Just because this sounds like a bad implementation, doesn't mean a good piece of techno-crap doesn't impart a ton of advantages on the battlefield. I know these soldiers' mission profile is probably "ride around a lot in a vehicle then man a checkpoint or go door-to-door through a block of houses" in which most of this crap is useless but for more elaborate or tactical missions, a headset and a locator map are probably very useful.
How about: the system turns off if any component is disconnected or removed from the body, and requires a code to log in when turned on? Sounds easy enough to me...
You are so intellectually weak it boggles the mind. In fact, you exemplify the intellectual weakness that allows Putin to continue pushing Russia into being the feeble-minded, authoritarian state it has always taken all too much comfort in.
Putin's authoritarian rule has almost nothing to do with the need to strengthen Russia's foreign stance, stabilize its economy, or purge corruption. The Russian government as it currently stands is incompatible with an open society. If you think that the ability to openly criticize the government or run in elections is not vital for Russia's well being or future stability and prosperity, or that it is somehow contingent on the weaselly excuses you present, I have nothing but disgust for you.
You're one of the countless Russian sheep, directed by the sovok-trained bureaucrats to smother the few Russians who understand the value of free thought and open society. Wake up.
...And don't even get me started with the wonderful i18n bugs that GAIM has all over the place. "Hasn't really been surpassed" my ass. I even tried 2.0, it's as shitty as it ever was.
As for the name change, well, it makes it that much less likely that I'll ever use GAIM again. (Not that there was a big chance to begin with...)
Can you tell it's been one of the most frustrating pieces of software I've ever had the displeasure to use?
Pidgin hasn't really been surpassed in its core focus--textual instant messaging. Gaim is nothing but a steaming pile of crap in its core focus--textual instant messaging. It crashes all the time and its UI usability is best described as "inspiring to claw your eyes out with a spoon". Besides the obvious UI problems, Gaim suffers from that unmistakable malaise of many projects associated with Gnome, the equal mix of incomprehensible and misplaced settings and features and the drive to remove any and all customization options from the UI.
At least one free project, Kopete, is light years ahead of Gaim in its core competency (text messaging). There are several other closed-source ones on Windows and Mac. There might be other open ones too, I don't know - it's not hard to beat Gaim's ingenious UI.
Surely the spontaneous origin of very simple life is more likely than the spontaneous creation of an all-powerful, all-knowing being who then created life, though. I never said it wasn't.
ignoring the greater question of jurisdiction while focusing on the lesser aspects The lesser aspects, huh? I can only hope that imagining where this country would be had the SCOTUS focused on the "lesser aspects" of its existence will remain a purely theoretical exercise for the forseeable future.
Because for all the willingness of SCOTUS to bend the jurisdiction assigned to it by the constitution, the other branches of government have proven to have infinitely more capacity for such abuse, and to need the SCOTUS for such abuse to be even remotely mitigated.
Yes. Chance did play a big role in it, and "supernatural forces" played none, but to trivialize the conditions that led to the formation of the universe, Earth-like planets and life as "it just happened by chance" is so simplistic as to be intellectually weak.
The Linux kernel is about 2MB in size. To generate it randomly, you need on the order of 2^2M tries. The number of atoms in the universe is about 1e68, and its age is about 14 billion years, or about 4e26 nanoseconds. Let's overestimate and say that every nanosecond, for every atom, the probability of the Linux kernel being expressed completely randomly from the surrounding atoms is 1/2^2M. Then so far we've had about 4e94, or 2^314 tries. The probability of this having occurred over those tries is then 1/(2^(2000000-314)). These odds cannot be beat. You must appreciate that there must be conditions to facilitate this chance. That's my point. And explaining how these facilitating conditions arise is one of the most interesting things you can do.
The fact that we sit here today though is that evolution is essentially exponential in its growth of complexity. Right?
That statement makes very little sense, and on its face is false. I think you're trying to say that evolution iterates through exponential amounts of possible genetic makeups over time. That's not exactly true, either.
Or is your real gripe that saying 'it just happened' undermines the human ego? Or wait, where you just chiming in to say, "I know more about it than you do"?
Now you're just making yourself look dumb by going ad hominem.
This is the whole point that I'm trying to make. The classification as it is does not allow for a distinction between the lack of belief and a belief in the non-existence of a deity. As far as I can tell, at least in common usage, the current classification implies a belief in an atheist, and the lack of all belief to be a flavor of agnosticism.
