Emacs rules. And btw, it should be obvious that if you move keys around, you'll have to "relearn keyboard layout"... whether or not they are alt keys or backtics...
Get in a car. Take your hands off the steering wheel at 60 MPH. Now come back and tell me cars are perfectly safe.
The goal is not perfect safety... *nothing*, is perfectly safe, not even sitting in your house all day. The goal is reasonable safety through training and safety guidelines, as well as good engineering.
"Toupsie" seems to have taken the (correct) viewpoint that "MHz isn't everything," and twisted it into "MHz isn't *anything*." You might be interested in knowing that the P4, for all its shortcomings (really high price comes to mind) still outperforms the fastest Athlons. Because of clock speed. And the Athlons, using their brute force approach to cpu design, still outperform the best Apple has to offer.
Clever design is good, but fast design is better. Most users don't care whether their fast chip was achieved through smart design, heroic process engineering, or simple brute force (a million transistors coming at ya!) The best product for the best price will win wherever there is a choice.
Good design always helps, especially in places where heat and power consumption are problems, but don't fool yourself into thinking the more efficient chip will always win. Oh, and one last note: AMD's Athlon cpus are very well designed (EV6 bus, large number of functional units, etc.) I only used them as an example of brute force because they still support the x86 ISA and sports huge numbers of transistors, compared to G3/G4 et al..
The windows world is inhabited by strange primates who grunt and throw items when disturbed. They have developed an elaborate religious culture centering around the worship of another ape, Bil Gaytes, whom they venerate by giving him small green pieces of paper called "mon-ey."
More tests are needed to determine if they should be considered sentient.
actually, you pretty much described what an engineer is NOT. Engineers find practical solutions to real-world problems. A pure scientist would have the attitude you describe (for better or worse.)
Um... think for a second (I know, it's late...)How could businesses list their losses from piracy?
Today we lost 4366.99 from people copying our software without us knowing.
In case you can't figure it out, there is no way for them to know. They know how many boxes they sold, because they can count them. Not so with unlicensed copies.
Ok. I've worked in robotics and I can tell you that we are a long, long way from anything that can reproduce itself. The materials we use are totally different from nature, as is the process of creation. Nature builds cell by cell, for the most part. We use chunks of metal and other stuff, bolted, screwed, soldiered, and otherwise connected together.
If you think that people are eagerly researching "self-reproduction," you are wrong. Most robots are created to assist humans in a specific function. There's simply no money in "self-reproduction," even of a limited sort-- hence few people, if any, are working on it. It took nature millions of years to design even primitive self-reproducing chemicals, yet you believe we will do it in a thousand or a hundred thousand?
Moreover, nature's "motivation" is a lot different from ours. We create machines for specific tasks, but in nature things exist only to propogate themselves. Why should we want to duplicate the waste, the inaccuracy, and the general sloppiness of nature? Aren't a million forms of bacteria enough for you?
What the future will bring, nobody can say, but I believe that "gray goo" fantasies are as far removed from reality as artificial intelligence or cold fusion. They've never been proved impossible, but damn near close. We already have sciences that deal with matter on a small scale. They're called chemistry and physics, and the engineering disciplines for these are chemical engineering and mechanical engineering. Stop living in a fantasy world and do something that will matter in 50 years.
Um... third world countries often have terrible enviromental problems.
A lot of industries move to the third world to benefit from looser pollution rules (or lack of pollution rules.) Just because the media hasn't seen fit to tell you this information yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Not a troll, then? Just really sloppy thinking then.
First, in case you have been living in a cave, indecent exposure is still a crime, yet bathing continues to be a regular practice. You simply go inside an enclosed room to bathe.
Second, and more importantly, you are confusing social convention with religion. They may be related, but they are not the same! This is why you can be a Catholic in Rome, France, England, or the US, all of which have different social conventions.
Lastly, since you seem to believe that religion is ONLY a matter of social convention which will eventually pass away (yes, it is partly, I admit), you must be an atheist. You might as well admit it. I certainly am.
