You guys need to get your story straight. It was, actually, a preference. McCain implied he felt that Iraq was just like Japan and Germany, countries that we've "occupied" (in his terms) for more than half a decade. The sheer ridiculousness of either implying either country is "occupied" (we have troops stationed in each, but not in an occupying sense), or that Iraq is anything like those two is what makes McCain's comments all the more ridiculous. Ironically, the right tends to complain we're misrepresenting him by pointing out he was making that comparison.
"Dude, McCain said he wants to eat babies"
"How dare the you on the left misrepresent McCain like that! All he said is that if the Chinese eat babies, then he'd like to eat one too, as he heard they're tasty and delicious."
Re:Thanks, that was interesting...
on
Running Xen
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Counterpoint? Drepper's not explaining that the "KVM and Xen are competitors" war is valid, he's just buying into it without justifying it. He doesn't "get" Xen so he assumes it's used in the same areas as KVM and that, therefore, crude performance comparisons are valid. I've not really read much of his stuff before, so it'd be inaccurate to say I've lost respect for the guy on reading that article, but it does sound like he's "not getting it" which reflects somewhat poorly on him. I know I made the right decision putting Xen on my firewall/gateway server, I can't imagine even considering virtualization for a network-accessable no-monitor/keyboard box sitting in my closet. I also know that I wouldn't want Xen on my desktop.
Saying "These both do virtualization therefore one is better than the other" is as silly as saying "Bluetooth and Wifi are both "doing wireless" therefore one is better than the other." The only way to make KVM usable in the area Xen excels is to refactor it so that Linux runs underneath it, not over it. This, of course, means it'll not be KVM, and it'll become a less than ideal application for desktop virtualization.
Likewise Xen can be refactored so it runs under Linux rather than vice-versa. Then it'll be hampered by Linux's limitations, and for the most part by GNU's too. There's no good reason to do this, there already are numerous desktop virtualization systems out there, why undermine the only viable server virtualization system in an effort to compete in an area that already has numerous alternatives?
If you want to compare KVM's performance, do it against its actual rivals like BOCHS and VMWare. If you want to compare Xen's... well, right now you have nothing to compare it to. You have to either say it's good enough for you, or it isn't, and if it isn't, buy multiple machines. If Drepper and others want to produce an alternative to Xen, they need to first understand what it is, why it's useful, and what it's used for. Clearly, if they're going to assume KVM is an alternative, they haven't bothered.
The SUVs I've been in have pretty crummy leg and head room. I'm 6'2", and I can only assume you've been in a very small set of, well, very small cars, and have extrapolated from that. Larger cars, from the Camry onwards, tend to have at least as much leg and head room as most SUVs.
If you really want comfort, you'd be looking into larger cars or minivans. But, of course, minivans are soooo unfashionable, whereas SUVs are sporty, even if they're also terrifyingly unsafe, both to their occupants and everyone around them.
meaning that they aren't going to allow any unlocked iPhones
Except Apple cannot forbid that in many markets. Apple can refuse to sell iPhones in particular markets, such as France and Germany, but if it makes a deal with a French telco (for example), that telco must offer the iPhone unlocked.
I don't see any evidence that Jobs is going to refuse to sell 3G iPhones in markets like France, so despite the "Maximum of $199" claim, you can expect to see unlocked 3G iPhones, and they'll probably cost a tad more than $199.
And we should, of course, abolish all laws. It's not like the other manslaughter laws have prevented manslaughter from happening, right?
Manslaughter is generally defined as (depends on country, I'm sure Slashdot's legion of lawyers will be here to quote the exact definition for your jurisdiction) death due to an avoidable error on the part of another. In other words, where you're responsible for someone's death but didn't intend to kill them. So, for example, if you accidentally kill someone by trying to scare them by driving your car towards them, only to slip up and run them over, then that's generally manslaughter.
What, I believe, the GP was getting at was that if you're going to make the decision to drive an SUV, a device that's the definition of "unsafe at any speed", you're exhibiting willful negligence in the process. It could be argued, strongly enough for the government to be within its rights passing a law to make it legally unambiguous, that if you made the decision to arm yourself with an SUV, and killed someone as a result, you committed an act of manslaughter because you intentionally drove an unsafe - difficult to control, more damaging in accidents - vehicle.
And if such a law is passed, and car dealerships are required to tell customers "There is a stronger possibility that you will be involved in an accident driving this vehicle, and also that the accident will result in a fatality, and under Florida State law, you will be held responsible for that death due to your decision to drive this type of vehicle, and will face up to ten years in prison once convicted", quite a few customers may chose to buy something else.
And those that buy SUVs anyway - well, hopefully they'll be a little more careful when driving.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
on
Running Xen
·
· Score: 1
Xen has pretty much no support for laptops. Unfortunately for Xen, it's becoming pretty clear that laptops are the future as far as general purpose computing goes. So I would say that Xen has no future
Here's a rewording that I think is more appropriate: Xen has sub-optimal support for laptops. As laptops appear to be the future as far as personal computing goes, Xen has little future in that area.
But it never did. Xen was never the optimal solution for desktops. Desktop users generally have no desire to run more than one operating system on a permanent basis. They want transitory access to virtualization. Only if you believe that the only use for virtualization is to run guest operating systems in the transitory way desktop users desire would you suggest that the future of Xen is dependent upon the success, or lack of it, for laptops.
You're fighting a war that doesn't need to be fought. The two systems, KVM/VMWare/Qeme etc and Xen, are complementary. They are aimed at entirely different applications. Sure, people will try to force fit one solution to the other's area, just as some people think a desktop operating system makes for a good server. But that doesn't mean it's the right approach, or that people will get to a point that the right solution - which right now has momentum and mindshare - is going to disappear.
Xen's days in the server space are dependent upon a superior technology not coming along in the same space. KVM doesn't exist in the same space, it doesn't solve the same problems, any admin who tries to run it there is certainly not doing themselves any favors. And given servers are exactly the kinds of system that are permanently on, running, and sucking up power, it's hard to take seriously the argument that "power management" issues are going to make Xen be seen to be so bad that (rational) admins would seriously consider running everything as VMs on a desktop.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
on
Running Xen
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well yes they do do things differently, but KVM does it better and simpler by just running on Linux as the base system hypervisor. From a maintenance point of view things get far simpler, as the OP said.
