As far as/.ers are concerned, they should have invented something to clean the keyboard first. You'd expect we clean the bathroom before we even clean the keyboard?
According to that hypothesis, I'm wondering how many geniuses/. has produced, since everyone here considers himself/herself a genius? Most important of all, when am I going to become a genius too, since I've been surrounding myself with all these geniuses here for quite a while now?
Can someone prove to me that this hypothesis is true:
1. Surround yourself with one/. genius makes you a genius. True. 2. Surround yourself with two/. geniuses makes you a genius. True. 3. Surround yourself with n/. geniuses makes you a genius. True. 4. Hence, surround yourself with n + 1/. geniuses also makes you a genius.
The question is, how many/. geniuses does it take to prove this?
Ok, so this is a grant. Does it mean that any software developed as a result of this grant will be open-sourced, and publicly available to all, free of charge? If not (and everything indicates that it won't be), I'd say, someone has a well-placed friend and got free money to develop their own proprietary software. Yeah, it will scan major open source softwares, and yeah, the database will be public (?), but then the tools from the grant money are still proprietary.
So, if this toolset and methodology are so good, I have to wonder why it does not get more widespread use? According to their info, it is developed in the 70's and 80's, so that's not new. And why are softwares so buggy and have such a lousy reputation anyway? Not to start a flamewar, but let's just list a few possible "reaons" here:
1. Why aren't schools teaching this methodoly thoroughly? Why aren't this toolset and programming language taught in school by default? I learned a bit of Ada at school, but that's only part of a comparison between programming language design. So, are schools to be blamed? Or those profs don't know better? Why aren't proper engineering methodologies emphasized?
2. Someone developed a nice methodology, with a nice toolset and programming language, and got greedy and made it too expensive to acquire. Other tools are good enough, and the resulting softwares are acceptable to the market, so, this nice thing never got widespread use.
3. Programmers are asked to do the impossible. We (I include myself here) had to work with customers who don't know what they want, only give very fuzzy requirements (Praxis's customers, from their list, are different kind of animals, and they probably know better than most of the customers we had to work with), and even if we lay out the whole detailed plan in front of them, they still don't know what they want. They will agree to the plan, sign and approve it, and until you have completed the whole system according to the plan, they would ask to redo the whole thing. If a customer dares to ask a civil engineer to add 2 more stories between the 3rd and 4th floor after the custom-built building is finished, guess what would the civil engineer say? Programmers are asked to do this all the time (I know I have been asked to), so are customers to blame? You can't get the system done properly if requirements are shifting all the time.
4. Programmers are a bunch of bozos who know shit about proper engineering. Yeah, I can take the blame, I've been programming for over a decade, and I know how programmers work: methodologies are for pimps! If a bridge engineer can't tell or prove how much load the bridge can take, I'm sure people would tell him/her that s/he has no business in building bridge.
5. Customers of packaged softwares would buy a buggy software to save one buck anyway, why would vendors put extra efforts and costs to make it better? Look at the market, a lot of good softwares didn't survive, and sometimes, the worst of the line prospoered (no naming here!). So people get what they asked for.
6. Customers (even custom-built projects customers) are a bunch of cheap folks, they would go to the least priced, no matter what. Praxis's customers are willing to pay 50% more for quality work, how many of your customers are willing to? We are willing to fix our bugs, free of charge, for the first 10 years too, if our customers are willing to pay 50% than the market rate for quality work. But so far, I've never met one such customer yet. Granted, I don't work in the defense industry. So, don't blame us for lousy work, if customers try to squeeze out every single buck out of it. And in China (and some other countries too), you have to pay a huge amount for kickback too, sometimes, as high as 80% of the project's budget.
7. Software vendors are a bunch of greedy bastards, they put buggy softwares on the market, without having to accept any responsibility (just read your EULA!). Industry problem or government problem? Not enough regulations (for safety, for useability, etc)? Other industries seem to do ok, e.g. medical, civil,.... so, are software vendors a bunch of irresponsible kids that need constant monitoring?
