Read the book, because it's good. Lots of it will make obvious sense. Use that stuff. Some of it will seem like a stretch. "You're calling that a pattern?" Don't use that stuff.
Programming is about basic principles applied intelligently. If it's complex, it's probably not right. You have to sift through the ideas of the week, such as template-, OO-, component-, and pattern-based programming, to find the right way to solve a particular problem.
I don't think you're talking about the Skinner box, which is a device used in the psychology of learning, but rather the Chinese room, which is John Searle's take on AI and the Turing test.
Re:g4u source code mirror
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 2
I sure hope you don't have/dev/hda mounted when you do that. Do you have a spare Linux boot drive on every computer you want to ghost? It can't be just a separate partition, since you're copying the entire physical drive.
I'm not a web developer, but I've heard that DHTML support in Mozilla is pretty bad. There are a few sites which either don't work at all in Mozilla, or have "static" versions with DHTML removed*. Some of the web developers around my office have complained about this, and cite IE's DHTML support as the best.
Is this an issue of actual support, or just "IE standards" where people don't want to use real standards, just whatever "standard" Microsoft supports?
* The site I'm thinking of is Citibank's credit card management section. here. Of course, if you don't have a card with them, you can't log in to check it out.
The recording industry (AKA the people that charge $ for recordings) is going to have to adapt to the fact that once something is transmitted broadcast, acted or spoken out, it is released into the collective state of existance and is available to all.
Unfortunately, this means that professionally produced media would disappear. Writers, actors, musicians, and directors would make very little money, and therefore find other jobs. This includes non-entertainment media, e.g. computer reference books. Why should I spend my time writing a reference book, if as soon as I publish it, the entire world can read it for free?
Do you really think that you can get all the media (which you currently pay for) for free? TANSAAFL. It's in your best interest to find some (reasonable) way to pay for it.
The biggest reason I would want this is very specific: tell it to record every Simpsons episode which airs (including syndication repeats) and burn them onto a DVD when there are enough of them. Ideally it wouldn't re-record episodes it had already recorded (though I don't know how it would be able to compare them) and put tables-of-content as DVD menus and printed labels (or DVD liner notes) telling me what episodes are on the discs.
I suppose you could use this for shows other than the Simpsons...but why?
I've said it before: Earthlink is a great ISP. I've had DSL with them for two years without any problems: no port blocking, bandwidth issues or restrictions, or major outages. Their customer service is the best I've ever found in any company, and their tech support is almost as good. They don't fully support Linux, but they don't have a problem with it either. I get a static IP address, and not only do they not block any incoming ports, they specifically advertise it as being good for running game servers and web sites. (the static IP is an extra $15/month). With DSL, I don't have any of the bandwith-sharing or security issues of "let's throw the neighborhood on a subnet" cable modems, and I only need one network card in my gateway.
I wouldn't touch one of those broadband ISPs with a ten-foot pole. The only thing better would be a real colocation for my server (and I'd need DSL anyway) or a commercial account.
I only wish I would have thought of the idea of throwing together bleeding-edge bugridden versions of software and giving it away for free, and calling that a viable business plan.
Some people just can't face reality.
Not the kitchen sink
on
Xandros 1.0
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· Score: 5, Insightful
We're not following the traditional Linux distribution approach where you've got six calculators, four text editors, three of this and two of that -- you get one of everything with us.
Thank god. This is something I wish more distros would do. Most seem to think that if I get eight different crappy ways to set up PPP, I'll be happy.
Because it's relatively simple. Have you ever compared Linus's original.99 version (the first he released publically, or anyway the first that I can find) with a modern 2.5 kernel? It's orders-of-magnitude more complex. Minix was designed to follow academic operating system principles, above practical issues such as performance. Because of that, it was easy to understand and teach.
The big problem with Minix wasn't technical, but political; any changes that were made to it couldn't be released except as patches (i.e., you couldn't change it and still call it Minix). Linus bitched once that Minix was only usable with a set of patches by a developer other than AST.
