>Not only by taking directly from the bsd releases, but by the mere fact that ATT ITSELF took some of the parts of the BSD releases.
I'm not denying that. I was replying to the previous poster that had suggested that SunOS, HP/UX, and AIX were "forked" from BSD, and that the BSD license was the cause of the forking. That is clearly not the case. These proprietary unicies were "forked" from other proprietary versions of UNIX that were NOT BSD licensed. Therefore the BSD license did not cause the forking. QED.
Yes, there's plenty of code overlap. Yes, these unicies did benefit immensly from BSD. But there's a difference between benefiting from BSD and being a direct fork of it.
>This weakness made it possible for IBM, Sun, HP, etc. to proprietize Unix and make many incompatible versions that only run on their hardware.
So would you say that made UNIX less successful? Anyway, you're spouting nonsense. IBM and Sun were never forked from BSD. They were forked from derivations of AT&T Unix, a proprietary product.
>The GPL was only created because of the lessons learned from the whole Unix-fiasco.
Unix, arguably the most sucessful operating system ever, was a fiasco? Surely you jest.
The GPL was created for those who believe that software should always be free. Believe it or not, there are those of us in the industry that are totally comfortable with closed-source software as well. For those of us that don't MIND that a large company might make money off software that we freely write, the BSD license is a good fit.
>"Science" has rarely met with any significant resistence from "religion" in the Western world.
I agree with much of your post, but that's a very silly statement. What about stem cell research? What about the John Scopes Monkey trial, which some (in the south) still insist isn't over? The Big Bang (somehow opposed to creation)?
It's really not hard to find examples of religion opposing science, especially when you talk about religious groups that take the bible literally.
>What have religions done for us other than caused death?
The really odd thing is that all major religions preach peace over war, yet somehow people still get it in their heads that their god wills them to kill people. Take any war: if you look at the root cause, why these people are really mad at each other, it's always some form of economic wealth.
I wouldn't say that religion has caused death. Rather it has given people who already want to kill each other, for economic reasons, a reprieve. If a deity wants a person to kill someone, how could the killer possibly suffer consequences? Combine a population with that mentality with a leader that wants a piece of land, and you've got a dangerous combination. Religion isn't bad per se, but it is a dangerous power to wield.
>Leahy has been relentless in his attacks. Recently, he blamed the intelligence failures on President Bush while the senate committed determined in a bipartisan manner that the failures had nothing to do with the president, and everything to do with practices at the CIA.
I'm going to side with Leahy on this one... When the attacks on the World Trade Center happened, the white house asked the CIA to "find the connection with Iraq", not "Is there a connection with Iraq?". The white house is 100% to blame for the intelligence failures, because they ordered the CIA to produce such information, whether or not such information was truthful and accurate. The "hawks" in the white house wanted to attack Iraq, let the CIA know that they need a reason to do so, so they provided one. Let's hope the parties who gave the order are held responsible instead of those just following orders.
I don't know much about Leahy's other claims, but I'm glad he's being a thorn in Cheney's side. Let's not forget that Cheney's no angel. He's still claiming that Al Quaeda and Saddam Hussein were partners. Didn't he read the memo that Bin Laden had tried to KILL Saddam on several occasions? Perhaps it's because he personally stands to gain tens of millions on Haliburton stock options from the Iraq war? For all I know Leahy is a nutcase, but if he's putting Cheney in the hot seat, he's all right in my book.
This is just a subjective opinion, but I prefer CBR at bitrates greater than 192 kbps. The reason is that with VBR, the more subtle cues in the music can get a bit dishwatery, even at very large values of --preset. A CBR bitrate of 256 using LAME will result in a very nice sound, one that is already hard to distinguish from a CD. I'd pit that against a similar-sized VBR file in terms of pure sound quality any day of the week. VBR (and ABR) are very nice alternatives to 128kbps or 160kbps CBR, but 256kbps CBR is tough to beat (except with higher file sizes). Again, just my subjective opinion, I don't have any data to back it up.
>Criticism of the mix of high tech space stuff and low tech western stuff strikes me as silly..
