Stripping down Linux is pretty easy. There are many distros that are already stripped down, and every distro I've ever tried has a "server" package, which includes only what you need to run a webserver.
But even if you do the stripping yourself it's not that bad. Whenever you do something mainstream that lots of people do, you can do it the way everyone else does.
The dependencies for apache are clearly known by pretty much every distribution. There's even a project to build everything you need from scratch if you just want to start with nothing and build up. In short, if you have dependency problems when you're dealing with apache, you're using a pretty messed up distro to start with, since virtually all of them solve that problem first.
As far as kernel bloat...I don't know where you're getting this. Even a big kernel is tiny compared to any Windows kernel 95 or higher. Recompile the kernel, or download one of the many, many already created tiny kernels. It takes four minutes to configure and half an hour to recompile and install.
*Note: Poster may be someone looking to Slashdot to do his research for him, and I didn't want to do so. I will, however, say that the links for all the things I mentioned are available at freshmeat.
$2000 AND I have to hack it to do something useful?
Does it give me super powers or something? Because I can think of roughly a kabillion devices that I don't have to hack in order to actually use them that cost WAY less. And I can MythTV those if I really want a media player that badly.
And first on the agenda will have to be sturdier people.
We can't have any of these "I can't survive a decade in space because of muscular atrophy" problems we have now. They need to get on with building people that are at least as sturdy as our current equipment.
Read the books. This is a natural side effect on basing it on the books.
The books get darker each book, so the movies should get darker too.
On the other hand, the last movie wasn't actually as good. It told a very small portion of the story the book did, and the things it focused on weren't nearly as interesting as some of the things it left in there.
Like, for instance, they didn't even mention some (IMHO) crutial plot things - SPOILER OF BOOK WARNING-:
1) all the new adults in the third movie went to Hogwarts together and were really good friends - and all really good friends with James Potter, Harry's dad. This group also made Harry's map. 2) Because of this friendship, all of them became animagi (people who could transform into animals) in sympathy for Lupis, who was naturally a lycanthrope. 3) including Harry's dad, who could turn into a stag. 4) Harry's patronus is a stag. He takes after his dad a lot it seems.
A big theme - probably the biggest that seems to run through the book is how heredity and your past affects it's future and the choices you make.
Well...that explains why the first two movies are so much better than the third.
What were they thinking getting rid of a director who successfully translated books to movies?
And for that matter, why have the characters in what is essentially an old English boarding school wearing modern and eventually dated clothing rather than uniforms?
It's local. The local community hasn't gone to other parts of the world and become experts in mammal taxonomy so that they could come back and say "hey, this rodent is different from all of the others!"
If they had, they surely would have gotten credit for it. Further, I'm sure that any taxonomist from the East would have gotten the credit had they discovered it.
Further, how do you expect the scientists to "ask around?" Randomly enter countries and say "hey, do you have any species that are unlike any of the ones elsewhere in the world?" Do you really expect the locals to know this?
Give them some credit. Because the differences are so small now, the only people who have the background to classify new animals found today are taxonomists, and they are an elite group not because they're from the west, but because there aren't very many of them.
Even if most of them are from the west, that's no reason to discredit them. The scientific community is very open to all comers - anyone who's smart is welcome.
Everyone in my family knows how to drive a stick. We all prefer automatic. Most of the people at my work know stick and prefer automatics. That's at least ten people that I can list without thinking about it.
Driving isn't about control or fun for most people. It's getting from point A to point B without being too angry at all the stop & go traffic that you have to endure along the way. Faced with that, manual transmission is just a hassle.
Manual transmission is something you grow out of, and most people in the US are middle-aged or older. It's no wonder that automatics sell so much better.
You don't actually think its hard to learn stick, do you?
Well, given the name, I expect that they'll be able to generate powerful magnetic fields and hatching nafarious plots. Apparently, Microsoft feels that the human demographic is no longer a viable source of income, and therefore must be wiped out to make way for the Homosuperiors.
Not, cooler, but it keeps with Microsoft's corporate vision, "be more evil each day."
I read it when I was little and then I tried rereading it.
Bad idea there.
