Read the article. The Munich transition troubles have little to do with Linux, and a lot to do with the fact that they are having trouble dealing with the rest of the Windows-using world. They've got software that they need to port, and subcontractors that they have to be compatible with.
Where did you see that?? I went thru it twice and all I saw in the article about the Munich troubles was a reference to unspecified news reports: "Munich's Linux switchover is proving more costly and complex than anticipated, according to news reports out of Germany."
Is it not yet practical to write real software that way because of all the education the programmer would need, or is it that the process would take too long to complete real programs given current toolsets?
No, the bad (nonintuitive or broken) code I've seen lately has nothing to do with attempts at improving performance and everything to do with ignorance re: the language and programming.
Let me understand. You had a friend bring you to India, he didn't pay you enough for even Indian cost of living, and he objected when you took on paying work?
Are you prepared to say that, as long as it saves the employer costs, then outsourcing every non-on-site-req'd job is a net good? Have you considered that technology, by enabling doing this, has undermined an assumption or two supporting free trade?
Read this (if it fails hit refresh). I've skimmed alot of/. discussions on the topic and read all the recent NY Times op-eds pieces on the subject and this info was new to me.
Great idea but alas, Distributed Science Inc. (a/k/a The ProcessTree Network)'s old domain name is for sale and Popular Power is a dead business, suggesting a lack of profit potential in this business model as yet.
If the results went the opposite way, would you still conclude "this article is a troll"? If not, it is unfair to attack the messenger based on how much you dislike the news.
Save your time. I wasted two hours on their site w/o finding any serious answer to how they allow simultaneous processes to write to shared information (without lost-update-types of problems), so that's probably all one needs to know about Prevayler. They may have something good to use in certain situations but any project "documented" with over-the-top hype substituting for data and serious info is not being run in a trustworthy fashion.
Do you mean cleartext 1-> ctealxret 2-> ciphertext ?
If yes, I think you're right. Step 1 would be useful to add as an encryption preprocessing step because cryptanalysis involves looking for translations of the ciphertext back into a natural language, not gibberish.
http://faqts.com/ works and has been around at least a few years. (Be patient after hitting "Save" over there, though; that aspect of the site was plenty slow today.)
Build a Knowledge Base - for FREE!
Anyone can build a FAQTs knowledge base. We are always looking for new topic areas and people willing to contribute and edit answers.
You can set up a new knowledge base yourself immediately, just create the new folders. If you don't feel confident, contact us and we'll do it for you.
How do you know this is the same Eric? It doesn't appear to be. E.g., kuro5hin's e r i c appears to promote Microsoft XP (link). Mucking thru the other postings of e r i c doesn't shed much more light. (I ask because I am currently in pursuit of Mr Krout's Linux marketing techniques.)
The habitué of news:comp.lang.php are arrogant and rude
Once you get to know them you learn this is an interesting instance of top-down attitude adoption. (Another example, though in a different direction, would be Larry Wall vis-à-vis the Perl community.)
But an even worse problem has been lack of an inexpensive, working debugger on Linux and Windows. Debugging even a moderate size PHP site is a nightmare without one. Komodo may be near solving that, at $23 for noncommercial use, if they can improve their mod_php support and docs. Their php cgi support seems to work fine. (If you value your time avoid Zend at all costs.)
Assuming your qn and distrust of RAID are serious, the answer is to buy two of the 320GB drives and have one backup to the other each night.
If you have multiple machines and a fast (eg, 100Mb/s) connection between them, you can even put the drives in different machines and use the drives' unused space to back up each other.
Then, to cover the possibilities of theft, flood, fire, and other mutual assured destruction of your drives, use CD-RW to backup your most important data and store offsite. If CD is not high capacity enough, you can buy more 320GB drives and make them (cold)swappable via rails (i saw them online somewhere for ~$15ea) to allow you to back up, using another drive or system as intermediary, and store the unused drive offsite.
While not a lawyer, I done a fair amount of thinking on this subject. I've written the former president and my congressmen about how detrimental and unfair junk patents are, and have parted w/far more o' the green stuff for legal consultation re: related matters than i should have. One of my late-breaking conclusions is that, while business method and software patents are, in fact, bad on the whole, the situation is not as bad as it first appears.
The US PTO does not prosecute infringement claims for you. The patent holder must do that for himself, and the junk patent jokers, holding only junk as they do, would usually lose. That's a good thing, for when the stakes are high enough you have this escape valve (optimistically speaking).
