Not sure what you mean by upstream - Debian Lenny (which I run) still has ctrl+alt+bkspace to restart X.
BTW - MS *did* have this, and it rebooted as well. They removed it for "security" back in Windows NT 4.0, just so people would stop building DOS password loggers that looked like an NT 4.0 screen. People didn't complain about it rebooting, in fact they used it quite often.
Also, never mix Windows and non-Windows boxes on the same KVM, we had an admin reboot a server because the keyboard didn't pipe to the right screen:D
Mine was basically a simplistic attempt to do something like RTF with XML, so yes - there were some stylistic hints. Just the usual stuff, and it was fairly simplistic. You know, italic, bold, size, specific fonts.
Stuff that is really just part of CSS/HTML formatting.
Now, they do specify a few elements I didn't have (like proofing, bookmarking, etc) but really. Is that innovation? There has to be someone who did this already, and with far more elegance than some simplistic XML editor.
There is so much prior art for this, it's just sick. ODF, for one thing.
Heck, I even wrote an XML based text editor back when I was learning Java in 2001 or so. All I can say is maybe I should file a patent for "Patenting inventions currently covered by patents"
I would agree with this. I would *never* use a attorney who didn't take proper care of my confidential records. Those are more than just slightly sensitive.
I play LOTRO quite a bit, along with DungeonRunners. I eventually quit WoW after many years because the quests started to bore me, and the 'suspension of disbelief' got too difficult to sustain. I also really detested the anime armor. Just plain stupid looking.
LOTRO has, for me at least, good suspension of disbelief. It works for me, for now. DungeonRunners is silly and funny, though it has enough only content for roughly 1 month of play. Max.
I tried to like SWG, I really did. It just felt old and boring after a few months, and that "Star Wars" feel goes away pretty quickly.
The matrix online? That was probably the most boring MMORPG I've ever seen. I think I played it for about a week - first time I ever lost interest during a trial period.
Well, we haven't listened to Gibson about the "black shakes" caused by too much RF - heck we put RF gear near our heads daily. Why would we stop now when we can charge it while wearing it? (cancer? naaaaaaah)
I loved that paper. When I learned to write compilers in school they gave us this paper and a lecture on it. We then had an exercise on building our own hidden codes.
Since then, I have learned the value of paranoia. I learned in that class (and have applied since) the concept that just because something *looks* secure doesn't mean that it is. It may just mean you're not looking at it properly.
True enough - I did the same thing with my ancient Mac Plus. Between Ebay and the dedicated enthusiast forums, I was able to get all the software I needed to get it up and working.
Thank you - this is pretty much exactly what I'm after.
There are finally a few comments on here that are not rabid pro-climate change or anti-climate change, but actually encouraging reason, research and thought (without attempting to attack me personally for no obvious reason.)
That's really my whole point - that this whole climate change business has become too emotionally charged.
If anyone who knows a good solid academic forum that has reasoned arguments on each side, I'd love to read it.
Actually, I believe I specifically said "electric" cars. Not hybrids.
I actually think hybrids are an excellent middle-of-the-road (no pun intended) choice. They make power onsite, where it's needed, and the technology will only get better.
Full electric is still too early to be truly a solution, in my opinion. Lithium Ion, while not horrible, is still a large question mark. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12904779 for example. It's the same with Nuclear power. It's clean, it's pretty safe, but nobody is advocating putting a nuke in every suburb. And while the goal is admirable, even in the best possible universe (where all energy is created in a fashion with no environmental impact in local safe sites) there will still be issues to resolve in having massive batteries cruising all over. If you look at the number of cars on the road, and the average life span, you will see that this utopia requires an amazing recycling infrastructure as well.
So seriously, people look: The reach exceeds the grasp.
I think we need to look for modern day, possible, likely solutions, and stop arguing that global impact is impossible, OR that some massive apocalypse is imminent. Neither is true, both are exaggerated.
