GNOME... only used it once or twice, but I think anything is better than either of them. I can't stand the unconfigurability of CDE... I literally spent HOURS trying to figure out how to customize the menus in the control panel thingy (not sure what it's called... it's ugly and silly), and it STILL doesn't behave the way I want it to. *Sigh*. Now, if only I can figure out where an unb0rken C compiler is on this miserable system, perhaps I have a chance of compiling VTWM (which, in spite of its flaws, is still my favorite WM).
But on another note... isn't it interesting how bigshot Sun is adopting a free desktop? Just a thought...
however, saying that programming is is a highly creative process, and human creative processes are very easily hampered by frustration, irritation, and disillusionment is just bull. It may be irritating, but it's your job and you have to do it well or you should leave.
there are commercial artists. they don't love creating mcdonald's billboards. they might go home and paint frescos to satiate their creative urges. but they do their damn work because they are paid to, and programmer shouldn't be held to different standards.
No, you're missing my point. Actually I agree with you that programmers shouldn't whine about their job; if they don't like the job, go find something else. If they can't then they'd best shut up and put up. But my point is that, from the POV of an IT manager, making the programmers under you suffer like this is bad management. Your programmers won't perform well, and they will just be bitter and hard to manage. I'm not saying that programmers are right to be bitter; but if you're a manager and you cause them to be bitter by imposing unnecessary red tape on them, then don't be surprised they write a lousy product for you. And from a management point of view, this is a stupid route to take. That's all I'm trying to say.
Implement lots of policies like this, in the development teams, and enforce them strictly.
Nothing is less productive than pissed-off developers who hate their developing environment.
On a more serious note, development is a highly creative process, and human creative processes are very easily hampered by frustration, irritation, and disillusionment. The best way to get your programmers to produce top-quality work, IMNSHO, is to make them happy and comfortable. And that means giving them freedom to customize their working environment to the way they like it. Of course, that doesn't mean you should tolerate that slacker who does nothing but run illegal warez servers off the company's network; but one shouldn't go the other extreme and basically chain the developers' elbows to their feet.
People often criticize lazy or incompetent programmers for poorly-written code, but has anyone realized that making your programmers unhappy and disillusioned by imposing unnecessary restrictions on them is another good way of producing poorly-written code?
Alright, enough rant already. My point is, such policies won't fly, and even if they do, it just means that your developers are just mindless sheep who are obviously very capable at producing quality software (*cough*sarcasm*cough*). Programmers are at their best when they're in a challenging environment, and happily so.
I agree with you that software in general is a lot more complex, and used in a lot more unexpected ways, than something like a car.
OTOH, there is such a thing called graceful degradation -- that is, if you push the limits of the software, it shouldn't just suddenly barf and die on you, but degrade gracefully. Too much code I've seen (both open and non-open source) assumes too much -- and dies badly when the assumptions fail.
It is possible and not overly difficult to design software such that it degrades gracefully. Sadly to say, sloppy programming (programmers), deadline pressure, or disinterest in handling error conditions, dominate the world of software. Not many would put in the extra work to make a program degrade gracefully, because it doesn't have very visible effect -- until things start to fail. And too many programmers have this "test only the cases that work" syndrome.
I'm working at a consulting company and we have to work with a very large codebase with mixed new and old code of varying degrees of quality. And it's often a pain to add new things or optimize old things because a lot of cruft has built up over the years. Nevertheless, it's fun to be, in that it's challenging and gratifying when you know that what you did makes the code cleaner, better, and faster.
There are also times when it's just plain annoying, when you're faced with a virtual tower of cards of badly-written but working code. You wish you could rewrite it to make it better, but you're also afraid everything might just start tumbling down. And it's very frustrating to know that you could fix it, but unable to do it because of time constraints or fear of breaking everything (due to other code relying on buggy behaviour).
Nevertheless, I consider my job quite fun. I think most of it comes from the fact that I work with a very inspiring person who also shares my ideals of what is good code, etc.. And even when we know we don't want to touch that piece of ugly code, although we'd love to "fix" it, we can share the wish that had we the chance, we'd do it better. We can talk about what design methods would've been better, and how perhaps we can work towards that in the future, etc.. And I think it's this personal connection that makes the difference -- the job itself can be quite a bore at times, but when you know someone else is with you on it, it makes a world of difference.
