You will note, however, that the public don't give a rats ass about some "law of armed combat" (a concept that seems like an oxymoron to me), they either care that Israel killed a notorious terrorist leader, or they care that Israel bombed a shit load of innocent people while trying to assassinate one man.
My question is, why do PCs even have a full BIOS anymore? Since most OSes seem to do their very best to completely ignore the BIOS (so many of them being buggy and unreliable), why do we even need them to go and initialise devices, only to have the OS rescan all the busses and initialise everything again? Surely by now the BIOS can be reduced to something simple enough to kick off whatever bootloader is in use.
For signatures to work, you need to trust the other persons key, that means both that it really is who it says it is (which requires a web of trust, which presents significant problems and scalability issues), plus the other person must be trusted to keep their private key safe and their password protected. That is hard enough on a single user machine, but becomes almost impossible if you want to send a message while you're mobile (e.g. an Internet cafe is right out). The two are interlinked as well, if someone in your web of trust is not secure, by trusting their key to some degree, you are also potentially tainting the authenticity of other keys. If OpenPGP were a more widely used standard, it would be nice to be able to get your keys signed by respectable authorities (i.e. the functional equivalent of SSL authorities). Many of the SSL key vendors also do personal certificates, but they aren't really in an especially useful form for PGP type stuff.
I was immensely impressed by all of the main characters, they really did an excellent job, but viggo shines as the best of the pack. it's a pity there aren't more roles in hollywood that suit his skills.
Isn't that arguably the same thing? You probably don't have many (if any at all) of the cells you had when you were born, so you've been mostly disintegrated many times, you just didn't notice it. If there is a continuity of conciousness, which the transporters provide, then you are really the same person, you are just made of different atoms. As for the down/uploading brain contents thing, well, that is a bit more complex - if you can copy the contents of a brain and upload them to another, then you have fork()'d yourself. Either you kill the old body and have it's fork of your conciousness die, or you have two of yourself. I'm not sure if the human mind could cope with the trauma of first finding itself in a new body, then seeing its old body die. It sounds simple enough, but it would take quite an adjustment! Besides, I don't actually believe it's possible, I find it reassuring that our brains are probably too complex for us to possibly understand;)
Either route, uploading or transporters, is a great way to build a clone army of yourself though:)
rotation is significantly important if you are working in the handheld market:)
You're all right, but I'm righter ;)
on
Linux Kernel 3.0?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There have been some excellent and very valid points made in the comments here - bumping it gives a media boost because everyone will devote a few screen inches to it. That therefore needs to be balanced with a collection of new features that people can be sold on. "It runs millions more threads than you will ever see, it does it in the blink of a very small and fast blinking bat" isn't quite the same as "we put in all new disk management and resizing tools, all new enterprise-class filing systems, top notch new security controls..", etc, etc. Those are all perfectly true and someone needs to work that out, not to mention work out if it really matters. What I think really does matter is what the 3.0 release comes from, not when. I really wouldn't like to see 2.5 or 2.9 go straight into 3.0. Sure it may be a lovely new kernel, but if it's going to take until 3.0.14 to get stable enough, people are going to be unhappy. I guess my suggestion therefore would be to turn 2.5 into 2.6, get it stable and into all the major distros, then run two development trees, an experimental 3.1 for way out new core stuff, but also a 2.9 that simply adds non-core things to 2.6 (e.g. Reiser4, EVMS, MACs, etc.) so that it has a stable base to sit on while integration work is done. The wonderous BitKeeper ought to make back/forward porting work done on each tree relatively simple, plus we get to announce a big 3.0 release that not only has tons of sweet new features, but also has many months of proven stability because it's core is really 2.6. Nes pas?
I think you'd find that we have seen dramatic jumps in the flora and fauna around us, the problem is that the process is quite slow and we are quite short lived and until comparatively recently, we didn't keep records of such things. Things in nature have changed quite a bit since the last peak of the ice age. On the other hand, the whole wondery of creation is very difficult to accept on the argument of random chance. Part of the problem is definitely that this is an intellectual problem on a scale like few others!