The definition of agnosticism is ridiculously overly broad in the American cultural establishment. Those figures are not surprising, since "agnostic" in American English means all the religious stances from "I'm religious but I don't want to offend any of the several religions I like, so I dither between them, so I'm agnostic" to "I'm not interested in defining my religious stance" to "all kinds of religion including atheism are equally absurd and intellectually weak, and so is this classification system, but if you want a pigeonhole, then call me agnostic".
You understand that you're a bit like someone who knows no programming at all trying to explain, oh I don't know, cache locality patterns in callback functions under virtualization? Or claiming that the Linux kernel can conceivably be obtained by streaming/dev/urandom into a file?
Sure, a complete archaeal organism (the genomic DNA alone is insufficient for propagation) could arise by chance. But the probability of this event occurring in our universe's lifetime, in its physical configuration, is infinitesimally small. Instead, the (very weak) consensus is that life was born as a self-replicating ribozyme, a string of nucleic acids that gains function by folding upon itself. The thousands of details of how life progressed to and past that step to a population of robust organisms that archaea are, are still very unclear.
The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in molecular biology. The vast majority of evolutionary increments we have observed between organisms are easily explained on the molecular level. Spontaneous origin of life by no means is. And claiming that "it just happened by chance" in evolutionary molecular biology is absurdly simplistic.
You're free to use an obsolute POS closed operating system, and you're free to make a fork of an open source project to support it. And others are free to completely ignore you.
Applaud it passes Acid 2 compatibility but don't expect it or demand it. Acid2 is NOT a standard./i.
Mm-hmm, and the NHTSA crash test is not a standard either. I mean, who cares if something doesn't pass a test for standard compliance if it looks good and works well? Nothing could possibly go wrong when using it, could it? And web standards are more like guidelines anyway.
WTF is wrong with increasing the dpi? Even Windows is capable of running at any reasonable dpi you throw at it, and it looks a hell of a lot nicer at 130 dpi.
Civil and open debate happens here and elsewhere every day, but it is only possible when participants are minimally informed about the subject at hand. Like in the article linked, your claims make it abundantly clear that you're not informed, and see fit to spew flamebait nonsense nonetheless. Don't expect a civil debate with these ingredients.
The people who really need the speed, those running clusters and such, aren't using Gentoo. Quite a few of them are, and I say this as someone who spent the past 6 months researching software options for HPC clusters. And while we're at it, I'd like to put in that as a Gentoo user, I'm a little underwhelmed by the "flexibility" that Rocks users tout so much.
There are many 100+ node Gentoo cluster deployments out there, precisely because Gentoo offers such easy customization.
Text search for "Micro-howto: Creating master and slave nodes for clustering". Everything up to the double newline is relevant.
Any particular problem you've run into?
Re:Gentoo definitely is in crisis.
on
Is Gentoo in crisis?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Your sentiment is valid. Your points are not.
The first thing to do is to stop emerging world. Emerge things when you know you want them, otherwise just run glsa-check (really "glsa-check|grep '\[N\]'") to scan for vulnerabilities. And if you do upgrade a big package, run revdep-rebuild.
Gentoo is not well-suited for the beginner desktop user or beginner corporate sysadmin. Its features do impart the drawbacks you describe: the config syntax changes would only be encountered by someone upgrading to the next release of a traditonal distro, where they are expected. In general, traditional distros don't have to deal with nearly the same amount of QA testing that Gentoo does. So really, regular desktop users are better off with ubuntu and friends, junior sysadmins are better off with RHEL and friends. It's when you need the flexibility Gentoo can provide that you want to use it.
I don't personally care for the XMMS issue, but since XMMS needed GTK1 and had vulnerabilities that needed fixing because its upstream dev team disbanded, it's really predicated on those two issues (you do realize that it's irresponsible for a dev to keep a package with known vulnerabilities in the tree, right?). You can still install it from an overlay, you can install a modern XMMS clone, and as far as I'm concerned, any package that doesn't support utf8 should get off the face of the earth ASAP.
Gentoo does need new QA tools to deal with the combinatorial explosion of package versioning and configuration possibilities. That, and a bit more immunity to drama on part of the devs (e.g. the ability to tell ciaranm to fuck off), is necessary for Gentoo not to stagnate.
