The current Israeli government is not tolerant of everybody, but it is not on the basis of religion that they oppress people; it's actually racism against the people who were living in the promised land when they got there. It's the same racism that you see everywhere between groups which lay claim to the same land, regardless of religion.
I'm not convinced that the individuals of the middle east want the area to be secularized. In Saudi Arabia, in particular, the government is much more liberal than the average person. Were Saudi Arabia to become democratic, the government would become more religious and isolationist. The separation of church and state is a particularly american and now european ideal, but is not necessarily related to democracy. Americans rarely elect non-politicians; why couldn't a coutry elect only clergy? Why couldn't the basis for the legal system be religious as opposed to whatever we claim it to be? For that matter, Israel is already a democratic religious state (with, of course, the caveat that Jewish law and custom is unusually in favor of religious tolerance).
I wouldn't be surprised if the middle east ended up democratic as a consession to the political sensibilities of the rest of the world, but heavily religious and with a lot of restrictions on culture. I suspect that they will find that it is impossible to suppress information, but that their citizens will react to much of it with revulsion, much like most people on slashdot react to a certain.cx site. And American culture would probably be less welcome, because the people's sensibilities would prevail, rather than the governments desire to have favorable relations with the US.
"Virus" was never used in the plural in Latin because it was a mass noun like "water". It meant something like "toxin", and lumped together all different kinds into a single aggregate.
If the English word "virus" were like the Latin word "virus", the plural (in the sense that English speakers want it) would be "types of virus". But the current meaning of the word is closer to "type of toxin (with certain restrictions)" by itself, so it makes sense to pluralize it. As the plural only developed in English, it follows English pluralization rules.
Of course, given the usual progression of English words, I bet in 1000 years the plural will be "virus" and the singular will be "viru". It's probably just the rarity of words ending in 'u' that meant this didn't happen immediately. "I have discovered the causes of some diseases to be tiny objects which I have named "virus", from the Latin." "Great! Can you show me a viru?" Similar things happened to form "asset" and "cherry".
"I've had the experience of asking students a question and there's a one-sentence answer. And it's not a question of shyness or dumbness, but the person hasn't learned how to develop an idea. How to make a statement and then qualify and describe and give examples and illustrations. Each and every one of these people could do that."
The first sentence is unclear. Is the teacher looking for a one-sentence answer or getting one? The clauses ("asking..." and "there's...") aren't parallel, either. The second sentence refers to the individual omitted from the first. The third sentence is a fragment. The fourth sentence refers, presumably, not to anyone mentioned in the previous three sentences, but to some other people; "these people" evidentally don't include "the person".
Might the problem be that the students have incoherent teachers as role models? You aren't going to learn to write logical arguments if your teacher doesn't link ideas or develop the relationship between them.
I think Cisco is in trouble here. Since this matter primarily for BGP, and is necessary to keep the internet infrastructure from being vulnerable to attack, and the internet is now considered vital infrastructure, I wouldn't be surprised if the FCC called up the PTO and told them to reject the application. Or, for that matter, if the NSA called up Cisco and told them to drop the application. Or the DHS could call up Cisco and ask about how they seem to be aiding cyberterrorism. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't Microsoft's idea to allow unlicensed copies of Windows to get security patches, either.
Your IT department should deal with a lot of the issues with your work computer, and they'll have an easier time due to the computers all being configured similarly (e.g., they configure all of the computers for their mail server; they don't have to deal with some ISP that nobody else you know uses).
On the other hand, you're right; as soon as people start using Linux at work, they're likely to want to use it at home. But I think that the work desktop, supported by an IT department, is a better bet for pushing Linux to end users than the home desktop, supported by relatives. Also, the Linux work desktop is likely to be as much like the Windows work desktop as possible, to keep users happy, and differ largely on the configuration side, where IT will be taking care of it.
The United States government is neither allowed to have intellectual property nor is it bound by intellectual property law. Of course, it may be indirectly affected by claims against contractors (thus preventing them from providing the services the government wanted), so they pay attention, and they like to arrange to have contractors create things, so that those things don't go into the public domain.