Sure, and Wifi does it better and simpler than Bluetooth by using Ethernet frames (The Bluetooth vs Wifi "war" is also a good example of where geeks get it completely, 100%, wrong by not recognizing the entirely different applications the technologies are aimed at.) You're comparing apples to oranges, and assuming that because KVM works better in a specific scenario that it works better.
That statement is just, well, daft. You're implying that Xen can't run VMs under Linux but KVM can, or Xen can run VMs on systems other than Linux or something that KVM can't do? They're both Linux only at this point, and Xen effectively runs a forked version of Linux because it isn't, and won't be, upstream
It's not daft, your response makes no sense. Let's break it down:
You're implying that Xen can't run VMs under Linux but KVM can
That's right. Xen cannot run VMs under Linux. Xen runs VMs on the bare hardware. In the Xen environment, operating systems run under Xen, not vice versa. The only way to run Xen "under" Linux is to run it in an emulator!
or Xen can run VMs on systems other than Linux or something that KVM can't do?
This sentence makes no sense as is. It can't run VMs under Linux, as stated above. In terms of operating system support, you can run various operating systems under Xen as "dom0". Dom0 is a special domain that most hardware is managed by by default (though you can redirect any almost piece of hardware to be managed by any guest system. For example, on my home server, one of the Ethernet cards is managed completely by a domU.) Dom0 can be one of many operating systems, including Linux-based systems, OpenSolaris/SunOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and certain versions of FreeBSD (with certain versions of Xen.) The only restrictions that go with being dom0 have to do with the kernels for those systems being Xen-aware.
This flexibility brings enormous advantages incidentally. With enough memory, you can install something like Solaris as your domU and have it export NFS shares upon a ZFS file system to all of the domUs, giving every operating system you run the advantages of the host. At the other extreme, you can install something small and light - bugs aside, I found Xen's integration with Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS wonderful when setting up my little firewall-gateway/servers box. I have the barest Ubuntu Server installation (no X11/GNOME/etc) as dom0, and even barer systems for the domUs It's great.
They're both Linux only at this point, and Xen effectively runs a forked version of Linux because it isn't, and won't be, upstream.
Xen is PowerPC, ix86, and AMD64 at the moment. In terms of operating systems it can run as dom0, see above. In terms of operating systems it can run as domU, well, the choice is massive.
Really, what you're saying convinces me you haven't really investigated what makes Xen Xen. I would never install Xen on my laptop. I'd never install KVM on my server machine. Take another look at both, and see why their strengths make them suitable for different purposes, neither are solutions that fit every application, and they complement each other well in terms of the applications they efficiently support.
Re:Expand on that please..
on
Running Xen
·
· Score: 1
I can't expand on it here because Pudge thinks that 4k is a really big message, and I really can't be bothered any more to navigate through the unholy fuck-up that is Slashcode today.
However, I did write something on Multiply that essentially explains the whole issue. If you understand why KVM and Xen are entirely different explanations, you understand why a desktop system like Ubuntu was never going to "choose" Xen as a "virtualization solution", and probably shouldn't have even considered it back when they were. Likewise, the only reason a sysadmin would run KVM (or its predecessors such as VMWare) to replace a host of server machines is either out of desperation because a specific Xen issue, or out of ignorance. Xen has no competitors (thus far), but it has a narrow focus of application, and much of the bad-mouthing it gets is because of people who use it when something like KVM or VMWare would be much more suitable.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
on
Running Xen
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Xen and KVM are completely different types of virtualization solution. The supposed rivalry between the two is largely bad journalism, not rooted in anything to do with the platforms themselves.
If you want to run a single physical computer with multiple operating system instances, such as replacing a bank of servers with a single machine, Xen is your guy. If you want to run VMs under Linux, KVM is your friend. Conflating the two is like comparing... well, to use a car analogy, for this is Slashdot, a railroad with a tractor trailer.
The 8086 predates the 8088, which was more popular and eclipsed it largely because IBM picked the latter for the original IBM PC. The 8088 is a modified 8086 that talks to the outside world using bytes rather than 16 bit words. It's otherwise completely identical.
PC manufacturers started switching over to the 8086 from around 1986 onwards (the Amstrad PC1512 was one example, dating to 1986) because of the slight performance improvement it offered without being as expensive as the 80286. For real-mode applications, and 8086s running at the same speed as the 80286, there was barely any performance difference between the two chips.
The old joke at the time was that the 8088 was being phased out in 1986-1988 because the '88 in 8088 was the expiry date...
Christian terrorism and violence is practically non-existent.
As someone who lived in Britain from 1971 to 1998, I have to say you have no idea what you're talking about.
And that's just the obvious example. The KKK considers itself a Christian organization, and many of the groups involved in violent attacks on everyone from Jews to gays do to. You probably don't consider them Christian (and neither do I), but then what do you think your average Muslim thinks of Osama Bin Laden? How "Holy" do you think the Muslim guy down the street thinks a man who murders 3,000 people in cold blood is?
Mainstream Christianity in most places is non-violent, but the same is true of Judaism and Islam. This is not about moral equivalence, it's about the fact that you cannot judge an entire group of people on the basis of a bunch of extremists. You choose to do so for one group and turn a blind eye to others. That is why you fail.
That's great and all, but you seem to making a logic jump from "Well, we helped Kuwait at some point, and then afterwards the WTC was bombed, by some guy from Kuwait" to "This is just because the bomber wanted to demonstrate his moral superiority."
The deal is that Osama was upset with the fact that (a) the West was involved in liberating Kuwait. He didn't want non-Islamic forces on Arab soil, and (b) we were "still there" several years after the event. Interestingly, I believe the reasons why the WTC was attached twice are completely different. The first time it was apparently an attempt to get the US out of the region. The second couldn't have been that because Osama had to have known that that wouldn't have been the US reaction. I believe he wanted us in: Osama wants the governments in that region destabilized. Provoking a reaction from the the most powerful country on Earth was a great way to do that.
