actually, that is still not censorship. censorship is forbidding JonKatz to write at all. Rob could say that he does not want Katz to post and that would still be his right, not an exercise of censorship, because the site more or less reflects Rob's views. Censorship is when you cut of JonKatz's hands, put a cloth into his mouth, chain him up in the dungeons of Bastille for the purpose of never hearing his opinions (because you do not like his grammar or subject clauses). That's censorship. I hate when some two-bit political columnist is being laid off in a newspaper and he find a job as an editor of some ultra-[liberal|communist|socialist|etc] college publication and starts rambling how he was censored by a NY Times editor who rejected his submission.
but would you want the same 13-year-old try those things out without knowing what they are? adam and eve tried it and look how we turned out. i merely thought it is better to show the movie to the kid and ask him "do you understand?" than prohibiting the movie and saying "you do not need to know why!"
p.s. the columbine kids (victims, shooters, and otherwise) were not old enough to read a lot of the literature that shapes the morality of a person. Even Hemingway is only for seniors. But they were old enough to see movies with or without a parent supervision. to tell you the truth, "Romeo and Juliet" is full of senseless violence and random sex by minors. As for addictive, mind-altering drugs I recommend "Midsummer Night's Dream." read it it's a classic. then try explaining to a 13-year-old why they can't see the same thing on a movie screen.
but would you want the same 13-year-old try it out without knowing what they are? adam and eve tried it and look how we turned out. i merely thought it is better to show the movie to the kid and ask him "do you understand?" than prohibiting the movie and saying "you do not need to know why!"
I suppose that's not too old for me. Do you have a phone number I can call? 8) good comments.
I did not like Katz after he put out three stories about Columbine but this one was well balanced in the arguments it presented.
Btw, did you notice that in the incident with JonKatz, the movie theatre clerk/usher too understood the pointlessness of the rule. The truth is, when you are at the movie stand buying a ticket you are only fighting a rule by some 50 year old congressmen imposed on teenagers along with Trey Parker and Matt Stone. You are not fighting the guy who is selling you a ticket, or the parent of your best friend who forbade him/her from seeing the movie, or even your own parents who might have forbade you to do so. If you are sneaking into a movie you are not allowed to see, it only exercises your wits in hiding that you in fact saw it. I am not going to swear in front of my parents, though I am more than proficient in the language. This is a farfetched point, but perhaps the experience of seeing the forbidden movie is even better for the child's upbringing than paying $4.50 for a movie in which the voice of Earl James Jones tries to justify the "circle of life," because of the mystery of that R on the movie posters... arrrgh, stop rambling now!
all in all, love, war, murder, drugs, obsenities, and plain-old fucking are all parts of everyone's life (mine for sure). but we would not want any of the kids to experience that, would we?
Ridiculously easy -- my buns! During the SP:B,L&U experience, for the first time in my life my being in a movie theater was questioned. I am 19 but the clerk thought it was his responsibility to card me. Not even my parents question which movies I see, although nothing but what appears in movie theaters ever came up in our conversations. 8) Still, being carded was an episode I will not soon forget. Interestingly, the same clerk did not card me two weeks before or two days after when I went to see other R-rated movies.
With all the poo that we put up with, it is convingcing that the movie and TV rating people are hopeless morons who they look for solutions in altering what Hollywood brings us instead of their own realization of the problem. I cannot help but think that all of my high school graduating class could have gone and seen the movie when they were 10 without "warping their fragile little minds." Conversely, after seeing South Park a kid from a high school with less than average teaching personel (Columb^H^H^H^H^H^Hcity schools come to mind) just might start singing "Uncle Fucka" at the dinner table without a care for his parents.
But that is not the movie makers' fault. Perhaps teachers should address all of what children might encounter instead of completely excluding some of the content from their teaching plan. My social studies teacher talked about his suspension from school because in the seventies he happened to have Mein_Kampf and Mao's Little_Red_Book in his locker. And still he turned out to be one hell of a guy, because studying something is not the same as following. Can kids learn the difference by themselves? Maybe they should start learning the difference earlier with some help.
If Hollywood wanted to influence the young they would use hypnosis, drugs, and lobotomy, not foul language and sexual innuendos. It is capital-D dumb to assert that the source of teenage violence must be dealt with and seek restrictions of the Idiot Nation's entertainment but overlook the problems of ignorant education.
Here are translations of some of the things mentioned about E2K (i put [sic] wherever i did not know what the hell they were talking about):
-- the processor should triple or quintiple the performance, cut down the electrical consumption, and be cheaper than the Intel Merced.
-- the Elbrus team has a good enough reputation and experience to make that happen [sic]
-- Elbrus series computers were produced in Russia well before their architectural analogs even made their way into western development labs.
-- the Elbrus 3 was made in 1991 using old crystall [sic: not silicon?] technology but still outperformed the Cray 2-to-1.
-- the E2K will use even better technology than that of the today's record holder Alpha 21264.
-- the E2K EPIC technology with its low consumption of electricity will provide in the next 2-3 years a "supercomputer in a pocket calculator"
-- the compiler for the E2K is as innovative as the hardware used. The de-parallelizing [sic] compiler at its current state allows upto 10 operations per cycle which is more than 3 times higher than the Alpha.
-- the E2K is able to run Intel and Sun processor code only 10-30% slower than its own (in comparison to the FX!32 patch for execution of Intel code on the Alpha slows the computer down threefold). With this the E2K allows for a 100% dual compatibility [sic] of any Intel codes under any operating system, which is another improvement over FX!32.
-- another important innovation is the "bulletproof" defense of active code and data against viruses. Development of similar technology in the West stopped with the downfall of Intel 432 processor.
The logical development of the Elbrus has been completed and the team is now ready for the final phase -- making the crystal. [silicon or something else?]
According to B.A Babaian, "The first superscalar machine was Elbrus 1 in 1978, whose analog in the West appeared only in 1992. In fact, that design is analogous to the Pentium Pro which appeared in 1995."