I agree. Think about it this way: Imagine if you were going to colonize another planet, that was earthlike in enviromnent. Which would you rather bring with you: A car, or a horse? A car requires a replenishable source of gasoline, a mechanic, new tires now and then, belts, hoses, wiring... a car is not viable outside a civilization that can support it. A horse, on the other hand, just needs some room to run and some plants to graze on. In the same token, would you rather have a knife or a laser pistol that runs on Duracells?
I think Joss Wheadon was right on when he predicted that colonization would result in a return to older technologies... or at least not throwing away the tried and true.
>But im sick of the BS pretending that there's the government and there's private industry. They are interelated, and we would do well to discuss, and plan, that relationship and public funding of r&d. And dont get me started on healthcare
Commie.:)
The fact is, in a capitalist society (or at least one that's MOSTLY capitalist), spending tax dollars and non-tax dollars are different things. If tax dollars are spent, you get a $900 toilet seat, $5 million in wireless equipment that never leaves the loading dock, etc. It's impossible for government to be efficient, because there's no incentive for efficiency. On the other hand, if private dollars are spent, there's a very big incentive to be efficient: They get to keep the money they don't spend! (or at least whoever is funding them gets to).
That is the very reason SpaceShipOne cost $20 million instead of $2 billion. If we ever want space flight to be within the reach of the average person, NASA is NOT going to get us there. It's private programs like this that will make the cost reasonable.
>When it comes to speed, compiled languages will always run faster than interpreted ones, especially in real-world applications.
It's a bit simplistic to call Java an "interpreted" language. A Java source file is compiled into bytecode. Modern JVMs then take this bytecode and use a Just In Time compiler to compile it into machine code just before it runs. Naturally this is a bit of overhead up front, but once the class is JITed, it will perform on the order of natively compiled code written in another language.
>All Cablevision Corporation has to do is offer some special deal with cable TV and people leave DSL.
Why couldn't the phone company do a similar thing with the telephone? There's really no difference. More people have a land line phone than have cable.
>The problem is, DiVX/XViD aren't designed with streaming in mind..
I would argue that "streaming" is the major reason people don't like RealVideo... If a movie clip is going to stop and re-buffer while I'm watching it, I'd rather not watch it. I'd much rather download a clip and watch it later uninterupted.
>It's not that accounting is odd or a black art, it's that you don't understand that every dollar has to be accounted for and properly categorized.
I submit, however, that modern accounting does defy common sense. "Depreciating goodwill like any other asset"...
Good Lord. Accountants have invented their own laws of time and space. I found out the other day that you can depreciate an appreciating asset.
I wouldn't call accounting a black art exactly... it's more a series of tricks and diversions designed to legally conform to (while still evading) a badly designed tax code.
>They've needed a process model for a long time. That's still the critical piece needed to make a "Java OS" a reality. (AFAIK it still is missing...)
If you look at WebSphere, you'll notice there's support for "shared libraries", which allow "applications" to use certain sets of classes isolated from other applications.
The "Java OS", at least from a server perspective, is really an application server.
I'd agree that this functionality is missing on the desktop, however.
>They should instead work on fleshing out AWT
SWT, in my opinion, is the widget toolkit of the future. It integrates with existing GUIs quite nicely... has bindings for Windows, GTK, and Motif.
>Well if you own the physical ROM then you have a de facto license to use it.
I'm not sure you do. Copyright law says very little about licensing, except where it entails the transfer of copyright. The "right to use" license doesn't really exist.
Don't forget that copyright is a government-enforced monopoly on the publication of works. The DMCA (for better or worse) extends this to incude copying at home for whatever your reason. Sorry, but even if you own the physical rom, you probably do not have a legal right to copy it even for personal use (except maybe for portions of it for comment, criticism, or parody, provided you can do that without violating any of the rest of the DMCA). The "license to use" is a fallacy.
>Is there anything in the middle that is also cheap/free and suitable for adults?