8. The indsutry is developing too fast, people are chasing the coolest, hippiest, most buzzword-sounding technologies. No one gives a shit about "real engineering". And there are simply too much to learn too, in how many industries can you say people are required to master that much technologi
It's a little bit early to say yet, but if all the "design source, verification suite and simulation models" are released as open-source (as TFA said), and if the license would allow design and manufacture of systems based on that chip without paying an arm and a leg (which TFA didn't mention), I'd say: "Woohooo!", and I'd say this for all the developing countries, including China, India, etc.
And I hope this will "sparc" a revival of the sparc acrhictecture!
HP should've done the same with the Alpha architecture instead of letting it die a forgotten death. What a shame!
I remember reading about it in the paper, and it just seemed so lame. It was as if Canada was ruled by America.
Heh, I remembered when I was studying at McGill, and met a journalist (couldn't remember her name) who was having fun about the Canada's status in Washington DC. She was a young reporter sent to Washington, and has heard a lot about the USians' ignorance of geography. So, she went out to the front gate of the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue, with 2 friends, and asked a few bypassers if they could tell them where Canada is. One of the answers she got was:
"Hmm... I saw it somewhere, but not really sure. I think it's around the corner over there."
And this was from a bypasser who looked like a businessman or a government office worker, very decent and "respectable" man.
A friend of mine returned from the USA and California 100 years ago and mentioned the train and how many white people made no bone about the fact the train would be used to move many white people into the midwest nd west to shift the demographics and help dilute/destroy Amerindians as an independent culture.
Why don't you turn a little bit of your viewing angle, and think maybe, the whole point of building infrastructure is to help less developed areas to catch up, and hence, reduce the poverty level as a whole?
Why does everything have to be negative? This is not like building a Liberty statute which serves nothing but for display. This is a modern railway to a remote area which is almost cut off from the world. This might be a catalyst for more economic development, along the line of that railway, from Qinghai all the way to Tibet.
No one seeems to scream bloody when the US built their railway system link the east and the west over 100 years ago, which had an amazing effect on the development of the country, in terms of economic, social, cultural, etc. No one screamed bloody when the US built the national highways and other infrastructures, in the 1930s amid the biggest economic crisis when people were lining up for soup.
Look, as good as vim could be, at this rate, you are not going to catch up with emacs, which is already at version 21.x or something. Which just proved that emacs is much better. If you don't believe, here is some proofs:
1- Emacs has a much higher version number, which proves to be a more mature software, which proves to be better (more mature is better)
2- Even an icon such as RMS whom has been proved to be more intelligent than the average USians, uses Emacs. This shows that smart people always make the right choice, and in reverse, proves that Emacs is better than Vim.
3- Everyone in Cryptonomicon, which is the bibile of all geeks, uses Emacs. We even have a module for encryption. It would take a long time for Vim to catch up to that kind of functionalities.
4- Only in Emacs can you do Ctrl-A to move the beginning of a line. In one shot. How could you do that in Vim? You have to Esc, then press 0, which is lame. Which just shows how advanced Emacs is in terms of maturity and functionality.
5- As the theorem goes, computer science is a science for minimizing keystrokes. Emacs, in contrast to Vim, can prove this theorem right. Emacs users press less keys than Vim users.
6- Humans have 10 fingers (some may have more, but I don't know how to grow them), and Emacs allows you to use all your fingers at one. Which shows you that Emacs has a better human user interface. In contrast, Vim users can only type one key at a time, which has no concept of fingers. That is like an interface for dogs, which can only press one key at a time with their paws.
7- Emacs allows users to stretch their fingers more, and finger exercise has been proved, again and again, scientifically, to help increase human intelligence. The more you use Emacs, the more you become intelligent. Unlike Vim users, who become dumber and dumber, and end up with paws.
