The language taught needs to be suitable and easy to use for general purpose programming. It is also a benefit if it can scale up to large projects.
People should be able to program because computers already form a part of everyone's lives, and just "using" them by pointing and clicking is _not_ sufficient to use them effectively in all cases.
Knowing an easy programming language would allow the general populace to get much more out of their computers, at work or at home, and would increase productivity, by allowing them to take control of the computer, and to make it do something nearer to what they want, which is a good thing.
I'd guess most people who use computers have something they'd like to automate, but are forced by the software they use to do it manually, and it's too expensive to have that feature added just for them, so they continue being less productive than they could be with it. If they knew how to program (just some simple basics), _and_ there is a usable language that can be integrated, then it's only a matter of converting what they know into a few lines of code, so they never have to repeat it.
What if you mess up burning the CD, so that eg. you miss a few crucial files, or break it so the CD doesn't boot ? It's not Red Hat then, although without taking care, you may *think* it is. The result is that people who recieve these get a bad impression, undeservedly, of Red Hat. This can happen, and unless proved otherwise (eg by selling your own support and manuals) counts as a 'cheap knock-off product'
>If you're at.999c or whatever and you turn the lights on, the light from the headlights will still appear to be going at 'c' relative to you to observers (_not_.001c)
Yeah it's been a while since I checked this but:
Light from the headlights will still appear to _you_ to be going at 'c' away from you.
It will appear to be going away from you at 'c' as viewed by other observers.
'You' will also compress to near zero length as viewed by others.
'You' will be flamed for going so far off topic (...:)
Re:Kernel Usage will fork unless...
on
Kernels Galore
·
· Score: 1
"Many Linux users in future won't understand how to recompile packages that get broken by kernel incompatibilities"
These same users will not be upgrading their kernels to a new version by themselves, except as part of upgrading their linux distribution. Thus the distribution maintainers would have checked for such incompatibilities and fixed them and generally made sure things work.
If there are packages on the system they have installed themselves, then it's perfectly reasonable for them to download/get new versions which can be installed in the same way they originally installed them.
So there are no problems.
Re:Why do I care about 2.0?
on
Kernels Galore
·
· Score: 1
"And why does PPP require the novj flag?"
Not sure:
I'm using it because I upgraded to 2.2 when I got a new machine with a decent (56k) modem, and without "novj" I'd only get 2-3 kb/sec, but disabling vj gets me the proper 4-5 kb/sec. I had however thought it was to do with the service provider I use, whose servers can't handle vj compression at the higher speeds (I know others at the same ISP who've had the same problem).
Thing is, I'd have thought the same problem exists with whatever kernel as it's not a problem on my side.
Seriously though, I'm not surprised I've met no female hacker types (here in UK) yet considering that I've met no male hacker types socially either - all the way through school and 6th Form. There'd better be hackers at Uni (this Oct)!
It's probably just very expensive for big vendors to maintain their own flavour of unix, so just put the best bits of their own unix into linux, and allow the open source community to look after it, with allthe other bebefits linux brings (multi-platform compatibility etc). Maybe if more vendors do this (competing to add technology to linux ???) then we'll see it improve much further than it already has.
Good: They've realised that key escrow _will not work_ and is very, very bad for e-commerce. People need to be able to transact knowing their financial details are not available without their explicit consent. Requiring people to hand decryption keys over when required (by secretary of state etc.) as part of a legitimate criminal investigation is also ok, the government needs to be able to get evidence against criminals to prosecute them. We can also (just about) trust the government not to mis-use any small pieces of information they gain in this way, with the knowledge of the recipient (as opposed to being able to decrypt everything without the correspondent's knowledge, as key escrow allows).
The Bad: Asking people to voluntarily hand keys in for escrow is just a bad idea, no criminals will hand in their keys, and is just a potential security hole for anyone using encryption. The heavy handed measures for informants and complaints etc, seems totally unjustified and way, way over the top. If I feel the government had no reason to get my decryption key from me, I expect to be able to recieve fair treatment when lodging a complaint, and expect a thorough investigation. There must be checks to stop law enforcement agencies abusing their powers, as they all seem so keen to do.
If you're going to install required packages from source, you ought to download the source packages, and compiling them produces a binary package which can then be installed.