The prose is horribly dry. It's written for children - not young adults - children. The spirit of the books is laid out plain as day and easy to see, because the audience is children. To get the same feeling into a movie, all they'd have to do is not change it very much.
Of course, it won't actually be the same as the spirit of the words in your memory or in mine. It'll be what was actually there, which, unfortunately, is much less grand.
Then you could be dealing with luck. You happen to get a bad batch of RAM and your server crashes? Sucks for you. The other guy wins. Somebody decides to get the other team to win via DDOS? Sucks. Other team wins. Random lightening strike? You see the problem?
Plus it makes stability the ultimate concern rather than (possibly) throughput, which is clearly a benchmark in favor of Linux, since the OS itself is simply better designed (if for no other reason than because they replace the worn-out parts more often). If you go down for a minute every day, but only for a minute, will anyone care?
Most likely not. Incidentally, thats about the length of time it takes for me to restart my apache install. Heck, I could run apache with xinetd without too much problem, which to me is kind of cheating.
A better idea would be to separate these into two separate scores: one for uptime characteristics (including recovery time), and one for throughput.
Actually, it was because of the PG rating on BOTH of those movies that people decided they needed a PG-13 rating. So...I guess you could say that they got the PG-13 rating afterwards.
Those are all technologies that work with things that render html (browsers), which to me means that you're still pretty much talking about the same thing.
None of the things also handle the effects (or javascript that produces that effect, etc.) that I mentioned. I'd be perfectly happy with a oHTML (office XML) xml format that was html+javascript with some new tags.
The point is that this new document format is much, much different from that. There are a lot of things in the format that don't really even need to be there, and are just redundant information adding to the complexity.
If they use something similar to html, then they've got about 100 WYSIWYG editors that can become document editors really quick.
There is a way you could make them, but you'd have to change the format from what it is. It's a lot of work for MS right now. Right now their RTF writer can't even write documents that it can read correctly.
Why not just make "newpage" and "pagedimensions" tags for HTML, and include the ability to embed anything that can be rendered (including fonts; everything else can already be embedded in Javascript variables)?
If you put those things in, then (D)HTML becomes a new document format with all the capabilities of all the other formats. It would even make it easy to make new types: just add DTDs, write new tags and say what they do.
Right now OO has a 600 page document to explain their "open" format. Yeah, that's open. Open like CORBA and like SGML. Open, but a huge chunk of time to learn when there are other perfectly good ways to do it that don't take all of your time.
Oh, and it would kill Acromedia's chokehold on printable document formats.
Ah yes. Harken back to the earlier days, when databases were just files on a file system, and did not distribute the resourses at all.
Certainly that's not going to lead to more crashes.
Certainly it's a better idea than, for example, distributing the databases and using load-balancing and regularly scheduled back-ups to ameliorate the loss of the least realiable portions of a databases design - the harddrives.
When you've only got a hammer, everything seems like a nail...what does Hans Reiser do? He could be right. Microsoft is jumping on the filesystem-database wagon with their new filesystem, and we all know that if anyone knows and cares about reliability it's Microsoft.
Did you not read where I explained that both were falsifiable, but that doing so is incredibly difficult for both? I thought that pretty much showed that I understood the concept of falsifiability.
In other words, both are incredibly hard to verify, because the test that could prove them false is hard to do?
I think there are a lot of cases that weaken evolution - such as, for instance, the discovery of a mammal that lays eggs - but the actual proof is hard to come by. So is the proof that God didn't create things.
And just to make sure when rereading my post you don't miss it again: proof that the universe was created another way would rule out intelligent design of life. proof that life was created another way would rule out evolution
Short of those incredibly difficult finds, you're going to have a lot of trouble.
Yes, you're right. They have changed. So have many, many other species. Obviously natural selection is part of nature. Not as obvious is if this is evolution at work, or merely a shift in what attributes are dominant in a species' gene pool. This distinction is still untested; we have yet to cause speciation.
Don't use semantics. You do know what I mean by it. Advanced is not a problematic word when it is used in this context. Advanced means "more complex" in the same way that entropy means "making things less complex out of more complex components."
The theory of evolution is used to explain how initially non-complex life became complex life. Otherwise, it's not a useful theory about the origins of life. Further, since there is so much complexity in life as it is, this is definitely one of the things we should see when experimenting to determine evolutionary properties.
