Then just don't use it. Nobody is trying to make this replace the Linux kernel console, much in the same way nobody is trying to make Emacs replace ed.
If you read the article (or was it the blog post?), you'll find answers.
First, kmscon has only one dependency - libudev. It can be compiled to use Pango for font rendering, or EGL for hardware-accelerated rendering, but those are optional. X11 is never used.
Second, the rationale for putting this in userspace was mainly for internationalization. In particular, some character tables (for Asian languages, especially) can be rather large. If it was in the kernel, that memory could not be swapped out. In userspace, you can.
Third, this seems aimed at regular console users, not primarily-X-users-that-use-a-terminal. There are plenty of good X11 terminal emulators (and just as many bad ones). This is aimed at people who don't need (or at least, don't want) X, but still want to use all the features of modern hardware. It also claims to interact well with both the kernel VT system, and with X - you can keep an X session on one virtual screen, keep the kernel terminal on another (for those few cases where it is needed, like kernel error messages), and put kmscon on the rest.
I will probably try this out, because I at least used to fit into that group of regular console users. I have on several occasions run out of virtual terminals. I'm not so much of one anymore, but maybe this will get me back into it.
In 2010 I paid over $3000 to buy components to build my workstation/gaming machine.
Slightly off-topic, but I'm curious of what you bought to spend that much. Do you run dual-socket Xeons or something? Triple-SLI? Or are you counting the price of monitors in that $3K figure?
There comes a moment in many arguments when you realize that, in the battle of wits, you are attacking an unarmed man. In this case, that happened around the second sentence of your last post.
A reminder: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
Now, let's examine this scientifically.
You propose a hypothesis, that any war between combatants that are both armed with and use nuclear weapons would result in the total destruction of both.
Now, the next step of the scientific process it to test that hypothesis. This presents an obvious logistical problem (probably an ethical one as well, but my science always leaned towards the "mad" type anyways). Let us assume, then, for the sake of argument, that such an experiment is beyond our means to carry out.
However, such a long peace since Korea (the last war of true significance militarily, not just politically, IMO) is abnormal. You posit this is an additional effect of MAD deterrence. This, however, is a hypothesis ("no two nuclear-armed countries will engage in a significant war due to fear of the war becoming nuclear") that attempts to prove the negative - you cannot definitively prove it true (as long as at least two nations have nuclear weapons, there exists a possibility they will go to war), but it could be definitively disproven.
Indeed, while I cannot prove it completely false, I can present counter-examples. The Kargil War was a military action between two nuclear-armed nations, and a non-trivial one with 35,000 men involved and at least 500 killed. Even a cursory glance at the Cold War shows that we were once extremely close to a nuclear war. I can also point at the increasing development of counter-nuclear weapons that may decrease the damage done by nuclear weapons to more acceptable thresholds.
So ultimately this is an argument that cannot be perfectly resolved. I for one remain convinced that not only is nuclear war possible, but possible to survive and even win. And I doubt your mind has been changed, either.
I wouldn't even say we would definitely win. I'm saying that there are two classes of war, and that the performance of an army in one is not indicative of their performance in the other.
And in case you haven't kept up, there's been a surprising amount of work into anti-ballistic-missile technology recently. Look in particular at anti-satellite weapons, which are generally designed with the "secondary" purpose of taking down inbound ballistic missiles.
More precisely, most spammers use an account once. They may make several dozen posts at once (one phpbb bot I saw would post the same thing in every single subforum at once), or they may only make one, but they seem to assume that their account will be banned pretty much after the first infraction.
Assuming they're using bots, that makes sense. The exception would be human-generated spam, especially that which tries to camouflage as actual discussion, and double-especially if they use multiple accounts to hold a "discussion" with themselves. As this is a) very expensive, time-wise and b) barely distinguishable from unpaid fanboyism, it's not something I would worry about.
I hope you're not really contemplating attacking China ?
No, I'm not. I'm just saying that "oh, the US just lost two desert counter-insurgencies, they would absolutely suck at fighting a monolithic Soviet-style military" is like saying "oh, the Raspberry Pi can't run Crysis, it must be useless".