So the real influence of Minix on Linux was in the GPL. Linus was certain that he wanted to release his code under a license which encouraged change, because of his experiences with Minix. And in fact, it is the GPL which distinguishes Linux from other x86 Unices such as the BSDs, much more than anything technical.
The kjournald process is flushing the journal. This doesn't mean (AFAIK) that your filesystem is only up-to-date as of the 5s interval that kjournald last ran. When the system reboots without unmounting properly, it replays the journal to get it as up-to-date as possible (up to the last transaction that was fully written to the journal). The point of flushing the journal every 5s is to limit the size of the journal and therefore the time it takes to replay it on reboot. And quick reboots are the point of journalling.
OffTopic: Is there a way to filter Google News to return only "national" publications (plus perhaps publications from my region)? I don't like wading through volumes of crappy local coverage from small towns and cities when I'm looking for reporting on national or world stories.
The article compares the digital camera's output to a digital scanner's scan of 35mm film. But I imagine that the paper output of the digital camera's image is still not as good as an actual 35mm print, even with a top-of-the-line photo printer.
It's good to know that digital cameras surpass digital photo scanners. I don't know that it's true that they're surpassing 35mm film.
Thank god at least one Linux company is actually acting like a company and trying to make a profit in a realistic way.
The important thing about Open Source and Linux isn't that Red Hat has to give away their product, nor that they be "nice" to the community by keeping KDE and Gnome separate. The important thing is that no matter what, you know that you can get the source to every (important) piece of the Red Hat operating system. You can replace the kernel, the GUI, the web server. You can examine the code and recompile it yourself.
Red Hat is a company. If you want completely free, volunteer-based stuff, go to Debian. If you want a corporate-style OS, with actual help, support, integration, and consistency, then for christ's sake YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO PAY FOR IT.
Red Hat could really care less if Slashdot readers think that BlueCurve sucks, or that the new licensing scheme sucks, or that the mirrors suck, or whatever. They're in the business of selling copies and support of their Operating System, which is the Red Hat Operating System based on the Linux Kernel and the GNU tools and the X Windows GUI and the Gnome and KDE toolkits / environments.
Personally I think Red Hat should abandon the idea of giving away copies entirely. Sell the damn things. That's what companies DO. The support idea is hogwash. Support is good cash but it won't replace copies sold. Red Hat needed to win acceptance and dominance, and so it gave away binary copies of their OS.
The GPL, thank god, means that Red Hat DOES have to give away their SRPMS, at least to any code in their OS that is GPL'd. Their installer doesn't have to be GPL'd. Their makefiles and build scripts don't have to be GPL'd. They could legally give away nothing but the actual source code they used to build the finished product. That satisifes the GPL, both in letter and spirit.
Personally I think the Open Source community should applaud Red Hat for acting like a company and proving that Open Source doesn't mean amateur, or broke.
A local video store here in Atlanta already has the original Japanese version (with subtitles) on VHS and DVD. If you really want to see this film, get the subtitled version. Disney's doing the dubbing and I know they're going to screw it up. The dubbed version of Princess Mononoke had Billy Bob Thorton playing the priest character. God only knows who they'll get to play these voices.
If you can only see the dubbed version--definitely still see it. It's one of the best anime I've ever seen. It's got a magical quality to it that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland. It's a very strange story, very surrealistic at times, but something kids will love and adults can really get into. I loved Princess Mononoke but I thought Spirited Away was at least as good.
According to the Bureau of Justice statistics (Federal), the average sentence for rape is 117 months, serving an average of 65 months. The stats are below. The first number is the average sentence in months, the second is the average time actually served in months. The average percent of time served for all violent crime (all this document covers) is 48%. Therefore I would guess he will be released (on parole) within 16 months or so.
Eventually, corporate interests are always very closely related to individual interests, because eventually corporate revenue comes from individuals.