For that matter, probably most people identify non-faces that look like faces by context. If you can tell there's no body attached, it's probably not a face. In order to figure that out, however, you need to understand things in front of other things, how much space a body takes up, how it bends, etc.
The kernel developers want to get new stuff out to distributions as frequently as is reasonable, so that they can test effectively. It's not like a distribution has to catch up with the latest kernel (and these releases are not so different from each other, anyway; unlike the 2.4->2.6 change, they don't need changes in support tools).
2.6 seems to be as stable as 2.4 is. They've done an admirable job of keeping 2.6 stable during the period where changes come in that were kept out of 2.6.0 due to the feature freeze (which made 2.4.x unstable from 2.4.2 to 2.4.17, IIRC). The main issue, as far as I can tell, is that there are differences in performance, and they'd like to have 2.6 configurable to be as good as 2.4 at the things 2.4 was better at.
People seem to be commenting mostly about the nVidia module. Any binary-only module will have problems if the core developers change anything, and the core developers can't update the out-of-tree drivers like they can update the in-tree drivers. So they fix all of the in-kernel drivers, and make the thing that breaks the others optional. The change is part of getting 2.6 worst-case performance up to 2.4 levels; a change that improved things overall made something worse which could be fixed by this change.
As for why things have to be broken, there are cases in which some changes are needed to fix some hardware, but they break other hardware in unexpected or less significant ways. For example, an old version might autodetect a device, but the autodetection might misconfigure other devices. In order to fix the other devices, autodetection has to be disabled, and people using the formerly detected device will have to enable it specifically, or not all of their device's capabilities will be usable.
There's an option for mouse protocol; they changed the default from autodetect to a conservative setting recently, because the autodetection was messing some things up (it changed some settings it couldn't fix, or something). Try "psmouse_proto=ImExPS/2".
The changes in most kernels break down into things that non-coders won't notice directly (from "the people who develop the applications I use are happier" to "my applications feel a bit different") and driver fixes. For driver fixes, the important thing is which driver it is, and what it was doing wrong before. For the core changes, if you're actually interested, you can read the linux kernel mailing list (on an archive, probably), and there are threads in which people try to convince each other that their ideas are good; the convincing ones go into the kernel. There are also a number of web sites (mentioned by other people) which explain the interesting changes.
The thing about Linux is that it really is just a kernel, and it's following a set of specifications. Unless you're making your own system calls, you shouldn't notice any difference between one version and another, aside from how nice it feels and whether the hardware is supported.
You can just download the 2.6.5->2.6.6 patch and apply only those parts that you want. Or, better, you can find the interesting bits in the Changelog, and use bitkeeper to get the relevant changesets.
The first time it rained, they figured out why it's the Gates building: the windows have leaks. Also, there isn't any storage left for users, and you have to flush all the toilets frequently, or the system doesn't work right.
Or indies can do it themselves. Magnatune is an indie label set up exclusively for online distribution which lets artists keep the rights to their music and gives them half of the money. You can get albums for 6 dollars or your choice of higher price, with 8 dollars recommended and $8.59 the current average. Most Magnatune music is also available per-song from netmusic, and some albums are available from novatune on physical CD.
What I think would be really interesting would be a cross-site standard and index for this sort of thing, such that you could find a particular song by artist and title regardless of label.
Maybe, "It's okay for me to deprive the songwriter of their royalties, because they wouldn't get them anyway." If you actually wanted to be honest, you'd download an album with Kazaa and then send a check to the songwriter, instead of funding organized crime.
For that matter, what's to say that concert promoters aren't following the popularity of songs on Kazaa and choosing who to book based on that? Promoters don't care about record sales; they care about ticket sales, which depend on how many people listen to the artist. Record sales are affected by details that don't matter, like how good the songs that they won't play live are.
The real problem with C++ is that they keep changing it in ways that haven't been studied such that someone (like the language designers) understands it. How do you make sure that memory held by objects which are locals gets freed when control leaves the function due to an exception these days?
