28-8-888 assumes the Gregorian callendar- not in use in the 9th century AD!
Irrelevant. The day identified at 28-8-888 on the Gregorian calendar is, always was, and always will be 28-8-888 on the Gregorian calendar, regardless of who is or isn't using the Gregorian calendar on that day.
A calendar is mearly a means of pointing out a particular day, giving it some name so that it can be talked about by two people using the same calendar. The Gregorian calendar is one such calendar, and like most useful calendars, it provides a means for naming any day that has ever occured or ever will occur, throughout all eternity. 28-8-888 names a particular day, and that day actually was 28-8-888 Gregorian, although no one knew it at the time.
Think of it this way. JFK died 5 years before men landed on the moon. Just because no one had landed on the moon yet doesn't mean it wasn't five years before the event. Does that clarify things or just confuse the issue? Lemme try that again. Just because no one knew at the time that it was 5 years before man would land on the moon, doesn't mean that is wasn't. In fact, it was. If we decided to redo the calendar so that the year Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon was year 0 (a nice feature the Gregorian calendar lacks: a zero year), then on this new calendar this is year 30, and JFK died in the year -5. It is currently true, always has been true, and always will be true that JFK died in the year -5 on this calendar I'm proposing. The fact that I hadn't yet proposed this calendar at the time is irrelevant, the event still occured when it did, and on the calendar I'm proposing, that was during the year -5.
28-8-888 is 887 years after the year identified as 1 on the Gregorian calendar. This is true, always has been, and always will be, regardless of what calendar you use to identify those dates.
In summary, there's nothing funny about dates on the Gregorian calendar that identify days before the Gregorian calendar was invented. What would be odd would be a calendar where this actually made a difference...
Since mathematicians are the sort who like their theorems to look pretty, it was decided that it would be easier for everybody if we just defined 1 to be non-prime.
Actually, there's more to it than that.
2,3,5,7,11,13,17,... share the property of having exactly two factors.
1 does not, it only has 1 factor.
Now, the union of {1} and {2,3,5,7,11,...} is a set of integers that are only divisible by themselves and 1. Which is all fine and dandy, but it turns out there are no other interesting properties the members of this set share.
On the other hand, the members of the set of prime numbers share many interesting properties. For example, if x is a member of the set of prime numbers, then sqrt(x) is irrational. Note that the sqrt(1) is not irrational.
So, 1 is not excluded from the set of prime numbers because it makes theorems prettier or any such nonsense. Nor is it an arbitrary decision. The set of prime numbers is an interesting set because all its members share some very interesting properties. 1 does not share these interesting properties, so it is not a member of the set! It wouldn't make any sense for it to be a member!
why should the fact that 'itself' and '1' refer to same number be important?
Because then 1 only was 1 factor, itself. You can call it 1 and itself, 0.5+0.5 and itself, 2/2 and 1 and 6/3/2 and itself, or call it by as many other names as you like, but it's still only one number: 1. Prime numbers, on the other hand, always have exactly two factors. 1 doesn't qualify as prime for the same reason 4 doesn't == it doesn't have exactly 2 factors.
since zero is the absence of value, how can it be odd or even
How can it not be? The only way a number could be neither even nor odd would be for the result of the division of that number by 2 to be undefined. Last time I checked, 0 / 2 was not undefined but was in fact 0, which would make 0 even.
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Re:To be completely pedantic...
on
Happy Odd Day!
·
· Score: 1
... However, if you want that, then "1999/11/13" is actually a better representation...
Indeed. 1999-11-13 is the ISO (International Standards Organization) date format for the day in question, and is the only way it should be written for international use. Writing it 13/11/1999 is not being international, it's being every bit as local as Americans writing 11/13/1999. If you aren't yourself going to follow the ISO standard, you don't have much cause to complain when others don't either.
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Re:Why not in Debian's Distribution?
on
KDE 2.0 in Action
·
· Score: 1
Does anyone know why KDE is not included as part of the debian distribution? I know that there are some licensing issues with QT 1.x, but are these not resolved in QT 2.x?
Yes, the issues are resolved in QT2, but not in QT1. Since there is currently no version of KDE available based on QT2, it is irrelevant that these issues have been resolved in QT2. As long as the current version of KDE is based on QT1, it cannot be included in Debian.
Furthermore, when I check dselect's list of available packages, QT *is* available, in the non-free section. Why isn't KDE available in the non-free section therefore as well?
Why would KDE be in the non-free section? It's GPL, so it's free software. The problem with KDE is not that it's non-free or anything, the problem is that it's license conflicts with QT1's license in such a way that it's technically illegal to distribute KDE at all! This was pointed out to the KDE and QT developers. KDE never changed their license, and QT never changed their license for QT1, so as far as I know, it's still illegal to distribute QT1 based KDE. Most people do it anyways, but the Debian maintainers are somewhat pedantic. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of opinion, but that's the way it is...
screw the newbies. make them learn how to use Linux like we all did. If they really want to learn, they will on their own. I personally don't want to use an OS that products that cater to the lowest common denominator.