The cost of an "individual's interest" such as the "interest in being able to make free copies of music" may be high. It may be that the price of music which is freely copyable is more than that of music which is not. Would you pay $1.00 for a DRM CD which you cannot copy, or $50 for a CD which you can? I can guarantee that if there is interest in the second option, it will exist. There is, however, no guarantee that the price will be what you want.
Corporations are allowed to restrict distribution of their music. Technologically speaking, there is no real difference between copying and distributing (there is no way to allow one without the other) without DRM. I imagine that given the demand for personal copying of music (high) the RIAA would be very happy with a DRM solution which allowed personal copies without allowing distribution. They would probably be even happier with a solution which didn't allow copying at all; however, that goes against established copyright law and more importantly is not what consumers want.
Consumers will get what they want. Demand creates supply. They may not get it at the price they want, but they will eventually get it at the cheapest price possible.
I would never have been suprised that the RIAA would push such a bill. I would have been surprised (and still will be) if the bill actually passes, given the huge outcry which was inevitable. If the bill manages to pass, I will be absolutely astonished if the bill is not struck down within two years.
They're trying to make an OS called RedHat 8 which happens to be based on the Linux kernel and other free tools. I think it's a great decision on their part. It's very similar to what Apple did with OS X.
No one has a reason to complain; despite anyone's accusations, RedHat is still an open-source operating system. I personally wouldn't have a problem if they stopped giving away the OS for free via FTP. There's certainly no requirement that they do so. They are a company which has a product which they are trying to make money from. If you feel that RedHat is simply making money from other people's work, by packaging together free applications: go get those applications on your own, and make your own distro (or choose a completely free, volunteer distro like Debian). RedHat does an enormous amount of work assembling and testing those applications, and customizing them into a unified OS. They deserve to be paid for that work.
It is unlikely that a flaw in a Microsoft product could cause serious injury or death. If that were the case, I imagine the laws would apply (or be rewritten to apply). Thankfully, most consumer protection laws like this only apply in serious-injury-or-death cases, or lawsuits against companies would increase tenfold. ("Your stapler product didn't perform as advertised, we lost $800,000 last year fixing and replacing them...")
Personally I feel there should be MORE responsibility placed on the consumer, not less. Why should we have laws protecting them from their own bad decisions? Did Microsoft advertise that their product would be bug-free? On the contrary, their EULA says exactly the opposite. It's the consumer's responsibility to buy products from companies which they believe will support them in the future, won't cause death or financial loss, etc. Unless the company commits outright fraud, anyway.
I've been thinking that the Mozilla project should do something like this. They have the resources to handle an Exchange replacement. Imagine "Mozilla Server" which is a single-install replacement for Exchange/IIS; it uses existing OSS components like Apache but ties them together and simplifies configuration. The Mozilla client would be very well integrated into the server, able to access web pages, email, and newsgroups, as well as LDAP contacts, scheduling, and other groupware features.
Of course since the source and the standards are both open, many other clients would be able to access the data as well. But I think Mozilla/Netscape is enough of a force in the OSS world to set the standard for a project like this. I'm not sure KDE is.
Why not do it genetically? I'm not an expert on the subject, but the way I've always thought is that it's clearly possible to "breed" programs to do a particular task, as long as the task is very "ratable", i.e., you have a separate algorithm which will evaluate how well the program did. In this case, the "arena" program which pits the bots against each other serves very well. Generate random Java bytecode, run it as a bot, look at the points scored. Breed well-performing bots with each other by combining bytecode together in various fashions. Repeat several billion times...
Obviously, the first N iterations wouldn't be syntactically correct bytecode (though I would suggest that you hard-code the 0xCAFEBABE prefix) and would probably throw exceptions almost immediately (resulting in disqualification). Eventually, however, you'd get a program which would at least not produce errors, even if it did nothing productive like moving and shooting.
What's the best way to combine two bytecode programs to produce offspring which are similar-yet-different, and have the best chance of doing well? You would obviously want a chance of mutation (possibly reducing over time).
Slashdot Mirror
I think a more appropriate visualization would be a million monkeys jumping onto the car and begging for the data within.