I'm not entirely convinced that the Bombadier Beetle is a good argument against evolution, even before this theory. There are many organisms that use what would be lethal chemicals to disorient, disable and/or kill their prey and/or predators. If you think of the squillions of beetles in the world (and there really are billions and billions of them), then look at the amount of time they've existed (a very very long time), is it really that surprising that such a feature could evolve? Something as advantageous as being able to secrete chemicals that predators don't like gives you such a massive advantage over your defenseless peers that natural selection is going to promote that feature very aggressively, then one beetle arrives that has slightly too powerful secretion methods that squirt the chemical rather than simple secreting it onto their exoskeleton. Now you have an even bigger advantage, you can deter your predator before it has you in it's mouth. Again, natural selection is going to promote that quite aggressively because you're less likely to be injured and unable to reproduce further. I admit that the leap from there to squirting two different chemicals so they meet at a precise point and react is a little greater, but it only has to happen by random chance once, after that natural selection (less other random chances of death) will take care of making it the predominant feature. Given the incredible amount of specialisation nature displays elsewhere, the bombadier beetle doesn't seem to be too out of the ordinary. I would suggest that something like bioluminesence is equally impressive/unlikely.
yeah well, "chat room speak" isn't valid english either. You mean "Sounds like chat room language" at the very least or "I believe that is a colloquialism typically found in text based communications". Or, you could just crawl into a hole and die, I'd be happy with that;P
Personally, I find that l33t sp33k annoys the crap out of me. It's marginally acceptable in SMS messages, but really doesn't belong anywhere else imo. I don't even use it myself in SMS' because my phone as T9 input and I can type messages in pretty damn quickly. An interesting meme I wanted to throw down is that language is more than just communication, it's a formal way of constructing ideas not only for communication to others, but also in our own minds; Much in the way that mathematics has it's own language for the formulation and transmission of concepts. If common English starts to lose it's formal structure and we descend into some kind of Taxilinga, I will be worried that the ability to formalise and construct logical thought patterns will be lost to some people (I guess it probably already is lost to people who say 'like' and 'know what I'z sayin' 4 times a sentence;) I'm hanging on to Queen's English until the day I die either way:)
Well if they don't want them returned, wtf is the point of glueing the player shut? you could easily just cut it open and take the CD out. I would have thought it would actually make more sense, and be cheaper, to put the single onto a tiny device with a $10 mp3 decoder in it, so there physically isn't anything to remove, or any way to remove the track without some serious hardware debugging. Of course sanity and media companies are rarely found together;)
I worked in some way or another for most of my time at uni, but for the last two years I was also director of an IT consultancy. To be fair I was quite slack about the whole thing, but I found that balancing the two was extremely draining, I'd get home after a day of work/study and have to do more work/study to keep up to date. It got particularly bad as finals and projects approached. If you can avoid it, I would. University is just too much fun and too useful to waste time you could be spending studying or having fun with friends.
Probably because just about anyone can bash out some code that does something, but making a really good interface takes a lot of planning, consideration and skill. It's something that a coder either can't do, or they didn't pay any attention to it for time/money/commitment reasons. It's a pity that all the extra time spent using interfaces during development, thanks mainly to Visual development tools, hasn't lead to a large improvement;)
I wonder how far you could lint-a-like a glade xml file, flag up layout mistakes that don't meet the ui guidelines required of them (e.g. for inclusion into Gnome).
Most application interfaces are just a little more complex than a toaster. Consistency is the most important part of a UI - a user will get used to the behaviour of certain controls/widgets, if your app comes along and uses it's own that behave differently, you just broke consistency and the user will have to waste time deducing the behaviour rules of your control. Windows has become a hive of confusing and inconsistent interfaces, not only because people like Adobe write their own tab controls, but people like Creative and whoever wrote BlackIce discard the standard interface entirely and use their own hideous bitmap based monstrosities. Not to mention the fact that using standard controls saves a hell of a lot of time developing custom ones. Obviously some controls simply won't exist and you'll have to make them yourself, but with a reasonable set of standard ones and a good canvas control you have most things covered.