Natural selection. The ability to become immune was already in their makeup. Evolution is more than this, yes?
They're still the same species. It wouldn't be too hard for them to become vulnerable to the pesticides again if they weren't exposed to it for a bunch of generations.
Actually, it consists almost entirely of neat progressions. DNA->Cellular->multicellular->taxonomy tree
There are whole fields devoted to the study of the neat progressions. Having neat progressions is actually considered one of the functions of evolution - in other words, if there weren't neat progressions, then evolution is less likely. But I'm sure you mean something besides "easily quantifiable changes" when you say neat progressions, so this comment is perhaps without value to you.
don't seem to realise the timescales involved RTFP...I mention why evolution probably isn't testable.
species boundaries are not hard-and-fast binary things
Actually, they are for the most life (that being virtually all multicellular organisms). We have a hard and fast binary way to know when speciation has occurred. Two organisms are of a different species if their offsprint is always infertile. AFAIK we have not observed this.
So then what you're saying is that string theory, multiple universe theory, the theory of evolution and a good deal many others are superstitions because they can't be tested?
Let me just stick to evolution here. We as a species have been unable to cause evolution to happen. We cannot make a more advanced life form from a less advanced life form via mutation and natural selection. All we can do is make a life form that is the same species have more useful traits (that were previously recessive, or at least seldom seen, though still part of the genes).
We haven't been able test evolution to determine if it's correct - and the theory is that this is because even for less advanced organisms this process takes far to long to observe. We can only extrapolate that it is true. The same can be said for intelligent design.
So the two theories are on roughly equal footing at the moment as far as testability.
As far as falsifiabilty, both can be falsified. It is important to note, though, that intelligent design actually covers more territory to be falsified, so is understandably more difficult to falsify completely.
Evolution only states that once life happened, it became more complex through natural processes. Creationism actually covers the very natured of happening, which is a lot more ground. Incidentally, the Big Bang theory is about as hard to prove or falsify as the theory of Creationism.
To disprove the existence of a creator, one would have to give contrary evidence that proves how all things were created. To disprove evolution, one would have to show that life became how it was a different way. The means of looking for either of these things is impossible at the moment.
I do think you do have a point about testability and falsifiablity: anything you can't test or falsify you're taking on faith. There are a good deal more things that we take on faith than we realize. Science and philosophy used to be considered one discipline. I think we need to keep in mind how much they still are one.
No. One of the first advances in cryptography was to determine what "secure" means. The classic definition is taken from information theory, and is known as Shannon security after it's author, or information-theoretic security.
To put the definition in plain english (i.e. an algorithm is Shannon secure if) If you have an encrypted text (any from the set of all available texts), then (you can prove any of these properties with the other ones) 1) All keys are equally likely 2) All plaintexts are equally likely 3) The maximum length of a key is at least as large as the maximum length of the plain text 4) The maximum length of a ciphertext is at least as large as the maximum length of a key.
If you're not grasping this, I'll just tell you: this means that the algorithm is unbreakable. Mathematically so. You can't possibly figure out what the plaintext is without having the key no matter what you do.
The simplest algorithm that is Shannon secure is the one time pad - though it isn't used often because it's highly impractical, as are all algorithms for which properties #3-4 hold.
Unfortunately, though, the root poster is wrong about what Quantum Cryptography does. It isn't inherently unbreakable.
I'll go even further. If you have any idea what the thing your aunt gave you that you don't know what it is" is, then you'll know that Douglas Adams intended each version of things to be different from the others. He even went so far as to say that he was upset how similar (and therefore boring to the fans) the miniseries was to the books, and it was only that way because he didn't have as much creative control as he would have liked.
Slashdot Mirror
The sad thing about that is that the new gold is so fantastically radioactive. And when it stops being radioactive?
You guessed it.
It's back to being lead.
It's the real-life equivalent of fairy gold.
Stripping down Linux is pretty easy. There are many distros that are already stripped down, and every distro I've ever tried has a "server" package, which includes only what you need to run a webserver.
But even if you do the stripping yourself it's not that bad. Whenever you do something mainstream that lots of people do, you can do it the way everyone else does.
