Re:still can't login to slashdot
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
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· Score: 2
For some reason, I always have to login twice. The first time nothing happens and the page just reloads, the second time I'm logged in properly. This is not a mozilla problem since I have this problem with any browser (I tried konq, opera, ie). Also it happens on any computer I tried (so it is not a connection issue either). My guess is that the login scripts are a bit messy (probably due to the use of perl), not in the last place beacause slashdot seems to be the only site where I have this problem.
MS business model is build on ignorance. There is no logical reason to pay for office software and other software commodities anymore since high quality, free alternatives are available.
However, through FUD, clever marketing and slight abuse of monopoly power, MS has manouvered itself into a position where people assume that MS products are better and are virtually blind for competing products. Based on the above it wouldn't surprise me if openoffice on linux would do a better job of importing win32 created word documents than the apple version of ms office, in any case neither of them does a perfect job.
Office on the apple is a huge succes but most people have never even heard of openoffice. So they end up paying several hundreds of dollars per person (which in larger companies is a significant amount of money) for the privilege of running MS office while a free alternative would be equally usable.
The same applies to server software. In the late nineties it was commonly believed that the windows platform was easier to configure and maintain (largely due to MS agressively marketing NT and later windows 2000). However time has proven that this is not the case for anything but trivial setups (which are handled quite effectively by most linux distributions out of the box) and that in fact free alternatives can be very competitive, especially if they are to be maintained by expert sysadmins anyway (which is true for most larger companies). Since the people working in this area are generally a bit more knowledgeable than the average office user, MS largely failed at positioning windows as an alternative for unix on large systems. In fact just a few days ago news was out on the register that among others Compaq was canceling their line of windows data center machines (reason: nobody bothered to buy them).
Seen in this light it is no surprise that the subscriiption model is being reconsidered since the people taking decisions about this are of the knowledgeable sysadmin type (the same type that's eating their lunch on the serverside already) and may very well opt out entirely.
Welcome to rpm/deb hell. Not only do you need to have everything, you also need to have it in the right version, good luck.
And by the way, running is not the same as interoperating. I know abi word will probably run on my system and I also know that currently there's no way you can just paste some kde object in it. Also most likely it has completely different keybindings than xedit and looks completely different from my motif apps. But it will run. You are right about that. So, what. I can also run vmware on my gnome desktop and boot it into os/2 (hehe, ok I really run windows 2000).
The point is not whether you can run stuff on the same machine but whether the stuff you run on the same machine looks the same, feels the same and works together really well. It's not a technical problem but a problem of standardization. The problem will not be solved by more technical stuff instead that will only make the problem worse. Right now I'm very pessimistic about this ever being achieved on linux. KDE is sort of proving my point by providing a KDE implementation of everything and the kitchen sink.
The problem with choice in general is that it increases cost since developers and users are forced to make a choice (and therefore spend time on making the decision). If it is a relevant choice that is a good thing. But with something trivial as a window manager it is only annoying to even have to spend time thinking about. Under windows, you can assume a more or less standard look&feel, COM, printing, filemanagement, etc. Under linux there are multiple implementations of all these things and they can exist in various interesting combinations.
"there is still the ability to bring them together, pulling the best from each."
So, you would have another window manager to worry about (or do you really belief the others go away as soon as you merge them?). Following my line of thought, your suggestion would add to the problem rather than address it in any way.
In a propietary world, vendors make the decision as to what a window manager does and does not. It may not be optimal but it works and it allows application developers to focus on what really matters (namely features). The more you can assume about a target platform, the less you have to reinvent. Currently with linux there's not much you can assume to be present. The more you assume, the smaller your target audience becomes. Hence there are very few commercial desktop applications for linux. The few that do exist either don't integrate very well with other apps (netscape, staroffice, wordperfect,..) or put very specific requirements on the user's desktop.
Not in the version I have (win2k pro). Ctrl+c is mapped to copy (just checked this) and actually works as expected. I had to start it to find out though, since indeed it is quite a useless application.
