While I'd agree that most CIOs would prefer a single opaque fix-pack every six months, I'm betting that most of the people who actually do the work would prefer to get a fix this afternoon for a problem discovered this morning
Both is possible. The guy who takes care of the linux boxes from day to day may install fixes as soon as they get available.
Those who want a single fixpack (perhaps because they are going to install 50 machines, with the latest fixes applied) can use a "fixpack" consisting of all the small fixes and a script that goes rpm -i firstfix rpm -i second fix ... The various distributors should keep a "fixpack" like that for the benefit of new installs, as well as those who don't follow development closely.
Well, maby its just me, but if I buy a computer from a retailer, I expect some webbrowser and wordprocessor included. Not because it comes with Windows, but because the seller realized it was nessesary.
Exactly. The browser is an app bundled with the computer, not the os. In this case, MS-OS would supply the os kernel, and possibly a system for displaying graphical windows integrated into it. MS-APPS would supply the gui shell that makes it useable for the masses, possibly in the form of a browser. Combining the two would be the computer dealer's job, or possibly a task for the very advanced user.
One of my profs demoed a NN which found the solution to a nontrivial travelling salesman graph in constant time.
Neural nets find very good solutions to NP-complete problems in constant time. Unfortunately there is no guarantee they find the single best solution, they merely find a very good one. I.e. a solution useful for a salesman, but not necessarily the mathemathical best solution.
firstly, it's not a problem with windows, and second you don't need to reboot. just press all your alt, ctrl keys a couple of times...they get stuck in the wrong logic state.
Yuck - an os capable of getting alt, ctrl, etc. stuck in the wrong state. How do they do that?
As for the celsius scale, you do boil water, but that's beside the point. Most of your daily life (weather) with the celsius scale is dealing with the thirty degrees above and below zero. There are two problems with this: One, you have to deal with negative temperature values in normal situations
That's a feature. The freezing point of water is one of the most important weather temperatures - there's snow and ice and slippery roads.
As for precision - it isn't needed. I have never used fractional degrees celcius.
But to say that people are either one or the other, mapper or packer, is ludicrous.
Exactly. Mappers switch to packing when there is way too little information to understand the situation, and no time or even interest in figuring it out. There may be a standard procedure though.
Packers may switch to mapping too, when there are no applicable procedures for the situation at hand, and avoiding it is impossible too. Such as the Japan example in the text.
I wonder if you could build multiple layers of fresnel boxes and expontentially increase the size of your monitor.
No need. Just get a single better fresnel lens that do all the magnification in one step. The quality loss from a single fresnel lens would be much worse with several of them too.
..resizing the browser window. Or when when loading the page into the Communicator editor (as I do to trim the garbage before printing.)
I fail to understand why I should have to go back online and completely re-download the page and everything on it to do these things when I obviously already have the page on my computer.
If running linux - turn off the stupid dysfunctional netscape cache altogether. Install squid and get a much faster webcache that works, and don't eat more memory than you allow. Squid will do for caching for all your browsers - not just netscape. It can even do caching for a LAN.
Having a webcache (and special tricks for DNS lookups) in the browser software itself is just bloat.
It leaves only one error saying: Bus error. Anyone know what that means??
"Bus error" is similiar to "segmentation fault", typically an attempt to access memory you don't own. I.e. a programming error such as a bad pointer or array index.
The general idea is to adjust the brightness and contrast controls so that the whitest white on your screen is no brighter than a piece of paper held up beside it, and the darkest black is the lightest black that appears "black" (i.e. as low as it'll go to the point where you can't tell the difference anymore). That gives you a full, rich contrast of brightness on par with everything else in the room.
That would work just fine if I could do as you say, i.e. adjust the brightest white, then adjust the darcest black *without* disturbing the previous set brightest white.
But I don't have adjustments for "white" and "black", I have those stupid brightness/contrast things. Both adjust both settings. They work differently so the adjustment is possible by adjusting one, going back on the other and so on. Going through such a drill several times a day as the natural light conditions change is something I won't do though.
