I don't really see what the problem is... if a scientist has a problem with doing research that will help the U.S. wage war, they can simply not accept funding from the Pentagon. If no other agency will fund them, then probably (a) their research sucks or (b) their research has few non-military applications.
So most scientists don't receive military money... as the summary points out, this doesn't necessarily mean they're compromising their principles. Certainly many scientists support strengthening U.S. military capabilities (I'm one of them).
The article seems to take a fairly cynical viewpoint that scientists are whoring themselves out to the Pentagon, and that helping the DoD is morally wrong. But the fact is that the military funds tons of research that will benefit civilians, in everything from artificial intelligence to more efficient car engines.
Seems like there are already plenty of adequate ways to run Windowz apps under Linux. Just none of them are free software! Will the vanilla Wine ever catch up?
Yep, Linux is great on my laptop and at work, but why is it so great for embedded systems?
I assume that embedded systems don't need the Unix-like environment, and just run a single application. And how much of the Linux kernel do they actually use? Loadable device drivers are out, SMP is out, networking is probably out for a lot of them, filesystems may not be needed...
So what does an embedded Linux kernel look like? How does embedded Linux compare to things like, say, eCos (Red Hat's open source realtime embedded OS).
We all know that "faggot" just means a bundle of wood, but if you call someone a faggot you're calling them a homosexual in an insulting manner.
Likewise, anti-Semite has come to mean "prejudiced against Jews", even though Arabs and some north Africans are descended from Semitic groups and speak Semitic language.
Okay, RMS might do a lot of spouting off of his political/social/moral views, but let's not forget...
This guy is a real bad-ass programmer. He wrote Emacs and GCC, among other things. I would say those programs have stood the test of time and now are critical to the productivity of developers (yes, many use vi, but many use Emacs). How much less free/opensource software would there be today without those two programs?
For that matter, how much less software overall would there be without gcc and Emacs? I used to work at a proprietary software company and all of our Solaris and Linux development were done with gcc, gdb, Emacs, gprof, bash, perl...
Uh... do you have a source for this quote??? It is quite ridiculous, and suggests a total lack of understanding of how Unix security works, which seems doubtful coming from RMS, who wrote a big chunk of the GNU system himself.
My response to this quote, if it is real:
Truly "fascist" (aka security-conscious) system administrators should ensure that no one gets ahold of the root password, thus circumventing the need for a wheel group.:-)
I admire RMS but I think he's a little nuts for insisting that for a Linux distribution to be acceptable to him, it must not even include the option of non-free software in the basic install.
Debian is in my mind a scrupulous free-software-only distribution. If they include any non-free software, it's basically in the form of, "Okay, here's a directory of packages people have made to allow easy installation of non-free software under Debian."
I think considering Debian to be anything less than pristine free software is vaguely silly.
Okay, I buy computer parts and electronics and such on ebay from time to time. Generally $20-$200 items. It's usually a good deal. I've never had a bad experience, though I've passed up many a good deal from a seller with insufficient feedback.
This is what I do: (1) check out seller's feedback, make sure they've sold similar things before. If they have less than ~50 positive feedback and any legit negative feedback, I don't bid. (2) ask seller a question about the item, something so they'll have to put a minute or two of thought into it and actually LOOK at the item. (3) if they respond in a timely manner, I can be fairly sure they actually have the item. (4) go ahead and make a SINGLE BID for the item
Simpsons... the TV anchorman Kent Brockman says, "I for one, welcome our new alien overlords," when he mistakenly gets the impression that earth is being invaded by aliens.
He goes on to pretty much advertise himself as willing to betray humanity to save himself, then feels sheepish when he finds out there's no alien invasion.
Has anybody else noticed that hotmail has been down all day today? I haven't been able to login from my home computer (md.comcast.net) or work computer (umd.edu), or from a couple other Linux boxes at various points around the country...
Why the fuck are they still still distributing perfectly good 2.4 kernels on their own FTP site???
I think I've read at least 20 comments on/. in the past week with links to ftp.sco.com kernels or distros. Has nobody at SCO noticed that they are still distributing 2.4 kernels?
By permitting themselves to distribute Linux, are they now violating their own licensing terms for their "intellectual property in the Linux Kernel"? More importantly, could I sue them for it:-)
Uh... I just ran into this while browsing SCO's site. It seems to contain more vague threats and accusations, to the tune of "everyone using Unix apps under Linux has pirated SCO's libraries."