It is true that there are minor changes and sadly also incompatibilities between windows versions. However, since windows 95, apps have looked and functioned in more or less the same way. The first time you launch a random application, you can rely on the fact that alt+f4 closes the app, ctrl+c copies something, the file menu is on the left and probably contains file related menu items and so on and so on. There's so much you can assume more or less safely about a windows app (and most window apps actually behave rather well in this respect) that this gives a value to any conforming app a linux app currently cannot possibly provide simply because a consistent user experience is lacking and continues to be lacking.
Choice is not good, it is the main reason application developers are not targeting linux very often. They don't know what wm/desktop environment to target. Target gnome -> unhappy kde users, target kde -> unhappy gnome users, target motif -> crappy looking application. Coding for apple or windows is easy since you only have one look&feel to target. Under unix/linux you have to worry what component model is used (if any), what window manager is running, what desktop environment is running, what unix distribution is used and so on. Consequently, most apps come with their own look and feel, their own keybindings and generally only interoperate with a limited set of other applications. A direct consequence of this 'choice' is that 10 years after linux was created end user experience is still pathetic. Not because of technical problems but because of a lack of standardization.
So as far as I'm concerned this window manager is redundant, a reinvention of a very old wheel and its mere presence slows linux adoption.
There's simply no way to do it right. A window manager is just about the most stupid app I can imagine. Other than UNIX there's no other platform where you have to worry what component is responsible for minimizing/maximizing your windows!
Main Entry: 1standard
Pronunciation: 'stan-d&rd
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French estandard rallying point, standard, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English standan to stand and to Old English ord point -- more at ODD
Date: 12th century
1 : a conspicuous object (as a banner) formerly carried at the top of a pole and used to mark a rallying point especially in battle or to serve as an emblem
2 a : a long narrow tapering flag that is personal to an individual or corporation and bears heraldic devices b : the personal flag of the head of a state or of a member of a royal family c : an organization flag carried by a mounted or motorized military unit d : BANNER
3 : something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example : CRITERION
4 : something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality
5 a : the fineness and legally fixed weight of the metal used in coins b : the basis of value in a monetary system
6 : a structure built for or serving as a base or support
7 a : a shrub or herb grown with an erect main stem so that it forms or resembles a tree b : a fruit tree grafted on a stock that does not induce dwarfing
8 a : the large odd upper petal of a papilionaceous flower (as the pea) b : one of the three inner usually erect and incurved petals of an iris
9 : a musical composition (as a song) that has become a part of the standard repertoire
SUN's Jxta set of standards is 'open (speech and beer), assuming they know what they are doing they have some authority and most importantly it is explicitly intended to be picked up by the community. Looks like a standard to me. Besides C++ was only standardized very recently and nobody has sofar bothered to implement that standard in full. The value of a standard by your definition is dubious to say the least. I think you are just pissed off because SUN gets to set the standards.
The mistake in this article is all to common it assumes more of the same. However, my dsl connection (512 kbps) is already capable of streaming very high quality audio and vhs quality video. The only reason I don't use this capability is because there's not much content to stream right now. However, it is only a matter of time before somebody figures out that streaming audio/video content is something worthwhile. My guess is this will happen somewhere in the next few years as storage, networking and processor capacity keep growing. Once it happens, what am I going to do with those discs? We'll no longer need them. The whole concept of a backup/local storage of data is going to go away. I'd rather rent/buy a few terabytes on a fast server and use my ultra fast network connection (wireless? why not?) to access it from anywhere on this planet than keep fiddling with faulty discs, failing hard drives and so on.
Meanwhile, I'll keep saving money to buy me a dvdr:-).
Both KDE and Gnome are intended to be able to run on a whole range of platforms, not just Linux with XFree (I heard Gnome has even been ported to win32!). It would be very hard to make a crossplatform configuration tool for platform specifics. I agree though, that on linux this addition would be very welcome.
There's no need for new users to worry about such confusing things as xf86config and the contents of/etc since open source configuration tools are available for most things. The only problem with these tools is that the GUIs are inconsistent with each other and generally very primitive or even text based.