8- Everyone knows that geeks do no exercise. But we Emacs users have our daily dose of finger exercise. As a result, Emacs users have better shape. Take a look at the comparison: RMS (Emacs user) vs ESR (Vi user). RMS definitely looks better, with a nicer beard too. ESR can only have a lousy Asterix moustache. And look at what these two persons said in public, which just proved points 2, 6, and 7.
9- Look at this deductive proof I'm giving right now. Only an Emacs user can attain this level of intellect.
10- As a result of the last 9 points, this proves that Emacs is better. And from an evolutionary point of view, Emacs is like modern humans, and Vim like chimpanzee.
I did it for one year, almost ten years ago. It sucked, especially for #6 above. As a contractor, you are considered a code monkey, you are not involved in any part of the project except coding, fixing other people's bugs, and testing. Well, it makes sense, which company is stupid enough to let contractors do the core?
I was contracting at BNR (Bell Northern Research, in Ottawa) once, for 6 months. My main work was to fix bugs and maintain two 2-year-old modules of the Magellan ATM switch. The Magellan switch (at the time) had a nasty problem in the back plane design that it could not handle two-way connections, you had to use 2 one-way connections to simulate a two-way connection to make a call. To make a call, you have to go thru a grid of back planes, and you had to take care of state management in HW redundance, etc, which greatly complicated things. The employee who implemented the 2 modules for billing didn't understand it or didn't have experience, it was a classical example of spagheti code. There were at least 3 emergency calls from customers every week. I could've lived on that contract for at least 2 years, if I just fixed an urgent bug a week (which reduced the response time to 1/3 already), and the manager would be really happy.
But I was so efficient in fixing bugs that the group manager kept loaning me to other groups to fix bugs, and made quite a bunch of money on me (each group had internal budget). At the end, with the manager's approval, I just rewrote the 2 modules.
The work was no fun, and you are considered outsider all the time. The group manager was nice enough to invite me for group activities (which was an exception), but you are not allowed to participate in core works. You know full well that you could do a better job, but you have to implement some really lousy design.
And there's no chance for you to get promotion, regardless of your work.
So, if you don't mind the ugly codes, the no-fun work, being considered an outsider, no way to feel being part of a team, no chance for promotion, and if you are disciplined enoguh, etc, then go ahead.
Being part of a team is the fun part, regardless of office politics. You won't have that feeling as a contractor.
There's nothing to see here, he spent a whole ranting about naming things with Ubuntu, a second page ranting about the bongo sound and some crash, and by the time I clicked on the third page, the server is in smoke.
Here's the summary of the first 2 pages: - project code name is not good. So? What does "Longhorn", "Vista", "Chicago", "Darwin".... got to do with desktop? Gee, some people just need their daily of injected humor. - installation went fine, except that the HD partitioning does not give a lot of options. Well, nothing new here, everyone knew that already. I thought Ubuntu was supposed to make it as simple as possible. - he doesn't like the earthy theme. So? And that's supposed to make it not worthy? And does he like the default WinXP theme? - annoyed by the bongo sound. Why the fuck can't he turn it off, or turn off the freaking speaker then? I mean, I hate the beep made by stupid apps too, so I unplugged the beep wire in the box, so no more beeping. - some crashes here and there. Yeah, wake me up when you find a system that does not cost you a leg and an arm and does not crash. And he admitted it's a preview release. File a bug, tell the developers how to reproduce it, isn't it more productive that way?
I guess there would be more ranting on the third page, but good thing it's already/.ed, so I don't need to read it.
It's amazing how otherwise well-informed people didn't pick up years ago on the fact that it is easy to identify a writer based on the statistical properties of their writing. This guy is providing plenty of material for the analysis. Do a cross check against the email for all employees, and game over.
Gee, there are too many easier ways to get him/her, if it's necessary. You just have to subponea the ISP to trace down the connection to the home address (or work address). If the guy/gal is stupid enough to post from inside the campus, the MS network admin just has to grep the network connection log and, bingo.
As for preserving emails, the email messages of the executive branch contain much historical significance.
Blah, if that has so much historical significance, you just need to post it to the newsgroups, and it will be preserved for as long as internet exists.
