Some of it may be a difference in priorities. I think for many (id include myself here), people just dont care if you use linux or windows or openbsd or whatever. If i'm not being paid to support someone, i'll support them with a variable degree of patience.
From my perspective, there are some former windows users that we want, and some we don't want. It all has to do with why they are switching. As an example, I tend to have relatively little patience for people who are willing to do things like use binary blob drivers which you dont get source for, are legally prohibited from reverse engineering, and get no hardware documentation on the hardware. These are the type of users who do more harm to free software than they help, so yeah shun them, call them a n00b, whatever.
Opensource software doesn't need more ex-windows users, it needs more ex-windows users who are switching because they value freedom. There is a big difference between the two statements. These users should recognize that when you rely on free support, it will be hit and miss, particularly if you ask a question that has been asked a thousand times throughout the day.
This goes for any opensource community, not just linux. Also, if you want politeness, some mediums are better than others (and irc is prob not on the top of the list). Message boards (or usenet, or what have you) are probably better, particularly since you can search for previous questions.
It all comes down to the basic question of 'do you care'. For me, I could care less what os someone chooses to use, be it openbsd, linux, windows, hell even qnx. Since I don't have anything to gain by helping someone (since im not into advocacy), my incentive for being terribly useful is significantly reduced.
While I don't have a lot of experience with prior models of thinkpads, I have used some older thinkpad models, and they were always quite good. I bought a T43 though, and it was really substandard. It was just a dell laptop in a thinkpad casing, falling apart quite rapidly (much more so than my powerbook, for example).
Overall, I don't think the build quality of thinkpads these days is any greater than that found at dell or what have you.
Chosing to not hear a case is hardly taking steps to defend individual liberties.
>> The Digital Millenium Copywrite act can be viewed as unconstitutional. I'm glad the supreme court is finally taking the correct steps to defend the individual's liberties in this country instead of the usual practice of protecting large firms profits (merly because those firms have too much say in our government because of the money they put into it). Hopefully this will bring an end to frivilous lawsuits against people that are mere pawns in the scheme of warez and piracy. Personally, I would rather see the RIAA spend some of thier resources in ensuring better music is being produced instead of the formulized crap they are turning out currently.
That's not necessarily true; I dislike bush, and prefer badnarik. However, *i dislike kerry more than bush*, so it's impossible to vote for kerry. Since i think kerry is almost the worst choice (with cobb being the worst, for me), voting for him makes no sense. However, since I don't like bush either, voting for bush makes no sense, so the logical choice as badnarik.
In an ideal world, I could rank my candidates from 1...n
>> So, for example, let's say one dislikes Bush, and prefers Badnarik. Their vote for Badnarik would be a closet endorsement of Bush. The only way to remove Bush from office in 2004 is to vote Kerry. This has nothing to do with anyone's opinion, it's simply how the system works in its current form. You don't have to play the game, but one must realize the full effects of their actions.
This is simply not the case. You don't need to find a counterparty, this is the purpose of market makers. If there is no counterparty available, the market maker must take the other side of the position.
Atleast, this is how it works in most markets. Nasdaq for sure, nyse is similar (although they use specialists, and not market makers). The BB exchange as market makers, and I believe they serve a function similar to that of nasdaq market makers, although i'm told they will frequently try to get out of honoring an ask...
>> Jacobs' theory that the complaining Internet posters are motivated by making money from shorting SunnComm's stock is nonsense - it's very difficult to sell "short" (i.e. bet that a share goes down) when the share is obscure and rarely traded.
A professional trader *might* be able to find someone willing to go "long" (take the other side of the bet) but it's pretty unlikely. Joe Public has no chance.
The more I read about it, the more it sounds like a proprietary uqbt implementation. UQBT has many of the same limitations (particularly only handling like os - like os...
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~cristina/uqbt.html
>> Transitive explains the architechure of their system here. Basically, to support APIs on different operating systems they have what is called an Operating System Mapper. They don't claim that it maps Mac to Windows or Linux to Windows. Basically, it maps two like systems together (like Solaris to AIX or HPUX to Linux). If there is no straightforward mapping then the customer defines the map.