No attack on the US has been in any way deserved. But we do blunder by not understanding the politics and motivations of the people who attack us. Sometimes we cause harm. Other times we needlessly create resentment. If we want to get into a position of avoiding terror attacks, the onus is on us to be smart. We need to tackle the terrorists who try to attack us, and we need to do what we can to reduce the risk terrorists will see us as worth attacking in the first place. Unfortunately, for almost eight years, we've had a President and political establishment who was easily manipulated by a tall, bearded, psychopath living in a cave, and it'll be decades, possibly centuries, before we're able to undo the damage.
Several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights appear confusing because they've mixed different rights into single amendments. It's unclear as to what the hell the crap about "well regulated militias" in the second is specifically about, but the only explanation I've heard thus far that makes sense is that the second is an attempt to state two rights, much as the first amendment both prohibits governmental interference with religion and preserves freedom of speech, two related but nonetheless distinct rights. The rights protected by the second are as follows:
States have the right to organize militias to defend themselves
Everyone has the right to arm themselves
I've never really seen a reading of the second that makes more sense than the above. There's the "You have the right to arm yourself because states have need militias to stay free" interpretation, which doesn't make much sense on any level and goes against the fact that the other amendments don't seem to need to justify the rights they give. There's the "States have the right to organize militias and the Federal government has no right to prevent people from bearing arms because that'd make it difficult for states to exercise their right", which almost makes sense but it's not really what that amendment says and, moreover, the usual interpretation, that this somehow means states have the right to regulate weapon ownership, doesn't agree with the actual wording.
There is weasel room. It's not clear from the amendment whether everyone's allowed to arm themselves with any weapon, and that seems to be where most of the legitimate debate is these days. If the Supreme Court ruled it means a lunatic living in a highly populated area has the right to keep a nuke in his basement, then I suspect the amendment would be repealed in short order. On the other hand, does it mean the Federal government could outlaw gun ownership on the grounds that you can still technically bear arms by wielding a bow and arrows?
But no, the term "regulated" does not connect to "bear arms".
Me, I defend myself with a pair of bear arms, as I take the constitution literally. No, it's not a new joke, in fact, it's been beaten to death (probably by those self-same bear arms) by now so please don't repeat it or mod this funny.
They are pretty intimidating though. A burglar broke into the house once, and I caught him in the living room. I held the bear arm ready to swing it against his head. He froze. We stared at each other. The adrenaline was pumping, and both of us waited to make the first move. For a minute or two, as he waited for me to hit him, all we could hear was our breathing.
Finally, after staring at the arms and waiting for me to make my move, he finally spoke up. He took a deep breath, and asked "Why the long pause?"
Because they haven't held elections in either state. Not valid ones anyway. Those who participated in the state-run opinion polls in either state did so in the belief they weren't doing anything but expressing an opinion. Those who didn't participate stayed away believing they would be taking part in something that wouldn't count and would be in violation of the rules. In one of those opinion polls, voters weren't even asked their opinion of Obama.
There are two wrong-headed decisions made here. One was the refusal of both states to participate in the Democratic candidate selection process. The other was the decision by the DNC to partially validate the results of two bogus elections whose results were, effectively, utterly meaningless by allowing "half votes" for one state, and the "average between 50:50 and the bogus result, with Obama being given all the votes against the other candidate" for the other. In reality, no talk of compromises should have been made, and Clinton should have been penalized for deliberately stirring up trouble. The ball should have been firmly in the offending states's court to hold a proper election. Clinton's decision to pretend the results were in some way valid gave both states all the excuses they needed to ignore the complete illegitimacy of their results and refuse to hold valid elections.
The results of the 2008 nominating process are tainted by the inclusion of fraudulent election results. One has to hope that the end result, Obama winning, is what would have happened anyway, and that Clinton would not have gained enough candidates in Michigan and Florida to overturn Obama's lead had the elections there been valid.
VMS is a monolithic operating system. Windows NT started off as microkernel based, though in time some user services have since migrated into the kernel.
There's very little similarity between both operating systems - kernel and userland - save for what you'd expect from something designed by the same person (Dave Cutler), and for what you'd see between Unix and NT, or any other mainstream OS and NT. I'm always bewildered this meme has taken off, especially given the only comparisons I've seen have generally been of the "My god! They both have kernels in a file whose name ends in ".EXE"! And they both have ways to pass packets of information between processes!" type crap.
I think what he's saying is actually "If you're developing the program at the same time as it's running, then Smalltalk will present you with the current state of the class." Which, from where I'm sitting, is one of those "technically correct but practically useless" answers that certain geeks are infamous for.
It's all essentially because he's nitpicking over your choice of terminology. If you were talking about a "development and pre-execution" phase then, obviously, there's no way Smalltalk can predict what the program is going to do before it runs it so the answer is "It can't, just like Java, Ruby, and ObjectiveFORTRAN++ Express for Workgroups 98XE can't." Of course it can't, determinism is one of the Holy Grails of computer science and if it were possible, Kay and his colleagues at Xerox would have won a Nobel Prize by now, and compilers would generally create applications that compile into a single NOP instruction.
But you're referring instead to an "IDE", which in Smalltalk's case is a dynamic environment integrated with the current state of the program. If you've ever used FORTH or Prolog it's kind of similar to those (only Smalltalk is obviously more high level than FORTH and most Smalltalk environments are graphical.) You declare things to the environment, and that's how you program it. For certain levels of complexity, Smalltalk may be able to determine what an object's class looks like when you refer to it, but at some point the state of that class needs to be locked down and not dynamically alterable to ensure a 1:1 mapping between what the IDE expects it to be when you're referring to it, and what it is when the code you're writing is going to be run.
In essence, you're completely right. Determinism is determinism, there's no way around it, all you can do is make environments smarter and smarter such that they can ultimately can do what they can to prevent errors. Sane environments make dynamic class generation difficult but not impossible, ensuring mechanisms encouraging predictability are in place.
FWIW, Squeak is a free-software (since last year) implementation of Smalltalk that you might want to have a play with. It's available for most platforms, and under active development by Apple. It's worth looking so you can have a real idea of what Smalltalk advocates are talking about and how "practical" the language is for ordinary software development. A flippant description would be "Excel for Programmers". If you've seen what a PHB will do with Excel, you have some idea of what can be done in Smalltalk, only more elegantly and with far more power at your fingertips.