Unfortunate cases like the eBay suit happen because it is cheap for said joker to ask for a licensing fee and, if spurned, to file a pursuant lawsuit. And it will frequently happen that the defendent will determine that it makes sense, financially, to pay up rather than fight, as attorneys work rarely for free.
I would hope the courts would smile alot more kindly, though, at the plaintiff that starts from scratch something new and different (even if its just a business model) and who then patents it and makes the business go (not nec'ly in that order). Along comes a corporate behemoth inclined to consider him, returning as he has from the frontier w/o an arrow in the back, a market research firm publishing free results. If i'm right about the court's sympathies, the patent then creates considerable incentive for the newcomer to deal with the entrepreneur meaningfully (eg, offering to buy his co. or asks to license his IP) instead of obliterating him via incomparable resources, experience, contacts, payola, etc. And thus shores up the incentive as well for the entrepreneur to have risked his financial well being in the first place and prove the concept.
In short, the courts, while expensive and inefficient, provide a check on PTO excesses; To successfully enforce a patent you must convince a court that the infringement is real and that the patent is valid beyond simply its PTO signet.
When training your personal neural net blurb-generating subsystem, pls set maximize(reader.knowledge-gain/reader.time-expende d) as the primary fitness test.
In so doing you'll notice that when creating a story about another tiny PC, the price of the subject should be given, size and power, too.
You're correct about everything here except that the code examples in their docs very often didn't work (typos and such). Which was strange, but evidently the writers had to retype the programs provided them from hardcopy.
One could argue for programs in HTML, with the code bracketed in XML so that the compiler could find it.
Yes, and as i recently posted, i've found that it does in fact further program understanding to be able to embed xml tags of various types into the code and the surrounding documentation, if one can make use of it. Example benefits, achievable in code and non-code sections using the Amaya editor:
* Formatting, as you point out. XHTML, CSS works. * Hyperlinking to other files, sections, and urls. * SVG for drawing. (limited capability at present) * Automatic (re)creation of hierachical table of contents based on <h> tags (Amaya shows this nicely in a separate window, and allows drill-down from it into the document). Here's your outline.
I implemented this as a tiny PHP/XSLT program.
Since the above mentioned post, in addition to getting its two qn's answered, I added code to use as the target filename the <title> element of the source document (sudo'ing to root when necessary (which it wouldn't be for Windows)).
The code sections are id'ed by being in a a named ("code") style, which simultaneously formats them.
Using Amaya's also nice because it allows editing of html content in the same window in which the html is interpreted (and without any of the flood of non-standard tags MSWord uses).
I plan on creating a Sourceforge project based on this w/in a week. No name yet but it should be findable via search on ANDed terms: php, xslt, literate programming.
If you have N elements and want to count the number of possible interactions between them, then one can represent this as a binary number, where each digit represents the presence of an element. Then the # of interactions is 2^N (minus the N+1 cases where an element is alone or all are missing). Then, if each of these interactions can itself be considered to create a compound element able to interaction with other simple or compound elements, you a number on the order of N!.
Nope, I calculate it at n(n-1). Which is equal to n^2 - n.
If you have 8 interactors, and assume each can interact with the others (7), that's 7 interactions per interactor. 8 * 7 gives your total interactions. I.e., n(n-1) where n is the number of interactors.
RMS advocates/not/ helping the PTO find prior art relating to software patent applications, in order to make defeating the granted patent easier.
Unfortunately the PTO considers itself in the business of granting patents for its "customers", regardless of the inventiveness demonstrated by the so-called invention. Until that attitude changes, it's best to let them churn out their junk patents. If you warn the PTO about prior art, this will simply allow them and the "inventor" to take precautions against prior art claims.
How possible would it be to create a general purpose English-to-AIML translator?
I think the answer is "not very" because first we'd have to give the translator alot of knowledge about the world. Enough for it to, at minimum, make sense of the input. But does this mean it would also need a full-blown expertise specific to the subject to be translated?
If this converter could in fact do a good job, one would be able to easily create a useful expert system on any subject for which good documentation in a suitable format was available.
Re: the uploading, what do people say about how Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle might limit 3D resolution of neurons?
About the runaway chimps taking over theory, I have doubts that the apes will become numerous and advanced enough to do that before similar technology is used on humans. This is because improving intellectual capabilities would confer huge competitive advantages, and everyone would realize that. As long as humans believed it safe, many would be willing to pay/very/ high $ amounts for an "upgrade". And $ talks regardless of legalities.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you see that?? I went thru it twice and all I saw in the article about the Munich troubles was a reference to unspecified news reports:
"Munich's Linux switchover is proving more costly and complex than anticipated, according to news reports out of Germany."