According to Kit Difendorf, a Motorola developer, "in 1978, in Elbrus 1 the processor worked with execution of 2 operations per cycle, changing of operation order, renaming of registers, and execution of request" [sic].
Again according to Babaian, a number of western companies have been talking to Elbrus, including Sun and HP, but only Sun was able to become a partner. The Elbrus team has worked with Sun towards improvements in the UltraSparc processor, compilers, operating systems (including Solaris), Java, and multimedia libraries. [Amazing, huh?]
However, the partnership with Sun was discontinued because all of the intellectual property would move over to them even though 90% of the technology was done before Sun even appeared. Right now, around 70 US patents protect Elbrus's intellectual property.
...
All system programming for the E-1 (1978) and E-2 (1984) was done in hig-level language El-76 instead of assembly. El-76 has a lot of features of Algol-68, but the principal difference is in dynamic connection of types on hardware level. All programming on Elbrus is in El-76, there is no assembly for the Elbrus. El-76 is translated into bytecode, reminding of Java, which is interpreted by the hardware into simple machine commands "on-the-fly."
A lot of the rest (which i am skipping) is about E-90 which looks almost exactly like the Pentium Pro spec sheet. And the next bit about E2K includes comparisons of it with Intel Merced.
E2K Merced Frequency, GHz: 1.2 0.8 Performance, Specint95/Specfp95: 135/350 45/70 Size in mm^2: 126 300 Electric consumption, Watts: 35 60 System bus throughoutput, Gb/sec: 15 n/a Cache, Kb: 64/256 n/a Peak performance, GFLOPS: 10.2 n/a
Misha, in this day and age, to "do this [computing thing] for a living" means that you likely do it in Windows. The hood of their "Ford" is welded shut and they are a professional driver. They know how to manipulate their econobox down the road to get where they need to go. When it breaks, they tow it to the dealership. Introduce those folks to a stripped down chassis made for speed, flexibility & accessibility and a courier that is on the road every day isn't going to like the idea of driving a rolling project. The greatest error in consumer Linux thinking is that most people even WANT a system that can be turned from a tire iron to a toilet plunger by changing runlevels. Most people want a computing appliance: You plug it in and USE IT. Windows isn't there, but on good days, it's closer to being usable for the "common man" than Linux is now or is likely to be soon. The MS "way of doing things" also has the inertia in the computing culture. We won't change it overnight. Indeed, it might be smarter to borrow a page from the Chinese playbook: offer as little to resistance to invasion as is prudent (make the interface similar and duplicate the style) let the new folks get comfortable, and then retain the culture of openness. Ten years from now, joe user won't be bothered if his kid wants to edit inet.d.conf. But this change doesn't take place over night, so kvetching about joe-sixpack being MS brainwashed sounds exactly like what it is: bigoted and short sighted.
The above quote was not relevant to my post, at least from my point of view. I do not think I ever mentioned "MS" or "brainwashed" in my response.
But perhaps you right, I may have tried to portray the "sloppy article worse than it actually is". Then I must apologize for being irritated by a hypocritical claim that Linux is "too hard". Linux is as hard as one likes it to be. It was hard for me when I started, and it still is as I am trying to poke into the source. It sounds like it was hard for you as, like me, you had trouble installing it.
However, you and I have come through the difficulty to a status a tad above being the village idiot not through technical supremacy but simply taking the time to learn it. If you look back at the article, the author decides to get a preinstalled linux instead of figuring out the installation process and what linux actually is. In my opinion, that alone discredits his article because installation has a lot to do with what linux actually is, just like windows installation has a lot to do with what windows actually is.
If the user would rather click five OK buttons than make twenty consious choices selecting which window manager and packages to install (thankfully for the average user RedHat installation most of the time detects if you have an IDE or a SCSI hard drive and which COM port your modem is on) then windows is a better choice. But it is only a matter of attitude toward what you want out of your computer, not whether they are learn-ed enough. Same goes for education, voting, and a lot of other aspects of life.
You're attitude is a disgrace to the Linux community.
my only point was that the author of the article said that there was nothing he could do with Linux because there were few printers/scanners supported, which i interpreted as simply he did not have a supported printer/scanner, or more likely he did not know how to install one, possible frightened by the reference to the howto.
Linux has no printer and scanner support? I have never used printers or scanners on my box, but i have never had any trouble using those from a Unix station at work. and those were IRIX and AIX both of which are hardly nicer than Linux.
Plus, when he took the computer out of the box, he says that there was nothing else he could do. What could he do with a Windows machine that he cannot with the linux box? He can surf the web, check his email, type up his articles. No games -- that is true. He mentioned no printer. Well, the claim appears to be that VAResearch did not install it for him just like the whole system. Weird, I would have never thought that a person who "computes" ("uses a computer" if you will) for a living would ever complain about doing something as simple as that himself. If he had any considerable experience with computers (may it be windows) he would understand how to partition his hard drive with DiskDruid that ships with RedHat. My neighbors who ARE average computer users format their windows partitions every couple of weeks, because windows gets kinda slow. and to save time, they partition their hard drive anyways, so that they do not have to back up every single mp3 they have.
If the average village/urban idiot (the dumber part of the population) cannot use a computer correctly, maybe they should not use it. After all, the government does not let everyone drive a car. Why let everyone drive one on the Internet?
On ALL mirrors that SuSE lists, ONLY 5.3 and 6.0 are available for download. 6.1 is $50 though. And for a long time there was only the 6.0-evaluation available. (the iso is available for the evaluation copy as well)
RedHat put 6.0 out for ftp installs at the same time it shiped to the stores.
When I said RedHat is cheaper, that is because you CAN get the newest version from Cheapbytes, or for free. The box is $80 but that is if you want the application CD. You really only need the binaries and source. With SuSE you cannot do that.
that is why i decided NOT to try SuSE. b/c i could not download it freely off the web. but i did try redhat because that installed itself with 2 floppies and an ethernet connection.