I guess I should have figured out how useless the American school system was when they wanted to hold me back in kindergarten because I couldn't tie my shoes... Never mind that I could do long division, at that age, it was shoelace tying that was important.
I couldn't let this one go without commenting on it. I am not a doctor, but the above seems like an excellent indicator of some type of autism.
Far too little information for diagnosis. Maybe his parents didn't really bother with shoe training, maybe he had a lot of stringless shoes.
Last but not least: Some kids needs more time learning motor skills like tieing shoes, some needs more time to learn math. Neither is autist or retarded, they are just different. All withing normal variations.
Not really surprising. Fetchmail usage may increase non-linearly, but as the program and docs improve, fewer and fewer sees a need to add patches or ask questions.
A much smaller problem. A madman cannot successfully attack a crowd with a knife. 3-4 unarmed guys in the crowd can knock him out using almost anything they have at hand. Defense is a lot easier.
It's very simple, people will use software they can understand, and for a lot of people around the world, that means software not in english.
If Linux won't provide such a solution, that's fine. Microsoft is very considerate of the needs of non english-speaking countries.
It's sad a day when you get more consideration out of Microsoft than out of an OSS proponent.
Plenty of OSS is translated, or being translated. I have no problems with English, but prefer Norwegian. After setting up LANG I have got lots of positive surprises from already-translated programs.
And OSS translation is a lot better than ms translation. Ms seems to use a word list based approach giving some really hideous translations at times, particularly when there are lots of technical terms in the text. OSS translator is not under a regime where "this word should always translate to that" which fails spectacularly when languages don't have a 1 to 1 mapping.
Another problem with the ms approach is that they translate their own products and thats it. Other vendors of windows programs doesn't translate that much. With OSS any program can be translated by anybody, I can even do it myself if I so wish.
better make sure it has a DES encrypted filesystem.
And if that is hard - just encrypt the email files (and whatever else you want private.) An encrypted fs won't do that much good - if he can demand the root password, then he can demand the decryption key too.:-( Buryin the actual email in a strange and deep directory structure might work.
Finally, if this guy demand a "root" password, create a user named "root" with no privileges. Rename the real root to something else.
Another hack: make your home directory invisible (i.e./home/.username) and keep a fake account with some dummy messages.;-)
If they monitor you, consider setting a trap of sorts. Perhaps saving important work to "porn.gif" or something. Then the clueless try to bust you and make fools of themselves. Maybe they even delete the file so you can point out how they kill productivity. For the really advanced, try cracking the thing so it sends bogus reports...
Obviously, this doesn't by itself allow Sony to sue J. Random Webmaster for using the domain name -- but it does allow Sony to sue the band if the band tries to later use such a domain name without Sony's permission.
So the smart artist/band will simply have some "friends" set up a website for them when they leave sony...
On the other hand, no one looks for holes in an article that comes out stating that Linux is blazingly fast.
Looking for competitive flaws in linux is the job of MS and other competitors. Ask any MS salesman if he recommends linux and you'll get "not ready for the enterprise" or some such. And they'll use technical arguments too, those few times they can find some.
Russia pulled a similar egotistical maneuver and selected a railroad "gauge" or width (12?) that was inconsistent with the gauge gaining acceptance in neigboring Europe (8?). As a consequence, when trains passed the Western Russian boarder, all the passengers and contents had to be humped out, placed in another train, and sent on their way.
Incompatible railroad was considered a military advantage by the russians. If Russia was invaded, the invaders would want to send in supplies and reinforcements by train. But the invaders would have to build a set of different gauge trains first, slowing the initial advances. (The Russians could withtdraw or destroy the existing wide trains) and later the enemy would be wasting time and personel reloading trains at the border.
Is there any real reason why we process base ten numbers better,
The only reason is that we count in base-10, so its the only system we can do math in without doing conversions all the time. Do your counting in base-8 (or 12 or 16) and you'll do your math there too. Of course you will need some extra numerical symbols for the latter ones.