[achievement unlocked: made first RPi reference in a/. discussion]
Basically, there is no correlation between an army's performance in a counter-insurgency, and their performance in a total war.
That's because in Afghanistan, we're not fighting a war, we're fighting an insurgency. Big difference there (for a/.-friendly analogy, the difference between CP/M and RHEL).
A war would be two armies, fighting on relatively equal ground (within an order of magnitude of each other, at least). And it would be destructive as *hell* (there's almost no way a real war now would not go nuclear), and would end only with the near-complete destruction of one side's forces and economy. That's what the US military is designed for, and what a war with China would be. Remember Iraq? The proper war with Iraq's rather significant military, many of them veterans of a very long, bloody war with Iran, and armed with reasonably modern weapons? I'm sure you *don't* remember, because we cut through them like butter. We blasted them with not even the full might of our military (we held the nukes back, at least), and they literally could not surrender fast enough.
An insurgency is different. You don't win by killing all the enemy combatants, destroying all their materiel and wrecking their supply chain. After all, they can recruit more insurgents from the population, can arm themselves with locally-made or stolen small arms, and have no supply chain worth speaking of. No, you win this sort of war by "winning over" the people, by trying to minimize civilian casualties (instead of maximize enemy casualties), by building up civilian infrastructure (instead of destroying militarily-useful infrastructure). It's a war of politics and propaganda, not of armies and fleets.
And it is, unfortunately, something very difficult to win. In fact, I think it is essentially impossible for a democracy with any semblance of a free press to win, because all but one of the examples I can think of of "successfully ending an insurgency" were done by brutal massacres and the sort of things the Geneva Conventions were designed to stop. The sole counter-example I can think of is Ireland, and that was not a "victory" as much as it was "stalemate".
Cap it at 160 hours per four weeks (that's four 40-hour work weeks in four weeks, unless I fucked basic math up again). Some jobs work best with long shifts, but a long time between them. Some work best with short 4-hour stints twice a day. Capping it at the day level, or even the week level, may work for some jobs, but not for others.
It originated as an acronym; it is now fully acceptable to use as a proper or even regular noun. Indeed, this seems to be the preferred usage, as shown by the Federal Department of Rockets and Laser's own usage.
And I tend to defer to the Federal Department of Rockets and Lasers in matters regarding all things laser and/or rocket.
it cannot solve with the proper use of rockets, lasers and in one notable case, duct tape.
Someone start a White House petition to rename NASA to "Federal Department of Rockets and Lasers". Because who in their right mind (or several of the wrong ones) would cut funding to the Department of Rockets and Lasers?
Whenever someone yells at me about "the Founding Fathers" and "non-separation of church and state", I like to point out that Jefferson was basically an agnostic, and Ben Franklin took part in satanic orgies. If the yelling moron is a hardline Protestant, I try to remember which of them were Catholic (for some reason many of them consider "papists" to be worse than atheists, which still baffles me); if the yelling moron is Catholic, I point out that the majority of the Founding Fathers were protestant and that if they had meant to establish a national religion, it would not have been theirs.
I also like bringing up the Treaty of Tripoli (from 179something), which not only claims absolutely that the US is not a Christian nation, but specifically that the United States has no problem with Islam. I point out that the attempt at the treaty was started by Washington himself, although it was Adams who signed it.
Wow, a combination XKCD *and* Monty Python reference.
Now find a way to mix in a Simpson's reference and a way to blame it on Microsoft (bonus points if you swap $ for S), and you'll have the most perfect/. comment possible.
Oh, that works too. There's a bat that's nested in my attic for the past few summers - I call him Bruce, for obvious reasons. He even seems to have formed an alliance, or at least a truce, with my cats (work great on the moles and possums).
Now if only I had something to kill all the spiders... napalm perhaps?
The public at large doesn't give a shit about this kind of thing, which isn't really all that unreasonable.... Lest we forget when the network was hacked the first time around, the biggest, loudest complaint was not that CC info was leaked, along with personal details, but that the network was down and people couldn’t play the games they paid for.
