According to some of my Japanese friends, there was a version of BASIC developed in Japan which used Japanese for keywords, variable names, etc.; if memory serves, it was called Future BASIC. (Any Japanese readers want to correct me here?) At any rate, it was apparently a fad for a little while, but eventually fell out of use--due in part to the essentially English syntax which made little sense even with Japanese words substituted in, but also in part to the difficulty of typing Japanese on a keyboard.
In order to type ideographs, you have to type in the reading of the ideograph first using the Japanese syllabary (no, they don't use 6000-key keyboards;) ) and then convert that into the appropriate character. Which in itself takes time, but due to the small number of distinct syllables in Japanese, a single word or phrase can be converted into dozens or even hundreds of distinct strings of characters, and no matter how smart the conversion program is, it won't get things right all the time, so you may have to choose among several options for each phrase you type in. Although I'm not a native speaker, I've personally found that I can often handwrite Japanese faster than I can type it in, although my English typing speed is much better than my writing speed.
Although it would be nice if the Slashdot people researched a bit before posting stories, I've noticed that the comments by readers tend to straighten everything out in the end, so I don't get too concerned. I generally take the stories themselves with a grain of salt, check out any links, and then see what other readers have to say before making any conclusions.
I also suspect Slashdot is so overloaded with story submissions that they don't have time to check them over. When I tried submitting a story a month or so ago, there was a line that said something like "459 stories in the submission queue." Just reading the summaries users give for those stories must take enough time--having to go check links that may be pages and pages long is probably not feasible.
I've been using Linux since late 1995; I installed with Slackware 2.1 (kernel 1.1.59!), and have been updating via tarballs since. My/usr/src directory has a good 200 or so packages in it at the moment, most of which I've used at one time or another. The system has worked without any problems to speak of, except occasionally when doing upgrades (installing ELF libraries and compiler was a pain).
I personally enjoy tinkering with the system, customizing it to fit my needs best, but I wouldn't dare give my current setup to anyone else. I have libc4, libc5, and libc6 all coexisting somehow, and programs to go with each--some things like gzip which never change haven't been touched since the original a.out install. The directory structure is a mess, too; I've never gotten around to sorting things out. It can take quite a bit of time to keep things up to date, though I probably would have been better off if I had had something like the FHS to guide me. If you're going to go with your own distribution, such resources are definitely worth a read.
Although it takes effort, the results can be nice. Obviously you can install whatever software you like without having to worry about dependencies or wonder what someone's install script will do to your/etc directory; you can also tune it to fit different configurations if your computing environment changes. When faced with a PC at a summer job whose SCSI card was flakey, I was able to extract the bare bones from my home system and create a two-floppy Linux system with pico, telnet, ftp, and ssh (plus basic shell utilities)--more than enough for what I needed it for.
So yes, there's at least one person out here who uses a homegrown distribution. (-:
Of course nostalgia is part of it, but I think a lot of it is more about simplicity, as opposed to the relative complexity of "modern" games. Many modern game designers seem to focus on designing games that are, well, masterpieces of design. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it does represent a shift from games of 10-20 years ago when you couldn't design complex games (by today's standards) because of hardware limitations.
I think many of the people who enjoy "classic" games enjoy them because of that simplicity. As much as I liked Final Fantasy 8, it's not something I'm going to go back to for an hour or so when I feel like just sitting back, relaxing and playing a little bit of something; FF8 is a complex game and takes a good deal of involvement. With games like Pac-Man or Tetris, on the other hand, I can start the game up, play for a little while, and then switch it off and go do something else, without having to try and remember what I was doing last time I played or spend 5-10 minutes trying to think how to overcome the next obstacle. For me, that's a big plus; there are times when I just want to have a little fun, and those "classic" games are perfect for such a situation.
Slightly offtopic, but there is a statement here I have to take issue with:
I would counter that cooperation does not make more sense, as proven that collective societies cannot compete with competitive societies by the fall of the collectively based governments in Eastern Europe.