First of all, sanitation has little to do with religion directly. The catholic church has never taken any position on it. It's easy to be smug in an era when bacteriology and virology are highly refined.
Maybe you meant to say that, as an atheist and a materialist, you felt that religion held back important scientific progress. If so, you certainly chose a confusing way to express yourself.
And in case you haven't noticed, Captain Obvious, "guilt-based" behavior (i.e. all morality) is what holds society together. And loose sexual morality tends to spread disease, not stop it.
1) College is about more than getting a job. No, really. It might be the last time in your life you get to do what you want.
2) If it's experience you want, two words: internships! co-opts!
In any case, the highest paying jobs don't go to the techs, they go to business types. So if money is what you want, don't bother with computers. Then you can get your nice suburban house and 2.4 kids.
Re:Radical actions ...
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
I think you are missing the point entirely. Increases in engine efficiency, which everyone agrees are good, are not the issue here. The issue is that some Americans, to flaunt their wealth, decide to buy huge cars which they really don't need at all.
Aside from the sheer tastelessness of these "sport utility vehicles," there is the issue of inflated fuel consumption. Using more fuel to do less hurts the environment at every step: you must extract more from the wilderness, refine more in huge chemical complexes, transport more (think exxon-valdez), pump more, and burn more, which releases extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
As for diesel fuel being dirtier... diesel has some advantages in fuel efficiency, and some disadvantages in the area of soot, ozone, and other chemical emissions. Hopefully some of these problems will be mitigated in the future.
If the busses in your city go mostly unused, you must live in a rich suburb or something, because I live in Cleveland, and our busses are always full during the day. It is the same in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, and any other real city. Public transportation really is a good idea, and your comparions are silly. It is dirty compared to what? If the ten or fifteen people who rode the bus to school every morning with me had to drive cars separately, that would be at least ten times the pollution. Moving things in bulk uses less resources, even if they are people. But I forgot: you probably live in a suburb a half hour or more away from any real urban area, where your car is a status symbol which you would not think of giving up. Oh well.
The US Army switched to MacOS servers from WinNT after being hacked so many times.
The U.S. Army switched to $500 toilet seats too. No surprise they'd ignore the existence of FreeBSD. Don't get me wrong, macs are great, but not a replacement for unix.
There is no command line shell to allow redirection
Probably many script kiddie target weak linux (cough: red hat) systems because they're more familiar with the command line. But if macs became more common as webservers, we'd see a larger focus on remote GUI tools, some of which already exist. Anyway, you can still use buffer overflows to run malicious code, etc.
Everyhing is 'root' at all times so programmers do not get lazy and fantacize about the existance of a more secure root to help protect them
This comment makes no sense. If everyone is root, then anyone who gets any control of the system- at all- can do anything. It's not hard to write a mac program that erases the entire hard drive, and since everyone is root, not hard to run it!
Macintoshes do not suffer from stack exploits based on buffer overruns of C style strings. The mac uses Pascal style strings, instead of slow null-terminated strings in most all aspects of the entire operating system and in most users code. ANSI-C libraries are traditionally shunned.
It's true that standard C strings have caused many bugs and are probably overdue for retooling. But I've programmed on the mac using both C-style and Pascal-style, and I know it's a matter of the programmer. Pascal strings are not the answer: they are horribly inefficient (think: a large array with lots of empty space) and will be phased out anyway in os X.
Source to mac os (pre os X) is not typically available outside apple corp
Neither is the source for NT, genius.
Free is only free if you value your tech support at 0 dollars an hour sometimes
Most large servers hire their own people to do this kind of work. For everyone else, there's IIS.
The bottom line is, using something obscure can sometimes be better security, but only against casual attackers. People who don't care enough to learn about your fossilized stuff may not bother you. But if any of this ever became popular, forget about obscurity and we will see the OS in its full non-multiuser glory. In any case, all this will soon be moot anyway, since OS X is based on *BSD.
I think you just proved beyond a doubt why distributing music on CDs deserves to go the way of the dinosaur. It's so much easier just to download things.