Honestly, I was waiting for someone I know to get SuSE so I can install it from their cd. Not to make a point against SuSE's mercantilist distribution but because I did not want to spend $50 for something I might not like better than my Debian installation.
RedHat might have reported losses, but they charge less for their distribution and thus enjoy a lot more installations. That will come in handy when RedHat 6.1 or 7.0 comes out, because more people will want to buy the cd and upgrade, or simply to support the company.
as far as i know, my pII-300 compiles 2.2.4 in 150 seconds (although the configuration is rather simplistic). no compile ever took longer than three minutes. i would assume K6-III 500 would do it in less than half as long. after all it is 2/3 faster and interger operations are actually faster on AMD's. Slightly but the difference is there.
what i would like to know is how upgradable it is. I would love to have a machine dedicated for surfing (granted it will never run a proprietary hybrid of linux with anything, but...) but the 56k modem is just not what i would look for. any idea if the machine can could come with ethernet easily connectable to roadrunner and getting the ip using dhcp? that would be sweet. call me spoiled but i think that it is only worth surfing the web if you can get a decent speed out of it. Perhaps if the chip is really that standard, then the machine is hackable. I wonder if taking the hard drive out, writing a boot sector to it from a different machine and putting it back would do anything. Anyways, my point is that the box itself sounds pretty cool. And I would love to get a diskless Celeron gateway/print/web server for $200. The question is if it is possible. If the architecture and chipset are standard, then it probably is possible. correct me if i am wrong.
as for GPL issues, they did not say they used the linux kernel which is GPL'ed and would raise problems. but they might have taken other stuff normally attributed to linux. like libraries (LGPL) or X a lot of which is binary. That would make sense because then they would simply use a video card with a binary-only driver. Additionally, they mention that they had to port Quake and other games, which is ridiculous if they used Linux. Quake would not have to be ported.
The Xerox's computer was called Alto, AFAIK. (The Altair had nothing to do with Xerox -- it was just a box with lights and switches without a company other than Ed Robert's MITS behind it). The interesting thing was that it had more than just the GUI. It also had email and object oriented programming. That is mentioned by Jobs in Rev-o-t-Nerds. One other thing was that the Alto had a monitor that had higher vertical resolution than horizontal. Turn you monitor sideways, set X to be monochrome, and kill the window manager to have a feel of what that was like. 8)
I thought Larry Ellison was Silllicon Valley's second billionaire? (how do you spell that?) And Bill Gates was worth $40 billion only last year (February 1998 -- some stupid bullsh*t PC journal). How could he have more than doubled it while still being in the 40% tax bracket? Anyone know?
I liked the movie, though I wished it was longer. The story itself is much more rich than what they showed in two hours time. Remember Revenge of the Nerds? That documentary seemed to go on forever and it only covered 15-20 years of events excluding the gaps. Oh, and the personal life of silicon valley moguls was left out by cringely, not pbs. cringely is a nerd, hence he does not care about personal lives, just the technical stuff. pbs would show any documentary if it was any good.
A.M.Hall was acting very well I thought. Plus watching "The Breakfast Club" for the twentieth time on both TNT and TBS in the past 6 days helped. I think he is a pretty good actor and fits well into movies of this type, where it is more important to capture the physical look of a real life character. And I believe he will soon get a role in a hollywood movie thanks to the BG gig.
Steve Jobs should have played himself though. In the RevengeotNerds he was the only really guy who appeared to still think differently from everyone else's point of view, just like in the beginning. The rest of the characters calmed, lost their external enthusiasm, but not Jobs. I cannot say that I saw that on my TV yesterday. I don't think Noah W. was playing the real Steve Jobs. Or perhaps I simply do not know about Jobs' personal life as much as Noah has researched.
I don't understand why they even care. Let Microsoft conduct their benchmarks, just continue delivering the product. Everyone knows that Linus and RedHat has been doing that before, and think of all the FUD they have been going through. Microsoft tactics are not going to change. There are always going to be some stupid Win-benchmark where NT is secure, Office is fast, and IE is Sun-Java compliant. Linux doubled and doubled the number of its users for years while the trolls in the media always said how much faster their NT installation went.
I think so too. Plus some things to clear up from my point of view:
1) Darth Vader is hardly Hitler. The Emperor is. If Darth survived, he would have been tried for War crimes, just like Hitler's generals, even those who participated in his assasination. Thus justice works just like you would expect it to. More movies have explored the theme of criminals sacrificing organs to save lives of kids in hospitals. That is some kind of redemption for the criminal but has no effect on his punishment.
2) Another important thing: Luke is an idiot! From the first movie I thought he was a dork. Sorry, but I that's what his whiny dialogs suggest to me. I never bought into the "automatic conversion to evil" theory as well, but Luke was much too aggressive for a Jedi anyways. He himself was fearful. The whole point of his meeting with the Emperor was to make that clear.
3) Remember that Star Wars is based on mythical stories. Star Trek is just a crappy utopian society that fights against Borg/Dominion/etc (that is just my own opinion, not a universal idea that I force upon everyone). In Star Wars "Return of the Jedi", Luke is the classic Hamlet-like character who tries to find revenge for the loss of his father. Did Hamlet become evil trying to murder his uncle? Note that there are only certain times when Hamlet can kill the King such that the King would go to Hell and Hamlet will have made a righteous act. That sounds familiar, doesn't it? Why does Luke want to face Vader when Vader wants to kill him? A literary argument for that would be that Luke finds out whether Vader is to be killed, whether killing him is the revenge Luke seeks. "Return of the Jedi" explores that in a more modern and liberal context, overlooking other themes of "Hamlet" but it is there nonetheless.
I liked "TPM" a lot, except for the opening 20 minutes when the story felt chopped up. The flow of the story was not there, I thought. But when one starts to analyze the whole Star Wars saga, like Brin did, it is far too easy to deviate into the implications rather than the story. Sure most of the story is farfetched, including the microbiological foundation of the Force, but it is a story about Anakin who submitted to the Dark Side, and Luke who did not. Does not matter whether one is better than the other. The Jedi won, thus the Siths are bad. I am perfectly happy with a convention like that. If you ever saw a kung fu movie about two monasteries fighting between each other in a competition, you wouldn't see the reason why one of them was necessarily bad either, but the story would simply stick to the winner of the final fight and that was good enough to make a point.
