The community berates anyone who attempts anything, because it is composed of a lot of individuals with no central structure, and there are always going to be a bunch of people who think they are in the target segment for a proposal and are not served by it.
Additionally, some of the things you suggested have a long history of being used in other systems (e.g., the per-package prefix), and so there are well known issues with this approach ($PATH is huge and tools aren't as good at managing the environment), and you don't mention them, so you'll get a lot of responses from people who've had problems with the particular suggestions you make.
But it really comes down to Sturgeon's Law; you'll get 90% worthless responses when people respond to anything you post, and you just have to accept this any time you interact with the public.
There are parts of the US where electricity is really cheap, because it's easy to produce, there's not much demand, and it's far enough away from high demand locations that transmission loss would make it not worthwhile. If you can transport hydrogen safely and efficiently, this is about ideal. Sure, you lose a certain amount of energy transforming it, but not as much as you'd lose if you just didn't collect it, which is what happens now.
Hydrocarbons aren't all foreign oil. Biodiesel is actually a much better source, because it doesn't contain any sulfur (the main problem with producing hydrogen from crude oil is that you also get H2S, which is toxic and corrosive, due to the impurities in crude).
But the real benefit of a hydrogen-based method is that it adds modularity to the system. When someone manages to get power out of fusion (not soon, but eventually), and electricity becomes really easy to produce, it'll be trivial to switch hydrogen production to use that as a source. Fabricating gasoline from water, graphite, and energy is a lot harder.
(Calling a process which is more efficient from wellhead to power uneconomical is odd; it's obviously cheaper in the long run, and the short run is a matter of politics, not economics.)
I see in the story at The Register that they have various office templates and scripts that they want to port to OpenOffice, yet why waste time removing Office from each machine, then installing OpenOffice, then getting all the scripts and templates to work, then having to recreate things when done again in the Linux environment?
Probably because they'll install OpenOffice before removing MS Office, so they can continue to use their scripts and templates while they get them working in OpenOffice. It's a lot easier to write a new version of your templates if you can see how the old version works with software you have available.
If you look at the French Quarter, you'll see that it's dry while the areas down the hill from it are flooded. The original city is basically fine; the flooded areas are all the low-income housing that's close enough to serve the city. It's a tough situation, because it means the working class either gets screwed over in disasters, or their housing in more stable areas needs to be subsidized (or, ideally, they get cheap mass transit from out of town somewhere less ritzy but at least dry), or there aren't any waiters or store clerks. But, on the other hand, there's plenty of New Orleans left that isn't likely to just be abandoned at this point (things would have been different if the levee had broken during the storm, in which case the water in the city would have been 10 feet deeper, flooding even the rich parts).
For that matter, the Twilight Princess images I've seen (and the ones in the N64 games) don't look as realistic as the technology is available for (compare with Eternal Darkness or Half Life). I think the problem with Wind Waker was the interaction between 2D effects and the 3D world, such that edges of effects don't look right. The water splashed by your boat doesn't belong to the same universe as the water your boat is in.
What people actually want is internal consistency in the look of the game world. If things that are further away look smaller, and explosions extend over an area, then they should have larger and smaller parts.
The GPL will definitely interact better with patents. The main lawyer for the FSF has been encouraging free software developers to apply for software patents, to defend against unscrupulous companies patenting free software and to provide a disincentive for companies to sue free software projects over software patents.
Most likely, the GPL v3 will require that any patents used by the code and owned by the licensor must also be licensed for use by any code derived from the licensed code.
If the MA government generally switches to OO, sure. But if they can be convinced that Word is the only word processor worth using, and that their legislature forces them to have ugly documents, then the government contact in your story won't be surprised by a getting a crappy document from a Word user, because even documents produced by other software look bad on Word.
Now, if the MA government switches to non-Microsoft software in addition to non-Microsoft formats, and gets to use software that handles those formats well, then Microsoft wants to have good support, but Microsoft would probably first rely on package deals, inertia, and familiarity to make the switch unlikely.
I'd actually expect them to offer a version of Office that saves your files in OpenDocument format and loses any formatting that they didn't determine how to save. Lots of FUD about how difficult to use anything other than Office is, and claims about how good their OpenDocument support is, and most agencies will probably go for sticking with Office (which will require an upgrade of Office and probably Windows as well). Microsoft probably won't be too much against anything that forces a lot of people to quit using the versions of things they're currently using, since the biggest drag on their sales is people satisfied with their current Microsoft software.
