Screwdriver is to remove the screw under the oil reservoir. You might need a wrench. Depends on the vehicle. Unlike the strap wrench, you pretty much always need some tool for that bit. It tends to get grimy and stick.
To be sure, it doesn't work well yet. But its a far sight from "we can't prove it or tell you how to do it." If Xen development continues at the rate it has been going, its only another six months or so away before its reliable. Maybe less. Xen is very much a contender for this.
How many people can change their own oil? Fix their own TV?
Dude...that's like saying, "How many people can build their own birdfeeder? Build their own House?"
Fixing a TV requires replacement of high-voltage electronics. Good diagnostics require at least a multimeter, and preferably an oscilliscope...and if you do it wrong the high voltage could kill you.
Changing oil requires an oil filter, a screw driver, and a pan, and if you do it wrong you'll usually just get oil all over the place (although a friend of mine did accidentally destroy my transmission by changing the transmission fluid instead of the oil).
The only way the EU could actually enforce this would be to threaten, essentially, trade sanctions.
This just isn't true. It's much easier to seize assets of a large corporation than it is for an individual. They can just take the money.
Who controls the banks and credit agencies in Europe? (here's a hint: it rhymes with "la snoverning hodies."
Even if Microsoft stopped using Europe as a place to store their money (which they really can't do if they're going to have any people over there - they need a place to store payroll/etc), any money headed *to* Microsoft can be intercepted and replaced with a deduction in Microsoft's debt.
Of course, if the fine is repeatedly levied it becomes a sort of trade sanction, doesn't it?
Except that instead of taking a cut of each dollar MS makes, they're just going to take all of it until the daily fine quota has been filled...which likely means that they're going to be bleeding Microsoft's EU holdings dry after a pretty short time.
But...interface is in what it does not what the menus at the top look like.
IE4 is significantly different from IE6. Most notably different is that: 1) Nearly all of the things claimed actually work. 2) DOM support 3) CSS support
In practice, that means that there are a lot of things that you can do (and Websites you can go to) with IE6 that you can't with IE4.
Firefox 1.0 to 1.5 is a pretty big jump too, IMHO, because rendering works right most of the time.
Before, if you did funky things with div manipulation that required double buffering/etc. horrible things could happen. Works now. Javascript debugging is nicer now, too.
Those are hard things to solidify. If I had to make a comparison, I'd say that Firefox 1.0 to 1.5 is similar in # of bugfixes to IE4 to IE5.
So (IMHO) they're not going quite as overboard with numbering as Microsoft is, even.
Hmm...let me log into the ole virtual private server and see the memory used... 28764k (that would be 28.09MB for the uninformed).
Considering that memory for files almost never gets freed until it's needed, that's likely close to the most *ever* used.
Am I using an old version or a small one? Perhaps one configured to be small/lightweight?
Nope. CentOS 4.
What am I running?
mysql, postfix, spamassassin, apache, syslog, ssh, and denyhosts (a primitive IPS for ssh)
I seem to be considerably below your requirement for memory usage. I'm using 568MB for everything, btw, which includes a heck of a lot more stuff - rails, python, php, perl, gcc, postgres, egroupware, webmin, etc.
If I look at my desktop box, I see closer to 500MB used, which is more in synch with your expectations.
Maybe, though, your linux box should be used for something besides a desktop? Maybe as your router/spam detector/print server/webserver?
...but I do, and apparently so do the Slashdot editors who chose this title.
They're going to be digitizing it (like in Tron) so that they can fight viruses personally. They'll also be improving the searches by overseeing the programs responsible through direct communication rather than through programming.
Its thought that it'll be a little safer for them to do this in a plane since all the programs only have bikes. A plane will also help avoid the dangerous lines emitted by the back of the bikes, which can cause deresolution to those who don't have lightening reflexes.
Not that it's all going to be for business, of course. They've hired some playboy girls to write a few of the programs (well...they're only visual basic, but it counts), since all programs end up looking exactly like the person who writes them while inside, and all users are viewed as gods when they enter the internet.