The dependencies for apache are clearly known by pretty much every distribution. There's even a project to build everything you need from scratch if you just want to start with nothing and build up. In short, if you have dependency problems when you're dealing with apache, you're using a pretty messed up distro to start with, since virtually all of them solve that problem first.
As far as kernel bloat...I don't know where you're getting this. Even a big kernel is tiny compared to any Windows kernel 95 or higher. Recompile the kernel, or download one of the many, many already created tiny kernels. It takes four minutes to configure and half an hour to recompile and install.
*Note: Poster may be someone looking to Slashdot to do his research for him, and I didn't want to do so. I will, however, say that the links for all the things I mentioned are available at freshmeat.
I'm with you on this being a useless review.
$2000 AND I have to hack it to do something useful?
Does it give me super powers or something? Because I can think of roughly a kabillion devices that I don't have to hack in order to actually use them that cost WAY less. And I can MythTV those if I really want a media player that badly.
And first on the agenda will have to be sturdier people.
We can't have any of these "I can't survive a decade in space because of muscular atrophy" problems we have now. They need to get on with building people that are at least as sturdy as our current equipment.
Read the books. This is a natural side effect on basing it on the books.
The books get darker each book, so the movies should get darker too.
On the other hand, the last movie wasn't actually as good. It told a very small portion of the story the book did, and the things it focused on weren't nearly as interesting as some of the things it left in there.
Like, for instance, they didn't even mention some (IMHO) crutial plot things - SPOILER OF BOOK WARNING-:
1) all the new adults in the third movie went to Hogwarts together and were really good friends - and all really good friends with James Potter, Harry's dad. This group also made Harry's map.
2) Because of this friendship, all of them became animagi (people who could transform into animals) in sympathy for Lupis, who was naturally a lycanthrope.
3) including Harry's dad, who could turn into a stag.
4) Harry's patronus is a stag. He takes after his dad a lot it seems.
A big theme - probably the biggest that seems to run through the book is how heredity and your past affects it's future and the choices you make.
They missed it in this last movie.
Well...that explains why the first two movies are so much better than the third.
What were they thinking getting rid of a director who successfully translated books to movies?
And for that matter, why have the characters in what is essentially an old English boarding school wearing modern and eventually dated clothing rather than uniforms?
It's local. The local community hasn't gone to other parts of the world and become experts in mammal taxonomy so that they could come back and say "hey, this rodent is different from all of the others!"
If they had, they surely would have gotten credit for it. Further, I'm sure that any taxonomist from the East would have gotten the credit had they discovered it.
Further, how do you expect the scientists to "ask around?" Randomly enter countries and say "hey, do you have any species that are unlike any of the ones elsewhere in the world?" Do you really expect the locals to know this?
Give them some credit. Because the differences are so small now, the only people who have the background to classify new animals found today are taxonomists, and they are an elite group not because they're from the west, but because there aren't very many of them.
Even if most of them are from the west, that's no reason to discredit them. The scientific community is very open to all comers - anyone who's smart is welcome.
Yes. They found a new species that is so differenty they had to make a new family and genus for it.
The articles really short. It took me about 30 seconds to read.
Your case is the exception, not the rule.
Everyone in my family knows how to drive a stick. We all prefer automatic. Most of the people at my work know stick and prefer automatics. That's at least ten people that I can list without thinking about it.
Driving isn't about control or fun for most people. It's getting from point A to point B without being too angry at all the stop & go traffic that you have to endure along the way. Faced with that, manual transmission is just a hassle.
Manual transmission is something you grow out of, and most people in the US are middle-aged or older. It's no wonder that automatics sell so much better.
You don't actually think its hard to learn stick, do you?
Well, given the name, I expect that they'll be able to generate powerful magnetic fields and hatching nafarious plots. Apparently, Microsoft feels that the human demographic is no longer a viable source of income, and therefore must be wiped out to make way for the Homosuperiors.
Not, cooler, but it keeps with Microsoft's corporate vision, "be more evil each day."
Hmm...well, mine has failed regularly due to loss of internet connectivity.
It starts over all the time. Perhaps you have to be using XP for this? Or you have to be lucky?