Then don't install KDE. Sheesh! It's not like your perfectly-configured-for-your-needs OS will suddenly become less perfect because some newbie somewhere else on the planet installs a GUI over the top of his or her installation.
Free software is about choice. Why do you want to deny other people a choice just because you personally wouldn't choose it?
INTP? I believe that's been renamed INTEGERP in CL.;-)
(Note to the humor imparied: yes, I know what a Meyer-Briggs test is, no need to reply explaining. Considering it's a personality test result, it's somewhat amusing to note that INTEGERP used to be called FIXP in MacLisp...)
Well, bash is another shell that fits into the "extremely bloated" category. Not that I consider that necessarily bad with today's typical RAM configurations. Both take a healthy chunk or real-estate more than their "competition" if you're looking at small configurations (i.e. what shell do you put on RAM disk image for your diskless net-boot machine).
According to ps, memory usage among tcsh/bash/zsh is pretty close. ksh and ash have considerably smaller footprints.
Wow! That surprises me. I never bothered to check since I just plain don't use csh (the inability to easily redirect stderr makes it all but useless in my book); I never would have guessed it's such a memory pig!
I've found that zsh's usefulness outweighs any excessive memory usage it may have. Little things like being able to change directories without using cd make it almost unbearable to go back to bash or [t]csh.
I agree entirely. I merely brought it up because for some people, memory use is an issue. If it is, stay away from zsh and bash (and apparently csh too). If you've got a healthy chunk of memory, though, I think zsh is worth it.
No. The soviets were totalitarianists who payed only lip service to the concepts of socialism/communism.
Indeed. Stalinism would be a better name for what the Soviet Union became after the death of Lenin. Many of the more totalitarian measures that Stalin did not himself put into place were "emergency measures" Lenin had put into place because they were fighting a war! They were supposed to be lifted, and Lenin was actually playing around free market ideas before he died. He warned everyone not to let Stalin replace him when he died, but unfortunately for Russia and her neighbors, Stalin had too much power...
Anyways, Russian history is a facinating topic. There are so many great "what ifs" that we'll never know. I'm certain that if Lenin had lived longer, though, we would have seen a very very different 20th century...
I'd really recommend looking at the Z shell (zsh). The tab completion in the latest versions (>=3.1) is a lot better than any I've seen in previous shells. I don't know of any features in any other shell that aren't in zsh. History (both arrows and !), command line editing, mail checking, very powerful scripting, etc, etc, etc. I think pretty much any good idea from any other shell eventually makes it into zsh, plus some original ideas as well. Downside: it is huge. This ain't the shell you want on your memory starved 386. And the man pages were so big it's actually split into 13 sections ("man zsh" will give you a list of the other 12 sections, for things like "man zshbuiltins" etc.), although I actually consider that a feature (instead of wading through the entire manual I can just bring up the section I'm looking for information from).
Here's a sample zsh script to get the feel for it:
#!/bin/zsh for file in "$@" do if [ "${file}" != "${(L)file}" -a ! -e "${(L)file}" ] then echo "${file} => ${(L)file}" mv "${file}" "${(L)file}" fi done
Which naturally takes renames any file whose name is not all lowercase to be all lowercase. Great for junk imported from brain-damaged operating systems.
Anyways, try it out yourself. Worst that can happen is you won't like it and stop using it. I doubt it, though. Try it, you'll like it!
Oh - another thing that is really cool - where's the compile option? There is none. To compile a program, or part of one, you just edit and save the file. Saving the file compiles it. Wow.
Yikes! You can turn that off, right? I habitually save every time I pause to think for a moment, which is frequently right in the middle of writing something such that if a compile were attempted at that point it would produce a large number of errors. Not that I would mind that as much as it wasting time running the compiler and chewing up processor cycles and doing whatever else it does (popping up and output/error list, for example). This "feature" alone would stop me from using this product...
I realize I'm pissing of a lot of people here by claiming that OSS partially failed. But I fail to see its success on the desktop (I'm not talking about server applications). Sure there are a lot of projects (the gimp, K office, mozilla) but they are all unproven (unlike linux itself and the lower level stuff that runs on it).
You're contradicting yourself here. By saying they are "unproven", you're admitting they have yet to fail. Your point, at best, can be summarized as "OSS has yet to succeed." You would need to go much further to establish that it has failed or will fail.
For that matter, it makes no sense whatsoever to describe OSS has being a success or a failure without defining "successful at what" or "failed to do what". I find it funny to hear people talk about what Linux has to do to become successful when it is already wildly successful (a far greater success than I ever imagined it to be when I first started using it).
If by failed you mean "OSS failed to replace all proprietary software on the majority of computers by Nov 1, 1999" you are indeed correct, and your statement is undeniably true. But it's not a very significant truth.
If you mean to suggest "OSS will fail to replace all propriety software on the majority of ordinary users' desktop computers, ever" that's debateable, but I believe you're correct. However, I've never thought the point was to replace 100% of all proprietary software on all people's computer. Rather, it's to give people the option to run that way if they so choose. I don't want to be forced to buy a $100 imaging program because I have no alternatives. I do want to be able to buy a $100 imaging program is I decide I want to! If your vision of OSS is to drive such proprietary alternatives out of existence, I must say I oppose your vision of OSS. I still want to have that choice, I just want make sure it is a choice and not a necessity.
