As for RISC with a bolted on x86 decoder... why???
'Cause Windows won't run on the RISC ISA, that's why. And people won't buy a new computer if it completely negates all prior software purchases.
If you want to blame someone for this, blame IBM. The System/360 introduced the idea of an ISA being seperate from any single machine, and therefore the idea that programs could be moved from one machine to another without recompiling.
I have postulated some time ago that 10/10 Gbps is the magic number for home users. Once everyone has that, we can all chill and enjoy it for a century or so.
I have four mod points, and not one of them can be used to mod a post Naïve. Damn.
The ability to boot multiple systems off the same device sounds a lot like VAXcluster technology.
But you don't have to pay DEC an arm and a leg for hardware and software licenses.
The migration of all these ideas into the realm of industry standard, commoditized hardware is a huge deal. The age of one company being able to own a whole market vertically, from the silicon to the user interface, is gone. We left those monopolies behind, and good riddance. But we also left some good ideas behind with those non-free OSes, and now we have to either self-consciously copy them or reinvent them in vastly different environments.
We have a ways to go yet. VMS had networking down cold, in that you could use a cluster of machines of different types, ages, and even architectures (VAX or Alpha) as a single logical machine. UNIX doesn't have anything close to this, nor does any other OS I know of. I hope we can reinvent this in our new systems, and maybe improve it by being OS-agnostic as well.
As an aside, another reinvention I've noticed is the exokernel, originally invented by IBM in the 1960s as VM. VM simply handled hardware partitioning, letting the user run multiple OSes on one hardware system.
Is there a keyboard with _NO_ windows keys, and no hotkeys? I just want a 1-key hole between my alt and ctrl keys. Removing them is OK, but the right alt is a bit to the left, that's annoying sometimes.
You can effectively `deaden' the keys by not binding them to anything anyplace, and then your finger can hit them all the time with no effect on the application or anything else. But unless you buy a pre-Windows keyboard or modify a more modern one, I don't think you'll be able to find a blank space between the Ctrl and Alt keys.
All in all, I think this is a good thing. My Windows-Menu key (near my right Ctrl) is my compose-key under Linux, allowing me to type neat Latin-1 characters in the shell. My left-Windows key flips between my virtual terminals at a single keystroke. All of these keys can be rebound in software at any time, even to the point of inserting entire lines of text and/or control codes. This kind of power is addictive, and I don't need to give up anything useful to get it.
And, in the end, that's what it's all about: Raw untamed power right at the end-user's fingertips. Microsoft can demand a double-size keyboard with a hundred hotkeys, and as long as I can rebind them under Linux that will make me very happy. It will make my arms tired, but I'll be very effective with every keystroke.
(As a note, the Z shell is very nice when it comes to binding keys: The bindkey builtin is the best interface to key-mapping I've seen yet.)
Bzzt, wrong, but we do have some lovely parting gifts.
Spam is wrong because it hijacks a useful service I pay for (that is, email) and subverts it into something only useful for the minority who abuse it. In other words, it is a theft of my resources, made even worse by the blatant subversion of my will my stolen resources are put to.
Is it ethical to say "your business model is annoying, so we are going to squash it?"
Is it ethical to say "your computer is mine, and I'm going to use it to annoy you"?
Technical solutions are a pragmatic "best try" effort at best, and worthless gewgaws at worst. But they also do something more sinister: They legitimize the idea that anything we create and we pay for can be used by others without our permission in ways detrimental to our own use of that property.
Anyway, if you think filtering is a solution, come back and talk with me when your servers are grinding under the effort of hundreds of thousands of junk messages and you're still expected to provide an acceptable level of service to the people who actually pay your salary.
how does it garuntee the correctness of the articles?
Human beings notice junk and fix it. It really is that simple: If you notice something that's pretty much crap, you can edit it and make it better. It works extremely well, which is to say it's better than any print encyclopedia for depth, breadth, and quality.
So if one contributer feels 2+2=4
and another feels 2+2=6
So then according to the "neutral viewpoint" on the issue, the entry should be 2+2=5.
Uh, no. Nobody who actually understood NPOV would say that. What would happen is that the article would give the facts of the issue with citations and present the opinions about the issue with attributions. It would present all opinions as fairly as possible, but it has no interest in suppressing facts simply because they paint a specific opinion in a bad light.