Well, I feel like I should get back to work, so I will. 8)
well... he does say "Linux market" not "Linux." and I think he means corporate desktop OS, not home desktop OS. at least I do not consider myself a part of the "Linux market" because I am just not looking for more applications to buy. And I run Debian 24-7 at school. As a home user, I use Netscape, X11amp, emacs, tex/dvips, gcc, and xeyes. 8) I may buy CivCTP but nevertheless I am more of a Linux zealot who tells his friends they should install and use Linux than a market for corporations.
RedHat is definitely a leader in the "market" part of Linux. Not "THE" leader, but "A" leader. I tried to introduce linux somewhereas, and I gave them a choice of RedHat and Debian. 9 out of 10 users who wanted Linux chose RedHat to be installed on their boxes, because it seemed nicer (RH5.2 vs Deb2.0).
However, this guy does not realize that RedHat also invests into more of the market, not us, mere mortal linux zealots. I cannot see myself jumping to use GNOME that much (except gnomine), just because my system is stable and easy enough without it. I have struggled for over 2 years, but now I am comfortable doing everything I want withough a flashy window manager. FVWM2 without themes is just fine. Same goes for most linux users I know. GNOME and KDE have the drag and drop feature which I'd like to have sometimes but mostly in Office-like applications which ARE market applications. Those are not the same as what I use at home. They wouldn't be even if I used WordPerfect to type up my papers.
Let me correct myself before you flame my post, RedHat also invests into X and the kernel (by employing Alan Cox, etc). I respect that. I am happy that they are ethical enough to donate money towards something that they get for free (the kernel). Thus it is a good thing. After all, I wouldn't want the kernel I run to be done by Linus if he was sweating over his keyboard for 12 hours a day programming a database, like I do, and then going home to release patches. The kernel is a FULL-TIME JOB, and people SHOULD get paid for it. RedHat is nice enough to make that happen. Debian is just not able to do that since they themselves live on donations.
As long as RedHat realizes they must support Linux to make money on Linux market, everything should be fine. No matter what journalists like this one say. RedHat dominates the shelves in the Linux section of CompUSA, but not the heart of developers out there. And RedHat directors are fine with it because they make money thanks to those developers.
That is really big of them. Most corporations, like a certain one whose name will be Microsoft, try to force developers into their own paradigm of the OS market. That is just wrong, and I believe will fail as a business model in a decade or so. That is if we survive the Y2K bug! 8)
Later, Misha.
P.S. I am not an expert, I am a student. Reply with constructive criticism, not flames. I am not writing this for the outrageous name-calling.
"Why should I buy another O'Reilly book when they'll be put on the web a short time later?"
Same reason you might want to own the printed version of JARGON.TXT from MIT press (I know that it is called something else but I think JARGON.TXT is a much better name). It is fun, plus it does not go away when I reformat, and I can put it into my backpack instead of taking a laptop with me. The point is : If you think it is a worthwhile book, don't hesitate to buy it. You may never know when you will want to read it again. And you will definitely not regret buying it if the book is that good. From the sample chapters that appeared a few months ago, I'd say that the book really is great.
p.s. myself, I am looking forward to printing out the web version though 8) just because I like the smell of printer ink, the heat the pages have when they come out of the printer, and the soft cover made out of a paper folder. I wish my CLR was like that. 8)
You sound like the kind of person who doesn't mind running XF86Setup after installation, if the installation does everything else correctly. Although debian is not like that (it hardly does EVERYTHING correctly), my feeling is that it is the most consistent distribution out there. I have been running it since v 1.3 (though I had it installed for me) and only Debian installs packages correctly, as well as deletes them correctly. Thus there is relatively less pain if you screw up an important package like libc6 and don't want to reinstall every single thing that uses it.
P.S. for all you flamers: Yes, I have used redhat 5.0 5.1 5.2 and 6.0. I also tried Caldera on a friend's computer. Never seen Slackware though and hope never to go into that realm. 8)
actually rsa encryption (or rather decryption) problem is NP, b/c it takes twice as long to solve if you increase the key length by one bit. it is stupid to think of NP if the key length is fixed. b/c if you can solve in in O(p(x)) for length x, then solving the whole thing for any length would be O(p(x)*x) which is still polynomial if p is polynomial.
afaik, there are no real non-deterministic machines. then a whole lot would take less time. like vertex cover or travelling salesman.
on a related note, proof of P=NP is still a long time away. because no problem originally thought to be NP-complete has been shown to be P-complete b/c it all started with the independent set or something simple like that, and most other problems were reduced to it.
actually, you are talking about P-complete and NP-complete. P-complete is when you can find a solution in polynomial time, and NP-complete is where finding a solution is going to take larger than polynomial time. Notice that P-completeness implies NP-completeness. NP (I suppose that's what you mean by NP-hard) problems are ones that take a polynomial time to check the solution. That is given a solution we check if it in fact is a solution. Notice that it says nothing about the largest/smallest possible solution, b/c then we would could solve the problem in P time.
Non-deterministic turing machines are (i think, that was last semester) actually NPSPACE. that is the memory they are going to use is exponential (they take multiple sets of inputs and check all of them, the number of possible things to check is exponential -- thus parallelism). Deterministic turing machines could emulate those but that would take exponential time. So determinism and non-determinism are equivalent but in different spaces of programs.
Note that was last semester. I do not actually remember anything from that class except for D and ND state machines and context free grammars.