Point is, they're impeding google's ability to improve it's searches, which impedes my ability to have better google searches.
1) While the filesystem architecture is pretty horrible, there have been successes there by other companies.
There's are file system interfaces to NFS, FTP, EXT2, UDF, and a probably a few more that I can't think of right now. This has nothing to do with the previously badly written code.
The problem with WinFS is WinFS. It's got features in it that would make it unacceptably slow and easily corrupted. That won't fly. I think they thought that they could overcome these obvious problems through genius. Apparently its still hard.
2) Like every OS trailing back almost to the invention of the compiler, Windows is modular. And by that I don't mean "it has modules, or even dlls" I mean that the ideas within it are divided into real (and occasionally conceptual) pieces.
Some of the pieces are new and shiny and well written. Some are old and spaghetti-like. There's no reason to throw out everything to get one new piece. The fundamental design of the Windows kernel is neat even if the registry isn't. The network stack works pretty well even if the filesystem interface doesn't.
Along those lines, I think they should stop selling windows as one thing. I'd like to know what new thing it is I'm getting in the latest version of Windows. Because they do occasionally throw out the old and replace it with something new and fresh that works great. But sometimes they only sell things that are exactly the same as the old, but with things I don't care about at all, or sell me lots of things I don't care about and only one that I do.
Using PHP, you don't have to worry about things like memory management and/or memory type translation. A "1" becomes a 2 when you add a 1 to it.
Arrays and hashes are the same. Any array can be accessed as a hash, any hash is also an array. Makes it easy to define data in memory, then do loops/recursion on it to get whatever result you want.
Simple!
These are features of nearly every modern scripting language and are therefore nothing to brag about. The first feature is called weakly typing, and is known not to scale well in terms of adding more developers on a tightly-coupled project. The second feature is an offshoot of that.
And, as far as security, the vast majority of issues have been with idiots writing insecure scripting, which can be done in any language. (Yes, I'm thinking of you, SPAW editor!) And, if you're using a decent operating system with an update mechanism (EG: yum) then updates to fix found security issues is a no-brainer.
The language puts everything into one global namespace. This is a horrible, horrible security risk that is built-in to the language design. Code badly in PHP, and you're in for trouble. Code well, and you still might be because of this.
In most other languages you only have yourself to blame when things go bad.
If you guys write software and you don't agree that user interfaces should be responsive and informative then I pity your your users. Well, these things are basically designed to edit config files. 1 web edit=1 config file edit.
Unlike places where fancy javascript is actually useful, there aren't any intermediate states. There's no "still shopping," or "not done with form, but need more info." All the information in the form is retrieved before editing, and it's all saved back afterwards.
So either: 1) AJAX is entirely superflous here. 2) The UI has abstracted away from what the original config files can do - thus limiting their functionality.
Who the hell labeled AJAX as a buzzword, it's an acronym. I don't want to say 'asynchronous javascript and xml' everytime I want to..
It's called a buzzword because it's used to discribe all client to server non-reloading mechanisms (i.e. all javascript-remoting mechanisms - why aren't we just calling it that?), whether they're synchronized (the original JSON-RPC libraries, often described as AJAX, can be) or asyncronous, XML, or not (I once again refer to the JSON-RPC library).
A buzzword is something whose meaning is generally all encompassing and conveys little meaning about the nature of something. I think that fits this pretty well.
The benefit of the webfaction control panel is not that it can do what other control panels can't already do
The benefit of the webfaction control panel is not that it can do what other control panels can't already do, I mean if that were ever the argument for any progress we'd still be using C for all our applications since it does everything in a very portable way.
I'm impressed at your debating skills. In so short a space you've got a straw man, and a red herring! I'll explain.
It's a straw man because it simplifies the opposing position about switching away from C by assuming that it can do everything that any other programming language can do (what "is capable of" means is a matter of debate, making this claim invalid).
