Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
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· Score: 1
Good point, it's not so much a proof as a theory otherwise I would be at least a million dollars richer from proving that NP != P.
However if you really believe that there are no algorithms that are the best and can be proven to be slow then you are welcome to prove it by finding faster algorithms for any of the current best algorithms that are slow (like factorising large non-prime numbers).
I guess the original poster should have been more careful and say the best *known* algorithm can sometimes be proved to be slow.
Saying that the BSD/X11/... licenses are more free than the GPL is true but so would it to say that a country in which you can enslave people by the same reasoning. After all, in the US today it is illegal to enslave people whereas just two century ago Americans were Free to do so. So the US 200 years ago were a freer country (in that respect) than the US today, don't you agree?
I know that People and source code are nowhere near the same thing but the question is what kind of society do we want to live in? One in which everybody is free to do anything (including enslaving, killing, stealing...) or one in which there are some limits placed on the Freedom of everyone to ensure everyone's remaining Freedoms?
I think that most people would prefer the latter (and the reaction to 2001/09/11 seems to confirm it for the US).
This of course lead to the question of how much Freedom should we give up to protect the remaining ones.
You think that giving up the Freedom to enslave other people's source code is giving up too much whereas the Copyleft camp thinks that's the right balance.
I tend to fall in the copyleft camp as if the benefit that your employer gets from GPL'd programs is not significant enough to justify GPL'in his application when he distribute the two combine then it must be small enough (compared to his application) not to be a problem for him to develop it himself (with inspiration from the GPL's program too as the GPL doesn't control ideas (patents do), just their expression) and if the contribution is significant enough in the hypothetical combined software then who is he to say that he should get that huge benefit but that we shouldn't get any benefit from it but the dubious right to pay him more money to use what was free to start with?
You are right that Copyleft is a club, but so is Proprietary software (or at least a multitude of little clubs). copyleft is just a way to avoid getting ripped of by the other club owners.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
"Both GCC and glibc are in the current state despite the RMS and FSF efforts."
Which is possible thanks to RMS's advocacy about Free Software. So even if the Free Software philosophy and the GPL were the only things that the GNU project contributed to GNU/Linux it still would be extremely significant.
But more practically you can view calling it Gnu/Linux as the counter reaction to calling Free Software Open Source. The latter dilutes the message of Free Software to make it more palatable to companies and the former remind/educate people that there is a philosophy that is deeper than the Open Source philosophy at the base. And the fact that people are constantly arguing about it, thus making more people learn about the Free Software philosophy when they learn about the why of the Linux/ Gnu/Linux dichotomy proves that it works.
"Which leaves me a bit puzzled about Scandinavian nations... they seem to have the best of all worlds, even if they tax you up the ass! (And there, I answered my own question.)"
That and their climate I suppose (though I never experienced first hand, the UK is bad enough as it is without going further north).
"The point is still valid. The only people still using the term "free software" are FSF zealots. If you don't believe me, go look at ESR's analysis of usage of the two terms on the web. If you don't believe him, he's provided the links to the searches he did; perform them for yourself and disprove the numbers."
Why should their be a need to disprove them?
Many people believe the term Free Software is better than Open Source Software, saying that they should give up Free Software because OSS has 95% mindshare is like saying they should give up Free/Open Source software/Linux altogether because proprietary software/Windows has 95% market share.
If all you care about is popularity go ahead and blindly use Open Source and join your local jock club but if not use other arguments to justify your choices. Most of the FOSS crowd is composed of geeks after all.
Even without emulation it could have been optimised for 64 bit performance and underperform in 32 bit performance due to architectural issues. And maybe it does, but given that it still performs better in 32 bit mode than other comparable processors it doesn't matter whether it could have performed even better or not if they had not had to balance 32 bit performance and 64 bit performance.
Many people see pictures of Mt. Rainier (which is close enough to Seattle to severely harm the city were it to violently erupt) and just assume it's Mt. St. Helens. Apparently many people think Washington state has only the one mountain."
I think that it is shameful for a computer geeks to know of Mt. St. Helen but not of Mt Rainier.
Re:It isn't that difficult...
on
Ho, Ho, Ho
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· Score: 1
"Are you suggesting Santa Claus entrusts the sucess of christmas to Microsoft? Check those toys for spyware, kids."
Of course, this is how he knows who's been naughty and who's been nice the next year.
"You will realize that Slashdot has already attributed the copyright to the poster by default"
No, US law attributed the copyright to the author (the poster) by default./. just confirmed what the law says so they can say the poster is responsible, not them.