Slashdot Mirror
actually, that is still not censorship. censorship is forbidding JonKatz to write at all. Rob could say that he does not want Katz to post and that would still be his right, not an exercise of censorship, because the site more or less reflects Rob's views. Censorship is when you cut of JonKatz's hands, put a cloth into his mouth, chain him up in the dungeons of Bastille for the purpose of never hearing his opinions (because you do not like his grammar or subject clauses). That's censorship. I hate when some two-bit political columnist is being laid off in a newspaper and he find a job as an editor of some ultra-[liberal|communist|socialist|etc] college publication and starts rambling how he was censored by a NY Times editor who rejected his submission.
but would you want the same 13-year-old try those things out without knowing what they are? adam and eve tried it and look how we turned out. i merely thought it is better to show the movie to the kid and ask him "do you understand?" than prohibiting the movie and saying "you do not need to know why!"
p.s. the columbine kids (victims, shooters, and otherwise) were not old enough to read a lot of the literature that shapes the morality of a person. Even Hemingway is only for seniors. But they were old enough to see movies with or without a parent supervision. to tell you the truth, "Romeo and Juliet" is full of senseless violence and random sex by minors. As for addictive, mind-altering drugs I recommend "Midsummer Night's Dream." read it it's a classic. then try explaining to a 13-year-old why they can't see the same thing on a movie screen.
but would you want the same 13-year-old try it out without knowing what they are? adam and eve tried it and look how we turned out. i merely thought it is better to show the movie to the kid and ask him "do you understand?" than prohibiting the movie and saying "you do not need to know why!"
I suppose that's not too old for me. Do you have a phone number I can call? 8) good comments.
I did not like Katz after he put out three stories about Columbine but this one was well balanced in the arguments it presented.
Btw, did you notice that in the incident with JonKatz, the movie theatre clerk/usher too understood the pointlessness of the rule. The truth is, when you are at the movie stand buying a ticket you are only fighting a rule by some 50 year old congressmen imposed on teenagers along with Trey Parker and Matt Stone. You are not fighting the guy who is selling you a ticket, or the parent of your best friend who forbade him/her from seeing the movie, or even your own parents who might have forbade you to do so. If you are sneaking into a movie you are not allowed to see, it only exercises your wits in hiding that you in fact saw it. I am not going to swear in front of my parents, though I am more than proficient in the language. This is a farfetched point, but perhaps the experience of seeing the forbidden movie is even better for the child's upbringing than paying $4.50 for a movie in which the voice of Earl James Jones tries to justify the "circle of life," because of the mystery of that R on the movie posters... arrrgh, stop rambling now!
all in all, love, war, murder, drugs, obsenities, and plain-old fucking are all parts of everyone's life (mine for sure). but we would not want any of the kids to experience that, would we?
not to disagree with you completely, but:
Ridiculously easy -- my buns! During the SP:B,L&U experience, for the first time in my life my being in a movie theater was questioned. I am 19 but the clerk thought it was his responsibility to card me. Not even my parents question which movies I see, although nothing but what appears in movie theaters ever came up in our conversations. 8) Still, being carded was an episode I will not soon forget. Interestingly, the same clerk did not card me two weeks before or two days after when I went to see other R-rated movies.
With all the poo that we put up with, it is convingcing that the movie and TV rating people are hopeless morons who they look for solutions in altering what Hollywood brings us instead of their own realization of the problem. I cannot help but think that all of my high school graduating class could have gone and seen the movie when they were 10 without "warping their fragile little minds." Conversely, after seeing South Park a kid from a high school with less than average teaching personel (Columb^H^H^H^H^H^Hcity schools come to mind) just might start singing "Uncle Fucka" at the dinner table without a care for his parents.
But that is not the movie makers' fault. Perhaps teachers should address all of what children might encounter instead of completely excluding some of the content from their teaching plan. My social studies teacher talked about his suspension from school because in the seventies he happened to have Mein_Kampf and Mao's Little_Red_Book in his locker. And still he turned out to be one hell of a guy, because studying something is not the same as following. Can kids learn the difference by themselves? Maybe they should start learning the difference earlier with some help.
If Hollywood wanted to influence the young they would use hypnosis, drugs, and lobotomy, not foul language and sexual innuendos. It is capital-D dumb to assert that the source of teenage violence must be dealt with and seek restrictions of the Idiot Nation's entertainment but overlook the problems of ignorant education.
P.S. I thought the Bill Gates bit was hillarious.
Here are translations of some of the things mentioned about E2K (i put [sic] wherever i did not know what the hell they were talking about):
-- the processor should triple or quintiple the performance, cut down the electrical consumption, and be cheaper than the Intel Merced.
-- the Elbrus team has a good enough reputation and experience to make that happen [sic]
-- Elbrus series computers were produced in Russia well before their architectural analogs even made their way into western development labs.
-- the Elbrus 3 was made in 1991 using old crystall [sic: not silicon?] technology but still outperformed the Cray 2-to-1.
-- the E2K will use even better technology than that of the today's record holder Alpha 21264.
-- the E2K EPIC technology with its low consumption of electricity will provide in the next 2-3 years a "supercomputer in a pocket calculator"
-- the compiler for the E2K is as innovative as the hardware used. The de-parallelizing [sic] compiler at its current state allows upto 10 operations per cycle which is more than 3 times higher than the Alpha.
-- the E2K is able to run Intel and Sun processor code only 10-30% slower than its own (in comparison to the FX!32 patch for execution of Intel code on the Alpha slows the computer down threefold). With this the E2K allows for a 100% dual compatibility [sic] of any Intel codes under any operating system, which is another improvement over FX!32.
-- another important innovation is the "bulletproof" defense of active code and data against viruses. Development of similar technology in the West stopped with the downfall of Intel 432 processor.
The logical development of the Elbrus has been completed and the team is now ready for the final phase -- making the crystal. [silicon or something else?]
According to B.A Babaian, "The first superscalar machine was Elbrus 1 in 1978, whose analog in the West appeared only in 1992. In fact, that design is analogous to the Pentium Pro which appeared in 1995."
According to Kit Difendorf, a Motorola developer, "in 1978, in Elbrus 1 the processor worked with execution of 2 operations per cycle, changing of operation order, renaming of registers, and execution of request" [sic].