Its a red herring because the real problem with webfaction control panel is that it cannot do what other control panels can already do (I'm thinking of webmin here), and it probably won't if it really needs AJAX to be better (because of #2 on the list at the top). Webmin is really good at parsing text into groupings. The other thing they've got is a clean, open API. That's it. It doesn't, for example, do a lot of the work of configuring the things for you. That's why it can do so many things that are useful. It had predecesors, too that could have taken the market: Linuxconf is one that comes to mind. It failed because it tried to present a slick, easy to use interface that automated almost everything rather than closely mapping config files to GUI...which was difficult to support in the case of problems/need for human editing, expand, and move to different environments.
The other thing it does is treat all of those other applications and frameworks as if they were like PHP. Meaning that if more hosting companies had a similar panel that some of these applications and frameworks would become ubiquitous like PHP is.
Strange...are you all of a sudden arguing the opposition? Of all really popular web backend programming languages I can think of off the top of my head (php, perl, python, ruby, java, C, C++, C#, VB), php has the worst configuration system. There's no namespace separation, and all modules have to be specified in the configuration to become part of the global namespace. There's something else like that which we all know & dislike (maybe hate): the Windows System Registry. The reasons (mainly security reasons) that both technologies are a problem is the same.
Honestly, I can't really understand what you're saying by this metaphor. Are you claiming that webfaction has one massive location from which you do everything and that this is good?
lots of meters that are expiring at the same time so they know where to concentrate their "efforts"
So then...I can play "make the cops run around" by just getting a bunch of my friends on opposite sides of the street to buy only 15 minutes at a time and renew within the last 7 seconds?
The rampant spread of AIDs is a symptom of a bigger problem - poorly educated countries with beliefs and lifestyles about sex that encourage the spread of diseases, and which is largely tied to its poverty.
The cure for the disease may be far away. Attempts can be made to try to fix the economy right now.
And what if there is a cure? How much will it fix? What about overcrowding, and vast numbers of orphans, for that matter? There are so many unplanned children born into families with no way to support them... Just having a vaccine is no substitute for having an economy that can stand on its own. It's like a putting a bandaid on an arterial wound.
So what you're saying is that they will only focus on immediate needs or things that are life-threatening, but symptoms of a bigger problem. Sort of doing "giving a man a fish" type activities.
There won't be any attempts to put affordable technological foundations in poorer countries...which is primarily the domain of things made by the FSF and EFF.
Doesn't it seem rather shortsighted for what is now one of the wealthiest charities to only do that?
Seems to me that having a background in software is going to hinder any software-related growth. If they end up doing any software stuff, they'll probably buy a lot of those expensive copies of Windows and put them on machines, which would be a huge waste of money caused by a conflict of interest that you seem to be ignoring for some reason.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe when the time comes, they'll go with whatever serves the most people. Personally, I think they'll just do immediate aid stuff until they run out of money or switch over entirely to scholarships/grants and let other organizations (like the Peace Corps, for example), do the actual establishment of infrastructure.
Re:Restrike while the iron is still warm?
on
Futurama Returns
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· Score: 5, Insightful
...but see I remember watching the old episodes of Ren and Stimpy and thinking, "why did I like this? This is horrible." Especially those two minute ultra-grotesque stills.
It's not because the writers got worse. It's 'cause you got better. Or at least, I did. I can't stand the old Ren and Stimpy episodes now.
Just like Family Guy, Futurama still cracks me up. If they make more, I'll still like 'em.
Do you have a source? I think you're slightly changing a few facts to support your point.
For distributions that fit a gaussian, 95.46% is approximately two standard deviations, which is a good place to cutoff because most distributiosns are mostly gaussian in the middle but being to behave differently around the tails....which is to say that about the best confidence you can get for an unknown distribution is probably around 95%, not that you need 95% accuracy before you can draw any conclusions. Further, this is entirely based upon the observation that most distributions tend to act Gaussian for the range between 2 standard deviations. You have to throw that out the window if you know otherwise (which is quite a frequent occurance - "most" distributions here means does not mean 95% of all distributions).