That beats having a lot of packages installed from source, with no idea of what individual files they have installed.
Also, if you're into compiling lots of stuff, there is a host of tools to help you create debian packages, which you can use to generate binary packages from your source (*.tgz) files.
Thusly debian will know what's installed. Also, I find your redhat comment confusing - In my experience of RH, (5.2 on my older computer), it does complain about missing packages, even if the binary file is there. I clearly remember having to use the --force option to rpm for certain things (for which I had installed hte dependant files myself)
I find that a majority of Linux users do not have an unix background, ie they are from a PC world, and are typically "home" users.
A majority of xBSD users have previous "real" (commercial) unix experience, and are happier to move to BSD because they are more likely to know about it (and know more about it) than Linux.
"what do you people keep doing that makes Windows NT crash?"
It shouldn't matter what everyone's doing, it still shouldn't crash. I should be able to run any software concurrently, and have whatever services I like running, and it should be able to run fully loaded (high memory usage, high cpu usage) for extended periods of time.
I find (on my desktop NT box) that if I start using many applications at once (thus filling up most of the memory but not all), there is a tendency for it to lock up and it need me to reboot. Often explorer.exe crashes such that I cannot recover/restart it (resulting in screen garbage) and I am forced to power cycle it.
I will admit that I haven't had a BSOD with this machine, but I do (intentionally) reboot it every so often, and it does have 96Mb ram. My previous experience with a lower powered NT box, with only 32Mb was a whole lot worse. I was always able to make that crash (since this was previously, it probably was a few service packs down to my current computer) very easily, and get to the BSOD. I'd just start running a few apps simultaneously and use them all at once, and generally load up the machine, and it would fall over.
My experiences with Linux are much different. Since I got a modern laptop, (with suspend modes) I've been able to leave linux running on it without a single reboot. Among the applications I leave running are several instances of netscape, some compiles and other programs, that use up most of the memory (including virtual mem) and do a similarly lot of stuff including apache etc. Although netscape crashes, I have never experienced system instability on it, maybe slow response when I had many compiles going at once, but no lock ups.
If it gives you more time to work with the content, and not have to faff around with the associated stuff of running a highly popular web site. Just make sure that the site doesn't become any more "commercial" and I think everyone'll be happy and/. can grow properly.
The actual document is stored as XML, and an XSL type stylesheet (note that there isn't a formal spec for this yet, so it could be another similar technology) is used to render it into HTML on the fly.
I guess they're future proofing all the articles they store.
In the old days, cars were _not_ cheap. Cars were an expensive luxury. Today, cars are cheap. This can be demonstrated by counting how many cars peope used to own, and how many they do now. You will find that, on average, the number of cars per person (or per family) had gone significantly up, and is still rising.
"Cheap" is only a relative term, in relation to how much people can afford.
.. That this sort of thing is meant to use voice recognition (The 200Mhz StrongARM if enough to hack it apparently), so everyone stop complaining about how small it is.
I meant evenly mixed in, with a lot of variation. I think that uses both words, "heterogeneous" meaning lots of variation, and "homogeneous" meaning evenly mixed in, so it all "looks" the same.
(As things stand) I would have a company with different platforms on each desktop, eg an intel based WinXX machine on one desktop, a Sparc based Linux machine on the next, an Alpha based FreeBSD on the next, etc. (PS my examples are fairly bogus). So even a single department / office would be fairly resistant to any single point of failure / attack. Too bad that currently no-one would support anything like this, but hey, its something to aim for.
Slashdot Mirror
The language taught needs to be suitable and easy to use for general purpose programming. It is also a benefit if it can scale up to large projects.
People should be able to program because computers already form a part of everyone's lives, and just "using" them by pointing and clicking is _not_ sufficient to use them effectively in all cases.
Knowing an easy programming language would allow the general populace to get much more out of their computers, at work or at home, and would increase productivity, by allowing them to take control of the computer, and to make it do something nearer to what they want, which is a good thing.
I'd guess most people who use computers have something they'd like to automate, but are forced by the software they use to do it manually, and it's too expensive to have that feature added just for them, so they continue being less productive than they could be with it. If they knew how to program (just some simple basics), _and_ there is a usable language that can be integrated, then it's only a matter of converting what they know into a few lines of code, so they never have to repeat it.