Sugar cane and corn are being used to make biofuels. Rice is generally being ignored as a biofuel source.
So far as I can determine, demand hasn't risen for rice despite corn and sugar price increases. And rice paddy fields are not suitable for sugar cane or corn use, so the shortage has nothing to do with rice fields being turned over for ethanol production. So the whole "Biofuels are causing food shortage" argument is very obviously broken, and I'm baffled it's become the new right's meme. On the other hand, you're the same idiots who think global warming is a myth/secret liberal plot to take away your guns, as is evolution.
On the other hand, it will also slow down developers to and force them to take an attitude of "If I make this rely upon the just released and completely virtually untested features of kgnomevx11lib.so.4.0.11, then there's no chance anyone will ever run my program beyond a tiny group of Gentoo users in the next two years, so my better option is to actually do this properly and make it work with existing, widely used, systems."
Sorry, but this explanation is completely ridiculous. This is a Mac we're talking about. Macs aren't built using cheap components, Steve Jobs personally inspects every part that will go into a Mac himself and only buys the finest quality goods from superior suppliers.
At least, that's what I've been told numerous times which makes me wonder why none of my Macs have actually outlasted a single PC I've bought. (Well, ok, my Powerbook technically "works", but it crashes after a while if it runs anything remotely taxing. And one of the hinges is completely broken. As for the other three Macs I owned, none of them outlasted my ancient Thinkpad 750, my two Sun SparcClassics, or even my Wal-Mart PC.
I'm not the GP and I understood the OP's point, but I have to say I disagree and I disagree with your assessment. Here's why.
So-called "intellectual property law" is a somewhat misleading category that includes both good and bad laws designed to protect intangible property. Copyright, for the most part, is a good idea but current laws are far too draconian. Patents are of questionable usefulness (to a society, I mean, not to a patent holder...) the concept is inherently draconian (I can't use something I independently invented because someone else invented it before I did?), and even patent supporters would, for the most part - with some notable exceptions - agree that patents cover far too many areas of creativity at the moment.
But trademark law in the US is relatively sensible. Trademark law, above all, is about making it hard for someone to pass themselves off as someone else. To do that, the "someone else" is allowed to take something that isn't in the public domain already associated with their area of business, and monopolize it for as long as it stays out of the public domain, but only in relation to their business.
Apple doesn't have a case, as the City of New York has pointed out. The term "Apple" to describe NYC has been in the public domain for decades, and for much longer than Apple has been in existence, let alone had the trademark. This isn't a loophole that NYC has fallen through, this is absolutely the way it works. The term is in the public domain, and it has little or nothing to do with Apple Inc's area of business.
Now, if I tried to use the word "Apple" to describe my computer business, it's possible it might confuse customers who may believe my company has something to do with Steve Jobs's outfit. In that case, trademark law would apply. Would this be unfair? No, it wouldn't: my calling my business "Apple" is unfair both to Apple Inc and to society at large whose ability to trade would be undermined by completely unnecessary confusion.
I've yet to see a case in the US where someone's enforcement of a trademark was genuinely unfair to the people accused of misusing it. Most of the outrage tends to be associated with C&D letters, or even polite, friendly, "please stop doing that" letters such as the one T-Mobile sent Engadget last week; but in terms of actual court cases, I haven't seen any cases where someone was genuinely the victim of an abuse of trademark law.
Another just law is the one that outlaws Murder. If it became common for people to falsely accuse others of murder, we wouldn't claim that the laws that outlaw murder are somehow unjust.
Copyright law: good in concept, bad in execution. Patent laws: dubious in concept, execution over-broad and flawed by concept. Trademark law: good on concept, pretty good in execution in the US. Why we lump these three together in the first place is questionable.
Ah, the classic double standard of right-wing politics.
All liberals are responsible if one person, liberal or not, compares Bush to Hitler
All Muslims are responsible if one person who identifies themselves as Islamic blows up a building
All Blacks churchgoers are responsible if their pastor quotes a major mainstream political figure as suggesting that the US may have done some bad things in the past
No conservatives are responsible if Ann Coulter wishes for the death of the entire staff of the New York Times
A Presidential Candidate is not responsible if he actively solicits the endorsement of preachers who have already promoted hatred against blameless groups and who have suggested the US deserved being attacked by terrorists for not being Godly enough - as long as the Presidential Candidate is a Republican
None of the people you're responding to has in any way compared Bush to Hitler, or spewed hatred against any Republican, but apparently we're all responsible for those who have because we're liberals, even in cases where no such hatred has been apparent or implied.
Conservatives: The people who believe in personal responsibility for themselves and collective responsibility for everyone else.
Yet another reason to hold your nose and vote for the Democrat this November, whether it's the one we want or Hillary Clinton.
ultimately, an act of treason, a betrayal of a nation of people, of your neighbors and friends and family and yourself
It's really hard to take you seriously when you call John McCain the 'enemy' and link supporting him (directly or indirectly) to something as despicable as treason. Let me help you out with treason: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
It's hard to take you seriously when your talking points appear to be the same as the idiot wingnuts who have also suddenly decided that the act of taking sides in an election is "hatred" and you fail to understand basic English.
John McCain is the enemy. He is the person we're trying to beat at this election. We're trying to beat him because we believe our candidates, Clinton and Obama, will steer this country in the right direction whereas John McCain will fuck it up even more. John McCain's values are not ours.
For us to deliberately vote for John McCain, knowing, as we do, that we will be damaging the country by doing so, is an act of treason. I'm not accusing McCain of treason, I'm accusing you - that is, a member of the group I described that is willing to vote for McCain or refuse to vote for Clinton or Obama if your chosen candidate doesn't get the nomination - of treason. McCain's an idiot right-winger. He genuinely believes that endless war is in the country's best interests. He's not deliberately trying to destroy the country out of spite. You are.
No, you actually said that McCain WANTS to be in Iraq for the next 100 years. That's a lie, plain and simple.