This is all just "truthiness". Reality, as always, is somewhere in the middle between the extreme right and extreme left.
I totally agree with you - and I have read a lot of the papers on both sides.
However, since I'm am not a climatologist (IANAC?) and I'm no expert, I can only come to a layman's opinion. And the layman's opinion I have come to (as I stated) is that this debate is turning into a passionate argument.
People are letting emotion color their views on this.
The "climate change" side is getting too extreme, and the "no climate change" side is retaliating in kind. Reality is, as of course, in the middle.
So seriously - when you talk about electric cars or things like this, you need to remember that the *idea* is fantastic - but the current effect is simply to increase coal use.
Combustion engines aren't the long term answer. Massive batteries that introduce lead, mercury, and various other nasty chemicals into landfills aren't the answer either. Nobody has the longterm answer yet, IMO.
Once we get a non-coal powered economy bootstrapped, maybe it will be different.
So no - I'm not being dishonest - I've just done more research into this than some people.
I'm fairly neutral on global climate *. I think both sides are entirely too biased, and reason is not prevailing.
Sure, pollution in the environment is bad. No shit. Putting tons of hybrid cars on the ground (with the included extra huge batteries and short life spans such batteries dictate) is not the answer. Cows that burp less (WTF?) is not the answer.
I think the anti-environment group is being too extreme - nobody wants to live in 19th century London, ok? Everything covered in soot, the water toxic, etc. This is bad. On the other hand, the pro-environment groups are just as bad. Sorry guys, but if you expend more coal-driven energy on being green than you would otherwise, you're just hurting yourself.
Rationality on the eco topics is as rare as on the sexuality topics.
SAP has a track record of acting in only their own immediate term interest.
For years, SAP was best buddies with Oracle - then they switched to being best buddies with IBM. Then they bought Adabase and made that atrocity that is SAPDB. Which they sold to MySQL. Which is now spun off yet again. Some products were Windows only for a very long time, and the GUI still is for the most part. The Java GUI is multi-platform, but still missing stuff.
As a long term SAP admin (basis) and DBA, the only thing you can count on from SAP is random acts of chaotic self-interest. They don't play Friend or Foe, they just play Best Buddy of the Moment.
While I truly appreciate the long and well thought out rant above, I write GPL software.
I write rather a lot of it.
I write it entirely for me, by myself (or with a friend) and it fits my needs perfectly. It monitors the servers I need to monitor the way I like to monitor them (ie, converting dmesg into an RSS feed so I can subscribe to it, or creating email alerts that I can respond to with commands), it auto-configs the machines I use, it manages my DBs the way I like them managed.
Now, I'm not the team of the GIMP and don't pretend to be, but I would say I'm a pretty good example of the "average" GPL coder. The ones who make all those little apps that scratch an itch only we have, and share it because we think maybe someone else might have the same itch.
I leave the big lofty projects to the massive formal political teams, like Gnome, Mozilla, KDE, whatever. I'd be willing to bet that 40% or 50% of the stuff you find in the average repository was written by someone like me - coding for their own needs.
So while I respect that some people want to make Linux commercially viable - the rest of us just want to make an OS that works for us.
Some of us actually write basic operating systems for fun, you know - and we like Linux because it was written by someone like us, for people like us.
I see it like a 2009 Volkswagen Beetle vs a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle. I drive a '73. I respect the reasons that other people don't, but I don't want a car that requires expensive electronics to fix and uses rare and hard to find parts. I want something I can play with. (Just an example - no need to jump on my analogy:D )
The ideal OS will come - and it will be well designed and invisible. And when the day comes, some of us will still be hand-coding, hand-rolling, and enjoying the fun of being able to screw with software. We'll probably run the ideal OS as well, for games or taxes.