Not that these tools are for newbies only. I have long gotten bored with fiddling with/etc files so if I can avoid it, I use linuxconfig and similar tools.
Aquiring more skills in general is wise. The people that are less in demand these days are the people that failed to do so. Unfortunately a lot of so-called webdevelopers with little or no professional training fall into this category.
A good Java programmer (or any good programmer) will have little difficulty moving to another language.
So in short, if you are still wondering whether Java is worth the trouble for you, I strongly suggest you either start learning Java or pick up one of the many alternatives (C++, smalltalk, whatever).
I've recently come across Ruby and I must say that at first site it has all the features (after all it was inspired by python) that made python a success and some more. What are your impressions of this language and would you be willing to give up python for it or some other language?
The ending is non-hollywood. There's no happy end, in fact it is quite open ended. That's what makes it a nice movie. You leave the cinema not sure what to think. What was true what was illusion. Who's manipulating who. What bothers me in Hollywood movies is that there's always a happy/closed ending. Bad guy dies, hero walks away. In this movie (::::spoiler warning::::) it is just the other way around (but you can't be sure really).
The memory loss the guy seems to suffer from really exists, by the way. I saw a tv interview once with a guy who had suffered a stroke and was no longer able to store new memories. He sounded pretty normal until he started to ask what year it was (he was vaguely aware that something was wrong with his memory). Also he was surprised to hear that the cold war was over (he had his stroke somewhere in the eighties). After a few minutes the purpose of the interview had to be explained to him again (all in one shot) and the interviewer had to reintroduce himself. Very scary desease.
I agree. They take a very conservative position towards upgrading. That is good for servers but it really sucks for clients. I love apt-get but I hate to have to point it to obsolete packages. Pointing it to non obsolete packagers automatically makes you a beta tester (which I'm not).
Apperently there are some client oriented debian spinoffs now. I just might try one of them these days.
Ipv6 will take years to deploy. My guess is that you won't see it until something like ten years from now. Consumer operating systems do not support ipv6 and/or require significant and non trivial tweaking to support it (this is not likely to change for a while). As long as this is the case, ipv6 will be the standard. Port forwarding does not really help because you can only forward a port once (which sort of sucks if you are running more than one webserver behind NAT).
A kludgy solution like outlined above might just be a nice solution for many small companies and home users. I'd hate to get a more expensive account from my isp just for the additional IPv4 nrs when stuff this would solve my problem just fine.
MS is clearly using its power as a monopoly to force some technology out of the market. First bluetooth and now USB 2.0. MS is very much aware that their support can make or break these technologies.
Basically that means you're in deep trouble if the 12 year old says otherwise (for instance when they've grown up, this stuff happens a lot). However, the reality is that people are capable of having sex from the age of about 12/13 and do so. There's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is rape and adults having sex with 12 year olds usually falls into this category. The intention of the law is that if you are 12 you can have sex if you want to. Mind you, if you are a 12 year old boy and want to have sex with a 12 year old girl, both parties are doing something illegal in the US. In holland it is either rape (always illegal, no matter what age) or just two kids fooling around (in which case we teach 'em to use condoms).
You can have sex much younger if you like (12 or thirteen), however it has to be pretty clear that it is voluntary (adults having sex with children is definately not allowed but 14 year olds having sex is not illegal perse). Considering the amount of teenage pregnancies and abortions, I think the dutch approach might be a bit more realistic, kids fool around anyway. As for child pornography, I think any western country is pretty intolerant towards it.
However I think there's a difference between 6 year olds being forced to do stuff they don't want and sixteen year olds having sex. You might make the argument that in the latter case the participants are able to oversee the consequences whereas younger children cannot.
Both acm and ieee charge a fee for personal use, but it's a lot less than a single paper journal subscription. Some journals actually give free access (e.g. software practice & experience from wiley & son's). My whole point is that the library subscriptions are actually redundant. Both publishers and libraries go through the moves of making the paper journals available. And doing so, rediculously large amounts of cash flow from the libraries to the publishers (the main reason they are in the business). Despite all this, most recent articles are available online at no cost through the author's site or through ieee/acm site at a minor fee. I do it all the time, I rarely need to visit a library anymore (and when I need to, I'm pissed of at the time it is going to cost me).