In other words, actually use Wikipedia before you mindlessly slag it.
Batch files make automation a piece of cake, and you don't need a degree in Computer Science to write one.
Translation: They are just barely competent at scripting simple tasks, but don't expect them to respond to failures (as DCL can) or implement any form of looping (as dead-simple vanilla sh can).
I agree that DOS is the best solution for some tasks. I even agree that DOS batch is good for some things. But when I see buzzwords, I react.
This falls down when you realize that the airwaves are a very limited resource, and that they are the only way to reach a mass audience. No, not everyone has an Internet connection. And, while nearly everyone has access to a public library, plenty of people simply don't have the time to learn how to access relevant information online.
The airwaves aren't like land because while a billboard has a reach of a few yards or maybe a mile, a strong radio station can serve an entire state. Or, if the FCC regulations on signal strength were dropped, a single station could pollute the airwaves from sea to shining sea. This reach means that a single owner, or a very small consortium, could block out all public usage of an entire medium. Is PBS getting on Rupert Murdoch's nerves? Up the output into the gigawatt range and drown out everything except Rush Limbaugh and Fox News!
Ownership of airwaves is a complex issue. Do small owners have the same rights to be heard as ClearChannel? Can non-radio applications like 802.11b and cell phones encroach on traditional bands? The lines between technological regulation and form-versus-content medium control (that is, it's not what you say, it's how you say it) are blurry. But just giving it all over to whoever can mount the loudest transmitters is wrong.
I'm sure I remember reading that somewhere, would this qualify as non-obvious?
This is non-obvious if you aren't up on computer technology. If you over-worked, under-paid patent examiner isn't a geek, or isn't trained in what modern GUIs look like, it sounds like something genuinely new. 99% of Slashdot readers have used, at least once in their lives, a translucent window in a GUI, but if the examiner never has, Apple gets to sneak one by.
This is a serious flaw in the current patent examination system. Patent applications need to be peer-reviewed, looked over by representatives from the industry involved to weed out the obviously bogus attempts. They don't need to be lawyers, just experts in the field the patent would affect. This would halt over 90% of all bogus patents, I guarantee.
Of course, the idea of patenting software is itself bogus, but that's a different argument.
Those old people cracked one of the biggest, baddest encryption schemes in the history of warfare without the use of advanced computers (although they did invent some early mechanical computing machines) or a lot of information theory (Claude Shannon hadn't made his advances yet).
It's a damned shame Alan Turing is dead, but you can thank good old-fashioned British homophobia for that.
Happy Developers == Happy Users
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This should be obvious.
If the new Qt toolkit gives developers things to drool over, they'll develop more software. If they develop more software using droolworthy tools, there's a good chance some of that software will be droolworthy in and of itself.
A good API isn't the be-all and end-all of software design. But giving developers things to feel excited over is important, especially in the open-source world.
And, in addition to the obvious TIMTOWTDI, what's beautiful to one may be ugly to another.
And the most enjoyable similarity: If you get curious, you can always try it in private with a trusted partner! (Uh, does the computer count as a partner?)
Limited success was achieved with the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater and in space.
However, neither France nor China, both nuclear weapon States, signed the PTBT.
We can't get everyone on-board for these things. It just isn't going to happen. Even if we can get everyone to rule that spam isn't a free speech issue (and not everyone has been disabused of that fallacy yet) and that it isn't a legitimate business practice (good luck), we'll still have to agree on punishments (slap on the wrist or jail time?) and enforcement (who do you trust?).
It would be nice if it were possible, but it isn't going to happen.
I'll have to verify this, but I know it was partially true a long time ago (in Google terms).
My test of current behavior. The person was, indeed, bitching about old behavior. The first result is an exact phrase match, just as the new behavior dictates. No stopwords, no special processing of logical operators.
Well, what if kerosune is a company name and I really did want to search on that and avoid kerosene? It's one thing to offer a different spelling, its another to up and change
Semi-valid, but Google does say that the term returned no results and that it took the liberty of finding a close relative that matches something. Most people enjoy this, although I must admit it surprised me the first time I saw it. (More on this later.)
Even when you don't get these kind of messages, the results are for the individual words, not the phrase.