Is it not yet practical to write real software that way because of all the education the programmer would need, or is it that the process would take too long to complete real programs given current toolsets?
No, the bad (nonintuitive or broken) code I've seen lately has nothing to do with attempts at improving performance and everything to do with ignorance re: the language and programming.
Let me understand. You had a friend bring you to India, he didn't pay you enough for even Indian cost of living, and he objected when you took on paying work?
Are you prepared to say that, as long as it saves the employer costs, then outsourcing every non-on-site-req'd job is a net good? Have you considered that technology, by enabling doing this, has undermined an assumption or two supporting free trade?
/. discussions on the topic and read all the recent NY Times op-eds pieces on the subject and this info was new to me.
Read this (if it fails hit refresh). I've skimmed alot of
Great idea but alas, Distributed Science Inc. (a/k/a The ProcessTree Network)'s old domain name is for sale and Popular Power is a dead business, suggesting a lack of profit potential in this business model as yet.
If the results went the opposite way, would you still conclude "this article is a troll"? If not, it is unfair to attack the messenger based on how much you dislike the news.
Save your time. I wasted two hours on their site w/o finding any serious answer to how they allow simultaneous processes to write to shared information (without lost-update-types of problems), so that's probably all one needs to know about Prevayler. They may have something good to use in certain situations but any project "documented" with over-the-top hype substituting for data and serious info is not being run in a trustworthy fashion.
Do you mean cleartext 1-> ctealxret 2-> ciphertext ?
If yes, I think you're right. Step 1 would be useful to add as an encryption preprocessing step because cryptanalysis involves looking for translations of the ciphertext back into a natural language, not gibberish.
http://faqts.com/ works and has been around at least a few years. (Be patient after hitting "Save" over there, though; that aspect of the site was plenty slow today.)
Build a Knowledge Base - for FREE!
Anyone can build a FAQTs knowledge base. We are always looking for new topic areas and people willing to contribute and edit answers.
You can set up a new knowledge base yourself immediately, just create the new folders. If you don't feel confident, contact us and we'll do it for you.
How do you know this is the same Eric? It doesn't appear to be. E.g., kuro5hin's e r i c appears to promote Microsoft XP (link). Mucking thru the other postings of e r i c doesn't shed much more light. (I ask because I am currently in pursuit of Mr Krout's Linux marketing techniques.)
The habitué of news:comp.lang.php are arrogant and rude
Once you get to know them you learn this is an interesting instance of top-down attitude adoption. (Another example, though in a different direction, would be Larry Wall vis-à-vis the Perl community.)
But an even worse problem has been lack of an inexpensive, working debugger on Linux and Windows. Debugging even a moderate size PHP site is a nightmare without one. Komodo may be near solving that, at $23 for noncommercial use, if they can improve their mod_php support and docs. Their php cgi support seems to work fine. (If you value your time avoid Zend at all costs.)
Assuming your qn and distrust of RAID are serious, the answer is to buy two of the 320GB drives and have one backup to the other each night.
If you have multiple machines and a fast (eg, 100Mb/s) connection between them, you can even put the drives in different machines and use the drives' unused space to back up each other.
Then, to cover the possibilities of theft, flood, fire, and other mutual assured destruction of your drives, use CD-RW to backup your most important data and store offsite. If CD is not high capacity enough, you can buy more 320GB drives and make them (cold)swappable via rails (i saw them online somewhere for ~$15ea) to allow you to back up, using another drive or system as intermediary, and store the unused drive offsite.
While not a lawyer, I done a fair amount of thinking on this subject. I've written the former president and my congressmen about how detrimental and unfair junk patents are, and have parted w/far more o' the green stuff for legal consultation re: related matters than i should have. One of my late-breaking conclusions is that, while business method and software patents are, in fact, bad on the whole, the situation is not as bad as it first appears.
The US PTO does not prosecute infringement claims for you. The patent holder must do that for himself, and the junk patent jokers, holding only junk as they do, would usually lose. That's a good thing, for when the stakes are high enough you have this escape valve (optimistically speaking).
Unfortunate cases like the eBay suit happen because it is cheap for said joker to ask for a licensing fee and, if spurned, to file a pursuant lawsuit. And it will frequently happen that the defendent will determine that it makes sense, financially, to pay up rather than fight, as attorneys work rarely for free.
