human brain is "entirely basic". If it was, we would already have figured it out. More likely, the "original code" of the human brain is freakishly complicated, and close to impossible to understand. As most psychologists have long since figured out, we are not born "tabula rasa", with the brain in a "blank slate". Our behaviour is preprogrammed, although we have the ability to change that behaviour to some extent through learning.
What we seem to agree upon is that it must "develop its knowledge and personality by using senses/experiences in order to learn and develop itself". Untill we have something like that, it is not "intelligent".
And even then, emotions are going to be a really hard one to put in there. It's a little more difficult than just saying, If bot.senses(touch) = poked then bot.speach(yell) = "OW!" End If
I'm not convinced emotions are that important. Well, of course it would need to have some kind of emotions. Emotions would guide it's behaviour, and one important emotion would be curiosity. But it doesn't need to have emotions that mimic human behaviour, for us to call it "intelligent". Although it would make it easier for us to communicate with it, if it did. I can easily imagine an intelligent alien lifeform somewhere in the universe, having totally different emotions from us, so why not an AI?
In fact, if I were to develop an AI (assuming I had the abilities to do it), I would choose my emtotions with care. Anger? No, I don't want an angry AI/robot, anger is needed in nature as a defense mechanism, but I don't want an AI to start defending itself. Love? It complicates our lives so much, and part of the reason for an AI would be to create something without those problems, so the answer is still no. Friendship? Possibly... Hunger? Definitely not. And so on...
Which is kind of the point, isn't it. If you're a shopowner, you obviously don't want dogs, cats are birds right outside your shop either... You simply want your entrance clean and inviting...
Here's my list of the MOST important things to make clear in code:
Of course, there are other things that could be valuable as comments, such as:
Obviously, I'm the kind of guy who thinks a short README.txt is infinitely more interesting than thousands of "x++; // increase x by 1" lines...
If you can't even understand what some code is supposed to do, or why anyone would want to do that, then you really have a problem understanding the code. And to tell you the truth, it happens pretty much all time for me... While a program might have a documented purpose, an individual class, or even function or method has a documented purpose, very often you will have to dig pretty deep before you even find out the major components and interfaces of a big program (I.e. which files should I hunt in for changing how part foo behaves...).
Numerical computing can deal with the 32-bit floating point issue pretty easily.
I am no numerical analyst. But it seems to me that when you really need 8x4Ghz, you are doing some spiffy stuff. The more spiffy stuff you do, the higher precision you are going to need. While I agree that there are plenty of literature on "stable" numerical algorithms, after enough iterations, anything will become less accurate. Add to that the extra cost of developing the program for the cell (lots of workarounds for weak precision and non-ieee floating point semantics, as well as the (intended) complexity of developing for the cell), very few people are going to get interested.
Do you think no one did high precision mathematics on 16-bit CPUs?
Of course somebody did them. But most people doing numerical work back then would buy a better computer (or at least a floating point co-processor).
The techniques are old and well understood. Sure it costs some extra cycles, but when you have 8x4ghz going for you, you can easily afford it.
So what good is 8x4GHz going to do you if you have to use a software emulation of an FPU? Are you even sure that the SPU can be used efficiently for emulating FPU instructions? Add to that the extra cost of converting your algorithms from a normal computer, and any gains seems pretty small.
So, I believe that the Cell will find wider and wider popularity as people get around to thinking about their problems a bit differently, and as the tools begin to automate that process.
So do I. But markets are hard to predict. At the very least, someone must offer it to normal computer users in a more convenient form than a playstation console (such as a PCI-express card). And the architecture must be evolved to give people what they want, which is a line of binary-compatible cell-processors with different price/performance ratios, giving at least some hope of further evolution so people can justify the initial costs of developing software for it.
If performance doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. The discussion is moot. Go and buy a cheap 386.
If cell is what what it claims to be, developers will create new applications use multi threaed applications. Compared to 15 years ago, multi-threading is a snap.
There seems to be a difference between that the cell claims to be, and what you perceives it to be. The SPUs of the cell will make some specialized things go fast. Gamers will love it. It could also be a musicians- or video-editors dream machine. And quite likely we'll find it in a lot of specialized embedded hardware... But the SPUs of the cell are not designed as, and can not be used as general purpose CPUs. No matter how many SPUs are in the cell processor, it won't make your builds go any faster, allow you to serve more webpages, database-clients, or whatever... For that we need general purpose CPUs.
Even the supercomputing people won't be able to use the cell (yet), as it's only got 32-bit floating point.
Ouch, does that count for innovative these days?
Ok, you've proved you're a troll. Now, go away!
It makes more sense than trying to go out and educate every user. Think about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"? We don't try to educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform as a licensed electrician. We don't "educate" passengers and let anyone who cares be a bus driver give it a try. Why are things always so difficult when it comes to computers?
We "educate" our users in nearly every other field. We teach people to prepare food in a way that does not result in a house fire. We teach people to lock their doors. We teach people not to smoke on the bed, and not to leave candles burning when they go away. We teach people to cross the street in a safe manner. We teach, and even license, people to drive. We teach people not to put two nails into electrical outlets and see what happens, and we teach them that they should not do repairs on electrical equipment when the power is on, and we teach them that some repairs even needs a licensed electrician. And we do teach bus passengers to sit down and not disturb the driver.
It works. Reliably. In my previous job, we pretty much depended on it. A single faulty tape could cost us from $50k and up. And we didn't do backups of data on it... The tape drives were used continuosly 24/7.
If you can afford it, is an entirely different question. I think it's about $30k...
Not true. Say that after that hour, your program needs to access all of its memory again (because you deiconified it, or whatever...). And that you have done other stuff during the last hour, that caused the rest of your gargantuan memory hog program to be paged out to disk. That means 1GB needs to be loaded from disk.
At about 18 MB per second (which is what I measured when trying "time cat somemovie.avi > /dev/null"), that would take about a minute.
Paging to disk is no longer a solution to the problem of running out of memory. With most users having >512MB RAM, it just takes too long to reload memory from disk. Swapspace is obsolete! Besides, linux paging and disk scheduling isn't that smart. Try to do something productive at the same time as updatedb is running.
In the future, we may be able to swap to some cheaper slower memory, a solid state diskdrive, or something else. But untill then, both memory usage and disk time is a scarce resource. On the other hand, multicore has already arrived. CPU is going to get cheap!
I don't know about your box, but mine (Athlon XP2000+) can decompress JPEGs at a rate of around only 3MB per second. My disk drives, OTOH, are a hell of a lot faster than that.
I agree you have a point here. I'm not advocating decompressing jpegs on the fly when scrolling. Memory is scarce, but not *that* scarce. But saving memory by discarding uncompressed images from closed windows and tabs, and "back" pages, would be a good start. You only need speed for common operations. Wasting tons of memory on things rarely done, will eventually slow the whole system down.