Can't argue with what the man said, so short of you assuming I can mind-read and that McCain really isn't happy with us being in Iraq for 100 years, I can't really determine where you're getting it from that I'm "lying". McCain said it, and I believe him, he, like you, really is that crazy.
Adversary, maybe. Enemy? No. And that is the problem with so many like you. You consider everyone on the other side the "enemy".
Well, yeah, that's the definition of enemy.
You'll make yourself believe whatever it takes to justify your raw hatred for them.
I haven't actually displayed any hatred for the guy, so I'm inclined to wonder whether you've lost your marbles. I'm guessing you're so sucked into the Rush Limbaugh "TEH LIBERALS DISAGREE WITH US BECAUSE THEY HATE US" meme you've lost what remaining ability you had to understand logic, reason, and empathy.
I don't hate Obama nor Clinton. I do not see them as the enemy. I'll back whichever of the three make it the office because I love America more than a political party and partisanship. I can't say the same for people like you.
I look forward to you telling us how you put your hand over your eyes when you voted just to make sure your pick was truly random, because it's not like you'd be disappointed if a particular candidate wins or anything.
Yeah, I'm kind of bewildered by it. It's not even as if the right are making any sense, look at the fury they've worked themselves into by me describing the guy we have to beat as "the enemy".
I think the far-right have gotten so used to the "hatred" meme (an ironic meme for the wingnuts to paint liberals with if ever there was one) they just work themselves into a hatred-ridden tizzy on principle.
They're lunatics, which is another good reason why we need them out of power in November, whether we get the candidate we want, or have to make do with Hillary Clinton.
Slashdot Mirror
You guys need to get your story straight. It was, actually, a preference. McCain implied he felt that Iraq was just like Japan and Germany, countries that we've "occupied" (in his terms) for more than half a decade. The sheer ridiculousness of either implying either country is "occupied" (we have troops stationed in each, but not in an occupying sense), or that Iraq is anything like those two is what makes McCain's comments all the more ridiculous. Ironically, the right tends to complain we're misrepresenting him by pointing out he was making that comparison.
"Dude, McCain said he wants to eat babies"
"How dare the you on the left misrepresent McCain like that! All he said is that if the Chinese eat babies, then he'd like to eat one too, as he heard they're tasty and delicious."
Counterpoint? Drepper's not explaining that the "KVM and Xen are competitors" war is valid, he's just buying into it without justifying it. He doesn't "get" Xen so he assumes it's used in the same areas as KVM and that, therefore, crude performance comparisons are valid. I've not really read much of his stuff before, so it'd be inaccurate to say I've lost respect for the guy on reading that article, but it does sound like he's "not getting it" which reflects somewhat poorly on him. I know I made the right decision putting Xen on my firewall/gateway server, I can't imagine even considering virtualization for a network-accessable no-monitor/keyboard box sitting in my closet. I also know that I wouldn't want Xen on my desktop.
Saying "These both do virtualization therefore one is better than the other" is as silly as saying "Bluetooth and Wifi are both "doing wireless" therefore one is better than the other." The only way to make KVM usable in the area Xen excels is to refactor it so that Linux runs underneath it, not over it. This, of course, means it'll not be KVM, and it'll become a less than ideal application for desktop virtualization.
Likewise Xen can be refactored so it runs under Linux rather than vice-versa. Then it'll be hampered by Linux's limitations, and for the most part by GNU's too. There's no good reason to do this, there already are numerous desktop virtualization systems out there, why undermine the only viable server virtualization system in an effort to compete in an area that already has numerous alternatives?
If you want to compare KVM's performance, do it against its actual rivals like BOCHS and VMWare. If you want to compare Xen's... well, right now you have nothing to compare it to. You have to either say it's good enough for you, or it isn't, and if it isn't, buy multiple machines. If Drepper and others want to produce an alternative to Xen, they need to first understand what it is, why it's useful, and what it's used for. Clearly, if they're going to assume KVM is an alternative, they haven't bothered.
The SUVs I've been in have pretty crummy leg and head room. I'm 6'2", and I can only assume you've been in a very small set of, well, very small cars, and have extrapolated from that. Larger cars, from the Camry onwards, tend to have at least as much leg and head room as most SUVs.
If you really want comfort, you'd be looking into larger cars or minivans. But, of course, minivans are soooo unfashionable, whereas SUVs are sporty, even if they're also terrifyingly unsafe, both to their occupants and everyone around them.
Except Apple cannot forbid that in many markets. Apple can refuse to sell iPhones in particular markets, such as France and Germany, but if it makes a deal with a French telco (for example), that telco must offer the iPhone unlocked.
I don't see any evidence that Jobs is going to refuse to sell 3G iPhones in markets like France, so despite the "Maximum of $199" claim, you can expect to see unlocked 3G iPhones, and they'll probably cost a tad more than $199.
And we should, of course, abolish all laws. It's not like the other manslaughter laws have prevented manslaughter from happening, right?
Manslaughter is generally defined as (depends on country, I'm sure Slashdot's legion of lawyers will be here to quote the exact definition for your jurisdiction) death due to an avoidable error on the part of another. In other words, where you're responsible for someone's death but didn't intend to kill them. So, for example, if you accidentally kill someone by trying to scare them by driving your car towards them, only to slip up and run them over, then that's generally manslaughter.
What, I believe, the GP was getting at was that if you're going to make the decision to drive an SUV, a device that's the definition of "unsafe at any speed", you're exhibiting willful negligence in the process. It could be argued, strongly enough for the government to be within its rights passing a law to make it legally unambiguous, that if you made the decision to arm yourself with an SUV, and killed someone as a result, you committed an act of manslaughter because you intentionally drove an unsafe - difficult to control, more damaging in accidents - vehicle.
And if such a law is passed, and car dealerships are required to tell customers "There is a stronger possibility that you will be involved in an accident driving this vehicle, and also that the accident will result in a fatality, and under Florida State law, you will be held responsible for that death due to your decision to drive this type of vehicle, and will face up to ten years in prison once convicted", quite a few customers may chose to buy something else.
And those that buy SUVs anyway - well, hopefully they'll be a little more careful when driving.
Here's a rewording that I think is more appropriate: Xen has sub-optimal support for laptops. As laptops appear to be the future as far as personal computing goes, Xen has little future in that area.