Indeed. I made the mistake of answering "because Sony is evil and deserves it" to a comment "Why?" on the Kotaku forums.
That started off a rather nasty flamewar, but most of the counter-arguments boiled down to: 1) Accusing me of being an XBox fanboy (which apparently invalidates your opinions). They also often said that hackers must also be Microsoft fanboys, as Microsoft never gets hacked and they're "just as evil" as Sony. 2) Accusing me of being a troll ("obvious troll is obvious" was said at least once without a trace of irony) 3) Saying that the only people being hurt are Sony's customers, not Sony themselves (somehow not realizing the implications - if customers keep getting attacked, they aren't likely to continue being customers) 4) Saying that nobody ever used Linux on the PS3 and that Sony was 100% justified in removing it
And in one memorable case, bringing up Hitler, trying to minimize Sony's "evilness" by comparing it to that.
So no, none of "the general public" consider anything Sony does to be evil. They could probably kill a few people and people would care more about whether they can play their Final Fantasy XIII-2 DLC or not.
Civilization (n) [from the Latin civilus, "a Roman legionnaire, particularly one in the Gallic divisions"] 1) Having bigger, better, and more weapons than "uncivilized peoples"; this implicitly elevates the status of one's arts and culture above the rest 2) A computer game series, in which victory is generally obtained by acquiring bigger, better and more weapons than the other players.
See also: civil war Contrast: barbarian
(Taken without permission from the 2038 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary)
Good news! Microsoft has heard your plea, and responded with C#! It has all the features of Java, plus the extra feature of only working right on Windows!
Slashdot Mirror
"Beowulf connection" has a nice ring to it.
It's slightly over seven billion now, actually. 7.034 billion, to be precise.
Then just don't use it. Nobody is trying to make this replace the Linux kernel console, much in the same way nobody is trying to make Emacs replace ed.
If you read the article (or was it the blog post?), you'll find answers.
First, kmscon has only one dependency - libudev. It can be compiled to use Pango for font rendering, or EGL for hardware-accelerated rendering, but those are optional. X11 is never used.
Second, the rationale for putting this in userspace was mainly for internationalization. In particular, some character tables (for Asian languages, especially) can be rather large. If it was in the kernel, that memory could not be swapped out. In userspace, you can.
Third, this seems aimed at regular console users, not primarily-X-users-that-use-a-terminal. There are plenty of good X11 terminal emulators (and just as many bad ones). This is aimed at people who don't need (or at least, don't want) X, but still want to use all the features of modern hardware. It also claims to interact well with both the kernel VT system, and with X - you can keep an X session on one virtual screen, keep the kernel terminal on another (for those few cases where it is needed, like kernel error messages), and put kmscon on the rest.
I will probably try this out, because I at least used to fit into that group of regular console users. I have on several occasions run out of virtual terminals. I'm not so much of one anymore, but maybe this will get me back into it.
serial port.
A what now? "Serial port"? Is that anything like USB?
(I kid, I kid - I still have a null modem cable in my big bag o' cables)
In 2010 I paid over $3000 to buy components to build my workstation/gaming machine.
Slightly off-topic, but I'm curious of what you bought to spend that much. Do you run dual-socket Xeons or something? Triple-SLI? Or are you counting the price of monitors in that $3K figure?
There comes a moment in many arguments when you realize that, in the battle of wits, you are attacking an unarmed man. In this case, that happened around the second sentence of your last post.
A reminder: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
Now, let's examine this scientifically.
You propose a hypothesis, that any war between combatants that are both armed with and use nuclear weapons would result in the total destruction of both.
Now, the next step of the scientific process it to test that hypothesis. This presents an obvious logistical problem (probably an ethical one as well, but my science always leaned towards the "mad" type anyways). Let us assume, then, for the sake of argument, that such an experiment is beyond our means to carry out.