Why teach full programming and not something similar that she would find useful? Learning how to do calculations in spreadsheets is quite a useful skill... a skill I'm sure she could put to use. The mindstorms might hold her interest for a while, but unless she's a geek (doesn't seem so), she'll want practical applications.
What if you were using a brute force method? Wouldn't 000000 be a logical place to start?
I'd also wager to that if you were to poll a random sampling of individuals for their guess at the passcode, the passcodes involving all one digit would crop up more often. People enjoy patterns, particularly simple ones.
>Specifically, suppose I have one computer with 1GB of RAM and 1GB of swap, and another computer with 2GB of RAM and no swap.
That isn't the issue at all. Buying more RAM will always improve performance. The issue is for a FIXED amount of ram, whether or not swap improves performance.
I think the "issue" is quite silly anyway. 2GB of RAM with 2GB swap certainly ought to be at least as fast as 2GB of ram with no swap. If it isn't faster, or at least equal in performance, there's a tuning problem (see/proc/sys/vm/swappiness) or a bug in the VM subsystem.
>The main thing keeping diesel cars from becoming commercial in the US is emmission standards.
If you recall, the 80s were rife with diesel cars. My family had a diesel wood-panel station wagon and a diesel chevette. The chevette got around 50 miles per gallon.
If emissions were the only problem with these cars, I'm sure they could have overcome that. The main problem was that these small-engine diesels were not nearly as reliable as gasoline engines. That, and when you pull into the diesel area at a truck stop with a chevette, you're liable to get crunched monster-truck style.
Slashdot Mirror
>So, why back a pointless corporation?
Most of the backers are hedge funds.
A hedge fund, being defined by extremely risky investments, can afford to buy a few lottery tickets.
>The American sense of humour eludes me. I think it is because it's ... not funny.
Yeah... Ed the Sock is SO much funnier...
>So if your definition is correct, shouldn't Weird Al be getting sued lots?
Perhaps that's why Wierd Al asks the artist's permission first, then pays them handsome royalties after the fact.
>Not only by taking directly from the bsd releases, but by the mere fact that ATT ITSELF took some of the parts of the BSD releases.
I'm not denying that. I was replying to the previous poster that had suggested that SunOS, HP/UX, and AIX were "forked" from BSD, and that the BSD license was the cause of the forking. That is clearly not the case. These proprietary unicies were "forked" from other proprietary versions of UNIX that were NOT BSD licensed. Therefore the BSD license did not cause the forking. QED.
Yes, there's plenty of code overlap. Yes, these unicies did benefit immensly from BSD. But there's a difference between benefiting from BSD and being a direct fork of it.
>This weakness made it possible for IBM, Sun, HP, etc. to proprietize Unix and make many incompatible versions that only run on their hardware.
So would you say that made UNIX less successful? Anyway, you're spouting nonsense. IBM and Sun were never forked from BSD. They were forked from derivations of AT&T Unix, a proprietary product.
>The GPL was only created because of the lessons learned from the whole Unix-fiasco.
Unix, arguably the most sucessful operating system ever, was a fiasco? Surely you jest.
The GPL was created for those who believe that software should always be free. Believe it or not, there are those of us in the industry that are totally comfortable with closed-source software as well. For those of us that don't MIND that a large company might make money off software that we freely write, the BSD license is a good fit.
>"Science" has rarely met with any significant resistence from "religion" in the Western world.
I agree with much of your post, but that's a very silly statement. What about stem cell research? What about the John Scopes Monkey trial, which some (in the south) still insist isn't over? The Big Bang (somehow opposed to creation)?
It's really not hard to find examples of religion opposing science, especially when you talk about religious groups that take the bible literally.
>What have religions done for us other than caused death?
The really odd thing is that all major religions preach peace over war, yet somehow people still get it in their heads that their god wills them to kill people. Take any war: if you look at the root cause, why these people are really mad at each other, it's always some form of economic wealth.