Dangit, you can't be reasonable - this is slashdot!:D
Seriously though - I really appreciate when stuff "just works", and even more so when it breaks gracefully (logs, clear messages, error reporting, etc). What annoys me is when something breaks ugly, leaving a user with a garbled screen or a non-bootable system or something when they did something "reasonable". Closing a lid on a laptop or wandering off for a few minutes should not result in a trashed screen and a corrupted SD card. (Thanks Ubuntu, I needed to re-format my drive anyhow)
That'd be nice. As I recall, the way that got 'worked out in open source' was to create a linux project for a unified way of doing things, then devolve the whole thing with infighting, arguing, and forking.
See IceWeasel/Firefox for a great example of this.
Adding yet another GUI instead of trying to fix the current ones is not the right solution, IMO. I'd say throw the development weight behind making synaptic work with SuSE, or something equiv.
I'm not arguing windows/linux here. What I'm arguing is that tacking a pretty face on a fragile process is a *bad thing*.
Novell has had such great success in the past with this... Netware, Groupwise, WordPerfect - etc. They are not known for making sure that everything is flawless before running with it. They make neat stuff (or buy it) then just foist upon the users.
Synaptic does a pretty excellent job. The "Add/Remove", however, gets ugly when things don't go well.
When someone takes the time to really make something work, it's a beautiful thing. When they just slap a cutesy GUI on a shell script and assume it makes it user-friendly, it creates expectations of user-friendliness that are not met.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure what you mean by upstream - Debian Lenny (which I run) still has ctrl+alt+bkspace to restart X.
BTW - MS *did* have this, and it rebooted as well. They removed it for "security" back in Windows NT 4.0, just so people would stop building DOS password loggers that looked like an NT 4.0 screen. People didn't complain about it rebooting, in fact they used it quite often.
Also, never mix Windows and non-Windows boxes on the same KVM, we had an admin reboot a server because the keyboard didn't pipe to the right screen :D
Mine was basically a simplistic attempt to do something like RTF with XML, so yes - there were some stylistic hints. Just the usual stuff, and it was fairly simplistic.
You know, italic, bold, size, specific fonts.
Stuff that is really just part of CSS/HTML formatting.
Now, they do specify a few elements I didn't have (like proofing, bookmarking, etc) but really. Is that innovation? There has to be someone who did this already, and with far more elegance than some simplistic XML editor.
That's pretty cool - that would have been fairly forward thinking of them.
I wonder if it just took this long to patent?
There is so much prior art for this, it's just sick. ODF, for one thing.
Heck, I even wrote an XML based text editor back when I was learning Java in 2001 or so.
All I can say is maybe I should file a patent for "Patenting inventions currently covered by patents"
When I searched I got several things like "why are macbooks so expensive", "why are mac's [sic] so expensive" etc.
The article is correct. Bing is just the fox news of search engines. Surprise surprise.
I would agree with this. I would *never* use a attorney who didn't take proper care of my confidential records. Those are more than just slightly sensitive.
I think you're right on both of those points.
I play LOTRO quite a bit, along with DungeonRunners. I eventually quit WoW after many years because the quests started to bore me, and the 'suspension of disbelief' got too difficult to sustain. I also really detested the anime armor. Just plain stupid looking.
LOTRO has, for me at least, good suspension of disbelief. It works for me, for now.
DungeonRunners is silly and funny, though it has enough only content for roughly 1 month of play. Max.
I tried to like SWG, I really did. It just felt old and boring after a few months, and that "Star Wars" feel goes away pretty quickly.
The matrix online? That was probably the most boring MMORPG I've ever seen. I think I played it for about a week - first time I ever lost interest during a trial period.
I disagree strongly with this.
Teaching people microcontrollers and embedded C first is like teaching people how spark plugs work before letting them drive.
My issue is that the first thing a person should learn is *what* you can do. Class 2 should be *how* it does it.
I learned assembler too early - it taught me to truly despise programming, which I didn't get over until being introduced to C.
Assembler is a nice tool, but it's far too low-level for introductions.