What exactly is so puzzling about the word "do"? Its use in English is complex, but hardly counts as a great puzzle of linguistics.
Presumably, the distribution of do-support: question inversion, not, and VP ellipsis. I don't really think it's a great mystery, but it's a pain to characterize in Chomsky's formulation of chains.
Signatures aren't useful for security
on
Do You Code Sign?
·
· Score: 0
Code signing can be used to determine where the code came from (or, at least, some place that claims to have provided the code). If that's really what you want to know, then it's fine. It's a good mechanism for giving some information to people who click on a program and select "properties".
On the other hand, this information is not useful for deciding whether to trust some code, because the signature only provides proof of origin, not proof of correctness. Anything that only permits signed code to run is fundamentally flawed, because it makes the assumption that there are signers who only sign good code, which is manifestly false.
On the other hand, mere origin is useful in some cases, although, lacking any security implications to forged signatures, there's little need for cryptography, which is why I've signed a bunch of my code. (It's worked reasonably well; people sometimes realize when I'm the right person to debug something, and sometimes don't.)
There is some potential for validating that things haven't been changed using signed code. If the OS knows that you're trying to run Microsoft Word, and it's not signed by Microsoft, it can tell you that. And some OSes could actually retain the public keys with sufficient security to actually catch some problems that way (particularly on applications installed by users). But this is an unusual situation and only protects things that viruses don't generally do these days (modify programs without compromising the system).
Actually, the biggest source of bugs in the 2.6.13 process (hopefully all fixed before release, but you never know) was that the PCI setup code was changed, because the old code was inherently flawed and didn't work on a lot of laptops, while the new code does work, but places more correctness requirements on the drivers. So lots of pre-existing driver bugs started actually causing problems.
As you say the first time, when bugs occur, they get fixed, but things do get broken temporarily. People actually are responsive to bug reports when they're made. People generally feel most motivated to fix reported bugs, less to write new features, and very little to fix bugs that nobody knows about. And the problem is really bugs that are uncovered by correct changes to other code, and you want these to be fixed before they're discovered, which is obviously not going to happen. Combing the source for bugs is not going to be possible, because most of the bugs that can be found by looking at them have already been found and a lot of bugs are cases in which the kernel fails to handle obscure hardware correctly or fails to work around hardware bugs.
The stable series is an attempt to create releases where bugs are hacked over (because fixing them would reveal other bugs) and no new bugs are introduced. That's about the best you can reasonably get in the modern world of non-compliant hardware and unimplementable specifications.
I've been using it since 1.2.13, and my experience has been the opposite: a 2.0.x had a "ping of death" bug; I skipped 2.2.x until I already needed features not available in it; 2.4.x was generally stable; early 2.6.x had a bug where it would sometimes not set up the keyboard or mouse correctly; and recent 2.6.x has had no problems at all.
Have you tried reporting these crashes? I can't find anything about ifconfig triggering crashes. They can't test everything themselves, because they don't have every hardware configuration, so it's important for people who do to tell them when something is wrong.
Seems is the right word; the only thing removed at this point is the option to enable it. The idea is to get the attention of people who are still using it but haven't noticed, because things continued to work with old config files.
Linux developers (who had evidentally already had access to the documentation, but couldn't disclose their work until it was officially made public) sent out a new version of the patches to give programs access to the SPUs. It's looking pretty likely that, as soon as you can actually get Cell processors, there will be support in the toolchain and kernel for using them effectively (provided you actually have a task that benefits from massive vectorization with very little control logic, of course). This should be great for the photorealistic rusty steel Enlightenment theme.
Any time common user behavior is to do something wrong, it's a usability problem. Using Windows is like living in a house with a light switch that sets it on fire and expecting that, if it's clearly labelled, nobody will flip that switch. Users should have to seek out dangerous actions like opening attachments or installing software, not have to navigate a minefield of buttons which do these things in order to use their computers.
If you go to second-run theaters instead of first-run ones, it's a lot cheaper, and you avoid seeing movies that suck, because you can find out what people who saw them first-run thought.