I wouldn't say that religion has caused death. Rather it has given people who already want to kill each other, for economic reasons, a reprieve. If a deity wants a person to kill someone, how could the killer possibly suffer consequences? Combine a population with that mentality with a leader that wants a piece of land, and you've got a dangerous combination. Religion isn't bad per se, but it is a dangerous power to wield.
yes. Anything that you can say in valid HTML can be said in invalid HTML with fewer tags.. it's just a fact of life. :)
Are you tired?
Are you tired?
Tell us why.
>Leahy has been relentless in his attacks. Recently, he blamed the intelligence failures on President Bush while the senate committed determined in a bipartisan manner that the failures had nothing to do with the president, and everything to do with practices at the CIA.
I'm going to side with Leahy on this one... When the attacks on the World Trade Center happened, the white house asked the CIA to "find the connection with Iraq", not "Is there a connection with Iraq?". The white house is 100% to blame for the intelligence failures, because they ordered the CIA to produce such information, whether or not such information was truthful and accurate. The "hawks" in the white house wanted to attack Iraq, let the CIA know that they need a reason to do so, so they provided one. Let's hope the parties who gave the order are held responsible instead of those just following orders.
I don't know much about Leahy's other claims, but I'm glad he's being a thorn in Cheney's side. Let's not forget that Cheney's no angel. He's still claiming that Al Quaeda and Saddam Hussein were partners. Didn't he read the memo that Bin Laden had tried to KILL Saddam on several occasions? Perhaps it's because he personally stands to gain tens of millions on Haliburton stock options from the Iraq war? For all I know Leahy is a nutcase, but if he's putting Cheney in the hot seat, he's all right in my book.
>but why waste such valuable space by using CBR?
This is just a subjective opinion, but I prefer CBR at bitrates greater than 192 kbps. The reason is that with VBR, the more subtle cues in the music can get a bit dishwatery, even at very large values of --preset. A CBR bitrate of 256 using LAME will result in a very nice sound, one that is already hard to distinguish from a CD. I'd pit that against a similar-sized VBR file in terms of pure sound quality any day of the week. VBR (and ABR) are very nice alternatives to 128kbps or 160kbps CBR, but 256kbps CBR is tough to beat (except with higher file sizes). Again, just my subjective opinion, I don't have any data to back it up.
>Criticism of the mix of high tech space stuff and low tech western stuff strikes me as silly..
I agree. Think about it this way: Imagine if you were going to colonize another planet, that was earthlike in enviromnent. Which would you rather bring with you: A car, or a horse? A car requires a replenishable source of gasoline, a mechanic, new tires now and then, belts, hoses, wiring... a car is not viable outside a civilization that can support it. A horse, on the other hand, just needs some room to run and some plants to graze on. In the same token, would you rather have a knife or a laser pistol that runs on Duracells?
I think Joss Wheadon was right on when he predicted that colonization would result in a return to older technologies... or at least not throwing away the tried and true.
>But im sick of the BS pretending that there's the government and there's private industry. They are interelated, and we would do well to discuss, and plan, that relationship and public funding of r&d. And dont get me started on healthcare
:)
Commie.
The fact is, in a capitalist society (or at least one that's MOSTLY capitalist), spending tax dollars and non-tax dollars are different things. If tax dollars are spent, you get a $900 toilet seat, $5 million in wireless equipment that never leaves the loading dock, etc. It's impossible for government to be efficient, because there's no incentive for efficiency. On the other hand, if private dollars are spent, there's a very big incentive to be efficient: They get to keep the money they don't spend! (or at least whoever is funding them gets to).
That is the very reason SpaceShipOne cost $20 million instead of $2 billion. If we ever want space flight to be within the reach of the average person, NASA is NOT going to get us there. It's private programs like this that will make the cost reasonable.
>Skolelinux
sounds too much like
SKOAL linux (linux for rednecks)
or
SCO Linux (Linux for litigious bastards and masochists)
>When it comes to speed, compiled languages will always run faster than interpreted ones, especially in real-world applications.
It's a bit simplistic to call Java an "interpreted" language. A Java source file is compiled into bytecode. Modern JVMs then take this bytecode and use a Just In Time compiler to compile it into machine code just before it runs. Naturally this is a bit of overhead up front, but once the class is JITed, it will perform on the order of natively compiled code written in another language.