I'm a Ph D. student. I make a habit of providing pdf versions of what I publish on my web site. The reason for that are: I know what a hassle it can be to have to deal with libraries and I get most of the articles I read from the web as well (i.e. I'm returning the favor). In addition it is a way of promoting my work and the research group I'm working in.
The academic practice is all about money. You have to build relations so you can get funding. You have to publish to gain respect and you have to keep the university happy so you need to do all of the above or they'll cut your budget.
Unfortunately the system is obsolete. Traditionally you publish you're articles in a journal. Doing so means you go through a review process. And if you're lucky your work is published in a very expensive journal that in most cases will land in various university libraries. So where does the money go? To the publisher. The reviewers get nothing, the editor may get a small fee (I'm not sure actually), the paper writers get the honor.
At the university I work at it is required to spent a significant portion of your budget on library fees. The library uses these fees to pay for the journals, which nobody reads because the content is generally available online (though the author's homepage or through the ieee or acm sites). Some journals even offer free access! So what is it about? It is about pumping research money into publishers. Publishers aren't doing this for charity, they are making a profit here.
The only reason the system still works is that the academic world is very conservative. The CS department I work for is very characteristic. To my shock and surprise they have succeeded in making the secrateries use latex. Also they are quite clueless about such modern stuff as the internet. The department homepage design is very retro and no doubt renders perfectly in mosaic.
I think the single most important feature of journal publications is peer review. I think such a feature can survive in the internet age and in fafct I think it can be improved upon significantly. If reviewers and editors concentrate on putting their efforts online (after all they don't receive a penny for it now either) they may make the published content more accessible, they are not limited by such arbitrary measures as prining cost, they may attract a wide range of interested readers. In addition, providing a slashot like infrastructure to such an audience might also prove to be very productive. I'm not so much worried about quality. Time is a limited resource for anyone and no doubt new, reliable review systems will emerge to save others from reading badly written articles.
What are we supposed to think of this article? It lacks detail. In fact the only argument it puts forward are some vague remarks of linus (probably taken out of context) way back in 1997. Apparently there's an issue with lack of memory protection? I can't believe that would be true, I certainly haven't read anything about it in the reviews of mac os X (and they weren't that positive alltogether). This is typical for zdnet, inflamatory title, some vague bits and pieces. No facts, no details, and yet it makes it onto slashdot. I'd love to see how mac os x performs, I'm interested in benchmarks, comparisons, design issues. None of that can be found in this article.
Maybe it's different in the US, but here in europe there's a difference between universities and technical schools.
Being at a university means that you are surrounded by bright people researching and learning. If you have a good teacher, the book that goes with the course complements the course rather than just summarizes it. Of course just being there is not enough is not enough. You have to participate. Doing so learns you valuable skills that you don't get from a book.
Now my disdain was not directed at all people in industry but rather at those claiming to have reached a certain level of education, generally rewarded with a degree (either from a technical school or a university), when in fact they know close to nothing. Doing so is insulting to people who do have that knowledge and worked hard to get there. Of course you can get there without going to college but I must say that I don't know many people who can claim that (I have great respect for the ones that do BTW).
Of course there are plenty of IT jobs that don't require a lot of education. I have taught a few programming courses and I have become convinced that I can get most intelligent people programming within weeks or months at most. Programming is not rocket science. And you are probably quite right that such individuals could help themselves by reading text books rather than wasting time listening to a guy reading that book in front of a class. System administration is another simple job, it just requires a lot of knowledge of the tools you have to work with. Their god like status in some organizations is worrying to me since I know I can beat them at their own game easily, given enough time to acquire knowledge about the tools they work with. You don't see a great deal of system adminstrators with proper university degrees simply because most people having such a degree would consider their carreers failed if they ended up playing maintenance mechanic.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, I always have to login twice. The first time nothing happens and the page just reloads, the second time I'm logged in properly. This is not a mozilla problem since I have this problem with any browser (I tried konq, opera, ie). Also it happens on any computer I tried (so it is not a connection issue either). My guess is that the login scripts are a bit messy (probably due to the use of perl), not in the last place beacause slashdot seems to be the only site where I have this problem.