What if you mess up burning the CD, so that eg. you miss a few crucial files, or break it so the CD doesn't boot ? It's not Red Hat then, although without taking care, you may *think* it is. The result is that people who recieve these get a bad impression, undeservedly, of Red Hat. This can happen, and unless proved otherwise (eg by selling your own support and manuals) counts as a 'cheap knock-off product'
Wasn't this out at the same time as the Pre 4.0 snapshot? It was on the XFree86 web page when I first saw the 3.9.16 story ...
That about sez it all. - I'm happy because this fixes a bug in support for the ATI Rage LT Pro which caused random crashes in X - was damn annoying.
Anyway, on with downloading and testing the new server.
So ?
As the copyright holder you can change the wording to specify that it is only covered by the version you specify.
If I remember, the FSF suggest you allow it to be used under any later license, but you don't have to, it's not part of the GPL.
>If you're at .999c or whatever and you turn the lights on, the light from the headlights will still appear to be going at 'c' relative to .001c)
you to observers (_not_
Yeah it's been a while since I checked this but:
Light from the headlights will still appear to _you_ to be going at 'c' away from you.
It will appear to be going away from you at 'c' as viewed by other observers.
'You' will also compress to near zero length as viewed by others.
'You' will be flamed for going so far off topic (...:)
One more uk interested bod, nuff said
"Many Linux users in future won't understand how to recompile packages that get broken by kernel incompatibilities"
These same users will not be upgrading their kernels to a new version by themselves, except as part of upgrading their linux distribution. Thus the distribution maintainers would have checked for such incompatibilities and fixed them and generally made sure things work.
If there are packages on the system they have installed themselves, then it's perfectly reasonable for them to download/get new versions which can be installed in the same way they originally installed them.
So there are no problems.
"And why does PPP require the novj flag?"
Not sure:
I'm using it because I upgraded to 2.2 when I got a new machine with a decent (56k) modem, and without "novj" I'd only get 2-3 kb/sec, but disabling vj gets me the proper 4-5 kb/sec.
I had however thought it was to do with the service provider I use, whose servers can't handle vj compression at the higher speeds (I know others at the same ISP who've had the same problem).
Thing is, I'd have thought the same problem exists with whatever kernel as it's not a problem on my side.
>An Anon (+ available) 18 yrold female programmer :)
.. suits me sir!
Hmm, sounds like an invite
Seriously though, I'm not surprised I've met no female hacker types (here in UK) yet considering that I've met no male hacker types socially either - all the way through school and 6th Form. There'd better be hackers at Uni (this Oct)!
It's probably just very expensive for big vendors to maintain their own flavour of unix, so just put the best bits of their own unix into linux, and allow the open source community to look after it, with allthe other bebefits linux brings (multi-platform compatibility etc).
Maybe if more vendors do this (competing to add technology to linux ???) then we'll see it improve much further than it already has.
Good:
They've realised that key escrow _will not work_ and is very, very bad for e-commerce. People need to be able to transact knowing their financial details are not available without their explicit consent.
Requiring people to hand decryption keys over when required (by secretary of state etc.) as part of a legitimate criminal investigation is also ok, the government needs to be able to get evidence against criminals to prosecute them. We can also (just about) trust the government not to mis-use any small pieces of information they gain in this way, with the knowledge of the recipient (as opposed to being able to decrypt everything without the correspondent's knowledge, as key escrow allows).
The Bad:
Asking people to voluntarily hand keys in for escrow is just a bad idea, no criminals will hand in their keys, and is just a potential security hole for anyone using encryption.
The heavy handed measures for informants and complaints etc, seems totally unjustified and way, way over the top. If I feel the government had no reason to get my decryption key from me, I expect to be able to recieve fair treatment when lodging a complaint, and expect a thorough investigation. There must be checks to stop law enforcement agencies abusing their powers, as they all seem so keen to do.
Does it run linux easily?
:)
-- Person who can't be bothered to read a single more document/faq/howto today
If you're going to install required packages from source, you ought to download the source packages, and compiling them produces a binary package which can then be installed.