I'd guess that the real reason isn't outsourcing or anything like that. It's that most software is developed in-house at non-software companies. A developer who actually uderstands the field in addition to knowing how to write code is going to do better in these jobs than a brilliant coder who lacks an intuition for what the software is supposed to do. Since someone with a biotech background can learn a little programming more easily than a programmer can learn a whole lot of biotech, new graduates have to have education in both skills to compete effectively.
I know there's a lot of contention over RSS version numbers, where they aren't necessarily in order or unique, but an "RSS prime" just seems excessively confusing.
(Actually, this is clearly the regular possessive of RSS, which is, I suppose, plural)
He found that he could use Linux to replace Windows not only on his desktop, but his school lab computer, his laptop, his media player, and his game system. He seems to have forgotten to do anything with his PDA (although there are options there). But the part I was looking forward to, and was disappointed, was where he installed Linux on his ATM.
It's always beneficial to have additional diagnostic techniques that use existing equipment, rather than needing special equipment for everything. If doctors prescribe more MRIs, hospitals will buy more machines, and companies will invest money in making them less expensive to buy and run.
MRI is also a major research technique, and there's a reasonable chance that finding a way of seeing something on an MRI will lead to cheaper ways to screen for it. This research gives us a better idea of the initial effects of the disease, so we have a better idea of what tests to develop.
I think when he says "Not looking hard enough", he means not looking at all, or asking Microsoft-only companies. You can get Linux support from the first computer company in the Fortune 500, so you have to be pretty clueless to not find it.
Google is allowed to do a lot of things that most companies can't, because their prospectus actually says that their stock price isn't supposed to do well. If shareholders complain that Google made their stock tank, Google just replies that the shareholders knew they might do that.
If Google thinks their stock is overpriced and that a bubble now will lead to a crash which damages the company's position later, they're perfectly justified, with their prospectus, in dampening investor enthusiasm.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
This has nothing to do with the content, since the content is already on domains with other names.
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
But they clearly have to be allowed to get a TLD together...
and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It's actually a matter of economics more than anything else. The theory is available now for Moore's law to continue for a decade or two, and new theory seems to get worked out regularly; the fundamental limits are a long way off. What makes Moore's law relatively regular is that it takes a certain amount of development effort to get the new techniques into chips, and that rate of improvement is the minimum needed to get people to buy your chips.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in my day, really bad things happened when you tried that. Kids these days have no sense of scale...
The community berates anyone who attempts anything, because it is composed of a lot of individuals with no central structure, and there are always going to be a bunch of people who think they are in the target segment for a proposal and are not served by it.
Additionally, some of the things you suggested have a long history of being used in other systems (e.g., the per-package prefix), and so there are well known issues with this approach ($PATH is huge and tools aren't as good at managing the environment), and you don't mention them, so you'll get a lot of responses from people who've had problems with the particular suggestions you make.
But it really comes down to Sturgeon's Law; you'll get 90% worthless responses when people respond to anything you post, and you just have to accept this any time you interact with the public.
There are parts of the US where electricity is really cheap, because it's easy to produce, there's not much demand, and it's far enough away from high demand locations that transmission loss would make it not worthwhile. If you can transport hydrogen safely and efficiently, this is about ideal. Sure, you lose a certain amount of energy transforming it, but not as much as you'd lose if you just didn't collect it, which is what happens now.
Hydrocarbons aren't all foreign oil. Biodiesel is actually a much better source, because it doesn't contain any sulfur (the main problem with producing hydrogen from crude oil is that you also get H2S, which is toxic and corrosive, due to the impurities in crude).
But the real benefit of a hydrogen-based method is that it adds modularity to the system. When someone manages to get power out of fusion (not soon, but eventually), and electricity becomes really easy to produce, it'll be trivial to switch hydrogen production to use that as a source. Fabricating gasoline from water, graphite, and energy is a lot harder.
(Calling a process which is more efficient from wellhead to power uneconomical is odd; it's obviously cheaper in the long run, and the short run is a matter of politics, not economics.)
I see in the story at The Register that they have various office templates and scripts that they want to port to OpenOffice, yet why waste time removing Office from each machine, then installing OpenOffice, then getting all the scripts and templates to work, then having to recreate things when done again in the Linux environment?
Probably because they'll install OpenOffice before removing MS Office, so they can continue to use their scripts and templates while they get them working in OpenOffice. It's a lot easier to write a new version of your templates if you can see how the old version works with software you have available.