Anyway, for the sake of argument... the comparison with CPUs is flawed. The manufacturing plants capable of making CPUs run to the hundreds of billions of dollars; CD presses are trivial in comparison. Also, the engineering expertise is incredible, whereas with a CD you follow the cookbook formula.
IBM, Intel, AMD, and others could make money even if all intellectual property ceased existing tomorrow. They own huge industrial complexes in multiple countries, and they make the stuff that people need. In any case, you need a college education just to understand what's going on in computer engineering, which is not cheap.
Recording industry companies would be hard pressed to survive if piracy was legalized. The companies, well aware of this, buy all the legislators they can and hope for the best.
Just make sure to unplug things when you are working on them.
Um... unplugging the monitor doesn't discharge everything inside it. There's still enough charge to kill you, hours afterwards. Don't play with high voltage unless it's your job.
Not to sound like a microserf, but your comments are misleading at best.
Yeah, they are happy with building shell over shell on top of their crappy early-80's OS. (stolen).:)
Um, some of the new versions of windows, like NT, were reimplemented from scratch. And DOS wasn't stolen, just bought for a very low price from some people who should have known better. It wasn't such a great piece of work anyway, even by the standards of the time.
Personally, I'd like to run a vaccum-tube/plugboard simulator and play with all the ballistics stuff from even earlier. Now *that* would be an OS...
Whatever floats your boat. However, you managed to pick one of the few areas of computing that doesn't involve the OS at all. Better luck next time.
Wake up and smell the weed. MAPS doesn't care about politics. YOU are the one politicizing what is basically a network maintenance issue.
...nor is there any recorse for someone to take if they do not believe they fit the classification of spammer...
Um... change ISPs?
I hate span as much as anybody..
You just don't want to do anything about it. And if you think writing a polite letter will help, you are even more clueless than you seem.
MAPS is heading towards becoming a de facto totalitarian organization...
If MAPS took money for their services, I'd agree. But the RBL is neither universal nor ideologically motivated, beyond a basic desire to blacklist spam domains. Again, this isn't about politics.
MAPS's strategy is similar to the strategy of a city that closes a shopping mall where prostitutes and drug dealers hang out. It doesn't stop the people from setting up shop elsewhere, but it does send a strong message to the management that unethical behavior is bad business.
Someone mod this up. It's exactly on target... and the reason why so-called "genetic bombs" will never really be useful for much.
Killing all of a certain ethnic group with a virus will probably not work. Viruses tend to reach an equilibrium point, rather than kill 100% of the population and then quietly disappear. The laws of probability say that there will always be people who are resistant, and there very well may be a mutation that makes your virus less "selective."
Of course, a plague is not impossible, but it's unlikely it would remain contained to one country for long in the modern world.
For the military-minded among you, here's an idea. Cut the supply of clean water and food, and THAT will lead to epidemics. If you don't believe me, look back to wars of the past. Plague seldom travels without its companions, the three other horsemen of the apocalypse.
Slashdot Mirror
The goal is not perfect safety... *nothing*, is perfectly safe, not even sitting in your house all day. The goal is reasonable safety through training and safety guidelines, as well as good engineering.
I better send back that hard drive I just paid $100 for then, since it isn't "real" according to slashbots.
"Toupsie" seems to have taken the (correct) viewpoint that "MHz isn't everything," and twisted it into "MHz isn't *anything*." You might be interested in knowing that the P4, for all its shortcomings (really high price comes to mind) still outperforms the fastest Athlons. Because of clock speed. And the Athlons, using their brute force approach to cpu design, still outperform the best Apple has to offer.
Clever design is good, but fast design is better. Most users don't care whether their fast chip was achieved through smart design, heroic process engineering, or simple brute force (a million transistors coming at ya!) The best product for the best price will win wherever there is a choice.
Good design always helps, especially in places where heat and power consumption are problems, but don't fool yourself into thinking the more efficient chip will always win. Oh, and one last note: AMD's Athlon cpus are very well designed (EV6 bus, large number of functional units, etc.) I only used them as an example of brute force because they still support the x86 ISA and sports huge numbers of transistors, compared to G3/G4 et al..