You know, it always amazes me, every article on nanotech I read. I've always thought I'd see practical nanotech while alive, but certainly not so soon! It feels like we are mere years away from a breakthrough.
I don't think we'll see a big breakthrough yet. We may have a motor soon, but that just isn't enough. Then we need a reliable way for assembling the machinery and controlling it. And in what environment will the machines operate? To be useful the things must work well under something other than lab conditions only. You want nanomachines to build you a new car from dirt? It won't be that easy. These machines will need energy. They will dissipate heat, that could limit the build rate. Then there's the waste problem. Nanomachines tearing apart molecules in dirt will find a lot of atoms unuseable for your car. Merely tossing them won't be a good idea. Last, but not least: whatever you want nanomachines to build must be designed first, that won't be easier than today. And it must be designed for nanomachine manufacture. So you can't get any car, only existing models. And no long-distance spaceship.
These comments are almost immediately nailed as 'offtopic' or 'flamebait' by the moderators, but at the expense of many points that could have been better used promoting good comments.
This is because you give me X options to moderate up or down. Give me the opportunity to hand out up to X positive and X negative comments. The "offtopic"s won't prevent me from moderating others up then. And if there are no bad posts? Then I waste my negative points.
The specs for "the app I want" may very well put constraints on what os I can use. For example:
"This must run on old 486s (cheap hw) and stay up for years (users can't fix a crash and there isn't time for rebooting)"
Now this leave out quite a few os'es, no matter what the app is.
I don't know if the 486 thing is relevant, (maybe in the third world) but crashing a cash register is bad for business. I have seen it happen at a small pc shop using windows, and I left. Why wait when there are other shops?
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While I'd agree that most CIOs would prefer a single opaque fix-pack every six months, I'm betting that most of the people who actually do the work would prefer to get a fix this afternoon for a problem discovered this morning
Both is possible. The guy who takes care of the linux boxes from day to day may install fixes as soon as they get available.
Those who want a single fixpack (perhaps because they are going to install 50 machines, with the latest fixes applied) can use a "fixpack" consisting of all the small fixes and a script that goes
rpm -i firstfix
rpm -i second fix
...
The various distributors should keep a "fixpack" like that for the benefit of new installs, as well as those who don't follow development closely.
Well, maby its just me, but if I buy a computer from a retailer, I expect some webbrowser and wordprocessor included. Not because it comes with Windows, but because the seller realized it was nessesary.
Exactly. The browser is an app bundled with the computer, not the os. In this case, MS-OS would supply the os kernel, and possibly a system for displaying graphical windows integrated into it. MS-APPS would supply the gui shell that makes it useable for the masses, possibly in the form of a browser. Combining the two would be the computer dealer's job, or possibly a task for the very advanced user.
One of my profs demoed a NN which found the solution to a nontrivial travelling salesman graph in constant time.
Neural nets find very good solutions to NP-complete problems in constant time. Unfortunately there is no guarantee they find the single best solution, they merely find a very good one. I.e. a solution useful for a salesman, but not necessarily the mathemathical best solution.
firstly, it's not a problem with windows, and second you don't need to reboot. just press all your alt, ctrl keys a couple of times...they get stuck in the wrong logic state.
Yuck - an os capable of getting alt, ctrl, etc. stuck in the wrong state. How do they do that?
As for the celsius scale, you do boil water, but that's beside the point. Most of your daily life (weather) with the celsius scale is dealing with the thirty degrees above and below zero. There are two problems with this:
One, you have to deal with negative temperature values in normal situations
That's a feature. The freezing point of water is one of the most important weather temperatures - there's snow and ice and slippery roads.
As for precision - it isn't needed. I have never used fractional degrees celcius.
But to say that people are either one or the other, mapper or packer, is ludicrous.
Exactly. Mappers switch to packing when there is way too little information to understand the situation, and no time or even interest in figuring it out. There may be a standard procedure though.