Your definition of "probably" goes against the traditional meaning. I would consider "probably" to have a very concrete meaning of "most likely," not "outcome with a confidence of greater than 95%." Its a superlative. dictionary.com agrees with me.
So, for example, I would say that a die is probably going to land on a 6 because the number 6 has a higher likelihood of coming up than any of the other numbers (only slightly - it's because the dots on a dice are pitted - so the side with the one is the heaviest and the side with the six is the lightest, and these two sides are back-to-back), even though it's likelihood of occurance is only slightly greater than 1:6.
Your explaination that "but close to 50% means that it can go either way" is not really true. You can easily get some confidence built into your predictor. You may be able to say, for example, that 95% of the set of samples will obey your prediction that 51% of the time you'll get one outcome more than another. But that's besides the point. Numbers don't suddenly become more meaningful at 95%. If something is 1% more likely to occur than something else, then it's more likely...more probable. If I wanted to distinguish between probable and more than that, I would use modifiers like "more" or "much more" - I would much rather tell how much more, though.
When pressed for a random factoid without given the chance for numbers, I'd like to be as truthful as I can. Just saying "probably" covers that, since how much more probable one event is than another is usually a complex question.
I'm pretty damn sure about it, but because everything in science is subject to further investigation, I'm open to hear evidence to the contrary."
I don't want to hear this out of any scientist. That's the kind of thing a politician says in order to further his opinion. When a good scientist says "X is probably happening" they mean "based upon a particular metric which I think might be valid, there is a greater than 50% chance that X will occur." And they're still not certain that the metric is valid, because it's based upon something else, which is based upon something else, ad finitum, boiling down to just accepting something because there's no way to prove it one way or the other.
You seem to have some distaste for politicians. Enough to make me think that you don't want to be considered one, though you've attributed a political characteristic to scientists. It just goes to show that there are very few who observe, record, and learn objectively - few who "grok science."
I don't think that humans can handle the amount of uncertainty that is necessary for objectivity. I don't think any of us can.
Some of us aren't objective enough yet to realize that this is true.:)
I really hope not. DSL doesn't have the bandwidth that cable does; it's a bad solution. I don't want to have to pay $10 a month for crappy.3MB/sec connection (what I get with DSL near me - advertised as 768KBS) when I'm also paying $50 for my 5MB/sec connection (what I get from Cable near me - advertised as 6MBS).
The reason that DSL is undercutting cable's pricing is because they can't offer the same download bandwidth.
They are now price more in line with the quality of service they offer.
He hates it when you have to type in the current directory name to run a program in the shell. He believes that the current directory should always be part of the path like it is in Windows.
From the GPL FAQ: Combining two modules means connecting them together so that they form a single larger program. If either part is covered by the GPL, the whole combination must also be released under the GPL--if you can't, or won't, do that, you may not combine them.
You can't use libraries/modules/other ways of combining as part of commercial programs under the GPL. If you do, you're on shaky ground. The GPL says that this is not allowed, even if in practice there are conditions under which it is allowed.
The two are pretty incompatible. Lets say that a company wants to Do the Right Thing by supporting a good idea rather than either stealing it, or writing their own and adding a duplicate thing.
Maybe they even figure that making the supporting product better would be very useful.
Suppose, for example, that they'd like to go ahead and use a GPL'ed Windowing library. Then their code must also be GPL. That's a problem. So nobody developing commercial applications is going to touch GPL code.
This is why I'm a big fan of the LGPL. Then you can keep the development things separate while still having a form of copylefting.
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Screwdriver is to remove the screw under the oil reservoir. You might need a wrench.
Depends on the vehicle. Unlike the strap wrench, you pretty much always need some tool for that bit. It tends to get grimy and stick.
Xen cannot run Windows
To be sure, it doesn't work well yet. But its a far sight from "we can't prove it or tell you how to do it." If Xen development continues at the rate it has been going, its only another six months or so away before its reliable. Maybe less. Xen is very much a contender for this.