More tests are needed to determine if they should be considered sentient.
[chomps on trollbait]
but no, sir, that *can't* be true!
--What is IBM part #7320154?
hmm... is it a PC? Does anyone know?
Today we lost 4366.99 from people copying our software without us knowing.
In case you can't figure it out, there is no way for them to know. They know how many boxes they sold, because they can count them. Not so with unlicensed copies.
John Carmack aspires to that position.
If you think that people are eagerly researching "self-reproduction," you are wrong. Most robots are created to assist humans in a specific function. There's simply no money in "self-reproduction," even of a limited sort-- hence few people, if any, are working on it. It took nature millions of years to design even primitive self-reproducing chemicals, yet you believe we will do it in a thousand or a hundred thousand?
Moreover, nature's "motivation" is a lot different from ours. We create machines for specific tasks, but in nature things exist only to propogate themselves. Why should we want to duplicate the waste, the inaccuracy, and the general sloppiness of nature? Aren't a million forms of bacteria enough for you?
What the future will bring, nobody can say, but I believe that "gray goo" fantasies are as far removed from reality as artificial intelligence or cold fusion. They've never been proved impossible, but damn near close. We already have sciences that deal with matter on a small scale. They're called chemistry and physics, and the engineering disciplines for these are chemical engineering and mechanical engineering. Stop living in a fantasy world and do something that will matter in 50 years.
A lot of industries move to the third world to benefit from looser pollution rules (or lack of pollution rules.) Just because the media hasn't seen fit to tell you this information yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
First, in case you have been living in a cave, indecent exposure is still a crime, yet bathing continues to be a regular practice. You simply go inside an enclosed room to bathe.
Second, and more importantly, you are confusing social convention with religion. They may be related, but they are not the same! This is why you can be a Catholic in Rome, France, England, or the US, all of which have different social conventions.
Lastly, since you seem to believe that religion is ONLY a matter of social convention which will eventually pass away (yes, it is partly, I admit), you must be an atheist. You might as well admit it. I certainly am.
First of all, sanitation has little to do with religion directly. The catholic church has never taken any position on it. It's easy to be smug in an era when bacteriology and virology are highly refined.
Maybe you meant to say that, as an atheist and a materialist, you felt that religion held back important scientific progress. If so, you certainly chose a confusing way to express yourself.
And in case you haven't noticed, Captain Obvious, "guilt-based" behavior (i.e. all morality) is what holds society together. And loose sexual morality tends to spread disease, not stop it.
2) If it's experience you want, two words: internships! co-opts!
In any case, the highest paying jobs don't go to the techs, they go to business types. So if money is what you want, don't bother with computers. Then you can get your nice suburban house and 2.4 kids.
Aside from the sheer tastelessness of these "sport utility vehicles," there is the issue of inflated fuel consumption. Using more fuel to do less hurts the environment at every step: you must extract more from the wilderness, refine more in huge chemical complexes, transport more (think exxon-valdez), pump more, and burn more, which releases extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
As for diesel fuel being dirtier... diesel has some advantages in fuel efficiency, and some disadvantages in the area of soot, ozone, and other chemical emissions. Hopefully some of these problems will be mitigated in the future.
If the busses in your city go mostly unused, you must live in a rich suburb or something, because I live in Cleveland, and our busses are always full during the day. It is the same in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, and any other real city. Public transportation really is a good idea, and your comparions are silly. It is dirty compared to what? If the ten or fifteen people who rode the bus to school every morning with me had to drive cars separately, that would be at least ten times the pollution. Moving things in bulk uses less resources, even if they are people. But I forgot: you probably live in a suburb a half hour or more away from any real urban area, where your car is a status symbol which you would not think of giving up. Oh well.
The US Army switched to MacOS servers from WinNT after being hacked so many times.
The U.S. Army switched to $500 toilet seats too. No surprise they'd ignore the existence of FreeBSD. Don't get me wrong, macs are great, but not a replacement for unix.