You have more uses for * now, as in slurpy arrays and splicing. As in, the * can make an array parameter slurp up all the remaining arguments, or it can make an argument flatten into a list of arguments.
Wo betide the fool who still wants to use * for multiplication!
(1) Draw a complete operator precedence chart for C. (2) Draw a complete operator precedence chart for C++. (3) Draw a complete operator precedence chart for Perl 5. (4) Draw a complete operator precedence chart for Perl 6.
Perl's ability to express complicated things concisely is nothing short of astonishing, but it's gotten to the point where I can hardly parse code written by someone else...
Perhaps the Perl motto should be changed from TMTOWTDI to TAMODVPCWDSSAAMSTWDI:
"There's a multitude of different visually pleasing constructions with deceptively subtle syntax and auto-magical semantics that will do it."
Okay, I love Perl 5... Perl 6 looks really cool but overwhelming. I'm glad they're adding the options for stricter type-checking and such, but remembering the syntactic shortcuts is gonna be even harder. I don't even want to know what the parser code looks like...
Avogadro's number is nothing but a conversion factor between mass units:
One mole of atomic mass units = 6.02 x 10^23 amu = 1 gram
Yeah, it would be pretty weird if the universe had exactly Avogadro's number of whatever, but not nearly as cool as if, say, the exact number of stars turned out to always be prime:-P
I was writing a book for O'Reilly (yes, O'Reilly of all publishers) and they said that I could not use TeX or LaTeX because they had no one there who could work with it.
Is this for real???? I mean, so many of the O'Reilly books just LOOK like they've been formatted with TeX, the fonts, the headings, all that. I find it extremely hard to believe that they don't use *TeX at O'Reilly!
I use WinMX now [http://www.winmx.com]. It's so Napster-like, it's almost funny. The selection seems to be quite good and it has some nice feautres like multi-point downloads. But mostly, it's just like Napster. Woohoo.
Have you seen the latest Google toolbar for IE? It's extremely light and useful and it blocks popups too. So there's a pretty good, useful popup blocker for IE now...
Of course, I still prefer Mozilla (Galeon, actually), but popup-blocking is no longer a killer feature, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
It's spelled p e d a n t i c, you nitwit! </pedantic>
Townhouses? Dorm connections that you have to pay for? Why, you must be at Cornell :-)
I don't really see what the problem is... if a scientist has a problem with doing research that will help the U.S. wage war, they can simply not accept funding from the Pentagon. If no other agency will fund them, then probably (a) their research sucks or (b) their research has few non-military applications.
So most scientists don't receive military money... as the summary points out, this doesn't necessarily mean they're compromising their principles. Certainly many scientists support strengthening U.S. military capabilities (I'm one of them).
The article seems to take a fairly cynical viewpoint that scientists are whoring themselves out to the Pentagon, and that helping the DoD is morally wrong. But the fact is that the military funds tons of research that will benefit civilians, in everything from artificial intelligence to more efficient car engines.
Seems like there are already plenty of adequate ways to run Windowz apps under Linux. Just none of them are free software! Will the vanilla Wine ever catch up?
Yep, Linux is great on my laptop and at work, but why is it so great for embedded systems?
I assume that embedded systems don't need the Unix-like environment, and just run a single application. And how much of the Linux kernel do they actually use? Loadable device drivers are out, SMP is out, networking is probably out for a lot of them, filesystems may not be needed...
So what does an embedded Linux kernel look like? How does embedded Linux compare to things like, say, eCos (Red Hat's open source realtime embedded OS).
Are you SERIOUS??? The Visual Studio EULA actually forbids you from coding a word processor or spreadsheet app? Holy crap. Can I see that?
This is silly.
We all know that "faggot" just means a bundle of wood, but if you call someone a faggot you're calling them a homosexual in an insulting manner.
Likewise, anti-Semite has come to mean "prejudiced against Jews", even though Arabs and some north Africans are descended from Semitic groups and speak Semitic language.
Does SCO distribute GCC with UnixWare??? I mean, what kinda compiler do people use to build applications for UnixWare?
AFAIK, most Unix vendors gave up on writing compilers a few years ago and now just distribute GCC...
Hmm... I woulda thought that RMS wouldn't have too much of a moral problem with pornography himself. Though I could be wrong.
:)
Though perhaps he wouldn't want it in Emacs for legal reasons
Okay, RMS might do a lot of spouting off of his political/social/moral views, but let's not forget...