To add to my earlier comment, the flexibility I speak about is not just superficial, control panel type stuff. I routinely write ebuilds for various packages in my scientific field, for both internal and public use, and it's much easier to do than with any packaging system I know of. The Gentoo mainline repository has more packages in many specialist fields than any other distro, and the overlays have much more. For any package, Gentoo offers the choice of staying with the solid, well-tested version, the cutting-edge version that came out yesterday, or, if you're that crazy, even something from the svn trunk - all with a single command. Most packages are also much better tested against various configurations than on other distros, due to the system being a moving target. (The flip side is that sometimes stability does suffer, and you need extra precautions to deploy Gentoo on mission-critical servers.)
And finally, I couldn't care less about the ability to pass some souped-up compile flags to gcc (although compiling for core2 does give a performance boost in some code compared to i686). But a platform that integrates cross-compiling and environment configuration tools into every install, and provides easy tools for porting to any architecture, is a valuable tool for a developer.
Gentoo is very appealing to me and my lab because it offers unprecedented flexibility in how I want to build and configure my system, and reliable tools to keep it up-to-date and secure. Compiling from source is just one aspect of this flexibility - with just a couple simple steps I can modify the source code of any package and deploy it on my system, a much harder task on any other distro. Personally, I also consider it the epitome of the open source ideal.
Back to the appeal question, our lab will soon be deploying Gentoo on a PXE booted HPC cluster with over 256 cores, and this is on the low end of the scale where Gentoo clusters come in (I know of people responsible for its deployment on 512+ node, 2K-core clusters). I won't even begin to list other places where Gentoo comes in as a first choice because of its flexibility.
Please don't be obtuse. The parent poster was referring to running the program at development time, then incorporating its result as part of the product. The restriction you cite does not forbid that.
Apparently you haven't used a Thinkpad. Half your complaints go away when using a decent Thinkpad. Some of your points are just plain absurd, and while your points about expandability and performance stand, we're discussing fun and cheap ways to acquire an old computer that fits one's work needs. While playing games or running obscenely bloated software isn't fun on laptops, doing real work is (if you're not a graphic/video artist). And of course, if you need it, laptops provide the one thing desktops can't: spontaneous mobility.
Me, I use the best of both worlds. My desktop machine has the cheap, reliable components you speak of, terabyte-ish storage, and fast video, while my relatively old Thinkpad provides all the power I need to do my work anywhere.
You think P3 thinkpads are efficient, check out the T40 series (Pentium M). They're even better on power/performance and if you want you can tweak power consumption to push it even lower. My T40 is 4 years old, has taken a lot of abuse, is still plenty fast, still works for 3.5 hours on standard battery, and I fully expect to use it at least another 4 years unless a tank rolls over it or something.
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It's a shame you posted as AC, and aren't being noticed. An extremely insightful comment!
Please mod parent up!
Just because this sounds like a bad implementation, doesn't mean a good piece of techno-crap doesn't impart a ton of advantages on the battlefield. I know these soldiers' mission profile is probably "ride around a lot in a vehicle then man a checkpoint or go door-to-door through a block of houses" in which most of this crap is useless but for more elaborate or tactical missions, a headset and a locator map are probably very useful.
How about: the system turns off if any component is disconnected or removed from the body, and requires a code to log in when turned on? Sounds easy enough to me...
You are so intellectually weak it boggles the mind. In fact, you exemplify the intellectual weakness that allows Putin to continue pushing Russia into being the feeble-minded, authoritarian state it has always taken all too much comfort in.
Putin's authoritarian rule has almost nothing to do with the need to strengthen Russia's foreign stance, stabilize its economy, or purge corruption. The Russian government as it currently stands is incompatible with an open society. If you think that the ability to openly criticize the government or run in elections is not vital for Russia's well being or future stability and prosperity, or that it is somehow contingent on the weaselly excuses you present, I have nothing but disgust for you.
You're one of the countless Russian sheep, directed by the sovok-trained bureaucrats to smother the few Russians who understand the value of free thought and open society. Wake up.
...And don't even get me started with the wonderful i18n bugs that GAIM has all over the place. "Hasn't really been surpassed" my ass. I even tried 2.0, it's as shitty as it ever was.
As for the name change, well, it makes it that much less likely that I'll ever use GAIM again. (Not that there was a big chance to begin with...)
Can you tell it's been one of the most frustrating pieces of software I've ever had the displeasure to use?