Maybe it hurts Linux but it helps free software because it introduces people who don't know what it is to it and give them a good first impression.
But it probably doesn't hurt Linux either because if every software could run both on Windows and Linux like Firefox does then the only reason to stay with Windows would be if you thought it was better than Linux, not because your app doesn't run on Linux.
It also helps Linux because should a Firefox using company/user decide to try Linux it gives them something familiar to feel a bit more at home, making the transition easier.
So your assertion that it hurts Linux certainly is debatable.
"Like offshore outsourcing, right? You make a good point and then ruin it with an idiotic analogy."
Exactly like off-shore outsourcing.
There used to be a time when there were tolls and taxes between each fiefdom, which made trade between towns harder, nowadays such a notion is ridiculous but we still have the same notion on an international scale.
The problem of outsourcing is not that the borders are open for trade (with many exceptions like steel...) but that the different entities trading have wildly different standards.
The situation would be just as bad if the US had no federal labour laws, health and safety regulations... and some states had the same standard as the US currently does while a few had no such law on a state level either. In such a case you would see outsourcing to that state without labour laws and you would see sweatshops springing there.
Globalisation should be accompanied by a standardisation of the laws influencing labour conditions but given that it would make things more expensive for big companies with political connections in different countries it won't happen until the workers in a given country start asking for better work conditions, leading to offshoring to another cheaper country... making a race to the bottom until such time that they have outsourced to the last country possible (there are only so many countries on earth) and until it also asks for better working conditions.
As long as most/all countries manages to keep a level of industrialisation and of labour conditions higher after the onshoring wave retreats than before it came it raises the level globally and reduce the competitive gap between countries.
After a while of that (that is, in a few decades (or even centuries?)) the playing field will be more equal unless we manage to colonise new planets, thus creating a bigger playing field to level.
Sure it's gonna suck meanwhile (and it's us who are going to suffer) but these are just growing pains.
And if you want to make the situation better you can always try to inform yourself and buy from companies that treat their offshore workers better than the rest (or at least less worse).
Ok, no need to be a minority to be an elite but there still will be more people with six digit id's than with seven for quite a while so there won't be many over which you could exercise that power and influence
"Not that it really matters. It's just a sig with a silly observation.:) "
Does it matter? No. But it's a/. in-joke (it differentiate us not only from non-/.ers but understanding the joke but between different degrees of old-timers and new comers) and it's fun to bicker about it.
Yes but Free Software is not a company so it cannot think at that level. You can't force a linux developer to abandon a project he likes and/or needs for another one he don't care about and/or doesn't need so all you can do is try to persuade enough developers that they want/need to work on what you want/need them to work on.
Because of this lack of a single focus (replaced by a bigger number of smaller foci) it takes more time for a particular area to mature but overall and over time it is a better way to operate. It's like the difference between a governmental project and a free market solution; the government can put more focus and more resources on a project than any company but free market tends to be better over time.
You say that with/. reaching the million members mark all those 6 digit id's will stop being newbies and start being "elite" but I dispute that. 6 digit ids can only be an "elite" _minority_ if there already are more 7 digits id's than there are 6 digits ones so you will have to wait until the 1.9 million mark to start being elite.
Not that any of it really matters but I just wanted to challenge your flawed logic.
Yeah, but in French you can always use septante and nonante for soixante dix (seventy, lit. sixty-ten) and quatre-vingt dix (ninety, lit. four-twenty ten) if you want (although you will sound Swiss or Belgium).
Anyway, while the names decompose strangely you think of them and read them as one semantic unit (like if it was soixante (sixty)) not as separate words so it is just strange when you are learning the language (I'm sure I could find some similar words/expressions in English too).
"Let us not forget that you can run a FTP server on a computer whose DNS name is www. You can also run a NNTP server on that same computer."
And you could run a Web (HHTP) server on a computer named ftp.somethingorother.com. The DNS name has nothing to do with what kind of server is on the machine (except to give an indication).
To my understanding the internet is composed of multiple subnets who are all connected together (via the internet) and communicate using IP (the Internet Protocol). Above that protocol they can use other protocols (generally TCP and sometimes UDP) that are a bit more specialised and atop these protocols you have even more specialised protocols like HTTP (for the Web), SMTP (for mail), FTP (for file transfer)... and you even sometimes have protocols on top of these, like SOAP which is a remote procedure call protocol on top of HTTP.
The Web in World Wide Web is not the computer being connected in web-like fashion but the webpages being connected to each other in web-like fashion via hypertext links.
Slashdot Mirror
An Homage.
Good point, it's not so much a proof as a theory otherwise I would be at least a million dollars richer from proving that NP != P.