There is no command line shell to allow redirection
Probably many script kiddie target weak linux (cough: red hat) systems because they're more familiar with the command line. But if macs became more common as webservers, we'd see a larger focus on remote GUI tools, some of which already exist. Anyway, you can still use buffer overflows to run malicious code, etc.
Everyhing is 'root' at all times so programmers do not get lazy and fantacize about the existance of a more secure root to help protect them
This comment makes no sense. If everyone is root, then anyone who gets any control of the system- at all- can do anything. It's not hard to write a mac program that erases the entire hard drive, and since everyone is root, not hard to run it!
Macintoshes do not suffer from stack exploits based on buffer overruns of C style strings. The mac uses Pascal style strings, instead of slow null-terminated strings in most all aspects of the entire operating system and in most users code. ANSI-C libraries are traditionally shunned.
It's true that standard C strings have caused many bugs and are probably overdue for retooling. But I've programmed on the mac using both C-style and Pascal-style, and I know it's a matter of the programmer. Pascal strings are not the answer: they are horribly inefficient (think: a large array with lots of empty space) and will be phased out anyway in os X.
Source to mac os (pre os X) is not typically available outside apple corp
Neither is the source for NT, genius.
Free is only free if you value your tech support at 0 dollars an hour sometimes
Most large servers hire their own people to do this kind of work. For everyone else, there's IIS.
The bottom line is, using something obscure can sometimes be better security, but only against casual attackers. People who don't care enough to learn about your fossilized stuff may not bother you. But if any of this ever became popular, forget about obscurity and we will see the OS in its full non-multiuser glory. In any case, all this will soon be moot anyway, since OS X is based on *BSD.
I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.
Anyway, for the sake of argument... the comparison with CPUs is flawed. The manufacturing plants capable of making CPUs run to the hundreds of billions of dollars; CD presses are trivial in comparison. Also, the engineering expertise is incredible, whereas with a CD you follow the cookbook formula.
IBM, Intel, AMD, and others could make money even if all intellectual property ceased existing tomorrow. They own huge industrial complexes in multiple countries, and they make the stuff that people need. In any case, you need a college education just to understand what's going on in computer engineering, which is not cheap.
Recording industry companies would be hard pressed to survive if piracy was legalized. The companies, well aware of this, buy all the legislators they can and hope for the best.
Um... unplugging the monitor doesn't discharge everything inside it. There's still enough charge to kill you, hours afterwards. Don't play with high voltage unless it's your job.
Yeah, they are happy with building shell over shell on top of their crappy early-80's OS. (stolen). :)
Um, some of the new versions of windows, like NT, were reimplemented from scratch. And DOS wasn't stolen, just bought for a very low price from some people who should have known better. It wasn't such a great piece of work anyway, even by the standards of the time.
Personally, I'd like to run a vaccum-tube/plugboard simulator and play with all the ballistics stuff from even earlier. Now *that* would be an OS...
Whatever floats your boat. However, you managed to pick one of the few areas of computing that doesn't involve the OS at all. Better luck next time.
Um... change ISPs?
I hate span as much as anybody..
You just don't want to do anything about it. And if you think writing a polite letter will help, you are even more clueless than you seem.
MAPS is heading towards becoming a de facto totalitarian organization...
If MAPS took money for their services, I'd agree. But the RBL is neither universal nor ideologically motivated, beyond a basic desire to blacklist spam domains. Again, this isn't about politics.
MAPS's strategy is similar to the strategy of a city that closes a shopping mall where prostitutes and drug dealers hang out. It doesn't stop the people from setting up shop elsewhere, but it does send a strong message to the management that unethical behavior is bad business.
Killing all of a certain ethnic group with a virus will probably not work. Viruses tend to reach an equilibrium point, rather than kill 100% of the population and then quietly disappear. The laws of probability say that there will always be people who are resistant, and there very well may be a mutation that makes your virus less "selective."
Of course, a plague is not impossible, but it's unlikely it would remain contained to one country for long in the modern world.
For the military-minded among you, here's an idea. Cut the supply of clean water and food, and THAT will lead to epidemics. If you don't believe me, look back to wars of the past. Plague seldom travels without its companions, the three other horsemen of the apocalypse.