I would hope the courts would smile alot more kindly, though, at the plaintiff that starts from scratch something new and different (even if its just a business model) and who then patents it and makes the business go (not nec'ly in that order). Along comes a corporate behemoth inclined to consider him, returning as he has from the frontier w/o an arrow in the back, a market research firm publishing free results. If i'm right about the court's sympathies, the patent then creates considerable incentive for the newcomer to deal with the entrepreneur meaningfully (eg, offering to buy his co. or asks to license his IP) instead of obliterating him via incomparable resources, experience, contacts, payola, etc. And thus shores up the incentive as well for the entrepreneur to have risked his financial well being in the first place and prove the concept.
In short, the courts, while expensive and inefficient, provide a check on PTO excesses; To successfully enforce a patent you must convince a court that the infringement is real and that the patent is valid beyond simply its PTO signet.
/. Editors:
e d) as the primary fitness test.
When training your personal neural net blurb-generating subsystem, pls set maximize(reader.knowledge-gain/reader.time-expend
In so doing you'll notice that when creating a story about another tiny PC, the price of the subject should be given, size and power, too.
You're correct about everything here except that the code examples in their docs very often didn't work (typos and such). Which was strange, but evidently the writers had to retype the programs provided them from hardcopy.
One could argue for programs in HTML, with the code bracketed in XML so that the compiler could find it.
Yes, and as i recently posted, i've found that it does in fact further program understanding to be able to embed xml tags of various types into the code and the surrounding documentation, if one can make use of it. Example benefits, achievable in code and non-code sections using the Amaya editor:
* Formatting, as you point out. XHTML, CSS works.
* Hyperlinking to other files, sections, and urls.
* SVG for drawing. (limited capability at present)
* Automatic (re)creation of hierachical table of contents based on <h> tags (Amaya shows this nicely in a separate window, and allows drill-down from it into the document). Here's your outline.
I implemented this as a tiny PHP/XSLT program.
Since the above mentioned post, in addition to getting its two qn's answered, I added code to use as the target filename the <title> element of the source document (sudo'ing to root when necessary (which it wouldn't be for Windows)).
The code sections are id'ed by being in a a named ("code") style, which simultaneously formats them.
Using Amaya's also nice because it allows editing of html content in the same window in which the html is interpreted (and without any of the flood of non-standard tags MSWord uses).
I plan on creating a Sourceforge project based on this w/in a week. No name yet but it should be findable via search on ANDed terms: php, xslt, literate programming.
Gotchya, thx.
I believe this accounts for the factorial:
If you have N elements and want to count the number of possible interactions between them, then one can represent this as a binary number, where each digit represents the presence of an element. Then the # of interactions is 2^N (minus the N+1 cases where an element is alone or all are missing). Then, if each of these interactions can itself be considered to create a compound element able to interaction with other simple or compound elements, you a number on the order of N!.
I suspect he's right about factorial.
Nope, I calculate it at n(n-1). Which is equal to n^2 - n.
If you have 8 interactors, and assume each can interact with the others (7), that's 7 interactions per interactor. 8 * 7 gives your total interactions. I.e., n(n-1) where n is the number of interactors.
RMS advocates /not/ helping the PTO find prior art relating to software patent applications, in order to make defeating the granted patent easier.
Unfortunately the PTO considers itself in the business of granting patents for its "customers", regardless of the inventiveness demonstrated by the so-called invention. Until that attitude changes, it's best to let them churn out their junk patents. If you warn the PTO about prior art, this will simply allow them and the "inventor" to take precautions against prior art claims.
How would your answers differ if you were writing anonymously?
How possible would it be to create a general purpose English-to-AIML translator?
I think the answer is "not very" because first we'd have to give the translator alot of knowledge about the world. Enough for it to, at minimum, make sense of the input. But does this mean it would also need a full-blown expertise specific to the subject to be translated?
If this converter could in fact do a good job, one would be able to easily create a useful expert system on any subject for which good documentation in a suitable format was available.
Or am i wrong? Thank you.
There seems to be nothing left of Unix.org now but to see it as it was in 1998 go here.
I tried Google's cache (by searching on "unix site:unix.org" and clicking "Cached") for a more recent view but that shows nothing.
Re: the uploading, what do people say about how Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle might limit 3D resolution of neurons?
/very/ high $ amounts for an "upgrade". And $ talks regardless of legalities.
About the runaway chimps taking over theory, I have doubts that the apes will become numerous and advanced enough to do that before similar technology is used on humans. This is because improving intellectual capabilities would confer huge competitive advantages, and everyone would realize that. As long as humans believed it safe, many would be willing to pay
Is there a way to run an ISO image from hard disk or must it be burned onto a cd-rom?
thx.