However if you really believe that there are no algorithms that are the best and can be proven to be slow then you are welcome to prove it by finding faster algorithms for any of the current best algorithms that are slow (like factorising large non-prime numbers).
I guess the original poster should have been more careful and say the best *known* algorithm can sometimes be proved to be slow.
"I think we *all* know that pay-as-you-go phones are only used by mobsters and kidnappers.
And my mother... strange."
Maybe she is not your mother but kidnapped you when you were a baby? That would explain it.
Saying that the BSD/X11/... licenses are more free than the GPL is true but so would it to say that a country in which you can enslave people by the same reasoning. After all, in the US today it is illegal to enslave people whereas just two century ago Americans were Free to do so. So the US 200 years ago were a freer country (in that respect) than the US today, don't you agree?
I know that People and source code are nowhere near the same thing but the question is what kind of society do we want to live in? One in which everybody is free to do anything (including enslaving, killing, stealing...) or one in which there are some limits placed on the Freedom of everyone to ensure everyone's remaining Freedoms?
I think that most people would prefer the latter (and the reaction to 2001/09/11 seems to confirm it for the US).
This of course lead to the question of how much Freedom should we give up to protect the remaining ones.
You think that giving up the Freedom to enslave other people's source code is giving up too much whereas the Copyleft camp thinks that's the right balance.
I tend to fall in the copyleft camp as if the benefit that your employer gets from GPL'd programs is not significant enough to justify GPL'in his application when he distribute the two combine then it must be small enough (compared to his application) not to be a problem for him to develop it himself (with inspiration from the GPL's program too as the GPL doesn't control ideas (patents do), just their expression) and if the contribution is significant enough in the hypothetical combined software then who is he to say that he should get that huge benefit but that we shouldn't get any benefit from it but the dubious right to pay him more money to use what was free to start with?
You are right that Copyleft is a club, but so is Proprietary software (or at least a multitude of little clubs). copyleft is just a way to avoid getting ripped of by the other club owners.
If the given task is NP.
"chmod 700 -R
shouldn't that be 600?
Nah. To the "Who the Fuck is ZeD?" crowd I say "ZeD is dead baby, ZeD is dead".
You need to replace your sarcasm detector.
"Both GCC and glibc are in the current state despite the RMS and FSF efforts."
Which is possible thanks to RMS's advocacy about Free Software. So even if the Free Software philosophy and the GPL were the only things that the GNU project contributed to GNU/Linux it still would be extremely significant.
But more practically you can view calling it Gnu/Linux as the counter reaction to calling Free Software Open Source. The latter dilutes the message of Free Software to make it more palatable to companies and the former remind/educate people that there is a philosophy that is deeper than the Open Source philosophy at the base. And the fact that people are constantly arguing about it, thus making more people learn about the Free Software philosophy when they learn about the why of the Linux/ Gnu/Linux dichotomy proves that it works.
"Which leaves me a bit puzzled about Scandinavian nations... they seem to have the best of all worlds, even if they tax you up the ass! (And there, I answered my own question.)"
That and their climate I suppose (though I never experienced first hand, the UK is bad enough as it is without going further north).
"The point is still valid. The only people still using the term "free software" are FSF zealots. If you don't believe me, go look at ESR's analysis of usage of the two terms on the web. If you don't believe him, he's provided the links to the searches he did; perform them for yourself and disprove the numbers."
Why should their be a need to disprove them?
Many people believe the term Free Software is better than Open Source Software, saying that they should give up Free Software because OSS has 95% mindshare is like saying they should give up Free/Open Source software/Linux altogether because proprietary software/Windows has 95% market share.
If all you care about is popularity go ahead and blindly use Open Source and join your local jock club but if not use other arguments to justify your choices. Most of the FOSS crowd is composed of geeks after all.
Even without emulation it could have been optimised for 64 bit performance and underperform in 32 bit performance due to architectural issues. And maybe it does, but given that it still performs better in 32 bit mode than other comparable processors it doesn't matter whether it could have performed even better or not if they had not had to balance 32 bit performance and 64 bit performance.
Many people see pictures of Mt. Rainier (which is close enough to Seattle to severely harm the city were it to violently erupt) and just assume it's Mt. St. Helens. Apparently many people think Washington state has only the one mountain."
I think that it is shameful for a computer geeks to know of Mt. St. Helen but not of Mt Rainier.
"Are you suggesting Santa Claus entrusts the sucess of christmas to Microsoft? Check those toys for spyware, kids."
Of course, this is how he knows who's been naughty and who's been nice the next year.