The fatal flaw with this reasoning is that it assumes a competitive society as the "standard," if you will, and thus fails to consider the cooperative society on its own. In other words, this is only saying that "competitive societies left unchecked beat out cooperative ones." Sure, just look at history. But the question is not about interactions between societies--it's about how a single society would work.
Of course, the whole planet suddenly turning cooperative, or even just deciding to leave cooperative societies alone, is about as likely as That Hot Place Downstairs freezing over, but I don't see that it would necessarily be impossible to have a cooperative society with a competitive "interface," so to speak, to the rest of the world.
Take that further with China, which arguably has much more access to resources than the United States, but the United States has used competition to exploit the resources available to it in a more efficient manner and thus produce an economy and standard of living for its citizens that China will not equal for decades.
I could point out that you fail to support this argument, but it is flawed anyway, since it assumes that the values of Americans apply to everyone in the world, which is simply not true. Look at all of the trade arguments going on, for example: the U.S. versus Europe on genetically modified food, or the U.S. versus developing countries on labor conditions, among others. As well, a number of Chinese people I've talked to have complained of the U.S. trying to force values on their society that they don't believe in. (Incidentally, I'm an American myself, but living overseas for the last year has been a real eye-opener on this topic. The U.S. is not the whole world, folks.)
I personally think that both competition and cooperation are needed. Competition gets you improvement on inventions faster (I'd like to use Linux and BSD as an example here if they'd quit flaming and start working), but I don't see how competition gets you a better novel. (And look at the mess competition has made of HTML.)
So, let's assume SETI is successful and we enter into conversation with an alien society of incredibly aggressive capitalists, as seems to me the only possible outcome. What will their attitude be towards us? I don't think you can expect anything like, "Oh, look, a young species, let's teach them how to grow and prosper in the intergalactic community!" No. More like, "Look, another third-world planet to exploit!"
And this hypothetical super-capitalist society is going to patiently wait for us to send them a signal saying "Hey, we're here, come take us over"?
Sarcasm aside, while I do share your concerns, I don't think they're anything to get excited about, at least at the current stage--mainly because any civilization with the technology to travel here and the will and ability to take us over would presumably have done so a long time ago. It doesn't take a deliberate signal from us to be found; they could happen upon us by random searching, or, more likely, they'd pick up the EM signals we've been leaking for the past century.
Also, if SETI does find something, it doesn't necessarily follow that we'll respond; that's something to be decided by international committee, at which point I'm sure these concerns would be brought up.
I personally support SETI, just for the knowledge; that's what science is about, after all. Whether science is good for humanity at its current stage is a separate question, of course, but I like to think that we'll work out ways to put such knowledge to good use. Knowing that civilizations exist elsewhere, for example, could teach us a lot about evolution and such without needing to talk to the civilization in question. Failure to find any civilization would likewise tell us a lot. We may also discover phenomena completely unrelated to ETI as a side effect of the SETI studies.
And if they are out there and they are hostile, well, forewarned is forearmed.
Solaris had big numbers for the SQL tests. Unfortunately, those were in seconds -- so Solaris actually did very POORLY on the SQL tests.
Right you are--my apologies.
But I think what I initially said still holds; if it works for you, use it. Even Solaris isn't bad, after all--just "not as good" as some alternatives.
Questions of bias aside, I think this benchmark makes it pretty clear that there's no such thing as a absolute "best" system--even the author says as much in his conclusions. While the *BSDs performed very well for filesystem I/O, Linux did nicely in the HTTP tests and Solaris topped everyone in SQL performance.
Also, something the holy-war people seem to forget is that even the comparatively badly-performing systems are more than sufficient for the majority of users. How many people, for example, serve more than 10 dynamic pages per second?
I guess what it boils down to is use the one you like best. Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. all have things to recommend them, which all appeal to different people. I personally have the most experience with Linux--I was introduced to it first--so it's what I use daily, but I've had my eye on FreeBSD for a while as well. (No spare computer to put it on yet, though...)