- translate some posts on/. into comprehensible contents - figure out it is a dupe and kill it before it even appears - RTFA for me and just give me a good summary (by the rate of articles posted here, there's probably not much to summarize either) - translate "IANAL" into something else that does not make me think of ANAL thing - figure that articles on Google and Apple are just speculations by some dude living in his (can't be her, for sure) parent's basement, and not really news worth posting - translate my suggestions into something acceptable to the (kernel) hackers that good hygiene is a good thing - understand that I'm just ranting, and it should not take it personal.
I agree that everything is cool... except memory and storage. Way too little to be used by geeks. I want to have my emails (3GB of emails) moved to a small device like that, music, personal files, bookmarks, e-books (2GB of ebooks), etc.
The size is perfect, and it runs Linux. Now, give me a HD and put it more memory, and a terminal.
Oh, make it available in China too, and I'm willing to pay up to 800$ for that:)
No, that's not true. Please provide the name of the registrar where you tried to register your domain. You probably get scammed by some unknown registrar outside of China.
I own 2 chinese domain names (one for.com, the other for.cn). The registration fee is the same everywhere in China, namely, 280 RMB/year. That price is set by the government.
And no, you don't need any other software. What's wrong with your Firefox/Mozilla?
The only problem is, the government does not allow personal chinese domain name (registered by individuals for individuals), only corporations/organizations/institutions, etc.
Being a Chinese student with very little experience in English, I think that it may be harder now to get localized information about specific things in Canada/USA as they'll be oddities in the dns names..
What's wrong for a country to try to promote technologies that work better in the local languages?
What would Canadians and Americans think if they have to learn Chinese to use the Internet? That's what Chinese people (and all other people) have to do, i.e. learning English, to go online.
The world is a beautiful place, with all its differences and disparities. It would be really boring if everyone has to speak english and eat big macs, don't you think?
Ok, according to your description, the distinction is fine. But I don't think I could agree with this fact that such a mere distinction could justify that software can not be patented, and basically, that means only hardware and stuff can be patented.
Before you pull your gun and shoot at me, I must declare first that I hate this idiotic patenting system as any./er here.
According to your distinction here, I think it's a bit unfair to those who work in software and math, and as matter of fact, anyone working in what you called "immaterial", don't you think? Those people working on hardware do not create everything out of the vacuum, they base a lot of knowledge on the knowledge developed by other people. And so do programmers and math geeks.
Now, let me give an extreme example. Let's say I just use commodity PC hardware, and create an amazing program that does amazing thing, say, make that PC fly from NY to SF (I said extreme already!). That relies only on software. Do I have the right to patent that invention or not? According to your distinction here, probably not. There's no innovation in "computer controlled technical inventions" at all. It's pure software.
Seriously, I've been using Linux for almost ten years, starting from Slackware, then Redhat and Mandrake, then Debian, and finally, Ubuntu.
I don't know how they can call the plain Debian a distro, especially in 2005, it's like Linux in 1996. I tried to install it, for 2 weeks, on a server that has hardware listed as compatible everywhere, even on Debian site. But the friggin thing would not recognize (even configure manually) my network cards (5 year-old DLink) and my Maxtor HD.
I pop it any other distro (Ubuntu, Knoppix, even Mepis, RH, Mandrake), and everything is working like a champ. With Debian, even if I gave it specific chipset info, it wouldn't work.
Instead of complaining, why not move their behind and do something about. Move to the 21st century, for Linux sake!
Slashdot Mirror
As far as /.ers are concerned, they should have invented something to clean the keyboard first. You'd expect we clean the bathroom before we even clean the keyboard?
According to that hypothesis, I'm wondering how many geniuses /. has produced, since everyone here considers himself/herself a genius? Most important of all, when am I going to become a genius too, since I've been surrounding myself with all these geniuses here for quite a while now?
/. genius makes you a genius. True. /. geniuses makes you a genius. True. /. geniuses makes you a genius. True. /. geniuses also makes you a genius.