Again according to Babaian, a number of western companies have been talking to Elbrus, including Sun and HP, but only Sun was able to become a partner. The Elbrus team has worked with Sun towards improvements in the UltraSparc processor, compilers, operating systems (including Solaris), Java, and multimedia libraries. [Amazing, huh?]
However, the partnership with Sun was discontinued because all of the intellectual property would move over to them even though 90% of the technology was done before Sun even appeared. Right now, around 70 US patents protect Elbrus's intellectual property.
...
All system programming for the E-1 (1978) and E-2 (1984) was done in hig-level language El-76 instead of assembly. El-76 has a lot of features of Algol-68, but the principal difference is in dynamic connection of types on hardware level. All programming on Elbrus is in El-76, there is no assembly for the Elbrus. El-76 is translated into bytecode, reminding of Java, which is interpreted by the hardware into simple machine commands "on-the-fly."
A lot of the rest (which i am skipping) is about E-90 which looks almost exactly like the Pentium Pro spec sheet. And the next bit about E2K includes comparisons of it with Intel Merced.
E2K Merced
Frequency, GHz: 1.2 0.8
Performance, Specint95/Specfp95: 135/350 45/70
Size in mm^2: 126 300
Electric consumption, Watts: 35 60
System bus throughoutput, Gb/sec: 15 n/a
Cache, Kb: 64/256 n/a
Peak performance, GFLOPS: 10.2 n/a
calculators have a command line.
btw, whoever thought of supporting postfix RPN (1 1 +) on the HP48 was a genius!
Misha, in this day and age, to "do this [computing thing] for a living" means that you likely do it in Windows. The hood of their "Ford" is welded shut and they are a professional driver. They know how to manipulate their econobox down the road to get where they need to go. When it breaks, they tow it to the dealership. Introduce those folks to a stripped down chassis made for speed, flexibility & accessibility and a courier that is on the road every day isn't going to like the idea of driving a rolling project. The greatest error in consumer Linux thinking is that most people even WANT a system that can be turned from a tire iron to a toilet plunger by changing runlevels. Most people want a computing appliance: You plug it in and USE IT. Windows isn't there, but on good days, it's closer to being usable for the "common man" than Linux is now or is likely to be soon. The MS "way of doing things" also has the inertia in the computing culture. We won't change it overnight. Indeed, it might be smarter to borrow a page from the Chinese playbook: offer as little to resistance to invasion as is prudent (make the interface similar and duplicate the style) let the new folks get comfortable, and then retain the culture of openness. Ten years from now, joe user won't be bothered if his kid wants to edit inet.d.conf. But this change doesn't take place over night, so kvetching about joe-sixpack being MS brainwashed sounds exactly like what it is: bigoted and short sighted.
The above quote was not relevant to my post, at least from my point of view. I do not think I ever mentioned "MS" or "brainwashed" in my response.
But perhaps you right, I may have tried to portray the "sloppy article worse than it actually is". Then I must apologize for being irritated by a hypocritical claim that Linux is "too hard". Linux is as hard as one likes it to be. It was hard for me when I started, and it still is as I am trying to poke into the source. It sounds like it was hard for you as, like me, you had trouble installing it.
However, you and I have come through the difficulty to a status a tad above being the village idiot not through technical supremacy but simply taking the time to learn it. If you look back at the article, the author decides to get a preinstalled linux instead of figuring out the installation process and what linux actually is. In my opinion, that alone discredits his article because installation has a lot to do with what linux actually is, just like windows installation has a lot to do with what windows actually is.
If the user would rather click five OK buttons than make twenty consious choices selecting which window manager and packages to install (thankfully for the average user RedHat installation most of the time detects if you have an IDE or a SCSI hard drive and which COM port your modem is on) then windows is a better choice. But it is only a matter of attitude toward what you want out of your computer, not whether they are learn-ed enough. Same goes for education, voting, and a lot of other aspects of life.
You're attitude is a disgrace to the Linux community.
On the contrary, I think I am its best advocate.
my only point was that the author of the article said that there was nothing he could do with Linux because there were few printers/scanners supported, which i interpreted as simply he did not have a supported printer/scanner, or more likely he did not know how to install one, possible frightened by the reference to the howto.
Linux has no printer and scanner support? I have never used printers or scanners on my box, but i have never had any trouble using those from a Unix station at work. and those were IRIX and AIX both of which are hardly nicer than Linux.
Plus, when he took the computer out of the box, he says that there was nothing else he could do. What could he do with a Windows machine that he cannot with the linux box? He can surf the web, check his email, type up his articles. No games -- that is true. He mentioned no printer. Well, the claim appears to be that VAResearch did not install it for him just like the whole system.
Weird, I would have never thought that a person who "computes" ("uses a computer" if you will) for a living would ever complain about doing something as simple as that himself. If he had any considerable experience with computers (may it be windows) he would understand how to partition his hard drive with DiskDruid that ships with RedHat. My neighbors who ARE average computer users format their windows partitions every couple of weeks, because windows gets kinda slow. and to save time, they partition their hard drive anyways, so that they do not have to back up every single mp3 they have.
If the average village/urban idiot (the dumber part of the population) cannot use a computer correctly, maybe they should not use it. After all, the government does not let everyone drive a car. Why let everyone drive one on the Internet?
On ALL mirrors that SuSE lists, ONLY 5.3 and 6.0 are available for download. 6.1 is $50 though. And for a long time there was only the 6.0-evaluation available. (the iso is available for the evaluation copy as well)
RedHat put 6.0 out for ftp installs at the same time it shiped to the stores.
When I said RedHat is cheaper, that is because you CAN get the newest version from Cheapbytes, or for free. The box is $80 but that is if you want the application CD. You really only need the binaries and source. With SuSE you cannot do that.
that is why i decided NOT to try SuSE. b/c i could not download it freely off the web. but i did try redhat because that installed itself with 2 floppies and an ethernet connection.