But it never did. Xen was never the optimal solution for desktops. Desktop users generally have no desire to run more than one operating system on a permanent basis. They want transitory access to virtualization. Only if you believe that the only use for virtualization is to run guest operating systems in the transitory way desktop users desire would you suggest that the future of Xen is dependent upon the success, or lack of it, for laptops.
You're fighting a war that doesn't need to be fought. The two systems, KVM/VMWare/Qeme etc and Xen, are complementary. They are aimed at entirely different applications. Sure, people will try to force fit one solution to the other's area, just as some people think a desktop operating system makes for a good server. But that doesn't mean it's the right approach, or that people will get to a point that the right solution - which right now has momentum and mindshare - is going to disappear.
Xen's days in the server space are dependent upon a superior technology not coming along in the same space. KVM doesn't exist in the same space, it doesn't solve the same problems, any admin who tries to run it there is certainly not doing themselves any favors. And given servers are exactly the kinds of system that are permanently on, running, and sucking up power, it's hard to take seriously the argument that "power management" issues are going to make Xen be seen to be so bad that (rational) admins would seriously consider running everything as VMs on a desktop.
Sure, and Wifi does it better and simpler than Bluetooth by using Ethernet frames (The Bluetooth vs Wifi "war" is also a good example of where geeks get it completely, 100%, wrong by not recognizing the entirely different applications the technologies are aimed at.) You're comparing apples to oranges, and assuming that because KVM works better in a specific scenario that it works better.
It's not daft, your response makes no sense. Let's break it down:
You're implying that Xen can't run VMs under Linux but KVM can
That's right. Xen cannot run VMs under Linux. Xen runs VMs on the bare hardware. In the Xen environment, operating systems run under Xen, not vice versa. The only way to run Xen "under" Linux is to run it in an emulator!
This sentence makes no sense as is. It can't run VMs under Linux, as stated above. In terms of operating system support, you can run various operating systems under Xen as "dom0". Dom0 is a special domain that most hardware is managed by by default (though you can redirect any almost piece of hardware to be managed by any guest system. For example, on my home server, one of the Ethernet cards is managed completely by a domU.) Dom0 can be one of many operating systems, including Linux-based systems, OpenSolaris/SunOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and certain versions of FreeBSD (with certain versions of Xen.) The only restrictions that go with being dom0 have to do with the kernels for those systems being Xen-aware.
This flexibility brings enormous advantages incidentally. With enough memory, you can install something like Solaris as your domU and have it export NFS shares upon a ZFS file system to all of the domUs, giving every operating system you run the advantages of the host. At the other extreme, you can install something small and light - bugs aside, I found Xen's integration with Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS wonderful when setting up my little firewall-gateway/servers box. I have the barest Ubuntu Server installation (no X11/GNOME/etc) as dom0, and even barer systems for the domUs It's great.
Xen is PowerPC, ix86, and AMD64 at the moment. In terms of operating systems it can run as dom0, see above. In terms of operating systems it can run as domU, well, the choice is massive.
Really, what you're saying convinces me you haven't really investigated what makes Xen Xen. I would never install Xen on my laptop. I'd never install KVM on my server machine. Take another look at both, and see why their strengths make them suitable for different purposes, neither are solutions that fit every application, and they complement each other well in terms of the applications they efficiently support.
I can't expand on it here because Pudge thinks that 4k is a really big message, and I really can't be bothered any more to navigate through the unholy fuck-up that is Slashcode today.
However, I did write something on Multiply that essentially explains the whole issue. If you understand why KVM and Xen are entirely different explanations, you understand why a desktop system like Ubuntu was never going to "choose" Xen as a "virtualization solution", and probably shouldn't have even considered it back when they were. Likewise, the only reason a sysadmin would run KVM (or its predecessors such as VMWare) to replace a host of server machines is either out of desperation because a specific Xen issue, or out of ignorance. Xen has no competitors (thus far), but it has a narrow focus of application, and much of the bad-mouthing it gets is because of people who use it when something like KVM or VMWare would be much more suitable.
Xen and KVM are completely different types of virtualization solution. The supposed rivalry between the two is largely bad journalism, not rooted in anything to do with the platforms themselves.
If you want to run a single physical computer with multiple operating system instances, such as replacing a bank of servers with a single machine, Xen is your guy. If you want to run VMs under Linux, KVM is your friend. Conflating the two is like comparing... well, to use a car analogy, for this is Slashdot, a railroad with a tractor trailer.
The 8086 predates the 8088, which was more popular and eclipsed it largely because IBM picked the latter for the original IBM PC. The 8088 is a modified 8086 that talks to the outside world using bytes rather than 16 bit words. It's otherwise completely identical.
PC manufacturers started switching over to the 8086 from around 1986 onwards (the Amstrad PC1512 was one example, dating to 1986) because of the slight performance improvement it offered without being as expensive as the 80286. For real-mode applications, and 8086s running at the same speed as the 80286, there was barely any performance difference between the two chips.
The old joke at the time was that the 8088 was being phased out in 1986-1988 because the '88 in 8088 was the expiry date...
As someone who lived in Britain from 1971 to 1998, I have to say you have no idea what you're talking about.
And that's just the obvious example. The KKK considers itself a Christian organization, and many of the groups involved in violent attacks on everyone from Jews to gays do to. You probably don't consider them Christian (and neither do I), but then what do you think your average Muslim thinks of Osama Bin Laden? How "Holy" do you think the Muslim guy down the street thinks a man who murders 3,000 people in cold blood is?
Mainstream Christianity in most places is non-violent, but the same is true of Judaism and Islam. This is not about moral equivalence, it's about the fact that you cannot judge an entire group of people on the basis of a bunch of extremists. You choose to do so for one group and turn a blind eye to others. That is why you fail.
That's great and all, but you seem to making a logic jump from "Well, we helped Kuwait at some point, and then afterwards the WTC was bombed, by some guy from Kuwait" to "This is just because the bomber wanted to demonstrate his moral superiority."