I'm not so sure, they could be using some binary translation technology combined with api shims to achieve this. For binary translation technology, they could maybe base their work off of uqbt, and provide api shims a la wine.
I'd be surprised if it were real, but it's not one of those things that seems impossible to me.
>> without any performance hit. That would allow any program written for Windows to run on Linux or Mac, and vice-versa,... What do you think, vaporware or miracle? This is vaporware. What they're claiming - "without any performance hit" - is impossible. Accomplishing the rest of what they claim is not impossible, but it's very difficult, and since the "without any performance hit" claim establishes conclusively that these people are bullshitters, I don't believe they can even come close to doing it.
Hmm, using winsock, this is true. Generally speaking, this is completely false. Anyone can write a ndis driver to spoof to their heart is content. There is a windows port of pcap which has a low level ndis side which provides mechanisms to send arbitrary packets out.
With sourceforge being hacked, it makes one wonder why companies should trust valinux to do security, if they can not even secure their own network. They have been advertising pretty heavily about their
security consulting services, and I wonder if there is any reason to believe they can secure their clients' systems any better than they did their own.
>I've got a question, as someone with only a moderate knowledge of AI or chess (I constantly get whomped by xboard).
xboard can't play chess. you might be gnu chess though (xboard is just a graphical front end, it supports many chess engines, from gnuchess to crafty).
>While I'm sure that the number of possible chess moves and games is very large, it is finite, right? Wouldn't it be possible, then, to simply have a program with enough memory to know all possible moves and every possible game result, then allowing that program, at every turn, to simply perform whatever move has the highest number of possible wins associated with it? Also, if this is how it's done, how is this intelligence?
It is estimated that there are 10^120 possible moves in chess. Even at half this number, you won't be brute forcing it anytime soon.
clustering solutions dont play chess very well, because of the latency involved. Besides, gnuchess really really really sucks. Crafty is the only reasonably strong opensourced chess program, and its license is reasonable, not that gnu garbage.
this simply is irrelevant. Studying the evaluation function does not give you a clear plan for attack that you would not have if you just did the only thing you can do: play as positionally as possible. The source code just does not help the human in any measurable way.
I think people vastly overestimate the complexity of chess playing algorithms.
well it is getting a little better. Of course, a lot of the improvements are not algorithmic improvements, but rather the use of big hash tables. The endgame databases are case in point, the nalimov tablebases (can solve any endgame up to 5 pieces, some 6 piece endgames as well) dramatically improve endgame performance of computers. Some positional knowledge is available to computers as well, schredder in particular has more positional knowledge than most computer programs, but it is still nothing compared to a strong GM.
I think if kramnik can play a very positional game, and keep tactics to a bare minimum, he will win. If the computer can bust open the game and make it open, then the computer will win.
in the case of deep fritz, the deep refers (mostly) to SMP support. The standard fritz 6.0 lacks SMP support, so they added smp and doubled the price, and you have deep fritz.
the deep prefix is getting a bit tired though. Maybe Hyatt needs to rename crafty to deep crafty, since it supports SMP out of the box.
> The Morris "worm" only affected systems running > Ultrix and SunOS
Where did you get this piece of information? The morris worm predates both of those operating systems, to the best of my knowledge. Its primary target was VAXen running BSD (which was the only os/architecture pair the finger bo existed on, which was its primary means of replication.
About the only potyion in your post that is right is that many people prefer SysV. Many people also prefer windows98, perhaps many of the same people...
BSD lacks Netscape? Hmm/usr/ports/www and/usr/ports/editors tells a different story. Maybe before you make claims, you should bother checking to make sure you arent spreading fud
There is no doubt that redhat tries to be all things to all people, and fails being anything to anyone. There also is very little doubt that slackware is closer to freebsd than it is to solaris.
That you can work around redhat's misfeatures is not really relevant.
for 2) I don't know, but as to your first question: It should be relatively easy to port the applications that are not part of the netbsd/freebsd tree. Anything in the kernel, however, will be harder seeing as freebsd/openbsd/netbsd use a monolithic kernel architecture (essentially all of the kernel in one big executable -- although all of them do completely support loadable kernel modules), whereas the Apple stuff is based on a microkernel architecture where almost everything is a Mach process.