If that's what I think it is... that's an AWESOME improvement over previous x86 incarnations:-) Just imagine the extent of freedom your C++ compiler will have with register allocation... this will cut down memory accesses by at least an order of magnitude!
Of course, this all depends on whether these registers are general purpose. They'd better be, 'cos I can't imagine needing 300+ registers for special purposes while still giving you the klunky ole EAX, EBX,... & co. registers.
This only proves that Slashdot really doesn't
care to check a story before posting it. I don't
see what's so hard about clicking on a link to
see if it works? Or to see if it goes somewhere
sensible? I mean, we're not even talking about
checking facts here or anything. Why is it that
something so basic as checking URLs seems no
longer relevent to the Slashdot editors?! What
are they doing now???
Sorry for this rant. I hate the downward trend
of Slashdot recently. This wrong link almost made
me give up Slashdot forever... there are better,
less crowded, less trolled places around that I
think I'll move to.
Re:it's a step, but in the wrong direction
on
RPM Package Manager
·
· Score: 1
Ermmm....
It is not a step in the wrong direction.
It gives normal desktop users something they want;
if you don't like it, you already have Debian
anyway.
Remember, Linux is about choice. People keep
moaning and groaning about how we need a standard
package manager, how redhat sucks and debian rulez and we should standardize on debian, and how debian sucks and redhat rules and we should standardize on redhat, etc.
etc.. They're all missing the point, which is that
Linux is about choice.
If there were a single, "standard" Linux, it'd
look frighteningly like M$ to me.
But here we have different Linux distros, each of
which offers different advantages, and are learning from each other (eg., adding apt-get-like
features to RPM). This is a sign of health.
Umm... where in the article does it say that the
government will control standards?? All it suggests is that the government require
Microsoft to open its API's. How do you
conclude from this that the government wants to
control protocols??
All it's trying to do is to require MS to open
whatever API's it's currently using. Does that
mean only MS API will be allowed? No.
So why, if I may ask, does open source projects
suffer from the same problems?
No, this is not flamebait. This is for real --
although there are a few open source projects out
there that really shine, you've to admit a lot of
open source projects are kinda buggy, and seem to
suffer from the same problems as proprietary
software (although you could argue they are less
so because problems are easier to fix when anyone
can see the source -- but the problems are still
there). And this is for people who are coding
because they like it, not because they are under
pressure.
I think there's more to software quality than just
pressure from upper management, etc..
Like other posters have said, and like the article
said, there must be something more fundamental
about software that we still don't quite grasp.
Hopefully, XHTML will bring back the original
intention of HTML -- *logical* document structure
instead of haphazard, ad hoc mutilation based
mostly on visual structure that's the norm of
today's average website.
The current state of HTML (ie. its average use
today) is just sad... It's my firm belief that
anything overly popular eventually declines. I
call it the Mass Entropy Principle. Every time
something exceeds a certain threshold of popularity,
entropy runs wild and free.
That is why, although you express your doubts
about bringing back gopher, I think the idea has
merit (even if the gopher protocol itself may no
longer work in today's world).
Entropy is kept in check only beneath a certain
threshold. Anything that gets overly popular
very quickly deteriorates into mostly worthless
crap. So, maybe only a minority of users will
be interested in a gopher reincarnation (maybe
the original protocol, maybe a new idea built
from the same principles). But the small size is
what will nurture quality.
The Web of today is
just quantity, vast quantities, but very little
quality. Witness what happens with something like
Microsoft -- catering to the masses. Popular.
Big bucks. Big bugs. Look at Slashdot. Used to be
small, informative, useful. Look at it now. Large
numbers. Big popularity. Lotsa cash. And lotsa
trolls and blind rabid zealot syndromes too.