That's quite poor, if it decides the card can't handle multiple sources (which I guess would be fairly easy at the driver level), it should really start some kind of software mixer automatically. As it happens I'm using commercial OSS anyway, but that's not the point;)
what is this thing "the desktop" people talk about? It's not like there is some old grandma being kept in front of WinME at the standards institude in Paris to be trundled out as "the desktop" should anyone need to see if they are it or not. There are (at least) two desktop markets, home and office. They are extremely different. I doubt Linux can ever take on the home PC market in any useful way without PC's getting a lot simpler. The office desktop market, however, is a bit different and is something that Linux is already creeping into, much as it did with the server market. How effective it will be overall against Windows is obviously unknown, but if it knocks their market share down even half as much as it did in the server market, well, there'd be a whole heck of a lot more competition in that market than there is right now! Several factors have come together this year to make the Linux office desktop considerably more appealing (aside from the fact that this is really the first year that the software has been evolved enough to be viable). Microsoft are doing stupid things with their licenses which a lot of users (more often than not out of a general dislike of MS) aren't taking kindly to. Also, the price of a PC, especially a not-kitted-out-for-Doom-III office PC, is getting lower and lower, the margins are squeezed tighter than a duck's butt. You can now buy a PC for the same or less than a copy of Microsoft Office. Just as Microsoft has commoditized the hardware market out from under the IBM's and Dell's and HPaq's of the world, so things like Linux and Star/OpenOffice are commoditizing the software market out from under Microsoft. I'm really looking forward to the work between the StarOffice team and OASIS - an agreed standard for XML based office documents provides the opportunity for pretty much all of the not-Microsoft companies who produce office suites to present a united front. Who knows if they will, but the opportunity is there if they want.
Finding fonts that are Free enough to allow commercial redistribution (ie put in a distro that will be sold in a box on a shelf in a store, etc.) is actually quite hard. Making a font is extremely hard work, especially if it's a good one, which is why fonts are such well guarded property. However, that doesn't mean they can't make it easy for users to find and include decent fonts. If all distros can agree on a single directory within which they will keep all fonts then it becomes the job of the various font servers and fontconfig to track and maintain the font lists. Actually, I think the time has come for font servers to die - they make the job a million times more complicated than just using the font support already in XFree (which of course now includes TTF support). Even if you go by the argument that a font server is useful for serving the same fonts to lots of client machines over a network, the same would be true of a public ro nfs share of the fonts directory. It would then be really easy to have a button somewhere that says "Get me more fonts" and takes the user to, say, fonts.themes.org and offers them a bunch of fonts to download in a consistent archive format which can be automagically whisked away into the font directory and fontconfig called to automatically update it all.
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You will note, however, that the public don't give a rats ass about some "law of armed combat" (a concept that seems like an oxymoron to me), they either care that Israel killed a notorious terrorist leader, or they care that Israel bombed a shit load of innocent people while trying to assassinate one man.
My question is, why do PCs even have a full BIOS anymore? Since most OSes seem to do their very best to completely ignore the BIOS (so many of them being buggy and unreliable), why do we even need them to go and initialise devices, only to have the OS rescan all the busses and initialise everything again?
Surely by now the BIOS can be reduced to something simple enough to kick off whatever bootloader is in use.
For signatures to work, you need to trust the other persons key, that means both that it really is who it says it is (which requires a web of trust, which presents significant problems and scalability issues), plus the other person must be trusted to keep their private key safe and their password protected. That is hard enough on a single user machine, but becomes almost impossible if you want to send a message while you're mobile (e.g. an Internet cafe is right out).
The two are interlinked as well, if someone in your web of trust is not secure, by trusting their key to some degree, you are also potentially tainting the authenticity of other keys.
If OpenPGP were a more widely used standard, it would be nice to be able to get your keys signed by respectable authorities (i.e. the functional equivalent of SSL authorities). Many of the SSL key vendors also do personal certificates, but they aren't really in an especially useful form for PGP type stuff.
I was immensely impressed by all of the main characters, they really did an excellent job, but viggo shines as the best of the pack. it's a pity there aren't more roles in hollywood that suit his skills.
Very happy to see this :)
SG-1 is definitely the best Sci-Fi on TV at the moment, so more of it is definitely a good thing!
Isn't that arguably the same thing? You probably don't have many (if any at all) of the cells you had when you were born, so you've been mostly disintegrated many times, you just didn't notice it. ;)
:)
If there is a continuity of conciousness, which the transporters provide, then you are really the same person, you are just made of different atoms.
As for the down/uploading brain contents thing, well, that is a bit more complex - if you can copy the contents of a brain and upload them to another, then you have fork()'d yourself. Either you kill the old body and have it's fork of your conciousness die, or you have two of yourself.
I'm not sure if the human mind could cope with the trauma of first finding itself in a new body, then seeing its old body die. It sounds simple enough, but it would take quite an adjustment!
Besides, I don't actually believe it's possible, I find it reassuring that our brains are probably too complex for us to possibly understand
Either route, uploading or transporters, is a great way to build a clone army of yourself though
rotation is significantly important if you are working in the handheld market :)
There have been some excellent and very valid points made in the comments here - bumping it gives a media boost because everyone will devote a few screen inches to it. That therefore needs to be balanced with a collection of new features that people can be sold on. "It runs millions more threads than you will ever see, it does it in the blink of a very small and fast blinking bat" isn't quite the same as "we put in all new disk management and resizing tools, all new enterprise-class filing systems, top notch new security controls..", etc, etc.