It sounds like you want BSD:-). It is much more minimalistic. I too am of the opinion that a base OS is good, I can use the bsd ports collection to install what I need to make the system completely functional (tcsh, zsh, etc).
As for NFS, linux has improved NFS a lot. I still don't like it as much as *BSD's nfs, but it is much better than it used to be.
It seems to me, it is a good combo. Lets compare: BSDi Brings: 1: Corporate clients; many firewall vendors are using BSD/OS as the base for their product, the most well known probably being TIS Gauntlet. 2: Excellent support staff. This includes post install support, unlike some other vendors I won't mention. 3: BSD Training. BSDi has training programs all over the country to train corp users on system administration and other tasks using BSDi. 4: Consulting. What Walnut Creek and FreeBSD have (taken as a whole) 1: A stronger OS (although this is debatable) 2: Users, momentum; FreeBSD is BSD in the medias eyes, and in the majority of the users eyes (although not necessarily in the corp world -- not that BSD has any significant influence there at all). 3: Strong distribution channels, this is something BSDi really needs, and is probably the main plus from their point of view. Lastly, there is the non trivial factor of consolidation of the BSD sector, which is one of the things many people complain about (although linux is in somewhat the same situation; the difference being a common kernel, and to some degree, a common base userland). Just a couple observations and guesses
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Some of it may be a difference in priorities. I think for many (id include myself here), people just dont care if you use linux or windows or openbsd or whatever. If i'm not being paid to support someone, i'll support them with a variable degree of patience.
From my perspective, there are some former windows users that we want, and some we don't want. It all has to do with why they are switching. As an example, I tend to have relatively little patience for people who are willing to do things like use binary blob drivers which you dont get source for, are legally prohibited from reverse engineering, and get no hardware documentation on the hardware. These are the type of users who do more harm to free software than they help, so yeah shun them, call them a n00b, whatever.
Opensource software doesn't need more ex-windows users, it needs more ex-windows users who are switching because they value freedom. There is a big difference between the two statements. These users should recognize that when you rely on free support, it will be hit and miss, particularly if you ask a question that has been asked a thousand times throughout the day.
This goes for any opensource community, not just linux. Also, if you want politeness, some mediums are better than others (and irc is prob not on the top of the list). Message boards (or usenet, or what have you) are probably better, particularly since you can search for previous questions.
It all comes down to the basic question of 'do you care'. For me, I could care less what os someone chooses to use, be it openbsd, linux, windows, hell even qnx. Since I don't have anything to gain by helping someone (since im not into advocacy), my incentive for being terribly useful is significantly reduced.
While I don't have a lot of experience with prior models of thinkpads, I have used some older thinkpad models, and they were always quite good. I bought a T43 though, and it was really substandard. It was just a dell laptop in a thinkpad casing, falling apart quite rapidly (much more so than my powerbook, for example).
Overall, I don't think the build quality of thinkpads these days is any greater than that found at dell or what have you.
Chosing to not hear a case is hardly taking steps to defend individual liberties.
>>
The Digital Millenium Copywrite act can be viewed as unconstitutional. I'm glad the supreme court is finally taking the correct steps to defend the individual's liberties in this country instead of the usual practice of protecting large firms profits (merly because those firms have too much say in our government because of the money they put into it). Hopefully this will bring an end to frivilous lawsuits against people that are mere pawns in the scheme of warez and piracy. Personally, I would rather see the RIAA spend some of thier resources in ensuring better music is being produced instead of the formulized crap they are turning out currently.
That's not necessarily true; I dislike bush, and prefer badnarik. However, *i dislike kerry more than bush*, so it's impossible to vote for kerry. Since i think kerry is almost the worst choice (with cobb being the worst, for me), voting for him makes no sense. However, since I don't like bush either, voting for bush makes no sense, so the logical choice as badnarik.
In an ideal world, I could rank my candidates from 1...n
>>
So, for example, let's say one dislikes Bush, and prefers Badnarik. Their vote for Badnarik would be a closet endorsement of Bush. The only way to remove Bush from office in 2004 is to vote Kerry. This has nothing to do with anyone's opinion, it's simply how the system works in its current form. You don't have to play the game, but one must realize the full effects of their actions.