However, such a long peace since Korea (the last war of true significance militarily, not just politically, IMO) is abnormal. You posit this is an additional effect of MAD deterrence. This, however, is a hypothesis ("no two nuclear-armed countries will engage in a significant war due to fear of the war becoming nuclear") that attempts to prove the negative - you cannot definitively prove it true (as long as at least two nations have nuclear weapons, there exists a possibility they will go to war), but it could be definitively disproven.
Indeed, while I cannot prove it completely false, I can present counter-examples. The Kargil War was a military action between two nuclear-armed nations, and a non-trivial one with 35,000 men involved and at least 500 killed. Even a cursory glance at the Cold War shows that we were once extremely close to a nuclear war. I can also point at the increasing development of counter-nuclear weapons that may decrease the damage done by nuclear weapons to more acceptable thresholds.
So ultimately this is an argument that cannot be perfectly resolved. I for one remain convinced that not only is nuclear war possible, but possible to survive and even win. And I doubt your mind has been changed, either.
I wouldn't even say we would definitely win. I'm saying that there are two classes of war, and that the performance of an army in one is not indicative of their performance in the other.
And in case you haven't kept up, there's been a surprising amount of work into anti-ballistic-missile technology recently. Look in particular at anti-satellite weapons, which are generally designed with the "secondary" purpose of taking down inbound ballistic missiles.
PS: Mexico? What about Canada?
More precisely, most spammers use an account once. They may make several dozen posts at once (one phpbb bot I saw would post the same thing in every single subforum at once), or they may only make one, but they seem to assume that their account will be banned pretty much after the first infraction.
Assuming they're using bots, that makes sense. The exception would be human-generated spam, especially that which tries to camouflage as actual discussion, and double-especially if they use multiple accounts to hold a "discussion" with themselves. As this is a) very expensive, time-wise and b) barely distinguishable from unpaid fanboyism, it's not something I would worry about.
I hope you're not really contemplating attacking China ?
No, I'm not. I'm just saying that "oh, the US just lost two desert counter-insurgencies, they would absolutely suck at fighting a monolithic Soviet-style military" is like saying "oh, the Raspberry Pi can't run Crysis, it must be useless".
[achievement unlocked: made first RPi reference in a /. discussion]
Basically, there is no correlation between an army's performance in a counter-insurgency, and their performance in a total war.
That's because in Afghanistan, we're not fighting a war, we're fighting an insurgency. Big difference there (for a /.-friendly analogy, the difference between CP/M and RHEL).
A war would be two armies, fighting on relatively equal ground (within an order of magnitude of each other, at least). And it would be destructive as *hell* (there's almost no way a real war now would not go nuclear), and would end only with the near-complete destruction of one side's forces and economy. That's what the US military is designed for, and what a war with China would be. Remember Iraq? The proper war with Iraq's rather significant military, many of them veterans of a very long, bloody war with Iran, and armed with reasonably modern weapons? I'm sure you *don't* remember, because we cut through them like butter. We blasted them with not even the full might of our military (we held the nukes back, at least), and they literally could not surrender fast enough.
An insurgency is different. You don't win by killing all the enemy combatants, destroying all their materiel and wrecking their supply chain. After all, they can recruit more insurgents from the population, can arm themselves with locally-made or stolen small arms, and have no supply chain worth speaking of. No, you win this sort of war by "winning over" the people, by trying to minimize civilian casualties (instead of maximize enemy casualties), by building up civilian infrastructure (instead of destroying militarily-useful infrastructure). It's a war of politics and propaganda, not of armies and fleets.
And it is, unfortunately, something very difficult to win. In fact, I think it is essentially impossible for a democracy with any semblance of a free press to win, because all but one of the examples I can think of of "successfully ending an insurgency" were done by brutal massacres and the sort of things the Geneva Conventions were designed to stop. The sole counter-example I can think of is Ireland, and that was not a "victory" as much as it was "stalemate".
Agreed but with a modification:
Cap it at 160 hours per four weeks (that's four 40-hour work weeks in four weeks, unless I fucked basic math up again). Some jobs work best with long shifts, but a long time between them. Some work best with short 4-hour stints twice a day. Capping it at the day level, or even the week level, may work for some jobs, but not for others.