MS business model is build on ignorance. There is no logical reason to pay for office software and other software commodities anymore since high quality, free alternatives are available.
However, through FUD, clever marketing and slight abuse of monopoly power, MS has manouvered itself into a position where people assume that MS products are better and are virtually blind for competing products. Based on the above it wouldn't surprise me if openoffice on linux would do a better job of importing win32 created word documents than the apple version of ms office, in any case neither of them does a perfect job.
Office on the apple is a huge succes but most people have never even heard of openoffice. So they end up paying several hundreds of dollars per person (which in larger companies is a significant amount of money) for the privilege of running MS office while a free alternative would be equally usable.
The same applies to server software. In the late nineties it was commonly believed that the windows platform was easier to configure and maintain (largely due to MS agressively marketing NT and later windows 2000). However time has proven that this is not the case for anything but trivial setups (which are handled quite effectively by most linux distributions out of the box) and that in fact free alternatives can be very competitive, especially if they are to be maintained by expert sysadmins anyway (which is true for most larger companies). Since the people working in this area are generally a bit more knowledgeable than the average office user, MS largely failed at positioning windows as an alternative for unix on large systems. In fact just a few days ago news was out on the register that among others Compaq was canceling their line of windows data center machines (reason: nobody bothered to buy them).
Seen in this light it is no surprise that the subscriiption model is being reconsidered since the people taking decisions about this are of the knowledgeable sysadmin type (the same type that's eating their lunch on the serverside already) and may very well opt out entirely.
Welcome to rpm/deb hell. Not only do you need to have everything, you also need to have it in the right version, good luck.
And by the way, running is not the same as interoperating. I know abi word will probably run on my system and I also know that currently there's no way you can just paste some kde object in it. Also most likely it has completely different keybindings than xedit and looks completely different from my motif apps. But it will run. You are right about that. So, what. I can also run vmware on my gnome desktop and boot it into os/2 (hehe, ok I really run windows 2000).
The point is not whether you can run stuff on the same machine but whether the stuff you run on the same machine looks the same, feels the same and works together really well. It's not a technical problem but a problem of standardization. The problem will not be solved by more technical stuff instead that will only make the problem worse. Right now I'm very pessimistic about this ever being achieved on linux. KDE is sort of proving my point by providing a KDE implementation of everything and the kitchen sink.
The problem with choice in general is that it increases cost since developers and users are forced to make a choice (and therefore spend time on making the decision). If it is a relevant choice that is a good thing. But with something trivial as a window manager it is only annoying to even have to spend time thinking about. Under windows, you can assume a more or less standard look&feel, COM, printing, filemanagement, etc. Under linux there are multiple implementations of all these things and they can exist in various interesting combinations.
..) or put very specific requirements on the user's desktop.
"there is still the ability to bring them together, pulling the best from each."
So, you would have another window manager to worry about (or do you really belief the others go away as soon as you merge them?). Following my line of thought, your suggestion would add to the problem rather than address it in any way.
In a propietary world, vendors make the decision as to what a window manager does and does not. It may not be optimal but it works and it allows application developers to focus on what really matters (namely features). The more you can assume about a target platform, the less you have to reinvent. Currently with linux there's not much you can assume to be present. The more you assume, the smaller your target audience becomes. Hence there are very few commercial desktop applications for linux. The few that do exist either don't integrate very well with other apps (netscape, staroffice, wordperfect,
Not in the version I have (win2k pro). Ctrl+c is mapped to copy (just checked this) and actually works as expected. I had to start it to find out though, since indeed it is quite a useless application.
It is true that there are minor changes and sadly also incompatibilities between windows versions. However, since windows 95, apps have looked and functioned in more or less the same way. The first time you launch a random application, you can rely on the fact that alt+f4 closes the app, ctrl+c copies something, the file menu is on the left and probably contains file related menu items and so on and so on. There's so much you can assume more or less safely about a windows app (and most window apps actually behave rather well in this respect) that this gives a value to any conforming app a linux app currently cannot possibly provide simply because a consistent user experience is lacking and continues to be lacking.