HTTP/HTML has been butchered and raped by
commercial interests so much that it's now nothing
but an unecessarily bloated mutant of what it
ought to have been. For goodness' sake, HTML
stands for HyperText markup language! What
the h*** is that IMG tag doing there? And all the
other monstrosities like EMBED, WIDTH and HEIGHT
attributes, ad nauseum. But no, because of the
big bucks behind this monster, nobody cares to
think about how sensible (or idiotic) it has become. If only they realized how inefficient
HTML is for the kind of things it's used for these days.
IMNSHO, if you want multimedia, use a protocol
designed to handle multimedia! I don't
see the logic behind multimedia on a text
protocol. (Or what used to be a text protocol.)
But this is just the trees. To take a step back
and look at the forest. What is the Web intended
to be originally? It's supposed to be a source of
information. And no, contrary to what
today's couch potatoes might think, flashing
images and animations are not information. They are eye-candy. If you want
eye-candy, there is cable TV available. Or computer games, if you want something more interactive.
Information is best conveyed by text, in
most cases. And in cases where other formats are
more appropriate, they can usually be treated as
secondary content (ie., as auxilliary data files
that you can download). The front-end interface
is most efficient as text -- text to index the
non-text content.
OK, sorry for this long rant, but my point is
(was), the revival of gopher is by no means a
nostalgia for the "good ol' days". There is a lot
of reason why people that don't have dainbramage
would rather not waste bandwidth by
visiting a graphic-overloaded website, but by
visiting something like gopher, where you can find
and get the information you want without having
to wade through all the noise and muck.
OSS advocates often talk about technical merit,
and how open source projects tend to have more
technical merit than close source projects.
(Daft moderator pacifier: I said tend to be, not are.) IMNSHO, the Hurd has
a LOT of technical merit.
Hurd is the ultimate of configurability. One
of the major reasons I gave up Windows completely
was because the hood was welded shut. Linux gave
me so much more power to configure. Unfortunately,
Linux is still not the ultimate... dig Hurd: you
can replace parts of the OS and have it
affect only one user!! If you've ever tried writing anything close to an OS before, you'll
know that it's a major pain to get things going
because of the chicken-and-egg problem: you gotta
somehow bootstrap this new thing you've written,
and everything has to be perfect and properly
setup, and basically, you need to have written a
substantial amount of code before you can actually
see anything run.
But with Hurd, you can just run a new interface
in user-space, no matter how primitive it may be.
It may crash, it may burn, but you're safe in the
comfortable, stable development environment --
all you need to do is to debug the code and restart the interface.
The kernel hacker's dream, if you ask me. No
more tedious reboots, lost error messages, hard-to-reproduce bugs, etc.. I, for one, will
switch to the Hurd as soon as they make a stable
release.
Java has it's niche, though. And it does what it was intended to do - make code HIGHLY transportable. But you can't outrun native code, no matter how good your universal language is.
And what stops you from compiling a Java
program with
gcj?
And notice that gcj not only can compile Java source code into native code; it can compile bytecode into native binary!
Re:I'm a Maths Graduate but ...
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 3
FYI, I just got an email reply from Prof. Stephen Cook
who, after looking at the URL I sent him, said:
I doubt that the algorithm performs as claimed. I'll send it on
to some graph theorist; perhaps Mike Molloy.
Prof. Cook is a respected authority on complexity theory, so if he is doubtful about this paper,
I'd take an extra large grain of salt with it...
He's talking about partially overlapping polygons/triangles. VIS only gets rid of completely obscured poly's; but you still have to deal with partially visible poly's. Also, VIS doesn't get rid of 100% of the completely obscured poly's -- there will still be a few invisible poly's that won't be filtered out by VIS.
If you don't have VIS, you'll have to scale up his figures by an order of magnitude, perhaps more.
Why is it that, in the previous article about MS threatning to sue NTFS developers, some people bash Merkley deserving to be sued, and then in this story there's a post praising MS for dropping the lawsuit?
Why is it that MS is severely criticized, bashed, flamed, in the previous story, and then in this story, you get reactions like "Huh? MS apologized?!" and "I'm glad MS is starting to work with Linux"?
Why is it that when MS does something bad, it's Yet Another Reason To Flame MS, and when they do something right, it's because they're trying to clutch at straws to save their PR because the DoJ is coming after them?