This is simply not the case. You don't need to find a counterparty, this is the purpose of market makers. If there is no counterparty available, the market maker must take the other side of the position.
Atleast, this is how it works in most markets. Nasdaq for sure, nyse is similar (although they use specialists, and not market makers). The BB exchange as market makers, and I believe they serve a function similar to that of nasdaq market makers, although i'm told they will frequently try to get out of honoring an ask...
>>
Jacobs' theory that the complaining Internet posters are motivated by making money from shorting SunnComm's stock is nonsense - it's very difficult to sell "short" (i.e. bet that a share goes down) when the share is obscure and rarely traded.
A professional trader *might* be able to find someone willing to go "long" (take the other side of the bet) but it's pretty unlikely. Joe Public has no chance.
>>
If someone steals some CDs from you, you don't have the right to burn their house down.
I can see it now...the riaa and their team of arsonists burning down the houses of suspected mp3 traders...
that'll teach em!
The more I read about it, the more it sounds like a proprietary uqbt implementation. UQBT has many of the same limitations (particularly only handling like os - like os...
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~cristina/uqbt.html
>>
Transitive explains the architechure of their system here. Basically, to support APIs on different operating systems they have what is called an Operating System Mapper. They don't claim that it maps Mac to Windows or Linux to Windows. Basically, it maps two like systems together (like Solaris to AIX or HPUX to Linux). If there is no straightforward mapping then the customer defines the map.
I'm not so sure, they could be using some binary translation technology combined with api shims to achieve this. For binary translation technology, they could maybe base their work off of uqbt, and provide api shims a la wine.
I'd be surprised if it were real, but it's not one of those things that seems impossible to me.
>>
without any performance hit. That would allow any program written for Windows to run on Linux or Mac, and vice-versa,... What do you think, vaporware or miracle?
This is vaporware. What they're claiming - "without any performance hit" - is impossible. Accomplishing the rest of what they claim is not impossible, but it's very difficult, and since the "without any performance hit" claim establishes conclusively that these people are bullshitters, I don't believe they can even come close to doing it.
I sorta liked klingon academy
Hmm, using winsock, this is true. Generally speaking, this is completely false. Anyone can write a ndis driver to spoof to their heart is content. There is a windows port of pcap which has a low level ndis side which provides mechanisms to send arbitrary packets out.
With sourceforge being hacked, it makes one wonder why companies should trust valinux to do security, if they can not even secure their own network. They have been advertising pretty heavily about their
security consulting services, and I wonder if there is any reason to believe they can secure their clients' systems any better than they did their own.
>I've got a question, as someone with only a moderate knowledge of AI or chess (I constantly get whomped by xboard).
xboard can't play chess. you might be gnu chess though (xboard is just a graphical front end, it supports many chess engines, from gnuchess to crafty).
>While I'm sure that the number of possible chess moves and games is very large, it is finite, right? Wouldn't it be possible, then, to simply have a program with enough memory to know all possible moves and every possible game result, then allowing that program, at every turn, to simply perform whatever move has the highest number of possible wins associated with it? Also, if this is how it's done, how is this intelligence?
It is estimated that there are 10^120 possible moves in chess. Even at half this number, you won't be brute forcing it anytime soon.
clustering solutions dont play chess very well, because of the latency involved. Besides, gnuchess really really really sucks. Crafty is the only reasonably strong opensourced chess program, and its license is reasonable, not that gnu garbage.
this simply is irrelevant. Studying the evaluation function does not give you a clear plan for attack that you would not have if you just did the only thing you can do: play as positionally as possible. The source code just does not help the human in any measurable way.
I think people vastly overestimate the complexity of chess playing algorithms.
well it is getting a little better. Of course, a lot of the improvements are not algorithmic improvements, but rather the use of big hash tables. The endgame databases are case in point, the nalimov tablebases (can solve any endgame up to 5 pieces, some 6 piece endgames as well) dramatically improve endgame performance of computers. Some positional knowledge is available to computers as well, schredder in particular has more positional knowledge than most computer programs, but it is still nothing compared to a strong GM.