Choice is not good, it is the main reason application developers are not targeting linux very often. They don't know what wm/desktop environment to target. Target gnome -> unhappy kde users, target kde -> unhappy gnome users, target motif -> crappy looking application. Coding for apple or windows is easy since you only have one look&feel to target. Under unix/linux you have to worry what component model is used (if any), what window manager is running, what desktop environment is running, what unix distribution is used and so on. Consequently, most apps come with their own look and feel, their own keybindings and generally only interoperate with a limited set of other applications. A direct consequence of this 'choice' is that 10 years after linux was created end user experience is still pathetic. Not because of technical problems but because of a lack of standardization.
So as far as I'm concerned this window manager is redundant, a reinvention of a very old wheel and its mere presence slows linux adoption.
There's simply no way to do it right. A window manager is just about the most stupid app I can imagine. Other than UNIX there's no other platform where you have to worry what component is responsible for minimizing/maximizing your windows!
Webster defines standard as:
Main Entry: 1standard
Pronunciation: 'stan-d&rd
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French estandard rallying point, standard, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English standan to stand and to Old English ord point -- more at ODD
Date: 12th century
1 : a conspicuous object (as a banner) formerly carried at the top of a pole and used to mark a rallying point especially in battle or to serve as an emblem
2 a : a long narrow tapering flag that is personal to an individual or corporation and bears heraldic devices b : the personal flag of the head of a state or of a member of a royal family c : an organization flag carried by a mounted or motorized military unit d : BANNER
3 : something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example : CRITERION
4 : something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality
5 a : the fineness and legally fixed weight of the metal used in coins b : the basis of value in a monetary system
6 : a structure built for or serving as a base or support
7 a : a shrub or herb grown with an erect main stem so that it forms or resembles a tree b : a fruit tree grafted on a stock that does not induce dwarfing
8 a : the large odd upper petal of a papilionaceous flower (as the pea) b : one of the three inner usually erect and incurved petals of an iris
9 : a musical composition (as a song) that has become a part of the standard repertoire
SUN's Jxta set of standards is 'open (speech and beer), assuming they know what they are doing they have some authority and most importantly it is explicitly intended to be picked up by the community. Looks like a standard to me. Besides C++ was only standardized very recently and nobody has sofar bothered to implement that standard in full. The value of a standard by your definition is dubious to say the least. I think you are just pissed off because SUN gets to set the standards.
The mistake in this article is all to common it assumes more of the same. However, my dsl connection (512 kbps) is already capable of streaming very high quality audio and vhs quality video. The only reason I don't use this capability is because there's not much content to stream right now. However, it is only a matter of time before somebody figures out that streaming audio/video content is something worthwhile. My guess is this will happen somewhere in the next few years as storage, networking and processor capacity keep growing. Once it happens, what am I going to do with those discs? We'll no longer need them. The whole concept of a backup/local storage of data is going to go away. I'd rather rent/buy a few terabytes on a fast server and use my ultra fast network connection (wireless? why not?) to access it from anywhere on this planet than keep fiddling with faulty discs, failing hard drives and so on.
:-).
Meanwhile, I'll keep saving money to buy me a dvdr
Both KDE and Gnome are intended to be able to run on a whole range of platforms, not just Linux with XFree (I heard Gnome has even been ported to win32!). It would be very hard to make a crossplatform configuration tool for platform specifics. I agree though, that on linux this addition would be very welcome.
/etc since open source configuration tools are available for most things. The only problem with these tools is that the GUIs are inconsistent with each other and generally very primitive or even text based.
/etc files so if I can avoid it, I use linuxconfig and similar tools.
There's no need for new users to worry about such confusing things as xf86config and the contents of
Not that these tools are for newbies only. I have long gotten bored with fiddling with
Aquiring more skills in general is wise. The people that are less in demand these days are the people that failed to do so. Unfortunately a lot of so-called webdevelopers with little or no professional training fall into this category.