At least one free project, Kopete, is light years ahead of Gaim in its core competency (text messaging). There are several other closed-source ones on Windows and Mac. There might be other open ones too, I don't know - it's not hard to beat Gaim's ingenious UI.
Because for all the willingness of SCOTUS to bend the jurisdiction assigned to it by the constitution, the other branches of government have proven to have infinitely more capacity for such abuse, and to need the SCOTUS for such abuse to be even remotely mitigated.
But is it wrong?
Yes. Chance did play a big role in it, and "supernatural forces" played none, but to trivialize the conditions that led to the formation of the universe, Earth-like planets and life as "it just happened by chance" is so simplistic as to be intellectually weak.
The Linux kernel is about 2MB in size. To generate it randomly, you need on the order of 2^2M tries. The number of atoms in the universe is about 1e68, and its age is about 14 billion years, or about 4e26 nanoseconds. Let's overestimate and say that every nanosecond, for every atom, the probability of the Linux kernel being expressed completely randomly from the surrounding atoms is 1/2^2M. Then so far we've had about 4e94, or 2^314 tries. The probability of this having occurred over those tries is then 1/(2^(2000000-314)). These odds cannot be beat. You must appreciate that there must be conditions to facilitate this chance. That's my point. And explaining how these facilitating conditions arise is one of the most interesting things you can do.
The fact that we sit here today though is that evolution is essentially exponential in its growth of complexity. Right?
That statement makes very little sense, and on its face is false. I think you're trying to say that evolution iterates through exponential amounts of possible genetic makeups over time. That's not exactly true, either.
Or is your real gripe that saying 'it just happened' undermines the human ego? Or wait, where you just chiming in to say, "I know more about it than you do"?
Now you're just making yourself look dumb by going ad hominem.
The lack of a god-belief does not require faith.
This is the whole point that I'm trying to make. The classification as it is does not allow for a distinction between the lack of belief and a belief in the non-existence of a deity. As far as I can tell, at least in common usage, the current classification implies a belief in an atheist, and the lack of all belief to be a flavor of agnosticism.
The definition of agnosticism is ridiculously overly broad in the American cultural establishment. Those figures are not surprising, since "agnostic" in American English means all the religious stances from "I'm religious but I don't want to offend any of the several religions I like, so I dither between them, so I'm agnostic" to "I'm not interested in defining my religious stance" to "all kinds of religion including atheism are equally absurd and intellectually weak, and so is this classification system, but if you want a pigeonhole, then call me agnostic".
You understand that you're a bit like someone who knows no programming at all trying to explain, oh I don't know, cache locality patterns in callback functions under virtualization? Or claiming that the Linux kernel can conceivably be obtained by streaming /dev/urandom into a file?
Sure, a complete archaeal organism (the genomic DNA alone is insufficient for propagation) could arise by chance. But the probability of this event occurring in our universe's lifetime, in its physical configuration, is infinitesimally small. Instead, the (very weak) consensus is that life was born as a self-replicating ribozyme, a string of nucleic acids that gains function by folding upon itself. The thousands of details of how life progressed to and past that step to a population of robust organisms that archaea are, are still very unclear.
The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in molecular biology. The vast majority of evolutionary increments we have observed between organisms are easily explained on the molecular level. Spontaneous origin of life by no means is. And claiming that "it just happened by chance" in evolutionary molecular biology is absurdly simplistic.
damn messed up that tag
You're free to use an obsolute POS closed operating system, and you're free to make a fork of an open source project to support it. And others are free to completely ignore you.
Applaud it passes Acid 2 compatibility but don't expect it or demand it. Acid2 is NOT a standard. /i.
Mm-hmm, and the NHTSA crash test is not a standard either. I mean, who cares if something doesn't pass a test for standard compliance if it looks good and works well? Nothing could possibly go wrong when using it, could it? And web standards are more like guidelines anyway.
Idiot.
WTF is wrong with increasing the dpi? Even Windows is capable of running at any reasonable dpi you throw at it, and it looks a hell of a lot nicer at 130 dpi.
Civil and open debate happens here and elsewhere every day, but it is only possible when participants are minimally informed about the subject at hand. Like in the article linked, your claims make it abundantly clear that you're not informed, and see fit to spew flamebait nonsense nonetheless. Don't expect a civil debate with these ingredients.
There are many 100+ node Gentoo cluster deployments out there, precisely because Gentoo offers such easy customization.