If you look at the French Quarter, you'll see that it's dry while the areas down the hill from it are flooded. The original city is basically fine; the flooded areas are all the low-income housing that's close enough to serve the city. It's a tough situation, because it means the working class either gets screwed over in disasters, or their housing in more stable areas needs to be subsidized (or, ideally, they get cheap mass transit from out of town somewhere less ritzy but at least dry), or there aren't any waiters or store clerks. But, on the other hand, there's plenty of New Orleans left that isn't likely to just be abandoned at this point (things would have been different if the levee had broken during the storm, in which case the water in the city would have been 10 feet deeper, flooding even the rich parts).
For that matter, the Twilight Princess images I've seen (and the ones in the N64 games) don't look as realistic as the technology is available for (compare with Eternal Darkness or Half Life). I think the problem with Wind Waker was the interaction between 2D effects and the 3D world, such that edges of effects don't look right. The water splashed by your boat doesn't belong to the same universe as the water your boat is in.
What people actually want is internal consistency in the look of the game world. If things that are further away look smaller, and explosions extend over an area, then they should have larger and smaller parts.
The GPL will definitely interact better with patents. The main lawyer for the FSF has been encouraging free software developers to apply for software patents, to defend against unscrupulous companies patenting free software and to provide a disincentive for companies to sue free software projects over software patents.
Most likely, the GPL v3 will require that any patents used by the code and owned by the licensor must also be licensed for use by any code derived from the licensed code.
If the MA government generally switches to OO, sure. But if they can be convinced that Word is the only word processor worth using, and that their legislature forces them to have ugly documents, then the government contact in your story won't be surprised by a getting a crappy document from a Word user, because even documents produced by other software look bad on Word.
Now, if the MA government switches to non-Microsoft software in addition to non-Microsoft formats, and gets to use software that handles those formats well, then Microsoft wants to have good support, but Microsoft would probably first rely on package deals, inertia, and familiarity to make the switch unlikely.
I'd actually expect them to offer a version of Office that saves your files in OpenDocument format and loses any formatting that they didn't determine how to save. Lots of FUD about how difficult to use anything other than Office is, and claims about how good their OpenDocument support is, and most agencies will probably go for sticking with Office (which will require an upgrade of Office and probably Windows as well). Microsoft probably won't be too much against anything that forces a lot of people to quit using the versions of things they're currently using, since the biggest drag on their sales is people satisfied with their current Microsoft software.
What exactly is so puzzling about the word "do"? Its use in English is complex, but hardly counts as a great puzzle of linguistics.
Presumably, the distribution of do-support: question inversion, not, and VP ellipsis. I don't really think it's a great mystery, but it's a pain to characterize in Chomsky's formulation of chains.
Code signing can be used to determine where the code came from (or, at least, some place that claims to have provided the code). If that's really what you want to know, then it's fine. It's a good mechanism for giving some information to people who click on a program and select "properties".
On the other hand, this information is not useful for deciding whether to trust some code, because the signature only provides proof of origin, not proof of correctness. Anything that only permits signed code to run is fundamentally flawed, because it makes the assumption that there are signers who only sign good code, which is manifestly false.
On the other hand, mere origin is useful in some cases, although, lacking any security implications to forged signatures, there's little need for cryptography, which is why I've signed a bunch of my code. (It's worked reasonably well; people sometimes realize when I'm the right person to debug something, and sometimes don't.)
There is some potential for validating that things haven't been changed using signed code. If the OS knows that you're trying to run Microsoft Word, and it's not signed by Microsoft, it can tell you that. And some OSes could actually retain the public keys with sufficient security to actually catch some problems that way (particularly on applications installed by users). But this is an unusual situation and only protects things that viruses don't generally do these days (modify programs without compromising the system).
Actually, the biggest source of bugs in the 2.6.13 process (hopefully all fixed before release, but you never know) was that the PCI setup code was changed, because the old code was inherently flawed and didn't work on a lot of laptops, while the new code does work, but places more correctness requirements on the drivers. So lots of pre-existing driver bugs started actually causing problems.
As you say the first time, when bugs occur, they get fixed, but things do get broken temporarily. People actually are responsive to bug reports when they're made. People generally feel most motivated to fix reported bugs, less to write new features, and very little to fix bugs that nobody knows about. And the problem is really bugs that are uncovered by correct changes to other code, and you want these to be fixed before they're discovered, which is obviously not going to happen. Combing the source for bugs is not going to be possible, because most of the bugs that can be found by looking at them have already been found and a lot of bugs are cases in which the kernel fails to handle obscure hardware correctly or fails to work around hardware bugs.