A good Java programmer (or any good programmer) will have little difficulty moving to another language.
So in short, if you are still wondering whether Java is worth the trouble for you, I strongly suggest you either start learning Java or pick up one of the many alternatives (C++, smalltalk, whatever).
I've recently come across Ruby and I must say that at first site it has all the features (after all it was inspired by python) that made python a success and some more. What are your impressions of this language and would you be willing to give up python for it or some other language?
woody is testing, not stable. And despite rumors on the contrary I have run into trouble using it.
The ending is non-hollywood. There's no happy end, in fact it is quite open ended. That's what makes it a nice movie. You leave the cinema not sure what to think. What was true what was illusion. Who's manipulating who. What bothers me in Hollywood movies is that there's always a happy/closed ending. Bad guy dies, hero walks away. In this movie (::::spoiler warning::::) it is just the other way around (but you can't be sure really).
The memory loss the guy seems to suffer from really exists, by the way. I saw a tv interview once with a guy who had suffered a stroke and was no longer able to store new memories. He sounded pretty normal until he started to ask what year it was (he was vaguely aware that something was wrong with his memory). Also he was surprised to hear that the cold war was over (he had his stroke somewhere in the eighties). After a few minutes the purpose of the interview had to be explained to him again (all in one shot) and the interviewer had to reintroduce himself. Very scary desease.
I agree. They take a very conservative position towards upgrading. That is good for servers but it really sucks for clients. I love apt-get but I hate to have to point it to obsolete packages. Pointing it to non obsolete packagers automatically makes you a beta tester (which I'm not).
Apperently there are some client oriented debian spinoffs now. I just might try one of them these days.
I meant "ipv4 will be the standard" of course, silly me.
Sorry, I really should preview,
Jilles
Ipv6 will take years to deploy. My guess is that you won't see it until something like ten years from now. Consumer operating systems do not support ipv6 and/or require significant and non trivial tweaking to support it (this is not likely to change for a while). As long as this is the case, ipv6 will be the standard. Port forwarding does not really help because you can only forward a port once (which sort of sucks if you are running more than one webserver behind NAT).
A kludgy solution like outlined above might just be a nice solution for many small companies and home users. I'd hate to get a more expensive account from my isp just for the additional IPv4 nrs when stuff this would solve my problem just fine.
MS is clearly using its power as a monopoly to force some technology out of the market. First bluetooth and now USB 2.0. MS is very much aware that their support can make or break these technologies.
How much more proof do we need?
Basically that means you're in deep trouble if the 12 year old says otherwise (for instance when they've grown up, this stuff happens a lot). However, the reality is that people are capable of having sex from the age of about 12/13 and do so. There's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is rape and adults having sex with 12 year olds usually falls into this category. The intention of the law is that if you are 12 you can have sex if you want to. Mind you, if you are a 12 year old boy and want to have sex with a 12 year old girl, both parties are doing something illegal in the US. In holland it is either rape (always illegal, no matter what age) or just two kids fooling around (in which case we teach 'em to use condoms).
You can have sex much younger if you like (12 or thirteen), however it has to be pretty clear that it is voluntary (adults having sex with children is definately not allowed but 14 year olds having sex is not illegal perse). Considering the amount of teenage pregnancies and abortions, I think the dutch approach might be a bit more realistic, kids fool around anyway. As for child pornography, I think any western country is pretty intolerant towards it.
However I think there's a difference between 6 year olds being forced to do stuff they don't want and sixteen year olds having sex. You might make the argument that in the latter case the participants are able to oversee the consequences whereas younger children cannot.
"if not LaTex, what is your alternative?"
framemaker
It's not so much that latex is particularly bad (I've used it in the past). It just doesn't make much sense using it for day to day office work.