I haven't deployed it yet, but it does work just fine on my test boxes:
http://horizon.ath.cx/gentoo/
Text search for "Micro-howto: Creating master and slave nodes for clustering". Everything up to the double newline is relevant.
Any particular problem you've run into?
Your sentiment is valid. Your points are not.
The first thing to do is to stop emerging world. Emerge things when you know you want them, otherwise just run glsa-check (really "glsa-check|grep '\[N\]'") to scan for vulnerabilities. And if you do upgrade a big package, run revdep-rebuild.
Gentoo is not well-suited for the beginner desktop user or beginner corporate sysadmin. Its features do impart the drawbacks you describe: the config syntax changes would only be encountered by someone upgrading to the next release of a traditonal distro, where they are expected. In general, traditional distros don't have to deal with nearly the same amount of QA testing that Gentoo does. So really, regular desktop users are better off with ubuntu and friends, junior sysadmins are better off with RHEL and friends. It's when you need the flexibility Gentoo can provide that you want to use it.
I don't personally care for the XMMS issue, but since XMMS needed GTK1 and had vulnerabilities that needed fixing because its upstream dev team disbanded, it's really predicated on those two issues (you do realize that it's irresponsible for a dev to keep a package with known vulnerabilities in the tree, right?). You can still install it from an overlay, you can install a modern XMMS clone, and as far as I'm concerned, any package that doesn't support utf8 should get off the face of the earth ASAP.
Gentoo does need new QA tools to deal with the combinatorial explosion of package versioning and configuration possibilities. That, and a bit more immunity to drama on part of the devs (e.g. the ability to tell ciaranm to fuck off), is necessary for Gentoo not to stagnate.
To add to my earlier comment, the flexibility I speak about is not just superficial, control panel type stuff. I routinely write ebuilds for various packages in my scientific field, for both internal and public use, and it's much easier to do than with any packaging system I know of. The Gentoo mainline repository has more packages in many specialist fields than any other distro, and the overlays have much more. For any package, Gentoo offers the choice of staying with the solid, well-tested version, the cutting-edge version that came out yesterday, or, if you're that crazy, even something from the svn trunk - all with a single command. Most packages are also much better tested against various configurations than on other distros, due to the system being a moving target. (The flip side is that sometimes stability does suffer, and you need extra precautions to deploy Gentoo on mission-critical servers.)
And finally, I couldn't care less about the ability to pass some souped-up compile flags to gcc (although compiling for core2 does give a performance boost in some code compared to i686). But a platform that integrates cross-compiling and environment configuration tools into every install, and provides easy tools for porting to any architecture, is a valuable tool for a developer.
Gentoo is very appealing to me and my lab because it offers unprecedented flexibility in how I want to build and configure my system, and reliable tools to keep it up-to-date and secure. Compiling from source is just one aspect of this flexibility - with just a couple simple steps I can modify the source code of any package and deploy it on my system, a much harder task on any other distro. Personally, I also consider it the epitome of the open source ideal.
Back to the appeal question, our lab will soon be deploying Gentoo on a PXE booted HPC cluster with over 256 cores, and this is on the low end of the scale where Gentoo clusters come in (I know of people responsible for its deployment on 512+ node, 2K-core clusters). I won't even begin to list other places where Gentoo comes in as a first choice because of its flexibility.
"Their wacky addition"? Interesting.
Please don't be obtuse. The parent poster was referring to running the program at development time, then incorporating its result as part of the product. The restriction you cite does not forbid that.
Apparently you haven't used a Thinkpad. Half your complaints go away when using a decent Thinkpad. Some of your points are just plain absurd, and while your points about expandability and performance stand, we're discussing fun and cheap ways to acquire an old computer that fits one's work needs. While playing games or running obscenely bloated software isn't fun on laptops, doing real work is (if you're not a graphic/video artist). And of course, if you need it, laptops provide the one thing desktops can't: spontaneous mobility.
Me, I use the best of both worlds. My desktop machine has the cheap, reliable components you speak of, terabyte-ish storage, and fast video, while my relatively old Thinkpad provides all the power I need to do my work anywhere.
You think P3 thinkpads are efficient, check out the T40 series (Pentium M). They're even better on power/performance and if you want you can tweak power consumption to push it even lower. My T40 is 4 years old, has taken a lot of abuse, is still plenty fast, still works for 3.5 hours on standard battery, and I fully expect to use it at least another 4 years unless a tank rolls over it or something.