Why is it that when something goes wrong with an open source projects, it's not open source's fault but it's that one oddball jerk developer that caused the problem; and when open source projects are successful, it's Yet Another Reason to Bash Proprietary Software?
Why is it that some crack-smoking moderators will mark this post down even though this is clearly a parody of the Slashdot Zealot Kneejerk Reaction Syndrome?
Poll: What do you think is most likely the next hoax to be posted on/.?
MS Linux is announced
Easy, 10-step instructions for building a PC running Crusoe
Scientists grew a living, functioning human brain from a few cells, and are now trying to interpret its electronic signals transmitted through the eight 3-jointed electrodes attached to its base. (Hint: DOOM.)
Stephen King's experiment actually worked, and he's publishing all instalments of The Plant online. (I'm with you, jamie!:-)
Proof that Katz is not an AI programmed by CmdrTaco & gang.
Slashdot will not post another hoax again. (Now, this would be a real hoax!:-)
Don't discredit this so quickly... just think for a moment. They said the only thing they did was to make one post to a single newsgroup. Now think about how it spread from there.
It must have started with a few people reading that newsgroup who went and checked the site (the few negligible hits they reported), and then they told their friends about it, etc., and the word slowly spread. Then after a brief time, somebody spread the word to slashdot. Bingo! starting from slashdot, the word spread at an exponential rate. And don't think that it's merely the slashdot effect. After the posting on Slashdot, you better believe the news continued to spread like wildfire through the human network -- from slashdotters to their friends to their friends' friends, etc..
My point is -- this surely proves the effectiveness of the Net as a distribution medium (in this case, of news, but it could be of anything). All it takes is to have enough initial momentum, and eventually, it will reach places like Slashdot, and will start to take off from there.
Poll: what did you find most interesting of the recent Slashdot coverage?
The MacJunkie guy eating his hockey puck mouse for claiming the G4 Cube photos were fake
Upgrading that Visor on your head so that getting out in the sun after an all-night programming session won't zap your memory
Reading "Slashdot sucks" posts attached to redundant flames of redundant comments to the recurrent topic of free Linux ISPs
Posting an article about a fraud mimicking of a credit card site and not mentioning the outright rip-off of Debian's website
Craving the latest multi-processor board from SETI so that you can crack pr0n site passwords ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontribute to finding extraterrestial life
Coffee
Britney Spears
(Guide to Blind Moderators: in case you haven't noticed, the last two items cover two of the recent polls and the other items are parallel to the summary in this article...)
Poll: how many people are interested in this SGI box?
I want it!
What's the current bid on it? Are they bidding on eBay?
Does it come with the Quake SGI tools?
Gah, who cares. Slashdot is boring.
Oh no!! Id is going bankrupt! I mean, heck, with Corel selling the peripheral business and Id auctioning off their computers, the IT industry is collapsing! Aaarrrgghh!!!
(RMS voice imitation:) I hereby declare this SGI Box the GNU/Quake GNU/SGI workstation!
Interesting. Hmm, the typical Slashdot conspiracy theory fest comes to mind.... time for another Poll Mastah poll!!:-P
Poll: what really happened to the MacJunkie site?
They got hacked.
Internal political problems that provoked someone to self-destruct the site.
Ben really was too embarrassed about his mistake, but taking the site offline was an even more compromising position, so he put up a notice stating the contrary. (Man, talk about conspiracy theories!)
You dumb conspiracy theorists. They just got Slashdotted and their sponsor took them offline to save their network!!
I like coffee.
Re:Slashdot Users and Spam
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
·
· Score: 1
Well, there are several possible scenarios. I leave it up to you to pick one (yes this is another Poll Mastah poll):
SPAM is effective because people actually like it, and it's just the vocal minority that hates it
SPAM is effective because people get so enraged that they flame in reply, proving that their email address is read by a human being; and eventually, by repeatedly being bombarded by the same message, you unconsciously want to buy that product.
SPAM is only effective on clueless people who deserve what they get
SPAM is not effective; 'cos if it were, people wouldn't need to keep doing it like they are now.
SPAM is not effective, because it turns off Slashdot readers, who, obviously, comprise the entire universe.