The initial claim.
There are people who talk about this.
You can also find support issues concerning the topic in Xen related devel newsgroups.
How many people can change their own oil? Fix their own TV?
Dude...that's like saying,
"How many people can build their own birdfeeder? Build their own House?"
Fixing a TV requires replacement of high-voltage electronics. Good diagnostics require at least a multimeter, and preferably an oscilliscope...and if you do it wrong the high voltage could kill you.
Changing oil requires an oil filter, a screw driver, and a pan, and if you do it wrong you'll usually just get oil all over the place (although a friend of mine did accidentally destroy my transmission by changing the transmission fluid instead of the oil).
The only way the EU could actually enforce this would be to threaten, essentially, trade sanctions.
This just isn't true. It's much easier to seize assets of a large corporation than it is for an individual. They can just take the money.
Who controls the banks and credit agencies in Europe? (here's a hint: it rhymes with "la snoverning hodies."
Even if Microsoft stopped using Europe as a place to store their money (which they really can't do if they're going to have any people over there - they need a place to store payroll/etc), any money headed *to* Microsoft can be intercepted and replaced with a deduction in Microsoft's debt.
Of course, if the fine is repeatedly levied it becomes a sort of trade sanction, doesn't it?
Except that instead of taking a cut of each dollar MS makes, they're just going to take all of it until the daily fine quota has been filled...which likely means that they're going to be bleeding Microsoft's EU holdings dry after a pretty short time.
You can do that with the current one without any extensions installed. Just drag 'em with the left mouse button.
Is that the only dynamic thing you're looking for?
But...interface is in what it does not what the menus at the top look like.
IE4 is significantly different from IE6. Most notably different is that:
1) Nearly all of the things claimed actually work.
2) DOM support
3) CSS support
In practice, that means that there are a lot of things that you can do (and Websites you can go to) with IE6 that you can't with IE4.
Firefox 1.0 to 1.5 is a pretty big jump too, IMHO, because rendering works right most of the time.
Before, if you did funky things with div manipulation that required double buffering/etc. horrible things could happen. Works now. Javascript debugging is nicer now, too.
Those are hard things to solidify.
If I had to make a comparison, I'd say that Firefox 1.0 to 1.5 is similar in # of bugfixes to IE4 to IE5.
So (IMHO) they're not going quite as overboard with numbering as Microsoft is, even.
Hmm...let me log into the ole virtual private server and see the memory used...
28764k (that would be 28.09MB for the uninformed).
Considering that memory for files almost never gets freed until it's needed, that's likely close to the most *ever* used.
Am I using an old version or a small one? Perhaps one configured to be small/lightweight?
Nope. CentOS 4.
What am I running?
mysql, postfix, spamassassin, apache, syslog, ssh, and denyhosts (a primitive IPS for ssh)
I seem to be considerably below your requirement for memory usage.
I'm using 568MB for everything, btw, which includes a heck of a lot more stuff - rails, python, php, perl, gcc, postgres, egroupware, webmin, etc.
If I look at my desktop box, I see closer to 500MB used, which is more in synch with your expectations.
Maybe, though, your linux box should be used for something besides a desktop? Maybe as your router/spam detector/print server/webserver?
...but I do, and apparently so do the Slashdot editors who chose this title.
They're going to be digitizing it (like in Tron) so that they can fight viruses personally. They'll also be improving the searches by overseeing the programs responsible through direct communication rather than through programming.
Its thought that it'll be a little safer for them to do this in a plane since all the programs only have bikes. A plane will also help avoid the dangerous lines emitted by the back of the bikes, which can cause deresolution to those who don't have lightening reflexes.
Not that it's all going to be for business, of course. They've hired some playboy girls to write a few of the programs (well...they're only visual basic, but it counts), since all programs end up looking exactly like the person who writes them while inside, and all users are viewed as gods when they enter the internet.
Point is, they're impeding google's ability to improve it's searches, which impedes my ability to have better google searches.