Packers may switch to mapping too, when there are no applicable procedures for the situation at hand, and avoiding it is impossible too. Such as the Japan example in the text.
I wonder if you could build multiple layers of fresnel boxes and expontentially increase the size of your monitor.
No need. Just get a single better fresnel lens that do all the magnification in one step. The quality loss from a single fresnel lens would be much worse with several of them too.
Now, we can't count on the users cutting down on their bandwidth use conscientiously.
:-)
DNS, for example, would have a very high priority, and be one of the last services to drop
Consider dropping DNS first - loosing all the clueless will certainly free up bandwith!
..resizing the browser window. Or when when loading the page into the Communicator editor (as I do to trim the garbage before printing.)
I fail to understand why I should have to go back online and completely re-download the page and
everything on it to do these things when I obviously already have the page on my computer.
If running linux - turn off the stupid dysfunctional netscape cache altogether. Install squid and get a much faster webcache that works, and don't eat more memory than you allow. Squid will do for caching for all your browsers - not just netscape. It can even do caching for a LAN.
Having a webcache (and special tricks for DNS lookups) in the browser software itself is just bloat.
It leaves only one error saying: Bus error. Anyone know what that means??
"Bus error" is similiar to "segmentation fault", typically an attempt to access memory you don't own. I.e. a programming error such as a bad pointer or array index.
The general idea is to adjust the brightness and contrast controls so that the whitest white on your screen is no brighter than a piece of paper held up beside it, and the darkest black is the lightest black that appears "black" (i.e. as low as it'll go to the point where you can't tell the difference anymore). That gives you a full, rich contrast of brightness on par with everything else in the room.
That would work just fine if I could do as you say, i.e. adjust the brightest white, then adjust the darcest black *without* disturbing the previous set brightest white.
But I don't have adjustments for "white" and "black", I have those stupid brightness/contrast things. Both adjust both settings. They work differently so the adjustment is possible by adjusting one, going back on the other and so on. Going through such a drill several times a day as the natural light conditions change is something I won't do though.
I guess I should have figured out how useless the American school system was when they wanted to hold me back in kindergarten because I couldn't tie my shoes... Never mind that I could do long division, at that age, it was shoelace tying that was important.
I couldn't let this one go without commenting on it. I am not a doctor, but the above seems like an excellent indicator of some type of autism.
Far too little information for diagnosis. Maybe his parents didn't really bother with shoe training, maybe he had a lot of stringless shoes.
Last but not least: Some kids needs more time learning motor skills like tieing shoes, some needs more time to learn math. Neither is autist or retarded, they are just different. All withing normal variations.
Not really surprising. Fetchmail usage may increase non-linearly, but as the program and docs improve, fewer and fewer sees a need to add patches or ask questions.
Make guns illegal, and they'll use knives.
A much smaller problem. A madman cannot successfully attack a crowd with a knife. 3-4 unarmed guys in the crowd can knock him out using almost anything they have at hand. Defense is a lot easier.
It's very simple, people will use software they can understand, and for a lot of people around the world, that means software not in english.
If Linux won't provide such a solution, that's fine. Microsoft is very considerate of the needs of non english-speaking countries.
It's sad a day when you get more consideration out of Microsoft than out of an OSS proponent.
Plenty of OSS is translated, or being translated. I have no problems with English, but prefer Norwegian. After setting up LANG I have got lots of positive surprises from already-translated programs.
And OSS translation is a lot better than ms translation. Ms seems to use a word list based approach giving some really hideous translations at times, particularly when there are lots of technical terms in the text. OSS translator is not under a regime where "this word should always translate to that" which fails spectacularly when languages don't have a 1 to 1 mapping.
Another problem with the ms approach is that they translate their own products and thats it. Other vendors of windows programs doesn't translate that much. With OSS any program can be translated by anybody, I can even do it myself if I so wish.
better make sure it has a DES encrypted filesystem.