The deal is that Osama was upset with the fact that (a) the West was involved in liberating Kuwait. He didn't want non-Islamic forces on Arab soil, and (b) we were "still there" several years after the event. Interestingly, I believe the reasons why the WTC was attached twice are completely different. The first time it was apparently an attempt to get the US out of the region. The second couldn't have been that because Osama had to have known that that wouldn't have been the US reaction. I believe he wanted us in: Osama wants the governments in that region destabilized. Provoking a reaction from the the most powerful country on Earth was a great way to do that.
No attack on the US has been in any way deserved. But we do blunder by not understanding the politics and motivations of the people who attack us. Sometimes we cause harm. Other times we needlessly create resentment. If we want to get into a position of avoiding terror attacks, the onus is on us to be smart. We need to tackle the terrorists who try to attack us, and we need to do what we can to reduce the risk terrorists will see us as worth attacking in the first place. Unfortunately, for almost eight years, we've had a President and political establishment who was easily manipulated by a tall, bearded, psychopath living in a cave, and it'll be decades, possibly centuries, before we're able to undo the damage.
Several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights appear confusing because they've mixed different rights into single amendments. It's unclear as to what the hell the crap about "well regulated militias" in the second is specifically about, but the only explanation I've heard thus far that makes sense is that the second is an attempt to state two rights, much as the first amendment both prohibits governmental interference with religion and preserves freedom of speech, two related but nonetheless distinct rights. The rights protected by the second are as follows:
I've never really seen a reading of the second that makes more sense than the above. There's the "You have the right to arm yourself because states have need militias to stay free" interpretation, which doesn't make much sense on any level and goes against the fact that the other amendments don't seem to need to justify the rights they give. There's the "States have the right to organize militias and the Federal government has no right to prevent people from bearing arms because that'd make it difficult for states to exercise their right", which almost makes sense but it's not really what that amendment says and, moreover, the usual interpretation, that this somehow means states have the right to regulate weapon ownership, doesn't agree with the actual wording.
There is weasel room. It's not clear from the amendment whether everyone's allowed to arm themselves with any weapon, and that seems to be where most of the legitimate debate is these days. If the Supreme Court ruled it means a lunatic living in a highly populated area has the right to keep a nuke in his basement, then I suspect the amendment would be repealed in short order. On the other hand, does it mean the Federal government could outlaw gun ownership on the grounds that you can still technically bear arms by wielding a bow and arrows?
But no, the term "regulated" does not connect to "bear arms".
Me, I defend myself with a pair of bear arms, as I take the constitution literally. No, it's not a new joke, in fact, it's been beaten to death (probably by those self-same bear arms) by now so please don't repeat it or mod this funny.
They are pretty intimidating though. A burglar broke into the house once, and I caught him in the living room. I held the bear arm ready to swing it against his head. He froze. We stared at each other. The adrenaline was pumping, and both of us waited to make the first move. For a minute or two, as he waited for me to hit him, all we could hear was our breathing.
Finally, after staring at the arms and waiting for me to make my move, he finally spoke up. He took a deep breath, and asked "Why the long pause?"
Because they haven't held elections in either state. Not valid ones anyway. Those who participated in the state-run opinion polls in either state did so in the belief they weren't doing anything but expressing an opinion. Those who didn't participate stayed away believing they would be taking part in something that wouldn't count and would be in violation of the rules. In one of those opinion polls, voters weren't even asked their opinion of Obama.
There are two wrong-headed decisions made here. One was the refusal of both states to participate in the Democratic candidate selection process. The other was the decision by the DNC to partially validate the results of two bogus elections whose results were, effectively, utterly meaningless by allowing "half votes" for one state, and the "average between 50:50 and the bogus result, with Obama being given all the votes against the other candidate" for the other. In reality, no talk of compromises should have been made, and Clinton should have been penalized for deliberately stirring up trouble. The ball should have been firmly in the offending states's court to hold a proper election. Clinton's decision to pretend the results were in some way valid gave both states all the excuses they needed to ignore the complete illegitimacy of their results and refuse to hold valid elections.
The results of the 2008 nominating process are tainted by the inclusion of fraudulent election results. One has to hope that the end result, Obama winning, is what would have happened anyway, and that Clinton would not have gained enough candidates in Michigan and Florida to overturn Obama's lead had the elections there been valid.
Postscript: yeah, I know it wasn't your point, I just get annoyed at the "VMS = WNT" stuff when I read it. Sorry.
VMS is a monolithic operating system. Windows NT started off as microkernel based, though in time some user services have since migrated into the kernel.
There's very little similarity between both operating systems - kernel and userland - save for what you'd expect from something designed by the same person (Dave Cutler), and for what you'd see between Unix and NT, or any other mainstream OS and NT. I'm always bewildered this meme has taken off, especially given the only comparisons I've seen have generally been of the "My god! They both have kernels in a file whose name ends in ".EXE"! And they both have ways to pass packets of information between processes!" type crap.
I think what he's saying is actually "If you're developing the program at the same time as it's running, then Smalltalk will present you with the current state of the class." Which, from where I'm sitting, is one of those "technically correct but practically useless" answers that certain geeks are infamous for.
It's all essentially because he's nitpicking over your choice of terminology. If you were talking about a "development and pre-execution" phase then, obviously, there's no way Smalltalk can predict what the program is going to do before it runs it so the answer is "It can't, just like Java, Ruby, and ObjectiveFORTRAN++ Express for Workgroups 98XE can't." Of course it can't, determinism is one of the Holy Grails of computer science and if it were possible, Kay and his colleagues at Xerox would have won a Nobel Prize by now, and compilers would generally create applications that compile into a single NOP instruction.
But you're referring instead to an "IDE", which in Smalltalk's case is a dynamic environment integrated with the current state of the program. If you've ever used FORTH or Prolog it's kind of similar to those (only Smalltalk is obviously more high level than FORTH and most Smalltalk environments are graphical.) You declare things to the environment, and that's how you program it. For certain levels of complexity, Smalltalk may be able to determine what an object's class looks like when you refer to it, but at some point the state of that class needs to be locked down and not dynamically alterable to ensure a 1:1 mapping between what the IDE expects it to be when you're referring to it, and what it is when the code you're writing is going to be run.