"You will realize that Slashdot has already attributed the copyright to the poster by default"
No, US law attributed the copyright to the author (the poster) by default.
But how many books are as expensive as video games?
"It is "lose" not "loose." I am dedicated to eradicating this grammar mistake one internet user at a time."
I'm afraid it is a battle that you are bound to loose.
Maybe it hurts Linux but it helps free software because it introduces people who don't know what it is to it and give them a good first impression.
But it probably doesn't hurt Linux either because if every software could run both on Windows and Linux like Firefox does then the only reason to stay with Windows would be if you thought it was better than Linux, not because your app doesn't run on Linux.
It also helps Linux because should a Firefox using company/user decide to try Linux it gives them something familiar to feel a bit more at home, making the transition easier.
So your assertion that it hurts Linux certainly is debatable.
Well, I guess IHBT, IHBH so I will HAND.
"Like offshore outsourcing, right? You make a good point and then ruin it with an idiotic analogy."
Exactly like off-shore outsourcing.
There used to be a time when there were tolls and taxes between each fiefdom, which made trade between towns harder, nowadays such a notion is ridiculous but we still have the same notion on an international scale.
The problem of outsourcing is not that the borders are open for trade (with many exceptions like steel...) but that the different entities trading have wildly different standards.
The situation would be just as bad if the US had no federal labour laws, health and safety regulations... and some states had the same standard as the US currently does while a few had no such law on a state level either. In such a case you would see outsourcing to that state without labour laws and you would see sweatshops springing there.
Globalisation should be accompanied by a standardisation of the laws influencing labour conditions but given that it would make things more expensive for big companies with political connections in different countries it won't happen until the workers in a given country start asking for better work conditions, leading to offshoring to another cheaper country... making a race to the bottom until such time that they have outsourced to the last country possible (there are only so many countries on earth) and until it also asks for better working conditions.
As long as most/all countries manages to keep a level of industrialisation and of labour conditions higher after the onshoring wave retreats than before it came it raises the level globally and reduce the competitive gap between countries.
After a while of that (that is, in a few decades (or even centuries?)) the playing field will be more equal unless we manage to colonise new planets, thus creating a bigger playing field to level.
Sure it's gonna suck meanwhile (and it's us who are going to suffer) but these are just growing pains.
And if you want to make the situation better you can always try to inform yourself and buy from companies that treat their offshore workers better than the rest (or at least less worse).
Ok, no need to be a minority to be an elite but there still will be more people with six digit id's than with seven for quite a while so there won't be many over which you could exercise that power and influence
"Not that it really matters. It's just a sig with a silly observation.
Does it matter? No. But it's a
Yes but Free Software is not a company so it cannot think at that level. You can't force a linux developer to abandon a project he likes and/or needs for another one he don't care about and/or doesn't need so all you can do is try to persuade enough developers that they want/need to work on what you want/need them to work on.
Because of this lack of a single focus (replaced by a bigger number of smaller foci) it takes more time for a particular area to mature but overall and over time it is a better way to operate. It's like the difference between a governmental project and a free market solution; the government can put more focus and more resources on a project than any company but free market tends to be better over time.
You say that with
Not that any of it really matters but I just wanted to challenge your flawed logic.
"I stick with Merkin format myself"
Do you know what a merkin is? If you don't and are American then you might want to look it up before calling yourself one.
Yeah, but in French you can always use septante and nonante for soixante dix (seventy, lit. sixty-ten) and quatre-vingt dix (ninety, lit. four-twenty ten) if you want (although you will sound Swiss or Belgium).
Anyway, while the names decompose strangely you think of them and read them as one semantic unit (like if it was soixante (sixty)) not as separate words so it is just strange when you are learning the language (I'm sure I could find some similar words/expressions in English too).
"Let us not forget that you can run a FTP server on a computer whose DNS name is www. You can also run a NNTP server on that same computer."
And you could run a Web (HHTP) server on a computer named ftp.somethingorother.com. The DNS name has nothing to do with what kind of server is on the machine (except to give an indication).
To my understanding the internet is composed of multiple subnets who are all connected together (via the internet) and communicate using IP (the Internet Protocol). Above that protocol they can use other protocols (generally TCP and sometimes UDP) that are a bit more specialised and atop these protocols you have even more specialised protocols like HTTP (for the Web), SMTP (for mail), FTP (for file transfer)... and you even sometimes have protocols on top of these, like SOAP which is a remote procedure call protocol on top of HTTP.
The Web in World Wide Web is not the computer being connected in web-like fashion but the webpages being connected to each other in web-like fashion via hypertext links.
Does that explains things a bit?