Honestly, I was waiting for someone I know to get SuSE so I can install it from their cd. Not to make a point against SuSE's mercantilist distribution but because I did not want to spend $50 for something I might not like better than my Debian installation.
RedHat might have reported losses, but they charge less for their distribution and thus enjoy a lot more installations. That will come in handy when RedHat 6.1 or 7.0 comes out, because more people will want to buy the cd and upgrade, or simply to support the company.
as far as i know, my pII-300 compiles 2.2.4 in 150 seconds (although the configuration is rather simplistic). no compile ever took longer than three minutes. i would assume K6-III 500 would do it in less than half as long. after all it is 2/3 faster and interger operations are actually faster on AMD's. Slightly but the difference is there.
can't wait for k7!
what i would like to know is how upgradable it is. I would love to have a machine dedicated for surfing (granted it will never run a proprietary hybrid of linux with anything, but ...) but the 56k modem is just not what i would look for. any idea if the machine can could come with ethernet easily connectable to roadrunner and getting the ip using dhcp? that would be sweet. call me spoiled but i think that it is only worth surfing the web if you can get a decent speed out of it. Perhaps if the chip is really that standard, then the machine is hackable. I wonder if taking the hard drive out, writing a boot sector to it from a different machine and putting it back would do anything. Anyways, my point is that the box itself sounds pretty cool. And I would love to get a diskless Celeron gateway/print/web server for $200. The question is if it is possible. If the architecture and chipset are standard, then it probably is possible. correct me if i am wrong.
as for GPL issues, they did not say they used the linux kernel which is GPL'ed and would raise problems. but they might have taken other stuff normally attributed to linux. like libraries (LGPL) or X a lot of which is binary. That would make sense because then they would simply use a video card with a binary-only driver. Additionally, they mention that they had to port Quake and other games, which is ridiculous if they used Linux. Quake would not have to be ported.
Well, back to work. 8)
Other repliers forgot to mention "The Breakfast Club." I think A.M.Hall had his best acting there. Upto now, of course.
The Xerox's computer was called Alto, AFAIK. (The Altair had nothing to do with Xerox -- it was just a box with lights and switches without a company other than Ed Robert's MITS behind it). The interesting thing was that it had more than just the GUI. It also had email and object oriented programming. That is mentioned by Jobs in Rev-o-t-Nerds. One other thing was that the Alto had a monitor that had higher vertical resolution than horizontal. Turn you monitor sideways, set X to be monochrome, and kill the window manager to have a feel of what that was like. 8)
I thought Larry Ellison was Silllicon Valley's second billionaire? (how do you spell that?) And Bill Gates was worth $40 billion only last year (February 1998 -- some stupid bullsh*t PC journal). How could he have more than doubled it while still being in the 40% tax bracket? Anyone know?
I liked the movie, though I wished it was longer. The story itself is much more rich than what they showed in two hours time. Remember Revenge of the Nerds? That documentary seemed to go on forever and it only covered 15-20 years of events excluding the gaps. Oh, and the personal life of silicon valley moguls was left out by cringely, not pbs. cringely is a nerd, hence he does not care about personal lives, just the technical stuff. pbs would show any documentary if it was any good.
A.M.Hall was acting very well I thought. Plus watching "The Breakfast Club" for the twentieth time on both TNT and TBS in the past 6 days helped. I think he is a pretty good actor and fits well into movies of this type, where it is more important to capture the physical look of a real life character. And I believe he will soon get a role in a hollywood movie thanks to the BG gig.
Steve Jobs should have played himself though. In the RevengeotNerds he was the only really guy who appeared to still think differently from everyone else's point of view, just like in the beginning. The rest of the characters calmed, lost their external enthusiasm, but not Jobs. I cannot say that I saw that on my TV yesterday. I don't think Noah W. was playing the real Steve Jobs. Or perhaps I simply do not know about Jobs' personal life as much as Noah has researched.
no flames.
I don't understand why they even care. Let Microsoft conduct their benchmarks, just continue delivering the product. Everyone knows that Linus and RedHat has been doing that before, and think of all the FUD they have been going through. Microsoft tactics are not going to change. There are always going to be some stupid Win-benchmark where NT is secure, Office is fast, and IE is Sun-Java compliant. Linux doubled and doubled the number of its users for years while the trolls in the media always said how much faster their NT installation went.
no flames,
mxk
I think so too. Plus some things to clear up from my point of view:
1) Darth Vader is hardly Hitler. The Emperor is. If Darth survived, he would have been tried for War crimes, just like Hitler's generals, even those who participated in his assasination. Thus justice works just like you would expect it to. More movies have explored the theme of criminals sacrificing organs to save lives of kids in hospitals. That is some kind of redemption for the criminal but has no effect on his punishment.
2) Another important thing: Luke is an idiot! From the first movie I thought he was a dork. Sorry, but I that's what his whiny dialogs suggest to me. I never bought into the "automatic conversion to evil" theory as well, but Luke was much too aggressive for a Jedi anyways. He himself was fearful. The whole point of his meeting with the Emperor was to make that clear.
3) Remember that Star Wars is based on mythical stories. Star Trek is just a crappy utopian society that fights against Borg/Dominion/etc (that is just my own opinion, not a universal idea that I force upon everyone). In Star Wars "Return of the Jedi", Luke is the classic Hamlet-like character who tries to find revenge for the loss of his father. Did Hamlet become evil trying to murder his uncle? Note that there are only certain times when Hamlet can kill the King such that the King would go to Hell and Hamlet will have made a righteous act. That sounds familiar, doesn't it? Why does Luke want to face Vader when Vader wants to kill him? A literary argument for that would be that Luke finds out whether Vader is to be killed, whether killing him is the revenge Luke seeks. "Return of the Jedi" explores that in a more modern and liberal context, overlooking other themes of "Hamlet" but it is there nonetheless.