/. geniuses does it take to prove this?
Can someone prove to me that this hypothesis is true:
1. Surround yourself with one
2. Surround yourself with two
3. Surround yourself with n
4. Hence, surround yourself with n + 1
The question is, how many
Ok, so this is a grant. Does it mean that any software developed as a result of this grant will be open-sourced, and publicly available to all, free of charge? If not (and everything indicates that it won't be), I'd say, someone has a well-placed friend and got free money to develop their own proprietary software. Yeah, it will scan major open source softwares, and yeah, the database will be public (?), but then the tools from the grant money are still proprietary.
I thought only China has "guanxi" problem?
So, if this toolset and methodology are so good, I have to wonder why it does not get more widespread use? According to their info, it is developed in the 70's and 80's, so that's not new. And why are softwares so buggy and have such a lousy reputation anyway? Not to start a flamewar, but let's just list a few possible "reaons" here:
.... so, are software vendors a bunch of irresponsible kids that need constant monitoring?
1. Why aren't schools teaching this methodoly thoroughly? Why aren't this toolset and programming language taught in school by default? I learned a bit of Ada at school, but that's only part of a comparison between programming language design. So, are schools to be blamed? Or those profs don't know better? Why aren't proper engineering methodologies emphasized?
2. Someone developed a nice methodology, with a nice toolset and programming language, and got greedy and made it too expensive to acquire. Other tools are good enough, and the resulting softwares are acceptable to the market, so, this nice thing never got widespread use.
3. Programmers are asked to do the impossible. We (I include myself here) had to work with customers who don't know what they want, only give very fuzzy requirements (Praxis's customers, from their list, are different kind of animals, and they probably know better than most of the customers we had to work with), and even if we lay out the whole detailed plan in front of them, they still don't know what they want. They will agree to the plan, sign and approve it, and until you have completed the whole system according to the plan, they would ask to redo the whole thing. If a customer dares to ask a civil engineer to add 2 more stories between the 3rd and 4th floor after the custom-built building is finished, guess what would the civil engineer say? Programmers are asked to do this all the time (I know I have been asked to), so are customers to blame? You can't get the system done properly if requirements are shifting all the time.
4. Programmers are a bunch of bozos who know shit about proper engineering. Yeah, I can take the blame, I've been programming for over a decade, and I know how programmers work: methodologies are for pimps! If a bridge engineer can't tell or prove how much load the bridge can take, I'm sure people would tell him/her that s/he has no business in building bridge.
5. Customers of packaged softwares would buy a buggy software to save one buck anyway, why would vendors put extra efforts and costs to make it better? Look at the market, a lot of good softwares didn't survive, and sometimes, the worst of the line prospoered (no naming here!). So people get what they asked for.
6. Customers (even custom-built projects customers) are a bunch of cheap folks, they would go to the least priced, no matter what. Praxis's customers are willing to pay 50% more for quality work, how many of your customers are willing to? We are willing to fix our bugs, free of charge, for the first 10 years too, if our customers are willing to pay 50% than the market rate for quality work. But so far, I've never met one such customer yet. Granted, I don't work in the defense industry. So, don't blame us for lousy work, if customers try to squeeze out every single buck out of it. And in China (and some other countries too), you have to pay a huge amount for kickback too, sometimes, as high as 80% of the project's budget.
7. Software vendors are a bunch of greedy bastards, they put buggy softwares on the market, without having to accept any responsibility (just read your EULA!). Industry problem or government problem? Not enough regulations (for safety, for useability, etc)? Other industries seem to do ok, e.g. medical, civil,
8. The indsutry is developing too fast, people are chasing the coolest, hippiest, most buzzword-sounding technologies. No one gives a shit about "real engineering". And there are simply too much to learn too, in how many industries can you say people are required to master that much technologi
It's a little bit early to say yet, but if all the "design source, verification suite and simulation models" are released as open-source (as TFA said), and if the license would allow design and manufacture of systems based on that chip without paying an arm and a leg (which TFA didn't mention), I'd say: "Woohooo!", and I'd say this for all the developing countries, including China, India, etc.