SPAM is not effective because it's something marketing guys are crazy about, and we all know that marketing guys are dumb.
Whaddya mean, is SPAM effective?! It's just a can of meat, isn't it???
Slashdot Mirror
CDE... *shudder*
OpenWindows... *shudder*
GNOME... only used it once or twice, but I think anything is better than either of them. I can't stand the unconfigurability of CDE... I literally spent HOURS trying to figure out how to customize the menus in the control panel thingy (not sure what it's called... it's ugly and silly), and it STILL doesn't behave the way I want it to. *Sigh*. Now, if only I can figure out where an unb0rken C compiler is on this miserable system, perhaps I have a chance of compiling VTWM (which, in spite of its flaws, is still my favorite WM).
But on another note... isn't it interesting how bigshot Sun is adopting a free desktop? Just a thought...
No, you're missing my point. Actually I agree with you that programmers shouldn't whine about their job; if they don't like the job, go find something else. If they can't then they'd best shut up and put up. But my point is that, from the POV of an IT manager, making the programmers under you suffer like this is bad management. Your programmers won't perform well, and they will just be bitter and hard to manage. I'm not saying that programmers are right to be bitter; but if you're a manager and you cause them to be bitter by imposing unnecessary red tape on them, then don't be surprised they write a lousy product for you. And from a management point of view, this is a stupid route to take. That's all I'm trying to say.
Implement lots of policies like this, in the development teams, and enforce them strictly. Nothing is less productive than pissed-off developers who hate their developing environment.
On a more serious note, development is a highly creative process, and human creative processes are very easily hampered by frustration, irritation, and disillusionment. The best way to get your programmers to produce top-quality work, IMNSHO, is to make them happy and comfortable. And that means giving them freedom to customize their working environment to the way they like it. Of course, that doesn't mean you should tolerate that slacker who does nothing but run illegal warez servers off the company's network; but one shouldn't go the other extreme and basically chain the developers' elbows to their feet.
People often criticize lazy or incompetent programmers for poorly-written code, but has anyone realized that making your programmers unhappy and disillusioned by imposing unnecessary restrictions on them is another good way of producing poorly-written code?
Alright, enough rant already. My point is, such policies won't fly, and even if they do, it just means that your developers are just mindless sheep who are obviously very capable at producing quality software (*cough*sarcasm*cough*). Programmers are at their best when they're in a challenging environment, and happily so.
I agree with you that software in general is a lot more complex, and used in a lot more unexpected ways, than something like a car.
OTOH, there is such a thing called graceful degradation -- that is, if you push the limits of the software, it shouldn't just suddenly barf and die on you, but degrade gracefully. Too much code I've seen (both open and non-open source) assumes too much -- and dies badly when the assumptions fail.
It is possible and not overly difficult to design software such that it degrades gracefully. Sadly to say, sloppy programming (programmers), deadline pressure, or disinterest in handling error conditions, dominate the world of software. Not many would put in the extra work to make a program degrade gracefully, because it doesn't have very visible effect -- until things start to fail. And too many programmers have this "test only the cases that work" syndrome.
... on what you mean by "fun".
I'm working at a consulting company and we have to work with a very large codebase with mixed new and old code of varying degrees of quality. And it's often a pain to add new things or optimize old things because a lot of cruft has built up over the years. Nevertheless, it's fun to be, in that it's challenging and gratifying when you know that what you did makes the code cleaner, better, and faster.
There are also times when it's just plain annoying, when you're faced with a virtual tower of cards of badly-written but working code. You wish you could rewrite it to make it better, but you're also afraid everything might just start tumbling down. And it's very frustrating to know that you could fix it, but unable to do it because of time constraints or fear of breaking everything (due to other code relying on buggy behaviour).
Nevertheless, I consider my job quite fun. I think most of it comes from the fact that I work with a very inspiring person who also shares my ideals of what is good code, etc.. And even when we know we don't want to touch that piece of ugly code, although we'd love to "fix" it, we can share the wish that had we the chance, we'd do it better. We can talk about what design methods would've been better, and how perhaps we can work towards that in the future, etc.. And I think it's this personal connection that makes the difference -- the job itself can be quite a bore at times, but when you know someone else is with you on it, it makes a world of difference.