Anyway, personal experience !=FUD. This has happened to me.
I read it when I was little and then I tried rereading it.
Bad idea there.
The prose is horribly dry. It's written for children - not young adults - children. The spirit of the books is laid out plain as day and easy to see, because the audience is children. To get the same feeling into a movie, all they'd have to do is not change it very much.
Of course, it won't actually be the same as the spirit of the words in your memory or in mine. It'll be what was actually there, which, unfortunately, is much less grand.
It also starts over if you disconnect in the middle of downloading an update.
So if can't leave your computer on for a good three hours and not use it for internet access during that time, it'll never get done.
No, that's still no good.
Then you could be dealing with luck. You happen to get a bad batch of RAM and your server crashes? Sucks for you. The other guy wins. Somebody decides to get the other team to win via DDOS? Sucks. Other team wins. Random lightening strike? You see the problem?
Plus it makes stability the ultimate concern rather than (possibly) throughput, which is clearly a benchmark in favor of Linux, since the OS itself is simply better designed (if for no other reason than because they replace the worn-out parts more often). If you go down for a minute every day, but only for a minute, will anyone care?
Most likely not. Incidentally, thats about the length of time it takes for me to restart my apache install. Heck, I could run apache with xinetd without too much problem, which to me is kind of cheating.
A better idea would be to separate these into two separate scores: one for uptime characteristics (including recovery time), and one for throughput.
Actually, it was because of the PG rating on BOTH of those movies that people decided they needed a PG-13 rating. So...I guess you could say that they got the PG-13 rating afterwards.
Those are all technologies that work with things that render html (browsers), which to me means that you're still pretty much talking about the same thing.
None of the things also handle the effects (or javascript that produces that effect, etc.) that I mentioned. I'd be perfectly happy with a oHTML (office XML) xml format that was html+javascript with some new tags.
The point is that this new document format is much, much different from that. There are a lot of things in the format that don't really even need to be there, and are just redundant information adding to the complexity.
If they use something similar to html, then they've got about 100 WYSIWYG editors that can become document editors really quick.
There is a way you could make them, but you'd have to change the format from what it is. It's a lot of work for MS right now. Right now their RTF writer can't even write documents that it can read correctly.
Why not just make "newpage" and "pagedimensions" tags for HTML, and include the ability to embed anything that can be rendered (including fonts; everything else can already be embedded in Javascript variables)?
If you put those things in, then (D)HTML becomes a new document format with all the capabilities of all the other formats.
It would even make it easy to make new types: just add DTDs, write new tags and say what they do.
Right now OO has a 600 page document to explain their "open" format. Yeah, that's open. Open like CORBA and like SGML. Open, but a huge chunk of time to learn when there are other perfectly good ways to do it that don't take all of your time.
Oh, and it would kill Acromedia's chokehold on printable document formats.
Ah yes. Harken back to the earlier days, when databases were just files on a file system, and did not distribute the resourses at all.
Certainly that's not going to lead to more crashes.
Certainly it's a better idea than, for example, distributing the databases and using load-balancing and regularly scheduled back-ups to ameliorate the loss of the least realiable portions of a databases design - the harddrives.
When you've only got a hammer, everything seems like a nail...what does Hans Reiser do? He could be right. Microsoft is jumping on the filesystem-database wagon with their new filesystem, and we all know that if anyone knows and cares about reliability it's Microsoft.
Did you not read where I explained that both were falsifiable, but that doing so is incredibly difficult for both? I thought that pretty much showed that I understood the concept of falsifiability.
In other words, both are incredibly hard to verify, because the test that could prove them false is hard to do?
I think there are a lot of cases that weaken evolution - such as, for instance, the discovery of a mammal that lays eggs - but the actual proof is hard to come by. So is the proof that God didn't create things.
And just to make sure when rereading my post you don't miss it again:
proof that the universe was created another way would rule out intelligent design of life.
proof that life was created another way would rule out evolution
Short of those incredibly difficult finds, you're going to have a lot of trouble.
Yes, you're right. They have changed. So have many, many other species. Obviously natural selection is part of nature. Not as obvious is if this is evolution at work, or merely a shift in what attributes are dominant in a species' gene pool. This distinction is still untested; we have yet to cause speciation.