Read the book, because it's good. Lots of it will make obvious sense. Use that stuff. Some of it will seem like a stretch. "You're calling that a pattern?" Don't use that stuff.
Programming is about basic principles applied intelligently. If it's complex, it's probably not right. You have to sift through the ideas of the week, such as template-, OO-, component-, and pattern-based programming, to find the right way to solve a particular problem.
I don't think you're talking about the Skinner box, which is a device used in the psychology of learning, but rather the Chinese room, which is John Searle's take on AI and the Turing test.
I sure hope you don't have /dev/hda mounted when you do that. Do you have a spare Linux boot drive on every computer you want to ghost? It can't be just a separate partition, since you're copying the entire physical drive.
I'm not a web developer, but I've heard that DHTML support in Mozilla is pretty bad. There are a few sites which either don't work at all in Mozilla, or have "static" versions with DHTML removed*. Some of the web developers around my office have complained about this, and cite IE's DHTML support as the best.
Is this an issue of actual support, or just "IE standards" where people don't want to use real standards, just whatever "standard" Microsoft supports?
* The site I'm thinking of is Citibank's credit card management section. here. Of course, if you don't have a card with them, you can't log in to check it out.
The recording industry (AKA the people that charge $ for recordings) is going to have to adapt to the fact that once something is transmitted broadcast, acted or spoken out, it is released into the collective state of existance and is available to all.
Unfortunately, this means that professionally produced media would disappear. Writers, actors, musicians, and directors would make very little money, and therefore find other jobs. This includes non-entertainment media, e.g. computer reference books. Why should I spend my time writing a reference book, if as soon as I publish it, the entire world can read it for free?
Do you really think that you can get all the media (which you currently pay for) for free? TANSAAFL. It's in your best interest to find some (reasonable) way to pay for it.
The biggest reason I would want this is very specific: tell it to record every Simpsons episode which airs (including syndication repeats) and burn them onto a DVD when there are enough of them. Ideally it wouldn't re-record episodes it had already recorded (though I don't know how it would be able to compare them) and put tables-of-content as DVD menus and printed labels (or DVD liner notes) telling me what episodes are on the discs.
I suppose you could use this for shows other than the Simpsons...but why?
I've said it before: Earthlink is a great ISP. I've had DSL with them for two years without any problems: no port blocking, bandwidth issues or restrictions, or major outages. Their customer service is the best I've ever found in any company, and their tech support is almost as good. They don't fully support Linux, but they don't have a problem with it either. I get a static IP address, and not only do they not block any incoming ports, they specifically advertise it as being good for running game servers and web sites. (the static IP is an extra $15/month). With DSL, I don't have any of the bandwith-sharing or security issues of "let's throw the neighborhood on a subnet" cable modems, and I only need one network card in my gateway.
I wouldn't touch one of those broadband ISPs with a ten-foot pole. The only thing better would be a real colocation for my server (and I'd need DSL anyway) or a commercial account.
boy i wish i had mod points
I only wish I would have thought of the idea of throwing together bleeding-edge bugridden versions of software and giving it away for free, and calling that a viable business plan.
Some people just can't face reality.
We're not following the traditional Linux distribution approach where you've got six calculators, four text editors, three of this and two of that -- you get one of everything with us.
Thank god. This is something I wish more distros would do. Most seem to think that if I get eight different crappy ways to set up PPP, I'll be happy.
Because it's relatively simple. Have you ever compared Linus's original .99 version (the first he released publically, or anyway the first that I can find) with a modern 2.5 kernel? It's orders-of-magnitude more complex. Minix was designed to follow academic operating system principles, above practical issues such as performance. Because of that, it was easy to understand and teach.
The big problem with Minix wasn't technical, but political; any changes that were made to it couldn't be released except as patches (i.e., you couldn't change it and still call it Minix). Linus bitched once that Minix was only usable with a set of patches by a developer other than AST.