It originated as an acronym; it is now fully acceptable to use as a proper or even regular noun. Indeed, this seems to be the preferred usage, as shown by the Federal Department of Rockets and Laser's own usage.
And I tend to defer to the Federal Department of Rockets and Lasers in matters regarding all things laser and/or rocket.
it cannot solve with the proper use of rockets, lasers and in one notable case, duct tape.
Someone start a White House petition to rename NASA to "Federal Department of Rockets and Lasers". Because who in their right mind (or several of the wrong ones) would cut funding to the Department of Rockets and Lasers?
Whenever someone yells at me about "the Founding Fathers" and "non-separation of church and state", I like to point out that Jefferson was basically an agnostic, and Ben Franklin took part in satanic orgies. If the yelling moron is a hardline Protestant, I try to remember which of them were Catholic (for some reason many of them consider "papists" to be worse than atheists, which still baffles me); if the yelling moron is Catholic, I point out that the majority of the Founding Fathers were protestant and that if they had meant to establish a national religion, it would not have been theirs.
I also like bringing up the Treaty of Tripoli (from 179something), which not only claims absolutely that the US is not a Christian nation, but specifically that the United States has no problem with Islam. I point out that the attempt at the treaty was started by Washington himself, although it was Adams who signed it.
Wow, a combination XKCD *and* Monty Python reference.
Now find a way to mix in a Simpson's reference and a way to blame it on Microsoft (bonus points if you swap $ for S), and you'll have the most perfect /. comment possible.
That was actually about 30 different people, not just one.
"At the end of this course, only one student will be given an A. Why should it be you?"
The best response, of course, is "Because I am the only one with the antidote."
Oh, that works too. There's a bat that's nested in my attic for the past few summers - I call him Bruce, for obvious reasons. He even seems to have formed an alliance, or at least a truce, with my cats (work great on the moles and possums).
Now if only I had something to kill all the spiders... napalm perhaps?
You know what else works really well on mosquitoes?
Napalm.
Of course, I shudder to think of what would happen should they develop an immunity to that...
The public at large doesn't give a shit about this kind of thing, which isn't really all that unreasonable. ... Lest we forget when the network was hacked the first time around, the biggest, loudest complaint was not that CC info was leaked, along with personal details, but that the network was down and people couldn’t play the games they paid for.
Indeed. I made the mistake of answering "because Sony is evil and deserves it" to a comment "Why?" on the Kotaku forums.
That started off a rather nasty flamewar, but most of the counter-arguments boiled down to:
1) Accusing me of being an XBox fanboy (which apparently invalidates your opinions). They also often said that hackers must also be Microsoft fanboys, as Microsoft never gets hacked and they're "just as evil" as Sony.
2) Accusing me of being a troll ("obvious troll is obvious" was said at least once without a trace of irony)
3) Saying that the only people being hurt are Sony's customers, not Sony themselves (somehow not realizing the implications - if customers keep getting attacked, they aren't likely to continue being customers)
4) Saying that nobody ever used Linux on the PS3 and that Sony was 100% justified in removing it
And in one memorable case, bringing up Hitler, trying to minimize Sony's "evilness" by comparing it to that.
So no, none of "the general public" consider anything Sony does to be evil. They could probably kill a few people and people would care more about whether they can play their Final Fantasy XIII-2 DLC or not.
Civilization (n) [from the Latin civilus, "a Roman legionnaire, particularly one in the Gallic divisions"]
1) Having bigger, better, and more weapons than "uncivilized peoples"; this implicitly elevates the status of one's arts and culture above the rest
2) A computer game series, in which victory is generally obtained by acquiring bigger, better and more weapons than the other players.
See also: civil war
Contrast: barbarian
(Taken without permission from the 2038 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary)
Anarcho-Syndiclist
...
bloody peasant...
Sometimes I wish Java could suck more.
Good news! Microsoft has heard your plea, and responded with C#! It has all the features of Java, plus the extra feature of only working right on Windows!