And think of the irony of trying to tear down a Windows monopoly only to replace it with a {Linux,FreeBSD,...} one. Competition is good, and variety is the spice of life. (^:
I'm not so sure about that : if distributed processing take foot, manifacturers will stop producing full-fledged PC (at least the cheap ones) to start producing network PC.
I don't see that as much of a problem; after all, you can build a computer from parts for cheap, and parts stores are easy enough to find, despite the fact that most people don't know what a motherboard is. What worries me more is if Microsoft and friends pass a law (well, get one passed, same difference) that makes regular PCs illegal, say because they can be used for pirating--er, for "circumventing a copy-protection device" (thank you, DMCA). And upon finding it they could even take it upon themselves to wipe your entire hard drive clean--watch them define documents and data files as "part of the application" they're allowed to delete upon belief of infringing use.
>You'll always use your trusty hammer--until it breaks.
And then you'll just get another one and keep on keepin' on.
If Slackware, or any Linux distribution, doesn't fit your taste, there's no problem with that. Linux itself isn't for everyone--I'm perfectly happy running a well-hacked Slack 2.1 box at home, while I wouldn't think of giving that box to my mother (who uses Windows and is happy with it). But that doesn't mean Linux is intrinsically "bad". To each his own, after all.
I might also point out that there haven't been any really major OS advances in a long time. The two most recent ones that come to mind are multitasking and the GUI, both of which have been around for many, many years now. Sure, there's the Windows Registry, capabilities in Linux, or whatever, but I would argue that neither Windows nor *nix have made any eye-popping innovations in recent years. If anything, we ought to be looking at things like BeOS (which I personally haven't used so I can't say one way or the other).
Now, if Microsoft can beat *nix to a realtime idiot detection/elimination feature, I may just have to think about switching...
--Andrew Church// achurch without spam at dragonfire spam net
Slashdot Mirror
According to some of my Japanese friends, there was a version of BASIC developed in Japan which used Japanese for keywords, variable names, etc.; if memory serves, it was called Future BASIC. (Any Japanese readers want to correct me here?) At any rate, it was apparently a fad for a little while, but eventually fell out of use--due in part to the essentially English syntax which made little sense even with Japanese words substituted in, but also in part to the difficulty of typing Japanese on a keyboard.
In order to type ideographs, you have to type in the reading of the ideograph first using the Japanese syllabary (no, they don't use 6000-key keyboards ;) ) and then convert that into the appropriate character. Which in itself takes time, but due to the small number of distinct syllables in Japanese, a single word or phrase can be converted into dozens or even hundreds of distinct strings of characters, and no matter how smart the conversion program is, it won't get things right all the time, so you may have to choose among several options for each phrase you type in. Although I'm not a native speaker, I've personally found that I can often handwrite Japanese faster than I can type it in, although my English typing speed is much better than my writing speed.
Although it would be nice if the Slashdot people researched a bit before posting stories, I've noticed that the comments by readers tend to straighten everything out in the end, so I don't get too concerned. I generally take the stories themselves with a grain of salt, check out any links, and then see what other readers have to say before making any conclusions.
I also suspect Slashdot is so overloaded with story submissions that they don't have time to check them over. When I tried submitting a story a month or so ago, there was a line that said something like "459 stories in the submission queue." Just reading the summaries users give for those stories must take enough time--having to go check links that may be pages and pages long is probably not feasible.
I've been using Linux since late 1995; I installed with Slackware 2.1 (kernel 1.1.59!), and have been updating via tarballs since. My /usr/src directory has a good 200 or so packages in it at the moment, most of which I've used at one time or another. The system has worked without any problems to speak of, except occasionally when doing upgrades (installing ELF libraries and compiler was a pain).
I personally enjoy tinkering with the system, customizing it to fit my needs best, but I wouldn't dare give my current setup to anyone else. I have libc4, libc5, and libc6 all coexisting somehow, and programs to go with each--some things like gzip which never change haven't been touched since the original a.out install. The directory structure is a mess, too; I've never gotten around to sorting things out. It can take quite a bit of time to keep things up to date, though I probably would have been better off if I had had something like the FHS to guide me. If you're going to go with your own distribution, such resources are definitely worth a read.