1) While the filesystem architecture is pretty horrible, there have been successes there by other companies.
There's are file system interfaces to NFS, FTP, EXT2, UDF, and a probably a few more that I can't think of right now. This has nothing to do with the previously badly written code.
The problem with WinFS is WinFS. It's got features in it that would make it unacceptably slow and easily corrupted. That won't fly. I think they thought that they could overcome these obvious problems through genius. Apparently its still hard.
2) Like every OS trailing back almost to the invention of the compiler, Windows is modular. And by that I don't mean "it has modules, or even dlls" I mean that the ideas within it are divided into real (and occasionally conceptual) pieces.
Some of the pieces are new and shiny and well written. Some are old and spaghetti-like. There's no reason to throw out everything to get one new piece. The fundamental design of the Windows kernel is neat even if the registry isn't. The network stack works pretty well even if the filesystem interface doesn't.
Along those lines,
I think they should stop selling windows as one thing. I'd like to know what new thing it is I'm getting in the latest version of Windows. Because they do occasionally throw out the old and replace it with something new and fresh that works great. But sometimes they only sell things that are exactly the same as the old, but with things I don't care about at all, or sell me lots of things I don't care about and only one that I do.
Using PHP, you don't have to worry about things like memory management and/or memory type translation. A "1" becomes a 2 when you add a 1 to it.
Arrays and hashes are the same. Any array can be accessed as a hash, any hash is also an array. Makes it easy to define data in memory, then do loops/recursion on it to get whatever result you want.
Simple!
These are features of nearly every modern scripting language and are therefore nothing to brag about. The first feature is called weakly typing, and is known not to scale well in terms of adding more developers on a tightly-coupled project. The second feature is an offshoot of that.
And, as far as security, the vast majority of issues have been with idiots writing insecure scripting, which can be done in any language. (Yes, I'm thinking of you, SPAW editor!) And, if you're using a decent operating system with an update mechanism (EG: yum) then updates to fix found security issues is a no-brainer.
The language puts everything into one global namespace. This is a horrible, horrible security risk that is built-in to the language design. Code badly in PHP, and you're in for trouble. Code well, and you still might be because of this.
In most other languages you only have yourself to blame when things go bad.
If you guys write software and you don't agree that user interfaces should be responsive and informative then I pity your your users.
Well, these things are basically designed to edit config files. 1 web edit=1 config file edit.
Unlike places where fancy javascript is actually useful, there aren't any intermediate states. There's no "still shopping," or "not done with form, but need more info." All the information in the form is retrieved before editing, and it's all saved back afterwards.
So either:
1) AJAX is entirely superflous here.
2) The UI has abstracted away from what the original config files can do - thus limiting their functionality.
Who the hell labeled AJAX as a buzzword, it's an acronym. I don't want to say 'asynchronous javascript and xml' everytime I want to..
It's called a buzzword because it's used to discribe all client to server non-reloading mechanisms (i.e. all javascript-remoting mechanisms - why aren't we just calling it that?), whether they're synchronized (the original JSON-RPC libraries, often described as AJAX, can be) or asyncronous, XML, or not (I once again refer to the JSON-RPC library).
A buzzword is something whose meaning is generally all encompassing and conveys little meaning about the nature of something. I think that fits this pretty well.
The benefit of the webfaction control panel is not that it can do what other control panels can't already do
The benefit of the webfaction control panel is not that it can do what other control panels can't already do, I mean if that were ever the argument for any progress we'd still be using C for all our applications since it does everything in a very portable way.
I'm impressed at your debating skills. In so short a space you've got a straw man, and a red herring! I'll explain.
It's a straw man because it simplifies the opposing position about switching away from C by assuming that it can do everything that any other programming language can do (what "is capable of" means is a matter of debate, making this claim invalid).