:-(
/home/.username) and keep a fake ;-)
And if that is hard - just encrypt the email
files (and whatever else you want private.) An encrypted fs won't do that much good - if he can demand the root password, then he can demand the decryption key too.
Buryin the actual email in a strange and deep directory structure might work.
Finally, if this guy demand a "root" password, create a user named "root" with no privileges. Rename the real root to something else.
Another hack: make your home directory invisible (i.e.
account with some dummy messages.
If they monitor you, consider setting a trap of sorts. Perhaps saving important work to "porn.gif" or something. Then the clueless try to bust you and make fools of themselves. Maybe they even delete the file so you can point out how they kill productivity.
For the really advanced, try cracking the thing so it sends bogus reports...
Obviously, this doesn't by itself allow Sony to sue J. Random Webmaster for using the domain name -- but it does allow Sony to sue the band if the band tries to later use such a domain name without Sony's permission.
So the smart artist/band will simply have some "friends" set up a website for them when they leave sony...
On the other hand, no one looks for holes in an article that comes out stating that Linux is blazingly fast.
Looking for competitive flaws in linux is the job of MS and other competitors. Ask any MS salesman if he recommends linux and you'll get "not ready for the enterprise" or some such. And they'll use technical arguments too, those few times they can find some.
Russia pulled a similar egotistical maneuver and selected a railroad "gauge" or width (12?) that was inconsistent with the gauge gaining acceptance in neigboring Europe (8?). As a consequence, when trains passed the Western Russian boarder, all the passengers and contents had to be humped out, placed in another train, and sent on their way.
Incompatible railroad was considered a military advantage by the russians. If Russia was invaded, the invaders would want to send in supplies and reinforcements by train. But the invaders would have to build a set of different gauge trains first, slowing the initial advances. (The Russians could withtdraw or destroy the existing wide trains) and later the enemy would be wasting time and personel reloading trains at the border.
("chevaux", presumably, although I don't know what relationship "ch" has to "horsepower")
It is merely the word "horsepower" translated into french.
Is there any real reason why we process base ten numbers better,
The only reason is that we count in base-10, so its the only system we can do math in without doing conversions all the time. Do your counting in base-8 (or 12 or 16) and you'll do your math there too. Of course you will need some extra numerical symbols for the latter ones.
You know, it always amazes me, every article on nanotech I read. I've always thought I'd see practical nanotech while alive, but certainly not so soon! It feels like we are mere years away from a breakthrough.
I don't think we'll see a big breakthrough yet. We may have a motor soon, but that just isn't enough. Then we need a reliable way for assembling the machinery and controlling it. And in what environment will the machines operate? To be useful the things must work well under something other than lab conditions only. You want nanomachines to build you a new car from dirt? It won't be that easy. These machines will need energy. They will dissipate heat, that could limit the build rate. Then there's the waste problem. Nanomachines tearing apart molecules in dirt will find a lot of atoms unuseable for your car. Merely tossing them won't be a good idea.
Last, but not least: whatever you want nanomachines to build must be designed first, that won't be easier than today. And it must be designed for nanomachine manufacture. So you can't get any car, only existing models. And no long-distance spaceship.
These comments are almost immediately nailed as 'offtopic' or 'flamebait' by the moderators, but at the expense of many points that could have been better used promoting good comments.
This is because you give me X options to moderate up or down. Give me the opportunity to hand out up to X positive and X negative comments. The "offtopic"s won't prevent me from moderating others up then. And if there are no bad posts? Then I waste my negative points.
The specs for "the app I want" may very well put constraints on what os I can use. For example:
"This must run on old 486s (cheap hw) and stay up for years (users can't fix a crash and there isn't time for rebooting)"
Now this leave out quite a few os'es, no matter what the app is.
I don't know if the 486 thing is relevant, (maybe in the third world) but crashing a cash register is bad for business. I have seen it happen at a small pc shop using windows, and I left. Why wait when there are other shops?