Well, we haven't listened to Gibson about the "black shakes" caused by too much RF - heck we put RF gear near our heads daily.
Why would we stop now when we can charge it while wearing it? (cancer? naaaaaaah)
I was waiting for someone to mention that :)
I loved that paper. When I learned to write compilers in school they gave us this paper and a lecture on it. We then had an exercise on building our own hidden codes.
Since then, I have learned the value of paranoia. I learned in that class (and have applied since) the concept that just because something *looks* secure doesn't mean that it is. It may just mean you're not looking at it properly.
No, I was referring to this piece of crap: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077869/
Wizards was totally different.
LOTR.
Seriously - when Ralph Bakshi did that first version in the 70's, it SUCKED.
True enough - I did the same thing with my ancient Mac Plus. Between Ebay and the dedicated enthusiast forums, I was able to get all the software I needed to get it up and working.
Thank you - this is pretty much exactly what I'm after.
There are finally a few comments on here that are not rabid pro-climate change or anti-climate change, but actually encouraging reason, research and thought (without attempting to attack me personally for no obvious reason.)
That's really my whole point - that this whole climate change business has become too emotionally charged.
If anyone who knows a good solid academic forum that has reasoned arguments on each side, I'd love to read it.
Actually, I believe I specifically said "electric" cars. Not hybrids.
I actually think hybrids are an excellent middle-of-the-road (no pun intended) choice. They make power onsite, where it's needed, and the technology will only get better.
Full electric is still too early to be truly a solution, in my opinion. Lithium Ion, while not horrible, is still a large question mark. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12904779
for example. It's the same with Nuclear power. It's clean, it's pretty safe, but nobody is advocating putting a nuke in every suburb. And while the goal is admirable, even in the best possible universe (where all energy is created in a fashion with no environmental impact in local safe sites) there will still be issues to resolve in having massive batteries cruising all over. If you look at the number of cars on the road, and the average life span, you will see that this utopia requires an amazing recycling infrastructure as well.
So seriously, people look:
The reach exceeds the grasp.
I think we need to look for modern day, possible, likely solutions, and stop arguing that global impact is impossible, OR that some massive apocalypse is imminent. Neither is true, both are exaggerated.
This is all just "truthiness". Reality, as always, is somewhere in the middle between the extreme right and extreme left.
I totally agree with you - and I have read a lot of the papers on both sides.
However, since I'm am not a climatologist (IANAC?) and I'm no expert, I can only come to a layman's opinion. And the layman's opinion I have come to (as I stated) is that this debate is turning into a passionate argument.
People are letting emotion color their views on this.
The "climate change" side is getting too extreme, and the "no climate change" side is retaliating in kind. Reality is, as of course, in the middle.
You're kidding right?
Electric cars and Solar Panels and such are derived from what energy source?
You do know that most of the US's current energy is derived from coal power, right?
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/special/consumption.html
This graph here makes it quite clear: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/special/fig5.html
So seriously - when you talk about electric cars or things like this, you need to remember that the *idea* is fantastic - but the current effect is simply to increase coal use.
Combustion engines aren't the long term answer. Massive batteries that introduce lead, mercury, and various other nasty chemicals into landfills aren't the answer either. Nobody has the longterm answer yet, IMO.
Once we get a non-coal powered economy bootstrapped, maybe it will be different.
So no - I'm not being dishonest - I've just done more research into this than some people.
I'm fairly neutral on global climate *. I think both sides are entirely too biased, and reason is not prevailing.
Sure, pollution in the environment is bad. No shit.
Putting tons of hybrid cars on the ground (with the included extra huge batteries and short life spans such batteries dictate) is not the answer. Cows that burp less (WTF?) is not the answer.
I think the anti-environment group is being too extreme - nobody wants to live in 19th century London, ok? Everything covered in soot, the water toxic, etc. This is bad.