So the real influence of Minix on Linux was in the GPL. Linus was certain that he wanted to release his code under a license which encouraged change, because of his experiences with Minix. And in fact, it is the GPL which distinguishes Linux from other x86 Unices such as the BSDs, much more than anything technical.
The kjournald process is flushing the journal. This doesn't mean (AFAIK) that your filesystem is only up-to-date as of the 5s interval that kjournald last ran. When the system reboots without unmounting properly, it replays the journal to get it as up-to-date as possible (up to the last transaction that was fully written to the journal). The point of flushing the journal every 5s is to limit the size of the journal and therefore the time it takes to replay it on reboot. And quick reboots are the point of journalling.
OffTopic: Is there a way to filter Google News to return only "national" publications (plus perhaps publications from my region)? I don't like wading through volumes of crappy local coverage from small towns and cities when I'm looking for reporting on national or world stories.
The article compares the digital camera's output to a digital scanner's scan of 35mm film. But I imagine that the paper output of the digital camera's image is still not as good as an actual 35mm print, even with a top-of-the-line photo printer.
It's good to know that digital cameras surpass digital photo scanners. I don't know that it's true that they're surpassing 35mm film.
Thank god at least one Linux company is actually acting like a company and trying to make a profit in a realistic way.
The important thing about Open Source and Linux isn't that Red Hat has to give away their product, nor that they be "nice" to the community by keeping KDE and Gnome separate. The important thing is that no matter what, you know that you can get the source to every (important) piece of the Red Hat operating system. You can replace the kernel, the GUI, the web server. You can examine the code and recompile it yourself.
Red Hat is a company. If you want completely free, volunteer-based stuff, go to Debian. If you want a corporate-style OS, with actual help, support, integration, and consistency, then for christ's sake YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO PAY FOR IT.
Red Hat could really care less if Slashdot readers think that BlueCurve sucks, or that the new licensing scheme sucks, or that the mirrors suck, or whatever. They're in the business of selling copies and support of their Operating System, which is the Red Hat Operating System based on the Linux Kernel and the GNU tools and the X Windows GUI and the Gnome and KDE toolkits / environments.
Personally I think Red Hat should abandon the idea of giving away copies entirely. Sell the damn things. That's what companies DO. The support idea is hogwash. Support is good cash but it won't replace copies sold. Red Hat needed to win acceptance and dominance, and so it gave away binary copies of their OS.
The GPL, thank god, means that Red Hat DOES have to give away their SRPMS, at least to any code in their OS that is GPL'd. Their installer doesn't have to be GPL'd. Their makefiles and build scripts don't have to be GPL'd. They could legally give away nothing but the actual source code they used to build the finished product. That satisifes the GPL, both in letter and spirit.
Personally I think the Open Source community should applaud Red Hat for acting like a company and proving that Open Source doesn't mean amateur, or broke.
A local video store here in Atlanta already has the original Japanese version (with subtitles) on VHS and DVD. If you really want to see this film, get the subtitled version. Disney's doing the dubbing and I know they're going to screw it up. The dubbed version of Princess Mononoke had Billy Bob Thorton playing the priest character. God only knows who they'll get to play these voices.
If you can only see the dubbed version--definitely still see it. It's one of the best anime I've ever seen. It's got a magical quality to it that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland. It's a very strange story, very surrealistic at times, but something kids will love and adults can really get into. I loved Princess Mononoke but I thought Spirited Away was at least as good.
According to the Bureau of Justice statistics (Federal), the average sentence for rape is 117 months, serving an average of 65 months. The stats are below. The first number is the average sentence in months, the second is the average time actually served in months. The average percent of time served for all violent crime (all this document covers) is 48%. Therefore I would guess he will be released (on parole) within 16 months or so.
Homicide 149/71
Rape 117/65
Kidnaping 104/52
Robbery 95/44
Sexual assault 72/35
Assault 61/29
Eventually, corporate interests are always very closely related to individual interests, because eventually corporate revenue comes from individuals.