The stable series is an attempt to create releases where bugs are hacked over (because fixing them would reveal other bugs) and no new bugs are introduced. That's about the best you can reasonably get in the modern world of non-compliant hardware and unimplementable specifications.
I've been using it since 1.2.13, and my experience has been the opposite: a 2.0.x had a "ping of death" bug; I skipped 2.2.x until I already needed features not available in it; 2.4.x was generally stable; early 2.6.x had a bug where it would sometimes not set up the keyboard or mouse correctly; and recent 2.6.x has had no problems at all.
Have you tried reporting these crashes? I can't find anything about ifconfig triggering crashes. They can't test everything themselves, because they don't have every hardware configuration, so it's important for people who do to tell them when something is wrong.
Seems is the right word; the only thing removed at this point is the option to enable it. The idea is to get the attention of people who are still using it but haven't noticed, because things continued to work with old config files.
Linux developers (who had evidentally already had access to the documentation, but couldn't disclose their work until it was officially made public) sent out a new version of the patches to give programs access to the SPUs. It's looking pretty likely that, as soon as you can actually get Cell processors, there will be support in the toolchain and kernel for using them effectively (provided you actually have a task that benefits from massive vectorization with very little control logic, of course). This should be great for the photorealistic rusty steel Enlightenment theme.
Any time common user behavior is to do something wrong, it's a usability problem. Using Windows is like living in a house with a light switch that sets it on fire and expecting that, if it's clearly labelled, nobody will flip that switch. Users should have to seek out dangerous actions like opening attachments or installing software, not have to navigate a minefield of buttons which do these things in order to use their computers.
If you go to second-run theaters instead of first-run ones, it's a lot cheaper, and you avoid seeing movies that suck, because you can find out what people who saw them first-run thought.
I'd guess that the real reason isn't outsourcing or anything like that. It's that most software is developed in-house at non-software companies. A developer who actually uderstands the field in addition to knowing how to write code is going to do better in these jobs than a brilliant coder who lacks an intuition for what the software is supposed to do. Since someone with a biotech background can learn a little programming more easily than a programmer can learn a whole lot of biotech, new graduates have to have education in both skills to compete effectively.
I know there's a lot of contention over RSS version numbers, where they aren't necessarily in order or unique, but an "RSS prime" just seems excessively confusing.
(Actually, this is clearly the regular possessive of RSS, which is, I suppose, plural)
He found that he could use Linux to replace Windows not only on his desktop, but his school lab computer, his laptop, his media player, and his game system. He seems to have forgotten to do anything with his PDA (although there are options there). But the part I was looking forward to, and was disappointed, was where he installed Linux on his ATM.
It's always beneficial to have additional diagnostic techniques that use existing equipment, rather than needing special equipment for everything. If doctors prescribe more MRIs, hospitals will buy more machines, and companies will invest money in making them less expensive to buy and run.
MRI is also a major research technique, and there's a reasonable chance that finding a way of seeing something on an MRI will lead to cheaper ways to screen for it. This research gives us a better idea of the initial effects of the disease, so we have a better idea of what tests to develop.
I think when he says "Not looking hard enough", he means not looking at all, or asking Microsoft-only companies. You can get Linux support from the first computer company in the Fortune 500, so you have to be pretty clueless to not find it.
Google is allowed to do a lot of things that most companies can't, because their prospectus actually says that their stock price isn't supposed to do well. If shareholders complain that Google made their stock tank, Google just replies that the shareholders knew they might do that.
If Google thinks their stock is overpriced and that a bubble now will lead to a crash which damages the company's position later, they're perfectly justified, with their prospectus, in dampening investor enthusiasm.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
...as long as they play their movies backwards.
This has nothing to do with the content, since the content is already on domains with other names.
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
But they clearly have to be allowed to get a TLD together...
and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It's actually a matter of economics more than anything else. The theory is available now for Moore's law to continue for a decade or two, and new theory seems to get worked out regularly; the fundamental limits are a long way off. What makes Moore's law relatively regular is that it takes a certain amount of development effort to get the new techniques into chips, and that rate of improvement is the minimum needed to get people to buy your chips.