I think if kramnik can play a very positional game, and keep tactics to a bare minimum, he will win. If the computer can bust open the game and make it open, then the computer will win.
Who knows though.
in the case of deep fritz, the deep refers (mostly) to SMP support. The standard fritz 6.0 lacks SMP support, so they added smp and doubled the price, and you have deep fritz.
the deep prefix is getting a bit tired though. Maybe Hyatt needs to rename crafty to deep crafty, since it supports SMP out of the box.
you dont want the machines connected remotely, you need to ensure the software is run on the same hardware plotform, for fairness.
remember, a large part of the algorithms computers use is brute force tree search + position evaluation. faster hardware equates to a higher elo.
World champion is a vague thing. Depending on who you ask, there can be as many as 3 world champions
1) fischer (he never lost -- fide took his title away when he wouldnt defend it, and gave it to karpov)
2) the fide WC, this is currently anand, i believe.
3) winner of the braingames WC -- kramnik, he beat kasparov
4) kasparov himself. He is still the worlds strongest player, based on elo ratings. How can the worlds strongest player not be the WC?
With that said, it is clear that most people consider kramnik to be WC. FIDE, while being the official chess organization, is somewhat a joke.
Nokia's firewall's are not linux based, they
are freebsd based (2.2.5 or thereabouts, based).
Webramp, which nokia recently bought, is however
linux based (and also runs checkpoint).
> The Morris "worm" only affected systems running
> Ultrix and SunOS
Where did you get this piece of information? The
morris worm predates both of those operating
systems, to the best of my knowledge. Its primary
target was VAXen running BSD (which was the only
os/architecture pair the finger bo existed on, which was its primary means of replication.
About the only potyion in your post that is right is that many people prefer SysV. Many people also prefer windows98, perhaps many of the same people...
/usr/ports/www and /usr/ports/editors tells a different story. Maybe before you make claims, you should bother checking to make sure you arent spreading fud
BSD lacks Netscape? Hmm
There is no doubt that redhat tries to be all things to all people, and fails being anything to anyone. There also is very little doubt that slackware is closer to freebsd than it is to solaris.
That you can work around redhat's misfeatures is not really relevant.
There is an IRIX4 version that is B1. I believe they are working on an IRIX6 evaluation, but I may be mistaken.
for 2) I don't know, but as to your first question: It should be relatively easy to port the applications that are not part of the netbsd/freebsd tree. Anything in the kernel, however, will be harder seeing as freebsd/openbsd/netbsd use a monolithic kernel architecture (essentially all of the kernel in one big executable -- although all of them do completely support loadable kernel modules), whereas the Apple stuff is based on a microkernel architecture where almost everything is a Mach process.
It sounds like you want BSD :-). It is much more
minimalistic. I too am of the opinion that a base
OS is good, I can use the bsd ports collection
to install what I need to make the system
completely functional (tcsh, zsh, etc).
As for NFS, linux has improved NFS a lot. I still
don't like it as much as *BSD's nfs, but it is
much better than it used to be.
It seems to me, it is a good combo. Lets compare: BSDi Brings: 1: Corporate clients; many firewall vendors are using BSD/OS as the base for their product, the most well known probably being TIS Gauntlet. 2: Excellent support staff. This includes post install support, unlike some other vendors I won't mention. 3: BSD Training. BSDi has training programs all over the country to train corp users on system administration and other tasks using BSDi. 4: Consulting. What Walnut Creek and FreeBSD have (taken as a whole) 1: A stronger OS (although this is debatable) 2: Users, momentum; FreeBSD is BSD in the medias eyes, and in the majority of the users eyes (although not necessarily in the corp world -- not that BSD has any significant influence there at all). 3: Strong distribution channels, this is something BSDi really needs, and is probably the main plus from their point of view. Lastly, there is the non trivial factor of consolidation of the BSD sector, which is one of the things many people complain about (although linux is in somewhat the same situation; the difference being a common kernel, and to some degree, a common base userland). Just a couple observations and guesses