And I hope this will "sparc" a revival of the sparc acrhictecture!
HP should've done the same with the Alpha architecture instead of letting it die a forgotten death. What a shame!
I remember reading about it in the paper, and it just seemed so lame. It was as if Canada was ruled by America.
Heh, I remembered when I was studying at McGill, and met a journalist (couldn't remember her name) who was having fun about the Canada's status in Washington DC. She was a young reporter sent to Washington, and has heard a lot about the USians' ignorance of geography. So, she went out to the front gate of the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue, with 2 friends, and asked a few bypassers if they could tell them where Canada is. One of the answers she got was:
"Hmm... I saw it somewhere, but not really sure. I think it's around the corner over there."
And this was from a bypasser who looked like a businessman or a government office worker, very decent and "respectable" man.
Call me grumpy old man, but why does everything have to have face recogniation, fingerprint, video, camera, mp3 player, etc in it?
A friend of mine returned from the USA and California 100 years ago and mentioned the train and how many white people made no bone about the fact the train would be used to move many white people into the midwest nd west to shift the demographics and help dilute/destroy Amerindians as an independent culture.
Why don't you turn a little bit of your viewing angle, and think maybe, the whole point of building infrastructure is to help less developed areas to catch up, and hence, reduce the poverty level as a whole?
Why does everything have to be negative? This is not like building a Liberty statute which serves nothing but for display. This is a modern railway to a remote area which is almost cut off from the world. This might be a catalyst for more economic development, along the line of that railway, from Qinghai all the way to Tibet.
No one seeems to scream bloody when the US built their railway system link the east and the west over 100 years ago, which had an amazing effect on the development of the country, in terms of economic, social, cultural, etc. No one screamed bloody when the US built the national highways and other infrastructures, in the 1930s amid the biggest economic crisis when people were lining up for soup.
Look, as good as vim could be, at this rate, you are not going to catch up with emacs, which is already at version 21.x or something. Which just proved that emacs is much better. If you don't believe, here is some proofs:
1- Emacs has a much higher version number, which proves to be a more mature software, which proves to be better (more mature is better)
2- Even an icon such as RMS whom has been proved to be more intelligent than the average USians, uses Emacs. This shows that smart people always make the right choice, and in reverse, proves that Emacs is better than Vim.
3- Everyone in Cryptonomicon, which is the bibile of all geeks, uses Emacs. We even have a module for encryption. It would take a long time for Vim to catch up to that kind of functionalities.
4- Only in Emacs can you do Ctrl-A to move the beginning of a line. In one shot. How could you do that in
Vim? You have to Esc, then press 0, which is lame. Which just shows how advanced Emacs is in terms of maturity and functionality.
5- As the theorem goes, computer science is a science for minimizing keystrokes. Emacs, in contrast to Vim, can prove this theorem right. Emacs users press less keys than Vim users.
6- Humans have 10 fingers (some may have more, but I don't know how to grow them), and Emacs allows you to use all your fingers at one. Which shows you that Emacs has a better human user interface. In contrast, Vim users can only type one key at a time, which has no concept of fingers. That is like an interface for dogs, which can only press one key at a time with their paws.
7- Emacs allows users to stretch their fingers more, and finger exercise has been proved, again and again, scientifically, to help increase human intelligence. The more you use Emacs, the more you become intelligent. Unlike Vim users, who become dumber and dumber, and end up with paws.
8- Everyone knows that geeks do no exercise. But we Emacs users have our daily dose of finger exercise. As a result, Emacs users have better shape. Take a look at the comparison: RMS (Emacs user) vs ESR (Vi user). RMS definitely looks better, with a nicer beard too. ESR can only have a lousy Asterix moustache. And look at what these two persons said in public, which just proved points 2, 6, and 7.
9- Look at this deductive proof I'm giving right now. Only an Emacs user can attain this level of intellect.