In essence, you're completely right. Determinism is determinism, there's no way around it, all you can do is make environments smarter and smarter such that they can ultimately can do what they can to prevent errors. Sane environments make dynamic class generation difficult but not impossible, ensuring mechanisms encouraging predictability are in place.
FWIW, Squeak is a free-software (since last year) implementation of Smalltalk that you might want to have a play with. It's available for most platforms, and under active development by Apple. It's worth looking so you can have a real idea of what Smalltalk advocates are talking about and how "practical" the language is for ordinary software development. A flippant description would be "Excel for Programmers". If you've seen what a PHB will do with Excel, you have some idea of what can be done in Smalltalk, only more elegantly and with far more power at your fingertips.
The world food shortage is of rice.
Sugar cane and corn are being used to make biofuels. Rice is generally being ignored as a biofuel source.
So far as I can determine, demand hasn't risen for rice despite corn and sugar price increases. And rice paddy fields are not suitable for sugar cane or corn use, so the shortage has nothing to do with rice fields being turned over for ethanol production. So the whole "Biofuels are causing food shortage" argument is very obviously broken, and I'm baffled it's become the new right's meme. On the other hand, you're the same idiots who think global warming is a myth/secret liberal plot to take away your guns, as is evolution.
On the other hand, it will also slow down developers to and force them to take an attitude of "If I make this rely upon the just released and completely virtually untested features of kgnomevx11lib.so.4.0.11, then there's no chance anyone will ever run my program beyond a tiny group of Gentoo users in the next two years, so my better option is to actually do this properly and make it work with existing, widely used, systems."
And frankly, that'd be a good thing.
Sorry, but this explanation is completely ridiculous. This is a Mac we're talking about. Macs aren't built using cheap components, Steve Jobs personally inspects every part that will go into a Mac himself and only buys the finest quality goods from superior suppliers.
At least, that's what I've been told numerous times which makes me wonder why none of my Macs have actually outlasted a single PC I've bought. (Well, ok, my Powerbook technically "works", but it crashes after a while if it runs anything remotely taxing. And one of the hinges is completely broken. As for the other three Macs I owned, none of them outlasted my ancient Thinkpad 750, my two Sun SparcClassics, or even my Wal-Mart PC.
I'm not the GP and I understood the OP's point, but I have to say I disagree and I disagree with your assessment. Here's why.
So-called "intellectual property law" is a somewhat misleading category that includes both good and bad laws designed to protect intangible property. Copyright, for the most part, is a good idea but current laws are far too draconian. Patents are of questionable usefulness (to a society, I mean, not to a patent holder...) the concept is inherently draconian (I can't use something I independently invented because someone else invented it before I did?), and even patent supporters would, for the most part - with some notable exceptions - agree that patents cover far too many areas of creativity at the moment.
But trademark law in the US is relatively sensible. Trademark law, above all, is about making it hard for someone to pass themselves off as someone else. To do that, the "someone else" is allowed to take something that isn't in the public domain already associated with their area of business, and monopolize it for as long as it stays out of the public domain, but only in relation to their business.
Apple doesn't have a case, as the City of New York has pointed out. The term "Apple" to describe NYC has been in the public domain for decades, and for much longer than Apple has been in existence, let alone had the trademark. This isn't a loophole that NYC has fallen through, this is absolutely the way it works. The term is in the public domain, and it has little or nothing to do with Apple Inc's area of business.
Now, if I tried to use the word "Apple" to describe my computer business, it's possible it might confuse customers who may believe my company has something to do with Steve Jobs's outfit. In that case, trademark law would apply. Would this be unfair? No, it wouldn't: my calling my business "Apple" is unfair both to Apple Inc and to society at large whose ability to trade would be undermined by completely unnecessary confusion.
I've yet to see a case in the US where someone's enforcement of a trademark was genuinely unfair to the people accused of misusing it. Most of the outrage tends to be associated with C&D letters, or even polite, friendly, "please stop doing that" letters such as the one T-Mobile sent Engadget last week; but in terms of actual court cases, I haven't seen any cases where someone was genuinely the victim of an abuse of trademark law.
Another just law is the one that outlaws Murder. If it became common for people to falsely accuse others of murder, we wouldn't claim that the laws that outlaw murder are somehow unjust.
Copyright law: good in concept, bad in execution. Patent laws: dubious in concept, execution over-broad and flawed by concept. Trademark law: good on concept, pretty good in execution in the US. Why we lump these three together in the first place is questionable.
Ah, the classic double standard of right-wing politics.
None of the people you're responding to has in any way compared Bush to Hitler, or spewed hatred against any Republican, but apparently we're all responsible for those who have because we're liberals, even in cases where no such hatred has been apparent or implied.
Conservatives: The people who believe in personal responsibility for themselves and collective responsibility for everyone else.
Yet another reason to hold your nose and vote for the Democrat this November, whether it's the one we want or Hillary Clinton.
It's hard to take you seriously when your talking points appear to be the same as the idiot wingnuts who have also suddenly decided that the act of taking sides in an election is "hatred" and you fail to understand basic English.
John McCain is the enemy. He is the person we're trying to beat at this election. We're trying to beat him because we believe our candidates, Clinton and Obama, will steer this country in the right direction whereas John McCain will fuck it up even more. John McCain's values are not ours.
For us to deliberately vote for John McCain, knowing, as we do, that we will be damaging the country by doing so, is an act of treason. I'm not accusing McCain of treason, I'm accusing you - that is, a member of the group I described that is willing to vote for McCain or refuse to vote for Clinton or Obama if your chosen candidate doesn't get the nomination - of treason. McCain's an idiot right-winger. He genuinely believes that endless war is in the country's best interests. He's not deliberately trying to destroy the country out of spite. You are.
Get it?
Yeah, I'm kind of bewildered by it. It's not even as if the right are making any sense, look at the fury they've worked themselves into by me describing the guy we have to beat as "the enemy".
I think the far-right have gotten so used to the "hatred" meme (an ironic meme for the wingnuts to paint liberals with if ever there was one) they just work themselves into a hatred-ridden tizzy on principle.
They're lunatics, which is another good reason why we need them out of power in November, whether we get the candidate we want, or have to make do with Hillary Clinton.