That beats having a lot of packages installed from source, with no idea of what individual files they have installed.
Also, if you're into compiling lots of stuff, there is a host of tools to help you create debian packages, which you can use to generate binary packages from your source (*.tgz) files.
Thusly debian will know what's installed. Also, I find your redhat comment confusing - In my experience of RH, (5.2 on my older computer), it does complain about missing packages, even if the binary file is there. I clearly remember having to use the --force option to rpm for certain things (for which I had installed hte dependant files myself)
After a bit of guessing, I've found it's actually bug #8559 which is about http proxies. Seee that for the info.
Hate being finicky, but you can't really do that, but you can for certain cases use 6 x 16bit hex + 4 x 8bit decimal, eg:
3FFE:1CF8:FF01:0:0:0:0.0.0.1
I find that a majority of Linux users do not have an unix background, ie they are from a PC world, and are typically "home" users.
A majority of xBSD users have previous "real" (commercial) unix experience, and are happier to move to BSD because they are more likely to know about it (and know more about it) than Linux.
"what do you people keep doing that makes Windows NT crash?"
It shouldn't matter what everyone's doing, it still shouldn't crash. I should be able to run any software concurrently, and have whatever services I like running, and it should be able to run fully loaded (high memory usage, high cpu usage) for extended periods of time.
I find (on my desktop NT box) that if I start using many applications at once (thus filling up most of the memory but not all), there is a tendency for it to lock up and it need me to reboot. Often explorer.exe crashes such that I cannot recover/restart it (resulting in screen garbage) and I am forced to power cycle it.
I will admit that I haven't had a BSOD with this machine, but I do (intentionally) reboot it every so often, and it does have 96Mb ram. My previous experience with a lower powered NT box, with only 32Mb was a whole lot worse. I was always able to make that crash (since this was previously, it probably was a few service packs down to my current computer) very easily, and get to the BSOD. I'd just start running a few apps simultaneously and use them all at once, and generally load up the machine, and it would fall over.
My experiences with Linux are much different. Since I got a modern laptop, (with suspend modes) I've been able to leave linux running on it without a single reboot. Among the applications I leave running are several instances of netscape, some compiles and other programs, that use up most of the memory (including virtual mem) and do a similarly lot of stuff including apache etc. Although netscape crashes, I have never experienced system instability on it, maybe slow response when I had many compiles going at once, but no lock ups.
If it gives you more time to work with the content, and not have to faff around with the associated stuff of running a highly popular web site. /. can grow properly.
Just make sure that the site doesn't become any more "commercial" and I think everyone'll be happy and
That's most likely server side XML.
The actual document is stored as XML, and an XSL type stylesheet (note that there isn't a formal spec for this yet, so it could be another similar technology) is used to render it into HTML on the fly.
I guess they're future proofing all the articles they store.
I also am not an economist, but:
In the old days, cars were _not_ cheap. Cars were an expensive luxury. Today, cars are cheap. This can be demonstrated by counting how many cars peope used to own, and how many they do now. You will find that, on average, the number of cars per person (or per family) had gone significantly up, and is still rising.
"Cheap" is only a relative term, in relation to how much people can afford.
.. That this sort of thing is meant to use voice recognition (The 200Mhz StrongARM if enough to hack it apparently), so everyone stop complaining about how small it is.
I meant evenly mixed in, with a lot of variation. I think that uses both words, "heterogeneous" meaning lots of variation, and "homogeneous" meaning evenly mixed in, so it all "looks" the same.
(As things stand) I would have a company with different platforms on each desktop, eg an intel based WinXX machine on one desktop, a Sparc based Linux machine on the next, an Alpha based FreeBSD on the next, etc. (PS my examples are fairly bogus). So even a single department / office would be fairly resistant to any single point of failure / attack. Too bad that currently no-one would support anything like this, but hey, its something to aim for.
We need a homogeneous mix of Platforms, OSes, Applications.
Each of these should use well documented open protocols to communicate with each other, so they all do the same things, but in different ways.
Diversity, it's how nature does it.
Quick pointer (I wrote this a few days ago when the story was on slashdot).
http://slashdot.org/co mments.pl?sid=99/06/10/2319242&cid=242