Its a red herring because the real problem with webfaction control panel is that it cannot do what other control panels can already do (I'm thinking of webmin here), and it probably won't if it really needs AJAX to be better (because of #2 on the list at the top). Webmin is really good at parsing text into groupings. The other thing they've got is a clean, open API. That's it. It doesn't, for example, do a lot of the work of configuring the things for you.
That's why it can do so many things that are useful.
It had predecesors, too that could have taken the market: Linuxconf is one that comes to mind. It failed because it tried to present a slick, easy to use interface that automated almost everything rather than closely mapping config files to GUI...which was difficult to support in the case of problems/need for human editing, expand, and move to different environments.
The other thing it does is treat all of those other applications and frameworks as if they were like PHP. Meaning that if more hosting companies had a similar panel that some of these applications and frameworks would become ubiquitous like PHP is.
Strange...are you all of a sudden arguing the opposition? Of all really popular web backend programming languages I can think of off the top of my head (php, perl, python, ruby, java, C, C++, C#, VB), php has the worst configuration system. There's no namespace separation, and all modules have to be specified in the configuration to become part of the global namespace. There's something else like that which we all know & dislike (maybe hate): the Windows System Registry. The reasons (mainly security reasons) that both technologies are a problem is the same.
Honestly, I can't really understand what you're saying by this metaphor. Are you claiming that webfaction has one massive location from which you do everything and that this is good?
lots of meters that are expiring at the same time so they know where to concentrate their "efforts"
So then...I can play "make the cops run around" by just getting a bunch of my friends on opposite sides of the street to buy only 15 minutes at a time and renew within the last 7 seconds?
Yeah. Nobody ever accomplished anything great while also holding moderate views (and if you don't currently think of him as a moderate in his time, then you need to read his book).
The rampant spread of AIDs is a symptom of a bigger problem - poorly educated countries with beliefs and lifestyles about sex that encourage the spread of diseases, and which is largely tied to its poverty.
The cure for the disease may be far away. Attempts can be made to try to fix the economy right now.
And what if there is a cure? How much will it fix? What about overcrowding, and vast numbers of orphans, for that matter? There are so many unplanned children born into families with no way to support them... Just having a vaccine is no substitute for having an economy that can stand on its own. It's like a putting a bandaid on an arterial wound.
So what you're saying is that they will only focus on immediate needs or things that are life-threatening, but symptoms of a bigger problem. Sort of doing "giving a man a fish" type activities.
There won't be any attempts to put affordable technological foundations in poorer countries...which is primarily the domain of things made by the FSF and EFF.
Doesn't it seem rather shortsighted for what is now one of the wealthiest charities to only do that?
Seems to me that having a background in software is going to hinder any software-related growth. If they end up doing any software stuff, they'll probably buy a lot of those expensive copies of Windows and put them on machines, which would be a huge waste of money caused by a conflict of interest that you seem to be ignoring for some reason.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe when the time comes, they'll go with whatever serves the most people. Personally, I think they'll just do immediate aid stuff until they run out of money or switch over entirely to scholarships/grants and let other organizations (like the Peace Corps, for example), do the actual establishment of infrastructure.
...but see I remember watching the old episodes of Ren and Stimpy and thinking, "why did I like this? This is horrible." Especially those two minute ultra-grotesque stills.
It's not because the writers got worse. It's 'cause you got better. Or at least, I did. I can't stand the old Ren and Stimpy episodes now.
Just like Family Guy, Futurama still cracks me up. If they make more, I'll still like 'em.
Do you have a source? I think you're slightly changing a few facts to support your point.
...which is to say that about the best confidence you can get for an unknown distribution is probably around 95%, not that you need 95% accuracy before you can draw any conclusions.
For distributions that fit a gaussian, 95.46% is approximately two standard deviations, which is a good place to cutoff because most distributiosns are mostly gaussian in the middle but being to behave differently around the tails.
Further, this is entirely based upon the observation that most distributions tend to act Gaussian for the range between 2 standard deviations. You have to throw that out the window if you know otherwise (which is quite a frequent occurance - "most" distributions here means does not mean 95% of all distributions).