I'll have to verify this, but I know it was partially true a long time ago (in Google terms). Google has made its phrase-searching behavior a lot more intelligent than when I started using it (including stopwords without needing plus signs to force them, not seperating logical words for special processing, etc.), and you may well be complaining about old behavior.
You want to know what my big beef with Google is? Lack of documentation. Lack of an easily-findable page that details what certain things do, and how the team has changed Google's behavior recently. Google also under-advertises its world-accessable beta features. I could have been using Google News, now a staple of my news-finding experience, long before I heard about it on a message board.
Google is the master of clean, intelligent page design. It should be able to unobtrusively work in a link to a page describing advanced functionality and beta features right on its main page. It annoys and amazes me that Google doesn't more actively tout that it is the only group paving new roads in using the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
'Cause Windows won't run on the RISC ISA, that's why. And people won't buy a new computer if it completely negates all prior software purchases.
If you want to blame someone for this, blame IBM. The System/360 introduced the idea of an ISA being seperate from any single machine, and therefore the idea that programs could be moved from one machine to another without recompiling.
No, they'll just sue us all and make a lot of lawyers very, very rich.
The legal community sees no problems with this plan.
That's an old legend, son.
Don't worry. A lot of other people fell for it, too. And the reason they can fly is interesting.
More like: "You're my bitch, now bend over and take it!"
I have four mod points, and not one of them can be used to mod a post Naïve. Damn.
And the downside is... ?
If your download speed tops out at 2.0 KB/s, the difference between 8.8 MBs and 12.0 MBs means quite a bit.
The people used to IE won't notice the difference, until they realize the popups have stopped coming.
But you don't have to pay DEC an arm and a leg for hardware and software licenses.
The migration of all these ideas into the realm of industry standard, commoditized hardware is a huge deal. The age of one company being able to own a whole market vertically, from the silicon to the user interface, is gone. We left those monopolies behind, and good riddance. But we also left some good ideas behind with those non-free OSes, and now we have to either self-consciously copy them or reinvent them in vastly different environments.
We have a ways to go yet. VMS had networking down cold, in that you could use a cluster of machines of different types, ages, and even architectures (VAX or Alpha) as a single logical machine. UNIX doesn't have anything close to this, nor does any other OS I know of. I hope we can reinvent this in our new systems, and maybe improve it by being OS-agnostic as well.
As an aside, another reinvention I've noticed is the exokernel, originally invented by IBM in the 1960s as VM. VM simply handled hardware partitioning, letting the user run multiple OSes on one hardware system.
You can effectively `deaden' the keys by not binding them to anything anyplace, and then your finger can hit them all the time with no effect on the application or anything else. But unless you buy a pre-Windows keyboard or modify a more modern one, I don't think you'll be able to find a blank space between the Ctrl and Alt keys.
All in all, I think this is a good thing. My Windows-Menu key (near my right Ctrl) is my compose-key under Linux, allowing me to type neat Latin-1 characters in the shell. My left-Windows key flips between my virtual terminals at a single keystroke. All of these keys can be rebound in software at any time, even to the point of inserting entire lines of text and/or control codes. This kind of power is addictive, and I don't need to give up anything useful to get it.
And, in the end, that's what it's all about: Raw untamed power right at the end-user's fingertips. Microsoft can demand a double-size keyboard with a hundred hotkeys, and as long as I can rebind them under Linux that will make me very happy. It will make my arms tired, but I'll be very effective with every keystroke.
(As a note, the Z shell is very nice when it comes to binding keys: The bindkey builtin is the best interface to key-mapping I've seen yet.)
Bzzt, wrong, but we do have some lovely parting gifts.
Spam is wrong because it hijacks a useful service I pay for (that is, email) and subverts it into something only useful for the minority who abuse it. In other words, it is a theft of my resources, made even worse by the blatant subversion of my will my stolen resources are put to.
Is it ethical to say "your computer is mine, and I'm going to use it to annoy you"?
Technical solutions are a pragmatic "best try" effort at best, and worthless gewgaws at worst. But they also do something more sinister: They legitimize the idea that anything we create and we pay for can be used by others without our permission in ways detrimental to our own use of that property.