Novell's business depends on Linux going forward, because they're abandoning the NetWare kernel in favor of the Linux kernel. Even if they were to own the copyright on something vital to Linux, they couldn't license that to their customers without releasing it under the GPL, since that would violate the GPL on the rest of the kernel. So, even if they did have relevant copyrights and hadn't licensed the code out under the GPL, they would have to drop most of their product line to do anything about it. Note that the same was true of SCO, and that SCO isn't really selling things any more. Novell, on the other hand, has a whole lot more to lose than SCO ever did.
There are cases in which you want the person who will be wiring the front end to the database to be good at interface design, and not mind that they don't know CS. This is particularly true if your DBA is good as CS, and can tell the designer how to improve the SQL.
Of course, you still don't want to hire someone who only codes. But people who can design a good interface are more likely to have either an art or a psychology background than a CS background. (And hiring a domain expert probably means you'll get someone who doesn't know CS but can code a bit.)
Actually, it seems to be targetted at geek guys who think that, if they were carrying around a mirror, attractive women would stand close to them while putting on makeup.
Eh, I'd rather have apt-get be good than the installer be good; after all, you add packages more frequently than you install the base system. It would be nice if it defaulted to installing the minimum with minimal input and pointed you at apt-get (or other package managers) once the system was functional.
So it took Microsoft part of a week after releasing the patch to deal with a problem that it caused, and you think that this is a reason that companies shouldn't spend that long testing the patches? If a company spent as long on the follow-up patch as Microsoft took on the original patch (ignoring the fact that most companies don't have IT departments as big as Microsoft), this has testing completed (assuming it indicated that the patch worked) just in time for the end-of-the-month crunch. If you want to stay in business, you have to avoid changing anything then, so applying it has to wait until now, which is too late.
IT departments are doing the cost-benefit analysis correctly. If they'd applied the original patch immediately, they would have had a disruption worse than they've had so far. Even when an attack occurs, like it did in this case, it is better for reliability, on average, to delay applying the patches.
Slashdot Mirror
The current Israeli government is not tolerant of everybody, but it is not on the basis of religion that they oppress people; it's actually racism against the people who were living in the promised land when they got there. It's the same racism that you see everywhere between groups which lay claim to the same land, regardless of religion.
I'm not convinced that the individuals of the middle east want the area to be secularized. In Saudi Arabia, in particular, the government is much more liberal than the average person. Were Saudi Arabia to become democratic, the government would become more religious and isolationist. The separation of church and state is a particularly american and now european ideal, but is not necessarily related to democracy. Americans rarely elect non-politicians; why couldn't a coutry elect only clergy? Why couldn't the basis for the legal system be religious as opposed to whatever we claim it to be? For that matter, Israel is already a democratic religious state (with, of course, the caveat that Jewish law and custom is unusually in favor of religious tolerance).
.cx site. And American culture would probably be less welcome, because the people's sensibilities would prevail, rather than the governments desire to have favorable relations with the US.
I wouldn't be surprised if the middle east ended up democratic as a consession to the political sensibilities of the rest of the world, but heavily religious and with a lot of restrictions on culture. I suspect that they will find that it is impossible to suppress information, but that their citizens will react to much of it with revulsion, much like most people on slashdot react to a certain
"Virus" was never used in the plural in Latin because it was a mass noun like "water". It meant something like "toxin", and lumped together all different kinds into a single aggregate.
If the English word "virus" were like the Latin word "virus", the plural (in the sense that English speakers want it) would be "types of virus". But the current meaning of the word is closer to "type of toxin (with certain restrictions)" by itself, so it makes sense to pluralize it. As the plural only developed in English, it follows English pluralization rules.
Of course, given the usual progression of English words, I bet in 1000 years the plural will be "virus" and the singular will be "viru". It's probably just the rarity of words ending in 'u' that meant this didn't happen immediately. "I have discovered the causes of some diseases to be tiny objects which I have named "virus", from the Latin." "Great! Can you show me a viru?" Similar things happened to form "asset" and "cherry".
Actually, a 128kbps FLAC file will probably be inferior, since it is likely to have a low sample rate or few bits per sample.