Those are all perfectly true and someone needs to work that out, not to mention work out if it really matters.
What I think really does matter is what the 3.0 release comes from, not when. I really wouldn't like to see 2.5 or 2.9 go straight into 3.0. Sure it may be a lovely new kernel, but if it's going to take until 3.0.14 to get stable enough, people are going to be unhappy.
I guess my suggestion therefore would be to turn 2.5 into 2.6, get it stable and into all the major distros, then run two development trees, an experimental 3.1 for way out new core stuff, but also a 2.9 that simply adds non-core things to 2.6 (e.g. Reiser4, EVMS, MACs, etc.) so that it has a stable base to sit on while integration work is done. The wonderous BitKeeper ought to make back/forward porting work done on each tree relatively simple, plus we get to announce a big 3.0 release that not only has tons of sweet new features, but also has many months of proven stability because it's core is really 2.6. Nes pas?
I think you'd find that we have seen dramatic jumps in the flora and fauna around us, the problem is that the process is quite slow and we are quite short lived and until comparatively recently, we didn't keep records of such things.
Things in nature have changed quite a bit since the last peak of the ice age.
On the other hand, the whole wondery of creation is very difficult to accept on the argument of random chance. Part of the problem is definitely that this is an intellectual problem on a scale like few others!
I'm not entirely convinced that the Bombadier Beetle is a good argument against evolution, even before this theory.
There are many organisms that use what would be lethal chemicals to disorient, disable and/or kill their prey and/or predators. If you think of the squillions of beetles in the world (and there really are billions and billions of them), then look at the amount of time they've existed (a very very long time), is it really that surprising that such a feature could evolve?
Something as advantageous as being able to secrete chemicals that predators don't like gives you such a massive advantage over your defenseless peers that natural selection is going to promote that feature very aggressively, then one beetle arrives that has slightly too powerful secretion methods that squirt the chemical rather than simple secreting it onto their exoskeleton. Now you have an even bigger advantage, you can deter your predator before it has you in it's mouth. Again, natural selection is going to promote that quite aggressively because you're less likely to be injured and unable to reproduce further.
I admit that the leap from there to squirting two different chemicals so they meet at a precise point and react is a little greater, but it only has to happen by random chance once, after that natural selection (less other random chances of death) will take care of making it the predominant feature.
Given the incredible amount of specialisation nature displays elsewhere, the bombadier beetle doesn't seem to be too out of the ordinary. I would suggest that something like bioluminesence is equally impressive/unlikely.
yeah well, "chat room speak" isn't valid english either. You mean "Sounds like chat room language" at the very least or "I believe that is a colloquialism typically found in text based communications". ;P
Or, you could just crawl into a hole and die, I'd be happy with that
imo is an acceptable tla :)
/. comments.
ok, I got one use of "it's" incorrect. sue me. I proof read work, not
Personally, I find that l33t sp33k annoys the crap out of me. It's marginally acceptable in SMS messages, but really doesn't belong anywhere else imo. I don't even use it myself in SMS' because my phone as T9 input and I can type messages in pretty damn quickly. ;) :)
An interesting meme I wanted to throw down is that language is more than just communication, it's a formal way of constructing ideas not only for communication to others, but also in our own minds; Much in the way that mathematics has it's own language for the formulation and transmission of concepts.
If common English starts to lose it's formal structure and we descend into some kind of Taxilinga, I will be worried that the ability to formalise and construct logical thought patterns will be lost to some people (I guess it probably already is lost to people who say 'like' and 'know what I'z sayin' 4 times a sentence
I'm hanging on to Queen's English until the day I die either way
Isn't that a little unfair to music journos? ;)
What exact expertise do you need to force open the lid of a discman?
I think I already addressed the sanity of media companies :)
;)
As for the mp3's, you write me a program that will convert all my albums to ogg without losing huge amounts of quality, then I'll consider it
That's not the kind of excuse that's going to work more than once though ;)
Well if they don't want them returned, wtf is the point of glueing the player shut? you could easily just cut it open and take the CD out. I would have thought it would actually make more sense, and be cheaper, to put the single onto a tiny device with a $10 mp3 decoder in it, so there physically isn't anything to remove, or any way to remove the track without some serious hardware debugging. ;)
Of course sanity and media companies are rarely found together
Then when reviewer returns the walkman with cut wires, Epic Records can ream them for being naughty pirates.