Although it takes effort, the results can be nice. Obviously you can install whatever software you like without having to worry about dependencies or wonder what someone's install script will do to your /etc directory; you can also tune it to fit different configurations if your computing environment changes. When faced with a PC at a summer job whose SCSI card was flakey, I was able to extract the bare bones from my home system and create a two-floppy Linux system with pico, telnet, ftp, and ssh (plus basic shell utilities)--more than enough for what I needed it for.
So yes, there's at least one person out here who uses a homegrown distribution. (-:
Of course nostalgia is part of it, but I think a lot of it is more about simplicity, as opposed to the relative complexity of "modern" games. Many modern game designers seem to focus on designing games that are, well, masterpieces of design. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it does represent a shift from games of 10-20 years ago when you couldn't design complex games (by today's standards) because of hardware limitations.
I think many of the people who enjoy "classic" games enjoy them because of that simplicity. As much as I liked Final Fantasy 8, it's not something I'm going to go back to for an hour or so when I feel like just sitting back, relaxing and playing a little bit of something; FF8 is a complex game and takes a good deal of involvement. With games like Pac-Man or Tetris, on the other hand, I can start the game up, play for a little while, and then switch it off and go do something else, without having to try and remember what I was doing last time I played or spend 5-10 minutes trying to think how to overcome the next obstacle. For me, that's a big plus; there are times when I just want to have a little fun, and those "classic" games are perfect for such a situation.
Slightly offtopic, but there is a statement here I have to take issue with:
I would counter that cooperation does not make more sense, as proven that collective societies cannot compete with competitive societies by the fall of the collectively based governments in Eastern Europe.
The fatal flaw with this reasoning is that it assumes a competitive society as the "standard," if you will, and thus fails to consider the cooperative society on its own. In other words, this is only saying that "competitive societies left unchecked beat out cooperative ones." Sure, just look at history. But the question is not about interactions between societies--it's about how a single society would work.
Of course, the whole planet suddenly turning cooperative, or even just deciding to leave cooperative societies alone, is about as likely as That Hot Place Downstairs freezing over, but I don't see that it would necessarily be impossible to have a cooperative society with a competitive "interface," so to speak, to the rest of the world.
Take that further with China, which arguably has much more access to resources than the United States, but the United States has used competition to exploit the resources available to it in a more efficient manner and thus produce an economy and standard of living for its citizens that China will not equal for decades.
I could point out that you fail to support this argument, but it is flawed anyway, since it assumes that the values of Americans apply to everyone in the world, which is simply not true. Look at all of the trade arguments going on, for example: the U.S. versus Europe on genetically modified food, or the U.S. versus developing countries on labor conditions, among others. As well, a number of Chinese people I've talked to have complained of the U.S. trying to force values on their society that they don't believe in. (Incidentally, I'm an American myself, but living overseas for the last year has been a real eye-opener on this topic. The U.S. is not the whole world, folks.)
I personally think that both competition and cooperation are needed. Competition gets you improvement on inventions faster (I'd like to use Linux and BSD as an example here if they'd quit flaming and start working), but I don't see how competition gets you a better novel. (And look at the mess competition has made of HTML.)
So, let's assume SETI is successful and we enter into conversation with an alien society of incredibly aggressive capitalists, as seems to me the only possible outcome. What will their attitude be towards us? I don't think you can expect anything like, "Oh, look, a young species, let's teach them how to grow and prosper in the intergalactic community!" No. More like, "Look, another third-world planet to exploit!"
And this hypothetical super-capitalist society is going to patiently wait for us to send them a signal saying "Hey, we're here, come take us over"?
Sarcasm aside, while I do share your concerns, I don't think they're anything to get excited about, at least at the current stage--mainly because any civilization with the technology to travel here and the will and ability to take us over would presumably have done so a long time ago. It doesn't take a deliberate signal from us to be found; they could happen upon us by random searching, or, more likely, they'd pick up the EM signals we've been leaking for the past century.