On the other hand, the pro-environment groups are just as bad. Sorry guys, but if you expend more coal-driven energy on being green than you would otherwise, you're just hurting yourself.
Rationality on the eco topics is as rare as on the sexuality topics.
Because there isn't a +5 "Freaking sad but true" mod.
SAP has a track record of acting in only their own immediate term interest.
For years, SAP was best buddies with Oracle - then they switched to being best buddies with IBM. Then they bought Adabase and made that atrocity that is SAPDB.
Which they sold to MySQL.
Which is now spun off yet again.
Some products were Windows only for a very long time, and the GUI still is for the most part. The Java GUI is multi-platform, but still missing stuff.
As a long term SAP admin (basis) and DBA, the only thing you can count on from SAP is random acts of chaotic self-interest.
They don't play Friend or Foe, they just play Best Buddy of the Moment.
I believe that would make the USB5 logo Plaid?
Thank you, Nursie.
While I truly appreciate the long and well thought out rant above, I write GPL software.
I write rather a lot of it.
I write it entirely for me, by myself (or with a friend) and it fits my needs perfectly. It monitors the servers I need to monitor the way I like to monitor them (ie, converting dmesg into an RSS feed so I can subscribe to it, or creating email alerts that I can respond to with commands), it auto-configs the machines I use, it manages my DBs the way I like them managed.
Now, I'm not the team of the GIMP and don't pretend to be, but I would say I'm a pretty good example of the "average" GPL coder. The ones who make all those little apps that scratch an itch only we have, and share it because we think maybe someone else might have the same itch.
I leave the big lofty projects to the massive formal political teams, like Gnome, Mozilla, KDE, whatever. I'd be willing to bet that 40% or 50% of the stuff you find in the average repository was written by someone like me - coding for their own needs.
So while I respect that some people want to make Linux commercially viable - the rest of us just want to make an OS that works for us.
Some of us actually write basic operating systems for fun, you know - and we like Linux because it was written by someone like us, for people like us.
I see it like a 2009 Volkswagen Beetle vs a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle. I drive a '73. I respect the reasons that other people don't, but I don't want a car that requires expensive electronics to fix and uses rare and hard to find parts. I want something I can play with. (Just an example - no need to jump on my analogy :D )
The ideal OS will come - and it will be well designed and invisible. And when the day comes, some of us will still be hand-coding, hand-rolling, and enjoying the fun of being able to screw with software. We'll probably run the ideal OS as well, for games or taxes.
Dangit, you can't be reasonable - this is slashdot! :D
Seriously though - I really appreciate when stuff "just works", and even more so when it breaks gracefully (logs, clear messages, error reporting, etc). What annoys me is when something breaks ugly, leaving a user with a garbled screen or a non-bootable system or something when they did something "reasonable". Closing a lid on a laptop or wandering off for a few minutes should not result in a trashed screen and a corrupted SD card. (Thanks Ubuntu, I needed to re-format my drive anyhow)
Every linux distro?
That'd be nice. As I recall, the way that got 'worked out in open source' was to create a linux project for a unified way of doing things, then devolve the whole thing with infighting, arguing, and forking.
See IceWeasel/Firefox for a great example of this.
Adding yet another GUI instead of trying to fix the current ones is not the right solution, IMO. I'd say throw the development weight behind making synaptic work with SuSE, or something equiv.
I'm not arguing windows/linux here. What I'm arguing is that tacking a pretty face on a fragile process is a *bad thing*.
Novell has had such great success in the past with this... Netware, Groupwise, WordPerfect - etc. They are not known for making sure that everything is flawless before running with it. They make neat stuff (or buy it) then just foist upon the users.
Synaptic does a pretty excellent job. The "Add/Remove", however, gets ugly when things don't go well.
When someone takes the time to really make something work, it's a beautiful thing. When they just slap a cutesy GUI on a shell script and assume it makes it user-friendly, it creates expectations of user-friendliness that are not met.