>All Cablevision Corporation has to do is offer some special deal with cable TV and people leave DSL.
Why couldn't the phone company do a similar thing with the telephone? There's really no difference. More people have a land line phone than have cable.
>The problem is, DiVX/XViD aren't designed with streaming in mind..
I would argue that "streaming" is the major reason people don't like RealVideo... If a movie clip is going to stop and re-buffer while I'm watching it, I'd rather not watch it. I'd much rather download a clip and watch it later uninterupted.
>It's not that accounting is odd or a black art, it's that you don't understand that every dollar has to be accounted for and properly categorized.
I submit, however, that modern accounting does defy common sense. "Depreciating goodwill like any other asset"...
Good Lord. Accountants have invented their own laws of time and space. I found out the other day that you can depreciate an appreciating asset.
I wouldn't call accounting a black art exactly... it's more a series of tricks and diversions designed to legally conform to (while still evading) a badly designed tax code.
>I'm thinking about changing from ATT&WS to Cingular
Cingular is buying AT&T Wireless, so there's little point in moving. You'll end up with the same provider whether you stay or switch.
>Is that a sort of pop noise followed by crackling?
Get it straight... it's snap, crackle, pop.
>They've needed a process model for a long time. That's still the critical piece needed to make a "Java OS" a reality. (AFAIK it still is missing...)
If you look at WebSphere, you'll notice there's support for "shared libraries", which allow "applications" to use certain sets of classes isolated from other applications.
The "Java OS", at least from a server perspective, is really an application server.
I'd agree that this functionality is missing on the desktop, however.
>They should instead work on fleshing out AWT
SWT, in my opinion, is the widget toolkit of the future. It integrates with existing GUIs quite nicely... has bindings for Windows, GTK, and Motif.
>Well if you own the physical ROM then you have a de facto license to use it.
I'm not sure you do. Copyright law says very little about licensing, except where it entails the transfer of copyright. The "right to use" license doesn't really exist.
Don't forget that copyright is a government-enforced monopoly on the publication of works. The DMCA (for better or worse) extends this to incude copying at home for whatever your reason. Sorry, but even if you own the physical rom, you probably do not have a legal right to copy it even for personal use (except maybe for portions of it for comment, criticism, or parody, provided you can do that without violating any of the rest of the DMCA). The "license to use" is a fallacy.
>Is there anything in the middle that is also cheap/free and suitable for adults?
Why teach full programming and not something similar that she would find useful? Learning how to do calculations in spreadsheets is quite a useful skill... a skill I'm sure she could put to use. The mindstorms might hold her interest for a while, but unless she's a geek (doesn't seem so), she'll want practical applications.
>I personally never would of thought of 000000
What if you were using a brute force method? Wouldn't 000000 be a logical place to start?
I'd also wager to that if you were to poll a random sampling of individuals for their guess at the passcode, the passcodes involving all one digit would crop up more often. People enjoy patterns, particularly simple ones.
>Specifically, suppose I have one computer with 1GB of RAM and 1GB of swap, and another computer with 2GB of RAM and no swap.
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness) or a bug in the VM subsystem.
That isn't the issue at all. Buying more RAM will always improve performance. The issue is for a FIXED amount of ram, whether or not swap improves performance.
I think the "issue" is quite silly anyway. 2GB of RAM with 2GB swap certainly ought to be at least as fast as 2GB of ram with no swap. If it isn't faster, or at least equal in performance, there's a tuning problem (see
>The main thing keeping diesel cars from becoming commercial in the US is emmission standards.
If you recall, the 80s were rife with diesel cars. My family had a diesel wood-panel station wagon and a diesel chevette. The chevette got around 50 miles per gallon.
If emissions were the only problem with these cars, I'm sure they could have overcome that. The main problem was that these small-engine diesels were not nearly as reliable as gasoline engines. That, and when you pull into the diesel area at a truck stop with a chevette, you're liable to get crunched monster-truck style.