Also, if SETI does find something, it doesn't necessarily follow that we'll respond; that's something to be decided by international committee, at which point I'm sure these concerns would be brought up.
I personally support SETI, just for the knowledge; that's what science is about, after all. Whether science is good for humanity at its current stage is a separate question, of course, but I like to think that we'll work out ways to put such knowledge to good use. Knowing that civilizations exist elsewhere, for example, could teach us a lot about evolution and such without needing to talk to the civilization in question. Failure to find any civilization would likewise tell us a lot. We may also discover phenomena completely unrelated to ETI as a side effect of the SETI studies.
And if they are out there and they are hostile, well, forewarned is forearmed.
Solaris had big numbers for the SQL tests. Unfortunately, those were in seconds -- so Solaris actually did very POORLY on the SQL tests.
Right you are--my apologies.
But I think what I initially said still holds; if it works for you, use it. Even Solaris isn't bad, after all--just "not as good" as some alternatives.
Questions of bias aside, I think this benchmark makes it pretty clear that there's no such thing as a absolute "best" system--even the author says as much in his conclusions. While the *BSDs performed very well for filesystem I/O, Linux did nicely in the HTTP tests and Solaris topped everyone in SQL performance.
Also, something the holy-war people seem to forget is that even the comparatively badly-performing systems are more than sufficient for the majority of users. How many people, for example, serve more than 10 dynamic pages per second?
I guess what it boils down to is use the one you like best. Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. all have things to recommend them, which all appeal to different people. I personally have the most experience with Linux--I was introduced to it first--so it's what I use daily, but I've had my eye on FreeBSD for a while as well. (No spare computer to put it on yet, though...)
And think of the irony of trying to tear down a Windows monopoly only to replace it with a {Linux,FreeBSD,...} one. Competition is good, and variety is the spice of life. (^:
http://achurch.org/nitmar.html or http://achurch.dragonfire.net/nitmar.html (on different servers)
3) Poor Bill's lost his Word 2005 file for the 10th time today... I'm glad I bought Office 97 before they pulled it.
2) Steve, will you let off those hardcore movie downloads just long enough for me to save?
And, of course,
1) Hex editor + netscape.exe = no more <BLINK>.
I'm not so sure about that : if distributed processing take foot, manifacturers will stop producing full-fledged PC (at least the cheap ones) to start producing network PC.
I don't see that as much of a problem; after all, you can build a computer from parts for cheap, and parts stores are easy enough to find, despite the fact that most people don't know what a motherboard is. What worries me more is if Microsoft and friends pass a law (well, get one passed, same difference) that makes regular PCs illegal, say because they can be used for pirating--er, for "circumventing a copy-protection device" (thank you, DMCA). And upon finding it they could even take it upon themselves to wipe your entire hard drive clean--watch them define documents and data files as "part of the application" they're allowed to delete upon belief of infringing use.
Likely? No. Scary? Yes.
>You'll always use your trusty hammer--until it breaks.
And then you'll just get another one and keep on keepin' on.
If Slackware, or any Linux distribution, doesn't fit your taste, there's no problem with that. Linux itself isn't for everyone--I'm perfectly happy running a well-hacked Slack 2.1 box at home, while I wouldn't think of giving that box to my mother (who uses Windows and is happy with it). But that doesn't mean Linux is intrinsically "bad". To each his own, after all.
I might also point out that there haven't been any really major OS advances in a long time. The two most recent ones that come to mind are multitasking and the GUI, both of which have been around for many, many years now. Sure, there's the Windows Registry, capabilities in Linux, or whatever, but I would argue that neither Windows nor *nix have made any eye-popping innovations in recent years. If anything, we ought to be looking at things like BeOS (which I personally haven't used so I can't say one way or the other).
Now, if Microsoft can beat *nix to a realtime idiot detection/elimination feature, I may just have to think about switching...
--Andrew Church // achurch without spam at dragonfire spam net