10- As a result of the last 9 points, this proves that Emacs is better. And from an evolutionary point of view, Emacs is like modern humans, and Vim like chimpanzee.
* putting on flame suite *
I did it for one year, almost ten years ago. It sucked, especially for #6 above. As a contractor, you are considered a code monkey, you are not involved in any part of the project except coding, fixing other people's bugs, and testing. Well, it makes sense, which company is stupid enough to let contractors do the core?
I was contracting at BNR (Bell Northern Research, in Ottawa) once, for 6 months. My main work was to fix bugs and maintain two 2-year-old modules of the Magellan ATM switch. The Magellan switch (at the time) had a nasty problem in the back plane design that it could not handle two-way connections, you had to use 2 one-way connections to simulate a two-way connection to make a call. To make a call, you have to go thru a grid of back planes, and you had to take care of state management in HW redundance, etc, which greatly complicated things. The employee who implemented the 2 modules for billing didn't understand it or didn't have experience, it was a classical example of spagheti code. There were at least 3 emergency calls from customers every week. I could've lived on that contract for at least 2 years, if I just fixed an urgent bug a week (which reduced the response time to 1/3 already), and the manager would be really happy.
But I was so efficient in fixing bugs that the group manager kept loaning me to other groups to fix bugs, and made quite a bunch of money on me (each group had internal budget). At the end, with the manager's approval, I just rewrote the 2 modules.
The work was no fun, and you are considered outsider all the time. The group manager was nice enough to invite me for group activities (which was an exception), but you are not allowed to participate in core works. You know full well that you could do a better job, but you have to implement some really lousy design.
And there's no chance for you to get promotion, regardless of your work.
So, if you don't mind the ugly codes, the no-fun work, being considered an outsider, no way to feel being part of a team, no chance for promotion, and if you are disciplined enoguh, etc, then go ahead.
Being part of a team is the fun part, regardless of office politics. You won't have that feeling as a contractor.
There's nothing to see here, he spent a whole ranting about naming things with Ubuntu, a second page ranting about the bongo sound and some crash, and by the time I clicked on the third page, the server is in smoke.
.... got to do with desktop? Gee, some people just need their daily of injected humor.
/.ed, so I don't need to read it.
Here's the summary of the first 2 pages:
- project code name is not good. So? What does "Longhorn", "Vista", "Chicago", "Darwin"
- installation went fine, except that the HD partitioning does not give a lot of options. Well, nothing new here, everyone knew that already. I thought Ubuntu was supposed to make it as simple as possible.
- he doesn't like the earthy theme. So? And that's supposed to make it not worthy? And does he like the default WinXP theme?
- annoyed by the bongo sound. Why the fuck can't he turn it off, or turn off the freaking speaker then? I mean, I hate the beep made by stupid apps too, so I unplugged the beep wire in the box, so no more beeping.
- some crashes here and there. Yeah, wake me up when you find a system that does not cost you a leg and an arm and does not crash. And he admitted it's a preview release. File a bug, tell the developers how to reproduce it, isn't it more productive that way?
I guess there would be more ranting on the third page, but good thing it's already
Move on, nothing here.
It's amazing how otherwise well-informed people didn't pick up years ago on the fact that it is easy to identify a writer based on the statistical properties of their writing. This guy is providing plenty of material for the analysis. Do a cross check against the email for all employees, and game over.
Gee, there are too many easier ways to get him/her, if it's necessary. You just have to subponea the ISP to trace down the connection to the home address (or work address). If the guy/gal is stupid enough to post from inside the campus, the MS network admin just has to grep the network connection log and, bingo.
Are you new here? We compare everything to Windows. Bashing MS/SCO/..., kissing the ass of Google/Apple/..., are a daily sport here.
As for preserving emails, the email messages of the executive branch contain much historical significance.
Blah, if that has so much historical significance, you just need to post it to the newsgroups, and it will be preserved for as long as internet exists.