Don't use semantics. You do know what I mean by it. Advanced is not a problematic word when it is used in this context. Advanced means "more complex" in the same way that entropy means "making things less complex out of more complex components."
The theory of evolution is used to explain how initially non-complex life became complex life. Otherwise, it's not a useful theory about the origins of life. Further, since there is so much complexity in life as it is, this is definitely one of the things we should see when experimenting to determine evolutionary properties.
Natural selection. The ability to become immune was already in their makeup. Evolution is more than this, yes?
They're still the same species. It wouldn't be too hard for them to become vulnerable to the pesticides again if they weren't exposed to it for a bunch of generations.
Natural selection != Evolution
has few neat progressions
Actually, it consists almost entirely of neat progressions. DNA->Cellular->multicellular->taxonomy tree
There are whole fields devoted to the study of the neat progressions. Having neat progressions is actually considered one of the functions of evolution - in other words, if there weren't neat progressions, then evolution is less likely. But I'm sure you mean something besides "easily quantifiable changes" when you say neat progressions, so this comment is perhaps without value to you.
don't seem to realise the timescales involved
RTFP...I mention why evolution probably isn't testable.
species boundaries are not hard-and-fast binary things
Actually, they are for the most life (that being virtually all multicellular organisms). We have a hard and fast binary way to know when speciation has occurred. Two organisms are of a different species if their offsprint is always infertile. AFAIK we have not observed this.
So then what you're saying is that string theory, multiple universe theory, the theory of evolution and a good deal many others are superstitions because they can't be tested?
Let me just stick to evolution here. We as a species have been unable to cause evolution to happen. We cannot make a more advanced life form from a less advanced life form via mutation and natural selection. All we can do is make a life form that is the same species have more useful traits (that were previously recessive, or at least seldom seen, though still part of the genes).
We haven't been able test evolution to determine if it's correct - and the theory is that this is because even for less advanced organisms this process takes far to long to observe.
We can only extrapolate that it is true. The same can be said for intelligent design.
So the two theories are on roughly equal footing at the moment as far as testability.
As far as falsifiabilty, both can be falsified. It is important to note, though, that intelligent design actually covers more territory to be falsified, so is understandably more difficult to falsify completely.
Evolution only states that once life happened, it became more complex through natural processes. Creationism actually covers the very natured of happening, which is a lot more ground. Incidentally, the Big Bang theory is about as hard to prove or falsify as the theory of Creationism.
To disprove the existence of a creator, one would have to give contrary evidence that proves how all things were created. To disprove evolution, one would have to show that life became how it was a different way. The means of looking for either of these things is impossible at the moment.
I do think you do have a point about testability and falsifiablity: anything you can't test or falsify you're taking on faith. There are a good deal more things that we take on faith than we realize. Science and philosophy used to be considered one discipline. I think we need to keep in mind how much they still are one.
All encryption is breakable by some method.
No. One of the first advances in cryptography was to determine what "secure" means. The classic definition is taken from information theory, and is known as Shannon security after it's author, or information-theoretic security.
To put the definition in plain english (i.e. an algorithm is Shannon secure if)
If you have an encrypted text (any from the set of all available texts), then (you can prove any of these properties with the other ones)
1) All keys are equally likely
2) All plaintexts are equally likely
3) The maximum length of a key is at least as large as the maximum length of the plain text
4) The maximum length of a ciphertext is at least as large as the maximum length of a key.
If you're not grasping this, I'll just tell you: this means that the algorithm is unbreakable. Mathematically so. You can't possibly figure out what the plaintext is without having the key no matter what you do.
The simplest algorithm that is Shannon secure is the one time pad - though it isn't used often because it's highly impractical, as are all algorithms for which properties #3-4 hold.
Unfortunately, though, the root poster is wrong about what Quantum Cryptography does. It isn't inherently unbreakable.
I'll go even further. If you have any idea what the thing your aunt gave you that you don't know what it is" is, then you'll know that Douglas Adams intended each version of things to be different from the others. He even went so far as to say that he was upset how similar (and therefore boring to the fans) the miniseries was to the books, and it was only that way because he didn't have as much creative control as he would have liked.