The first sentence is unclear. Is the teacher looking for a one-sentence answer or getting one? The clauses ("asking..." and "there's...") aren't parallel, either. The second sentence refers to the individual omitted from the first. The third sentence is a fragment. The fourth sentence refers, presumably, not to anyone mentioned in the previous three sentences, but to some other people; "these people" evidentally don't include "the person".
Might the problem be that the students have incoherent teachers as role models? You aren't going to learn to write logical arguments if your teacher doesn't link ideas or develop the relationship between them.
I think Cisco is in trouble here. Since this matter primarily for BGP, and is necessary to keep the internet infrastructure from being vulnerable to attack, and the internet is now considered vital infrastructure, I wouldn't be surprised if the FCC called up the PTO and told them to reject the application. Or, for that matter, if the NSA called up Cisco and told them to drop the application. Or the DHS could call up Cisco and ask about how they seem to be aiding cyberterrorism. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't Microsoft's idea to allow unlicensed copies of Windows to get security patches, either.
Your IT department should deal with a lot of the issues with your work computer, and they'll have an easier time due to the computers all being configured similarly (e.g., they configure all of the computers for their mail server; they don't have to deal with some ISP that nobody else you know uses).
On the other hand, you're right; as soon as people start using Linux at work, they're likely to want to use it at home. But I think that the work desktop, supported by an IT department, is a better bet for pushing Linux to end users than the home desktop, supported by relatives. Also, the Linux work desktop is likely to be as much like the Windows work desktop as possible, to keep users happy, and differ largely on the configuration side, where IT will be taking care of it.
The United States government is neither allowed to have intellectual property nor is it bound by intellectual property law. Of course, it may be indirectly affected by claims against contractors (thus preventing them from providing the services the government wanted), so they pay attention, and they like to arrange to have contractors create things, so that those things don't go into the public domain.
Last I heard, he was complaining about the security in the Stata center...
For that matter, probably most people identify non-faces that look like faces by context. If you can tell there's no body attached, it's probably not a face. In order to figure that out, however, you need to understand things in front of other things, how much space a body takes up, how it bends, etc.
The kernel developers want to get new stuff out to distributions as frequently as is reasonable, so that they can test effectively. It's not like a distribution has to catch up with the latest kernel (and these releases are not so different from each other, anyway; unlike the 2.4->2.6 change, they don't need changes in support tools).
2.6 seems to be as stable as 2.4 is. They've done an admirable job of keeping 2.6 stable during the period where changes come in that were kept out of 2.6.0 due to the feature freeze (which made 2.4.x unstable from 2.4.2 to 2.4.17, IIRC). The main issue, as far as I can tell, is that there are differences in performance, and they'd like to have 2.6 configurable to be as good as 2.4 at the things 2.4 was better at.
People seem to be commenting mostly about the nVidia module. Any binary-only module will have problems if the core developers change anything, and the core developers can't update the out-of-tree drivers like they can update the in-tree drivers. So they fix all of the in-kernel drivers, and make the thing that breaks the others optional. The change is part of getting 2.6 worst-case performance up to 2.4 levels; a change that improved things overall made something worse which could be fixed by this change.
As for why things have to be broken, there are cases in which some changes are needed to fix some hardware, but they break other hardware in unexpected or less significant ways. For example, an old version might autodetect a device, but the autodetection might misconfigure other devices. In order to fix the other devices, autodetection has to be disabled, and people using the formerly detected device will have to enable it specifically, or not all of their device's capabilities will be usable.
There's an option for mouse protocol; they changed the default from autodetect to a conservative setting recently, because the autodetection was messing some things up (it changed some settings it couldn't fix, or something). Try "psmouse_proto=ImExPS/2".
The changes in most kernels break down into things that non-coders won't notice directly (from "the people who develop the applications I use are happier" to "my applications feel a bit different") and driver fixes. For driver fixes, the important thing is which driver it is, and what it was doing wrong before. For the core changes, if you're actually interested, you can read the linux kernel mailing list (on an archive, probably), and there are threads in which people try to convince each other that their ideas are good; the convincing ones go into the kernel. There are also a number of web sites (mentioned by other people) which explain the interesting changes.