The cost of an "individual's interest" such as the "interest in being able to make free copies of music" may be high. It may be that the price of music which is freely copyable is more than that of music which is not. Would you pay $1.00 for a DRM CD which you cannot copy, or $50 for a CD which you can? I can guarantee that if there is interest in the second option, it will exist. There is, however, no guarantee that the price will be what you want.
Corporations are allowed to restrict distribution of their music. Technologically speaking, there is no real difference between copying and distributing (there is no way to allow one without the other) without DRM. I imagine that given the demand for personal copying of music (high) the RIAA would be very happy with a DRM solution which allowed personal copies without allowing distribution. They would probably be even happier with a solution which didn't allow copying at all; however, that goes against established copyright law and more importantly is not what consumers want.
Consumers will get what they want. Demand creates supply. They may not get it at the price they want, but they will eventually get it at the cheapest price possible.
I would never have been suprised that the RIAA would push such a bill. I would have been surprised (and still will be) if the bill actually passes, given the huge outcry which was inevitable. If the bill manages to pass, I will be absolutely astonished if the bill is not struck down within two years.
They're trying to make an OS called RedHat 8 which happens to be based on the Linux kernel and other free tools. I think it's a great decision on their part. It's very similar to what Apple did with OS X.
No one has a reason to complain; despite anyone's accusations, RedHat is still an open-source operating system. I personally wouldn't have a problem if they stopped giving away the OS for free via FTP. There's certainly no requirement that they do so. They are a company which has a product which they are trying to make money from. If you feel that RedHat is simply making money from other people's work, by packaging together free applications: go get those applications on your own, and make your own distro (or choose a completely free, volunteer distro like Debian). RedHat does an enormous amount of work assembling and testing those applications, and customizing them into a unified OS. They deserve to be paid for that work.
It is unlikely that a flaw in a Microsoft product could cause serious injury or death. If that were the case, I imagine the laws would apply (or be rewritten to apply). Thankfully, most consumer protection laws like this only apply in serious-injury-or-death cases, or lawsuits against companies would increase tenfold. ("Your stapler product didn't perform as advertised, we lost $800,000 last year fixing and replacing them...")
Personally I feel there should be MORE responsibility placed on the consumer, not less. Why should we have laws protecting them from their own bad decisions? Did Microsoft advertise that their product would be bug-free? On the contrary, their EULA says exactly the opposite. It's the consumer's responsibility to buy products from companies which they believe will support them in the future, won't cause death or financial loss, etc. Unless the company commits outright fraud, anyway.
I've been thinking that the Mozilla project should do something like this. They have the resources to handle an Exchange replacement. Imagine "Mozilla Server" which is a single-install replacement for Exchange/IIS; it uses existing OSS components like Apache but ties them together and simplifies configuration. The Mozilla client would be very well integrated into the server, able to access web pages, email, and newsgroups, as well as LDAP contacts, scheduling, and other groupware features.
Of course since the source and the standards are both open, many other clients would be able to access the data as well. But I think Mozilla/Netscape is enough of a force in the OSS world to set the standard for a project like this. I'm not sure KDE is.
Why not do it genetically? I'm not an expert on the subject, but the way I've always thought is that it's clearly possible to "breed" programs to do a particular task, as long as the task is very "ratable", i.e., you have a separate algorithm which will evaluate how well the program did. In this case, the "arena" program which pits the bots against each other serves very well. Generate random Java bytecode, run it as a bot, look at the points scored. Breed well-performing bots with each other by combining bytecode together in various fashions. Repeat several billion times...
Obviously, the first N iterations wouldn't be syntactically correct bytecode (though I would suggest that you hard-code the 0xCAFEBABE prefix) and would probably throw exceptions almost immediately (resulting in disqualification). Eventually, however, you'd get a program which would at least not produce errors, even if it did nothing productive like moving and shooting.
What's the best way to combine two bytecode programs to produce offspring which are similar-yet-different, and have the best chance of doing well? You would obviously want a chance of mutation (possibly reducing over time).