Your definition of "probably" goes against the traditional meaning.
I would consider "probably" to have a very concrete meaning of "most likely," not "outcome with a confidence of greater than 95%." Its a superlative. dictionary.com agrees with me.
So, for example, I would say that a die is probably going to land on a 6 because the number 6 has a higher likelihood of coming up than any of the other numbers (only slightly - it's because the dots on a dice are pitted - so the side with the one is the heaviest and the side with the six is the lightest, and these two sides are back-to-back), even though it's likelihood of occurance is only slightly greater than 1:6.
Your explaination that "but close to 50% means that it can go either way" is not really true. You can easily get some confidence built into your predictor. You may be able to say, for example, that 95% of the set of samples will obey your prediction that 51% of the time you'll get one outcome more than another. But that's besides the point. Numbers don't suddenly become more meaningful at 95%. If something is 1% more likely to occur than something else, then it's more likely...more probable. If I wanted to distinguish between probable and more than that, I would use modifiers like "more" or "much more" - I would much rather tell how much more, though.
When pressed for a random factoid without given the chance for numbers, I'd like to be as truthful as I can. Just saying "probably" covers that, since how much more probable one event is than another is usually a complex question.
I'm pretty damn sure about it, but because everything in science is subject to further investigation, I'm open to hear evidence to the contrary."
:)
I don't want to hear this out of any scientist. That's the kind of thing a politician says in order to further his opinion. When a good scientist says "X is probably happening" they mean "based upon a particular metric which I think might be valid, there is a greater than 50% chance that X will occur." And they're still not certain that the metric is valid, because it's based upon something else, which is based upon something else, ad finitum, boiling down to just accepting something because there's no way to prove it one way or the other.
You seem to have some distaste for politicians. Enough to make me think that you don't want to be considered one, though you've attributed a political characteristic to scientists.
It just goes to show that there are very few who observe, record, and learn objectively - few who "grok science."
I don't think that humans can handle the amount of uncertainty that is necessary for objectivity. I don't think any of us can.
Some of us aren't objective enough yet to realize that this is true.
I really hope not. DSL doesn't have the bandwidth that cable does; it's a bad solution. I don't want to have to pay $10 a month for crappy .3MB/sec connection (what I get with DSL near me - advertised as 768KBS) when I'm also paying $50 for my 5MB/sec connection (what I get from Cable near me - advertised as 6MBS).
The reason that DSL is undercutting cable's pricing is because they can't offer the same download bandwidth.
They are now price more in line with the quality of service they offer.
DSL is the new dialup.
You're just reading it wrong.
He hates it when you have to type in the current directory name to run a program in the shell.
He believes that the current directory should always be part of the path like it is in Windows.
From the GPL FAQ:
Combining two modules means connecting them together so that they form a single larger program. If either part is covered by the GPL, the whole combination must also be released under the GPL--if you can't, or won't, do that, you may not combine them.
You can't use libraries/modules/other ways of combining as part of commercial programs under the GPL. If you do, you're on shaky ground. The GPL says that this is not allowed, even if in practice there are conditions under which it is allowed.
blatant lie
Works with=>use alongside, propagate, etc.
You just don't like the way he said what he did.
The two are pretty incompatible. Lets say that a company wants to Do the Right Thing by supporting a good idea rather than either stealing it, or writing their own and adding a duplicate thing.
Maybe they even figure that making the supporting product better would be very useful.
Suppose, for example, that they'd like to go ahead and use a GPL'ed Windowing library. Then their code must also be GPL. That's a problem. So nobody developing commercial applications is going to touch GPL code.
This is why I'm a big fan of the LGPL. Then you can keep the development things separate while still having a form of copylefting.
I think this page pretty well covers the whole story.
You're right. In fact, it's sort of semantics to talk about this at all.
NdisWrapper has been around for ages, and it works great.
I guess it's not being counted because it isn't part of the standard kernel or included in the distros.
It works without problems for the most part - allowing Linux to support all wireless cards without reverse engineering.