I liked "TPM" a lot, except for the opening 20 minutes when the story felt chopped up. The flow of the story was not there, I thought. But when one starts to analyze the whole Star Wars saga, like Brin did, it is far too easy to deviate into the implications rather than the story. Sure most of the story is farfetched, including the microbiological foundation of the Force, but it is a story about Anakin who submitted to the Dark Side, and Luke who did not. Does not matter whether one is better than the other. The Jedi won, thus the Siths are bad. I am perfectly happy with a convention like that. If you ever saw a kung fu movie about two monasteries fighting between each other in a competition, you wouldn't see the reason why one of them was necessarily bad either, but the story would simply stick to the winner of the final fight and that was good enough to make a point.
Well, I feel like I should get back to work, so I will. 8)
Later,
mxk
well... he does say "Linux market" not "Linux." and I think he means corporate desktop OS, not home desktop OS. at least I do not consider myself a part of the "Linux market" because I am just not looking for more applications to buy. And I run Debian 24-7 at school. As a home user, I use Netscape, X11amp, emacs, tex/dvips, gcc, and xeyes. 8) I may buy CivCTP but nevertheless I am more of a Linux zealot who tells his friends they should install and use Linux than a market for corporations.
RedHat is definitely a leader in the "market" part of Linux. Not "THE" leader, but "A" leader. I tried to introduce linux somewhereas, and I gave them a choice of RedHat and Debian. 9 out of 10 users who wanted Linux chose RedHat to be installed on their boxes, because it seemed nicer (RH5.2 vs Deb2.0).
However, this guy does not realize that RedHat also invests into more of the market, not us, mere mortal linux zealots. I cannot see myself jumping to use GNOME that much (except gnomine), just because my system is stable and easy enough without it. I have struggled for over 2 years, but now I am comfortable doing everything I want withough a flashy window manager. FVWM2 without themes is just fine. Same goes for most linux users I know. GNOME and KDE have the drag and drop feature which I'd like to have sometimes but mostly in Office-like applications which ARE market applications. Those are not the same as what I use at home. They wouldn't be even if I used WordPerfect to type up my papers.
Let me correct myself before you flame my post, RedHat also invests into X and the kernel (by employing Alan Cox, etc). I respect that. I am happy that they are ethical enough to donate money towards something that they get for free (the kernel). Thus it is a good thing. After all, I wouldn't want the kernel I run to be done by Linus if he was sweating over his keyboard for 12 hours a day programming a database, like I do, and then going home to release patches. The kernel is a FULL-TIME JOB, and people SHOULD get paid for it. RedHat is nice enough to make that happen. Debian is just not able to do that since they themselves live on donations.
As long as RedHat realizes they must support Linux to make money on Linux market, everything should be fine. No matter what journalists like this one say. RedHat dominates the shelves in the Linux section of CompUSA, but not the heart of developers out there. And RedHat directors are fine with it because they make money thanks to those developers.
That is really big of them. Most corporations, like a certain one whose name will be Microsoft, try to force developers into their own paradigm of the OS market. That is just wrong, and I believe will fail as a business model in a decade or so. That is if we survive the Y2K bug! 8)
Later,
Misha.
P.S. I am not an expert, I am a student. Reply with constructive criticism, not flames. I am not writing this for the outrageous name-calling.
"Why should I buy another O'Reilly book when they'll be put on the web a short time later?"
Same reason you might want to own the printed version of JARGON.TXT from MIT press (I know that it is called something else but I think JARGON.TXT is a much better name). It is fun, plus it does not go away when I reformat, and I can put it into my backpack instead of taking a laptop with me. The point is : If you think it is a worthwhile book, don't hesitate to buy it. You may never know when you will want to read it again. And you will definitely not regret buying it if the book is that good. From the sample chapters that appeared a few months ago, I'd say that the book really is great.
p.s. myself, I am looking forward to printing out the web version though 8) just because I like the smell of printer ink, the heat the pages have when they come out of the printer, and the soft cover made out of a paper folder. I wish my CLR was like that. 8)
You sound like the kind of person who doesn't mind running XF86Setup after installation, if the installation does everything else correctly. Although debian is not like that (it hardly does EVERYTHING correctly), my feeling is that it is the most consistent distribution out there. I have been running it since v 1.3 (though I had it installed for me) and only Debian installs packages correctly, as well as deletes them correctly. Thus there is relatively less pain if you screw up an important package like libc6 and don't want to reinstall every single thing that uses it.
P.S. for all you flamers: Yes, I have used redhat 5.0 5.1 5.2 and 6.0. I also tried Caldera on a friend's computer. Never seen Slackware though and hope never to go into that realm. 8)
actually rsa encryption (or rather decryption) problem is NP, b/c it takes twice as long to solve if you increase the key length by one bit. it is stupid to think of NP if the key length is fixed. b/c if you can solve in in O(p(x)) for length x, then solving the whole thing for any length would be O(p(x)*x) which is still polynomial if p is polynomial.
afaik, there are no real non-deterministic machines. then a whole lot would take less time. like vertex cover or travelling salesman.
on a related note, proof of P=NP is still a long time away. because no problem originally thought to be NP-complete has been shown to be P-complete b/c it all started with the independent set or something simple like that, and most other problems were reduced to it.
plz correct me if i am wrong.
actually, you are talking about P-complete and NP-complete. P-complete is when you can find a solution in polynomial time, and NP-complete is where finding a solution is going to take larger than polynomial time. Notice that P-completeness implies NP-completeness. NP (I suppose that's what you mean by NP-hard) problems are ones that take a polynomial time to check the solution. That is given a solution we check if it in fact is a solution. Notice that it says nothing about the largest/smallest possible solution, b/c then we would could solve the problem in P time.
Non-deterministic turing machines are (i think, that was last semester) actually NPSPACE. that is the memory they are going to use is exponential (they take multiple sets of inputs and check all of them, the number of possible things to check is exponential -- thus parallelism). Deterministic turing machines could emulate those but that would take exponential time. So determinism and non-determinism are equivalent but in different spaces of programs.
Note that was last semester. I do not actually remember anything from that class except for D and ND state machines and context free grammars.