Just my $0.02.
Did I read that right? 328 registers?
If that's what I think it is... that's an AWESOME improvement over previous x86 incarnations :-) Just imagine the extent of freedom your C++ compiler will have with register allocation ... this will cut down memory accesses by at least an order of magnitude!
Of course, this all depends on whether these registers are general purpose. They'd better be, 'cos I can't imagine needing 300+ registers for special purposes while still giving you the klunky ole EAX, EBX, ... & co. registers.
This only proves that Slashdot really doesn't care to check a story before posting it. I don't see what's so hard about clicking on a link to see if it works? Or to see if it goes somewhere sensible? I mean, we're not even talking about checking facts here or anything. Why is it that something so basic as checking URLs seems no longer relevent to the Slashdot editors?! What are they doing now???
Sorry for this rant. I hate the downward trend of Slashdot recently. This wrong link almost made me give up Slashdot forever... there are better, less crowded, less trolled places around that I think I'll move to.
Ermmm....
It is not a step in the wrong direction. It gives normal desktop users something they want; if you don't like it, you already have Debian anyway. Remember, Linux is about choice. People keep moaning and groaning about how we need a standard package manager, how redhat sucks and debian rulez and we should standardize on debian, and how debian sucks and redhat rules and we should standardize on redhat, etc. etc.. They're all missing the point, which is that Linux is about choice.
If there were a single, "standard" Linux, it'd look frighteningly like M$ to me. But here we have different Linux distros, each of which offers different advantages, and are learning from each other (eg., adding apt-get-like features to RPM). This is a sign of health.
Umm... where in the article does it say that the government will control standards?? All it suggests is that the government require Microsoft to open its API's. How do you conclude from this that the government wants to control protocols??
All it's trying to do is to require MS to open whatever API's it's currently using. Does that mean only MS API will be allowed? No.
So why, if I may ask, does open source projects suffer from the same problems?
No, this is not flamebait. This is for real -- although there are a few open source projects out there that really shine, you've to admit a lot of open source projects are kinda buggy, and seem to suffer from the same problems as proprietary software (although you could argue they are less so because problems are easier to fix when anyone can see the source -- but the problems are still there). And this is for people who are coding because they like it, not because they are under pressure.
I think there's more to software quality than just pressure from upper management, etc.. Like other posters have said, and like the article said, there must be something more fundamental about software that we still don't quite grasp.
Hopefully, XHTML will bring back the original intention of HTML -- *logical* document structure instead of haphazard, ad hoc mutilation based mostly on visual structure that's the norm of today's average website.
The current state of HTML (ie. its average use today) is just sad... It's my firm belief that anything overly popular eventually declines. I call it the Mass Entropy Principle. Every time something exceeds a certain threshold of popularity, entropy runs wild and free. That is why, although you express your doubts about bringing back gopher, I think the idea has merit (even if the gopher protocol itself may no longer work in today's world).
Entropy is kept in check only beneath a certain threshold. Anything that gets overly popular very quickly deteriorates into mostly worthless crap. So, maybe only a minority of users will be interested in a gopher reincarnation (maybe the original protocol, maybe a new idea built from the same principles). But the small size is what will nurture quality.
The Web of today is just quantity, vast quantities, but very little quality. Witness what happens with something like Microsoft -- catering to the masses. Popular. Big bucks. Big bugs. Look at Slashdot. Used to be small, informative, useful. Look at it now. Large numbers. Big popularity. Lotsa cash. And lotsa trolls and blind rabid zealot syndromes too.
Exactly!!
HTTP/HTML has been butchered and raped by commercial interests so much that it's now nothing but an unecessarily bloated mutant of what it ought to have been. For goodness' sake, HTML stands for HyperText markup language! What the h*** is that IMG tag doing there? And all the other monstrosities like EMBED, WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes, ad nauseum. But no, because of the big bucks behind this monster, nobody cares to think about how sensible (or idiotic) it has become. If only they realized how inefficient HTML is for the kind of things it's used for these days.