Both acm and ieee charge a fee for personal use, but it's a lot less than a single paper journal subscription. Some journals actually give free access (e.g. software practice & experience from wiley & son's). My whole point is that the library subscriptions are actually redundant. Both publishers and libraries go through the moves of making the paper journals available. And doing so, rediculously large amounts of cash flow from the libraries to the publishers (the main reason they are in the business). Despite all this, most recent articles are available online at no cost through the author's site or through ieee/acm site at a minor fee. I do it all the time, I rarely need to visit a library anymore (and when I need to, I'm pissed of at the time it is going to cost me).
I'm a Ph D. student. I make a habit of providing pdf versions of what I publish on my web site. The reason for that are: I know what a hassle it can be to have to deal with libraries and I get most of the articles I read from the web as well (i.e. I'm returning the favor). In addition it is a way of promoting my work and the research group I'm working in.
The academic practice is all about money. You have to build relations so you can get funding. You have to publish to gain respect and you have to keep the university happy so you need to do all of the above or they'll cut your budget.
Unfortunately the system is obsolete. Traditionally you publish you're articles in a journal. Doing so means you go through a review process. And if you're lucky your work is published in a very expensive journal that in most cases will land in various university libraries. So where does the money go? To the publisher. The reviewers get nothing, the editor may get a small fee (I'm not sure actually), the paper writers get the honor.
At the university I work at it is required to spent a significant portion of your budget on library fees. The library uses these fees to pay for the journals, which nobody reads because the content is generally available online (though the author's homepage or through the ieee or acm sites). Some journals even offer free access! So what is it about? It is about pumping research money into publishers. Publishers aren't doing this for charity, they are making a profit here.
The only reason the system still works is that the academic world is very conservative. The CS department I work for is very characteristic. To my shock and surprise they have succeeded in making the secrateries use latex. Also they are quite clueless about such modern stuff as the internet. The department homepage design is very retro and no doubt renders perfectly in mosaic.
I think the single most important feature of journal publications is peer review. I think such a feature can survive in the internet age and in fafct I think it can be improved upon significantly. If reviewers and editors concentrate on putting their efforts online (after all they don't receive a penny for it now either) they may make the published content more accessible, they are not limited by such arbitrary measures as prining cost, they may attract a wide range of interested readers. In addition, providing a slashot like infrastructure to such an audience might also prove to be very productive. I'm not so much worried about quality. Time is a limited resource for anyone and no doubt new, reliable review systems will emerge to save others from reading badly written articles.
What are we supposed to think of this article? It lacks detail. In fact the only argument it puts forward are some vague remarks of linus (probably taken out of context) way back in 1997. Apparently there's an issue with lack of memory protection? I can't believe that would be true, I certainly haven't read anything about it in the reviews of mac os X (and they weren't that positive alltogether). This is typical for zdnet, inflamatory title, some vague bits and pieces. No facts, no details, and yet it makes it onto slashdot. I'd love to see how mac os x performs, I'm interested in benchmarks, comparisons, design issues. None of that can be found in this article.
Maybe it's different in the US, but here in europe there's a difference between universities and technical schools.
Being at a university means that you are surrounded by bright people researching and learning. If you have a good teacher, the book that goes with the course complements the course rather than just summarizes it. Of course just being there is not enough is not enough. You have to participate. Doing so learns you valuable skills that you don't get from a book.
Now my disdain was not directed at all people in industry but rather at those claiming to have reached a certain level of education, generally rewarded with a degree (either from a technical school or a university), when in fact they know close to nothing. Doing so is insulting to people who do have that knowledge and worked hard to get there. Of course you can get there without going to college but I must say that I don't know many people who can claim that (I have great respect for the ones that do BTW).
Of course there are plenty of IT jobs that don't require a lot of education. I have taught a few programming courses and I have become convinced that I can get most intelligent people programming within weeks or months at most. Programming is not rocket science. And you are probably quite right that such individuals could help themselves by reading text books rather than wasting time listening to a guy reading that book in front of a class. System administration is another simple job, it just requires a lot of knowledge of the tools you have to work with. Their god like status in some organizations is worrying to me since I know I can beat them at their own game easily, given enough time to acquire knowledge about the tools they work with. You don't see a great deal of system adminstrators with proper university degrees simply because most people having such a degree would consider their carreers failed if they ended up playing maintenance mechanic.