This guy is a real bad-ass programmer. He wrote Emacs and GCC, among other things. I would say those programs have stood the test of time and now are critical to the productivity of developers (yes, many use vi, but many use Emacs). How much less free/opensource software would there be today without those two programs?
For that matter, how much less software overall would there be without gcc and Emacs? I used to work at a proprietary software company and all of our Solaris and Linux development were done with gcc, gdb, Emacs, gprof, bash, perl...
My response to this quote, if it is real:
I admire RMS but I think he's a little nuts for insisting that for a Linux distribution to be acceptable to him, it must not even include the option of non-free software in the basic install.
Debian is in my mind a scrupulous free-software-only distribution. If they include any non-free software, it's basically in the form of, "Okay, here's a directory of packages people have made to allow easy installation of non-free software under Debian."
I think considering Debian to be anything less than pristine free software is vaguely silly.
Okay, I buy computer parts and electronics and such on ebay from time to time. Generally $20-$200 items. It's usually a good deal. I've never had a bad experience, though I've passed up many a good deal from a seller with insufficient feedback.
This is what I do:
(1) check out seller's feedback, make sure they've sold similar things before. If they have less than ~50 positive feedback and any legit negative feedback, I don't bid.
(2) ask seller a question about the item, something so they'll have to put a minute or two of thought into it and actually LOOK at the item.
(3) if they respond in a timely manner, I can be fairly sure they actually have the item.
(4) go ahead and make a SINGLE BID for the item
Simpsons... the TV anchorman Kent Brockman says, "I for one, welcome our new alien overlords," when he mistakenly gets the impression that earth is being invaded by aliens.
He goes on to pretty much advertise himself as willing to betray humanity to save himself, then feels sheepish when he finds out there's no alien invasion.
Has anybody else noticed that hotmail has been down all day today? I haven't been able to login from my home computer (md.comcast.net) or work computer (umd.edu), or from a couple other Linux boxes at various points around the country...
Not only do I like your policies, but you're far and away the most gorgeous politician I've ever seen...
;-)
If your career takes off and you end up in the DC area, do you want my number?
Why the fuck are they still still distributing perfectly good 2.4 kernels on their own FTP site???
/. in the past week with links to ftp.sco.com kernels or distros. Has nobody at SCO noticed that they are still distributing 2.4 kernels?
:-)
I think I've read at least 20 comments on
By permitting themselves to distribute Linux, are they now violating their own licensing terms for their "intellectual property in the Linux Kernel"? More importantly, could I sue them for it
SCO System V for Linux
Uh... I just ran into this while browsing SCO's site. It seems to contain more vague threats and accusations, to the tune of "everyone using Unix apps under Linux has pirated SCO's libraries."
Does anyone know what this is about?
(1) Draw a complete operator precedence chart for C.
(2) Draw a complete operator precedence chart for C++.
(3) Draw a complete operator precedence chart for Perl 5.
(4) Draw a complete operator precedence chart for Perl 6.
Perl's ability to express complicated things concisely is nothing short of astonishing, but it's gotten to the point where I can hardly parse code written by someone else...
Perhaps the Perl motto should be changed from TMTOWTDI to TAMODVPCWDSSAAMSTWDI:
"There's a multitude of different visually pleasing constructions with deceptively subtle syntax and auto-magical semantics that will do it."
Okay, I love Perl 5... Perl 6 looks really cool but overwhelming. I'm glad they're adding the options for stricter type-checking and such, but remembering the syntactic shortcuts is gonna be even harder. I don't even want to know what the parser code looks like...
Avogadro's number is nothing but a conversion factor between mass units:
One mole of atomic mass units = 6.02 x 10^23 amu = 1 gram
Yeah, it would be pretty weird if the universe had exactly Avogadro's number of whatever, but not nearly as cool as if, say, the exact number of stars turned out to always be prime :-P
Is this for real???? I mean, so many of the O'Reilly books just LOOK like they've been formatted with TeX, the fonts, the headings, all that. I find it extremely hard to believe that they don't use *TeX at O'Reilly!
I use WinMX now [http://www.winmx.com]. It's so Napster-like, it's almost funny. The selection seems to be quite good and it has some nice feautres like multi-point downloads. But mostly, it's just like Napster. Woohoo.
Have you seen the latest Google toolbar for IE? It's extremely light and useful and it blocks popups too. So there's a pretty good, useful popup blocker for IE now...
Of course, I still prefer Mozilla (Galeon, actually), but popup-blocking is no longer a killer feature, IMHO.