Anyway, if you think filtering is a solution, come back and talk with me when your servers are grinding under the effort of hundreds of thousands of junk messages and you're still expected to provide an acceptable level of service to the people who actually pay your salary.
Human beings notice junk and fix it. It really is that simple: If you notice something that's pretty much crap, you can edit it and make it better. It works extremely well, which is to say it's better than any print encyclopedia for depth, breadth, and quality.
Uh, no. Nobody who actually understood NPOV would say that. What would happen is that the article would give the facts of the issue with citations and present the opinions about the issue with attributions. It would present all opinions as fairly as possible, but it has no interest in suppressing facts simply because they paint a specific opinion in a bad light.
In other words, actually use Wikipedia before you mindlessly slag it.
Translation: They are just barely competent at scripting simple tasks, but don't expect them to respond to failures (as DCL can) or implement any form of looping (as dead-simple vanilla sh can).
I agree that DOS is the best solution for some tasks. I even agree that DOS batch is good for some things. But when I see buzzwords, I react.
This falls down when you realize that the airwaves are a very limited resource, and that they are the only way to reach a mass audience. No, not everyone has an Internet connection. And, while nearly everyone has access to a public library, plenty of people simply don't have the time to learn how to access relevant information online.
The airwaves aren't like land because while a billboard has a reach of a few yards or maybe a mile, a strong radio station can serve an entire state. Or, if the FCC regulations on signal strength were dropped, a single station could pollute the airwaves from sea to shining sea. This reach means that a single owner, or a very small consortium, could block out all public usage of an entire medium. Is PBS getting on Rupert Murdoch's nerves? Up the output into the gigawatt range and drown out everything except Rush Limbaugh and Fox News!
Ownership of airwaves is a complex issue. Do small owners have the same rights to be heard as ClearChannel? Can non-radio applications like 802.11b and cell phones encroach on traditional bands? The lines between technological regulation and form-versus-content medium control (that is, it's not what you say, it's how you say it) are blurry. But just giving it all over to whoever can mount the loudest transmitters is wrong.
This is non-obvious if you aren't up on computer technology. If you over-worked, under-paid patent examiner isn't a geek, or isn't trained in what modern GUIs look like, it sounds like something genuinely new. 99% of Slashdot readers have used, at least once in their lives, a translucent window in a GUI, but if the examiner never has, Apple gets to sneak one by.
This is a serious flaw in the current patent examination system. Patent applications need to be peer-reviewed, looked over by representatives from the industry involved to weed out the obviously bogus attempts. They don't need to be lawyers, just experts in the field the patent would affect. This would halt over 90% of all bogus patents, I guarantee.
Of course, the idea of patenting software is itself bogus, but that's a different argument.
Those old people cracked one of the biggest, baddest encryption schemes in the history of warfare without the use of advanced computers (although they did invent some early mechanical computing machines) or a lot of information theory (Claude Shannon hadn't made his advances yet).
It's a damned shame Alan Turing is dead, but you can thank good old-fashioned British homophobia for that.
This should be obvious.
If the new Qt toolkit gives developers things to drool over, they'll develop more software. If they develop more software using droolworthy tools, there's a good chance some of that software will be droolworthy in and of itself.
A good API isn't the be-all and end-all of software design. But giving developers things to feel excited over is important, especially in the open-source world.
And, in addition to the obvious TIMTOWTDI, what's beautiful to one may be ugly to another.
And the most enjoyable similarity: If you get curious, you can always try it in private with a trusted partner! (Uh, does the computer count as a partner?)
It would be nice if it were possible, but it isn't going to happen.
My Gooja experiment. A-ha! Old behavior documented. Very interesting. I wonder if the Google team knows.
You want to know what my big beef with Google is? Lack of documentation. Lack of an easily-findable page that details what certain things do, and how the team has changed Google's behavior recently. Google also under-advertises its world-accessable beta features. I could have been using Google News, now a staple of my news-finding experience, long before I heard about it on a message board.
Google is the master of clean, intelligent page design. It should be able to unobtrusively work in a link to a page describing advanced functionality and beta features right on its main page. It annoys and amazes me that Google doesn't more actively tout that it is the only group paving new roads in using the Internet.
So you're postulating it will look like a better version of this flick?
"I am the rocker, I am the roller, I am the out-of-controller!"
-- Project Entropia's best player.