I worked in some way or another for most of my time at uni, but for the last two years I was also director of an IT consultancy. To be fair I was quite slack about the whole thing, but I found that balancing the two was extremely draining, I'd get home after a day of work/study and have to do more work/study to keep up to date. It got particularly bad as finals and projects approached.
If you can avoid it, I would. University is just too much fun and too useful to waste time you could be spending studying or having fun with friends.
Probably because just about anyone can bash out some code that does something, but making a really good interface takes a lot of planning, consideration and skill. It's something that a coder either can't do, or they didn't pay any attention to it for time/money/commitment reasons. ;)
It's a pity that all the extra time spent using interfaces during development, thanks mainly to Visual development tools, hasn't lead to a large improvement
I wonder how far you could lint-a-like a glade xml file, flag up layout mistakes that don't meet the ui guidelines required of them (e.g. for inclusion into Gnome).
Most application interfaces are just a little more complex than a toaster.
Consistency is the most important part of a UI - a user will get used to the behaviour of certain controls/widgets, if your app comes along and uses it's own that behave differently, you just broke consistency and the user will have to waste time deducing the behaviour rules of your control.
Windows has become a hive of confusing and inconsistent interfaces, not only because people like Adobe write their own tab controls, but people like Creative and whoever wrote BlackIce discard the standard interface entirely and use their own hideous bitmap based monstrosities.
Not to mention the fact that using standard controls saves a hell of a lot of time developing custom ones. Obviously some controls simply won't exist and you'll have to make them yourself, but with a reasonable set of standard ones and a good canvas control you have most things covered.
That's quite poor, if it decides the card can't handle multiple sources (which I guess would be fairly easy at the driver level), it should really start some kind of software mixer automatically. ;)
As it happens I'm using commercial OSS anyway, but that's not the point
However (and correct me if I'm wrong here), ALSA can do that transparently, removing the need for pretty much forcing esd or similar on users.
what is this thing "the desktop" people talk about? It's not like there is some old grandma being kept in front of WinME at the standards institude in Paris to be trundled out as "the desktop" should anyone need to see if they are it or not.
There are (at least) two desktop markets, home and office. They are extremely different.
I doubt Linux can ever take on the home PC market in any useful way without PC's getting a lot simpler.
The office desktop market, however, is a bit different and is something that Linux is already creeping into, much as it did with the server market. How effective it will be overall against Windows is obviously unknown, but if it knocks their market share down even half as much as it did in the server market, well, there'd be a whole heck of a lot more competition in that market than there is right now!
Several factors have come together this year to make the Linux office desktop considerably more appealing (aside from the fact that this is really the first year that the software has been evolved enough to be viable). Microsoft are doing stupid things with their licenses which a lot of users (more often than not out of a general dislike of MS) aren't taking kindly to. Also, the price of a PC, especially a not-kitted-out-for-Doom-III office PC, is getting lower and lower, the margins are squeezed tighter than a duck's butt. You can now buy a PC for the same or less than a copy of Microsoft Office.
Just as Microsoft has commoditized the hardware market out from under the IBM's and Dell's and HPaq's of the world, so things like Linux and Star/OpenOffice are commoditizing the software market out from under Microsoft.
I'm really looking forward to the work between the StarOffice team and OASIS - an agreed standard for XML based office documents provides the opportunity for pretty much all of the not-Microsoft companies who produce office suites to present a united front. Who knows if they will, but the opportunity is there if they want.
Finding fonts that are Free enough to allow commercial redistribution (ie put in a distro that will be sold in a box on a shelf in a store, etc.) is actually quite hard.
Making a font is extremely hard work, especially if it's a good one, which is why fonts are such well guarded property.
However, that doesn't mean they can't make it easy for users to find and include decent fonts. If all distros can agree on a single directory within which they will keep all fonts then it becomes the job of the various font servers and fontconfig to track and maintain the font lists.
Actually, I think the time has come for font servers to die - they make the job a million times more complicated than just using the font support already in XFree (which of course now includes TTF support). Even if you go by the argument that a font server is useful for serving the same fonts to lots of client machines over a network, the same would be true of a public ro nfs share of the fonts directory.
It would then be really easy to have a button somewhere that says "Get me more fonts" and takes the user to, say, fonts.themes.org and offers them a bunch of fonts to download in a consistent archive format which can be automagically whisked away into the font directory and fontconfig called to automatically update it all.