- translate some posts on /. into comprehensible contents
- figure out it is a dupe and kill it before it even appears
- RTFA for me and just give me a good summary (by the rate of articles posted here, there's probably not much to summarize either)
- translate "IANAL" into something else that does not make me think of ANAL thing
- figure that articles on Google and Apple are just speculations by some dude living in his (can't be her, for sure) parent's basement, and not really news worth posting
- translate my suggestions into something acceptable to the (kernel) hackers that good hygiene is a good thing
- understand that I'm just ranting, and it should not take it personal.
that ./ has been putting up too much of stuffs that don't matter at all?
Come on editors, there are too many cool technologies, articles, hacks, etc, submitted but rejected, and then what we see is this kind of junk.
Gee, jesus died for us and all we got is this lousy FA.
Who said size doesn't matter? Then why am I reminded to increase my size all the time?
Oh you're talking about search index...
Man, you must be really busy at it, I was expecting this dirty joke to be the FP!
I agree that everything is cool... except memory and storage. Way too little to be used by geeks. I want to have my emails (3GB of emails) moved to a small device like that, music, personal files, bookmarks, e-books (2GB of ebooks), etc.
:)
The size is perfect, and it runs Linux. Now, give me a HD and put it more memory, and a terminal.
Oh, make it available in China too, and I'm willing to pay up to 800$ for that
P h d... is that pronounced fud?
No, it's pronounced as permanent head damage !
No, that's not true. Please provide the name of the registrar where you tried to register your domain. You probably get scammed by some unknown registrar outside of China.
.com, the other for .cn). The registration fee is the same everywhere in China, namely, 280 RMB/year. That price is set by the government.
I own 2 chinese domain names (one for
And no, you don't need any other software. What's wrong with your Firefox/Mozilla?
The only problem is, the government does not allow personal chinese domain name (registered by individuals for individuals), only corporations/organizations/institutions, etc.
Well, let's rephrase that for a Chinese student:
Being a Chinese student with very little experience in English, I think that it may be harder now to get localized information about specific things in Canada/USA as they'll be oddities in the dns names..
What's wrong for a country to try to promote technologies that work better in the local languages?
What would Canadians and Americans think if they have to learn Chinese to use the Internet? That's what Chinese people (and all other people) have to do, i.e. learning English, to go online.
The world is a beautiful place, with all its differences and disparities. It would be really boring if everyone has to speak english and eat big macs, don't you think?
Ok, according to your description, the distinction is fine. But I don't think I could agree with this fact that such a mere distinction could justify that software can not be patented, and basically, that means only hardware and stuff can be patented.
./er here.
Before you pull your gun and shoot at me, I must declare first that I hate this idiotic patenting system as any
According to your distinction here, I think it's a bit unfair to those who work in software and math, and as matter of fact, anyone working in what you called "immaterial", don't you think? Those people working on hardware do not create everything out of the vacuum, they base a lot of knowledge on the knowledge developed by other people. And so do programmers and math geeks.
Now, let me give an extreme example. Let's say I just use commodity PC hardware, and create an amazing program that does amazing thing, say, make that PC fly from NY to SF (I said extreme already!). That relies only on software. Do I have the right to patent that invention or not? According to your distinction here, probably not. There's no innovation in "computer controlled technical inventions" at all. It's pure software.
Amen.
Seriously, I've been using Linux for almost ten years, starting from Slackware, then Redhat and Mandrake, then Debian, and finally, Ubuntu.
I don't know how they can call the plain Debian a distro, especially in 2005, it's like Linux in 1996. I tried to install it, for 2 weeks, on a server that has hardware listed as compatible everywhere, even on Debian site. But the friggin thing would not recognize (even configure manually) my network cards (5 year-old DLink) and my Maxtor HD.
I pop it any other distro (Ubuntu, Knoppix, even Mepis, RH, Mandrake), and everything is working like a champ. With Debian, even if I gave it specific chipset info, it wouldn't work.
Instead of complaining, why not move their behind and do something about. Move to the 21st century, for Linux sake!