The thing about Linux is that it really is just a kernel, and it's following a set of specifications. Unless you're making your own system calls, you shouldn't notice any difference between one version and another, aside from how nice it feels and whether the hardware is supported.
You can just download the 2.6.5->2.6.6 patch and apply only those parts that you want. Or, better, you can find the interesting bits in the Changelog, and use bitkeeper to get the relevant changesets.
The first time it rained, they figured out why it's the Gates building: the windows have leaks. Also, there isn't any storage left for users, and you have to flush all the toilets frequently, or the system doesn't work right.
Or indies can do it themselves. Magnatune is an indie label set up exclusively for online distribution which lets artists keep the rights to their music and gives them half of the money. You can get albums for 6 dollars or your choice of higher price, with 8 dollars recommended and $8.59 the current average. Most Magnatune music is also available per-song from netmusic, and some albums are available from novatune on physical CD.
What I think would be really interesting would be a cross-site standard and index for this sort of thing, such that you could find a particular song by artist and title regardless of label.
Maybe, "It's okay for me to deprive the songwriter of their royalties, because they wouldn't get them anyway." If you actually wanted to be honest, you'd download an album with Kazaa and then send a check to the songwriter, instead of funding organized crime.
For that matter, what's to say that concert promoters aren't following the popularity of songs on Kazaa and choosing who to book based on that? Promoters don't care about record sales; they care about ticket sales, which depend on how many people listen to the artist. Record sales are affected by details that don't matter, like how good the songs that they won't play live are.
The real problem with C++ is that they keep changing it in ways that haven't been studied such that someone (like the language designers) understands it. How do you make sure that memory held by objects which are locals gets freed when control leaves the function due to an exception these days?
Novell's business depends on Linux going forward, because they're abandoning the NetWare kernel in favor of the Linux kernel. Even if they were to own the copyright on something vital to Linux, they couldn't license that to their customers without releasing it under the GPL, since that would violate the GPL on the rest of the kernel. So, even if they did have relevant copyrights and hadn't licensed the code out under the GPL, they would have to drop most of their product line to do anything about it. Note that the same was true of SCO, and that SCO isn't really selling things any more. Novell, on the other hand, has a whole lot more to lose than SCO ever did.
It's good to see the retailers to tell SCO to put it where the sun don't shine.
On affordable hardware?
There are cases in which you want the person who will be wiring the front end to the database to be good at interface design, and not mind that they don't know CS. This is particularly true if your DBA is good as CS, and can tell the designer how to improve the SQL.
Of course, you still don't want to hire someone who only codes. But people who can design a good interface are more likely to have either an art or a psychology background than a CS background. (And hiring a domain expert probably means you'll get someone who doesn't know CS but can code a bit.)
Actually, it seems to be targetted at geek guys who think that, if they were carrying around a mirror, attractive women would stand close to them while putting on makeup.
Eh, I'd rather have apt-get be good than the installer be good; after all, you add packages more frequently than you install the base system. It would be nice if it defaulted to installing the minimum with minimal input and pointed you at apt-get (or other package managers) once the system was functional.
That link says: "circa: In approximately; about: born circa 1900"
While not as common, "circa" is perfectly reasonable to apply to numbers.
So it took Microsoft part of a week after releasing the patch to deal with a problem that it caused, and you think that this is a reason that companies shouldn't spend that long testing the patches? If a company spent as long on the follow-up patch as Microsoft took on the original patch (ignoring the fact that most companies don't have IT departments as big as Microsoft), this has testing completed (assuming it indicated that the patch worked) just in time for the end-of-the-month crunch. If you want to stay in business, you have to avoid changing anything then, so applying it has to wait until now, which is too late.
IT departments are doing the cost-benefit analysis correctly. If they'd applied the original patch immediately, they would have had a disruption worse than they've had so far. Even when an attack occurs, like it did in this case, it is better for reliability, on average, to delay applying the patches.