IMNSHO, if you want multimedia, use a protocol designed to handle multimedia! I don't see the logic behind multimedia on a text protocol. (Or what used to be a text protocol.)
But this is just the trees. To take a step back and look at the forest. What is the Web intended to be originally? It's supposed to be a source of information. And no, contrary to what today's couch potatoes might think, flashing images and animations are not information. They are eye-candy. If you want eye-candy, there is cable TV available. Or computer games, if you want something more interactive.
Information is best conveyed by text, in most cases. And in cases where other formats are more appropriate, they can usually be treated as secondary content (ie., as auxilliary data files that you can download). The front-end interface is most efficient as text -- text to index the non-text content.
OK, sorry for this long rant, but my point is (was), the revival of gopher is by no means a nostalgia for the "good ol' days". There is a lot of reason why people that don't have dainbramage would rather not waste bandwidth by visiting a graphic-overloaded website, but by visiting something like gopher, where you can find and get the information you want without having to wade through all the noise and muck.
(Flamesuit on, flame away :-P)
OSS advocates often talk about technical merit, and how open source projects tend to have more technical merit than close source projects. (Daft moderator pacifier: I said tend to be, not are.) IMNSHO, the Hurd has a LOT of technical merit.
Hurd is the ultimate of configurability. One of the major reasons I gave up Windows completely was because the hood was welded shut. Linux gave me so much more power to configure. Unfortunately, Linux is still not the ultimate... dig Hurd: you can replace parts of the OS and have it affect only one user!! If you've ever tried writing anything close to an OS before, you'll know that it's a major pain to get things going because of the chicken-and-egg problem: you gotta somehow bootstrap this new thing you've written, and everything has to be perfect and properly setup, and basically, you need to have written a substantial amount of code before you can actually see anything run.
But with Hurd, you can just run a new interface in user-space, no matter how primitive it may be. It may crash, it may burn, but you're safe in the comfortable, stable development environment -- all you need to do is to debug the code and restart the interface.
The kernel hacker's dream, if you ask me. No more tedious reboots, lost error messages, hard-to-reproduce bugs, etc.. I, for one, will switch to the Hurd as soon as they make a stable release.
And what stops you from compiling a Java program with gcj? And notice that gcj not only can compile Java source code into native code; it can compile bytecode into native binary!
Prof. Cook is a respected authority on complexity theory, so if he is doubtful about this paper, I'd take an extra large grain of salt with it...
If you don't have VIS, you'll have to scale up his figures by an order of magnitude, perhaps more.
(Hint: the last option, although it looks like the usual obligatory nonsense choice, isn't actually nonsensical :-P)
Let's find out what people think about the various alternatives:
Poll: which of the following is the best solution?
Poll: What do you think is most likely the next hoax to be posted on /.?
Don't discredit this so quickly... just think for a moment. They said the only thing they did was to make one post to a single newsgroup. Now think about how it spread from there.
It must have started with a few people reading that newsgroup who went and checked the site (the few negligible hits they reported), and then they told their friends about it, etc., and the word slowly spread. Then after a brief time, somebody spread the word to slashdot. Bingo! starting from slashdot, the word spread at an exponential rate. And don't think that it's merely the slashdot effect. After the posting on Slashdot, you better believe the news continued to spread like wildfire through the human network -- from slashdotters to their friends to their friends' friends, etc..
My point is -- this surely proves the effectiveness of the Net as a distribution medium (in this case, of news, but it could be of anything). All it takes is to have enough initial momentum, and eventually, it will reach places like Slashdot, and will start to take off from there.
Sorry, couldn't resist :-)
Poll: what did you find most interesting of the recent Slashdot coverage?
(Guide to Blind Moderators: in case you haven't noticed, the last two items cover two of the recent polls and the other items are parallel to the summary in this article...)
Poll: how many people are interested in this SGI box?
Caffeine underflow
Brain dumped
Interesting. Hmm, the typical Slashdot conspiracy theory fest comes to mind.... time for another Poll Mastah poll!! :-P
Poll: what really happened to the MacJunkie site?
(Warning: satire-o-meter reading exceeds threshold.)