I just love how we're observing things like black holes light-years away by looking at things inside dark tunnels. Kind of reminds of observing solar neutrinoes by looking at things in a dark cave.
Of course, since everything in the universe interacts with everything else gravitationally, I ought to be able to deduce the superstructure of the universe and the motion of anything and everything in it by observing how my tea leaves settle on the bottom of my cup. With sensitive enough instruments, of course. My grandmother, for instance...:-)
...if all this does is makes it easy to port Linux applications to the Palm, well, that's rather pointless. I don't need GIMP or Netscape on my Palm, as TealPaint and AvantGo do the same sort of functionality except better in the context of the Palm.
I disagree. Yes, it's true, I don't need GIMP or Netscape on a Palm. I haven't got one. I might buy one, though, if I can easily write applications for it under some OS I happen to actually use. If I can quickly and easily develop applications on my desktop and then simply recompile them for a Palm, I just might buy one. I don't care if I can run Netscape or StarOffice or some silly app best suited for the desktop, the real question I have when considering a handheld is, how easy is it to make it run programs I write. A Palm running Linux makes this much easier...
"Linux aficionados who are applauding US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's bitter denunciation of their archrival Microsoft might want to read the fine print first. In the 207-page preliminary ruling, Jackson says that "fringe" operating systems like Linux are destined for continued niche market status."
Am I the only one doesn't care? I happen to be in the niche Linux is the market for, and it works beautifully. Why on Earth would I care whether some idiot in Anytown, USA thinks Linux is a good replacement for Windows 98? I was perfectly happy for years running Solaris on my SPARCstation, while the rest of the world was running MS-DOS on miscellaneous pieces of junk. It did not bother me any that the computer platform and OS of my choice were not the most popular. Why should I care whether Linux ever gets any more popular or not? Not being popular didn't hurt me then, why should I care now? I just don't get it. I suspect Linux will in fact become more popular, but if for some reason it doesn't and in fact shrinks down to being used by only as many people as used it a couple years ago, I don't see why this would or should bother me any. I don't see why I should be bothered by Judge Jackson's comments. I've always found computers and operating systems designed to fill a niche to be far better than overly general crap aimed at the lowest common denominator.
I don't think it's a matter of wanting a cut. Consider the GPL. You're free to use my work as long as the work you include it in is ALSO free.
Now does this make more sense? No one on/. would mind being quoted by MSNBC etc. if they published their articles under an Open Content license. That would be perfectly acceptable. The problem is when you take them and include them in non-open content. That's like taking a GPL program and including it in a proprietary program -> strictly forbidden by the GPL.
If you're a BSD-minded/.er, you probably find the outrage over this odd, but it makes perfect sense to a GPL-minded/.er -- they shouldn't be allowed to take comments and include them in a non-open content site. Considering how many GPL fans/. has, this reaction is not surprising.
Now if only FUD master John C. Dvorak would get a clue...
Dvorak is not paid to be fair. He's paid to be controversial and inflamatory. Don't expect him to become suddenly cluefull while his job description remains "Professional Flamebait"...
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Oh, it can get much more trivial than this. The question is: will it?
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Irrelevant. The day identified at 28-8-888 on the Gregorian calendar is, always was, and always will be 28-8-888 on the Gregorian calendar, regardless of who is or isn't using the Gregorian calendar on that day.
A calendar is mearly a means of pointing out a particular day, giving it some name so that it can be talked about by two people using the same calendar. The Gregorian calendar is one such calendar, and like most useful calendars, it provides a means for naming any day that has ever occured or ever will occur, throughout all eternity. 28-8-888 names a particular day, and that day actually was 28-8-888 Gregorian, although no one knew it at the time.
Think of it this way. JFK died 5 years before men landed on the moon. Just because no one had landed on the moon yet doesn't mean it wasn't five years before the event. Does that clarify things or just confuse the issue? Lemme try that again. Just because no one knew at the time that it was 5 years before man would land on the moon, doesn't mean that is wasn't. In fact, it was. If we decided to redo the calendar so that the year Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon was year 0 (a nice feature the Gregorian calendar lacks: a zero year), then on this new calendar this is year 30, and JFK died in the year -5. It is currently true, always has been true, and always will be true that JFK died in the year -5 on this calendar I'm proposing. The fact that I hadn't yet proposed this calendar at the time is irrelevant, the event still occured when it did, and on the calendar I'm proposing, that was during the year -5.
28-8-888 is 887 years after the year identified as 1 on the Gregorian calendar. This is true, always has been, and always will be, regardless of what calendar you use to identify those dates.
In summary, there's nothing funny about dates on the Gregorian calendar that identify days before the Gregorian calendar was invented. What would be odd would be a calendar where this actually made a difference...
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That statement is false. The 1's are odd. To make this a correct statement, say instead:
Not all the digits in 1/1/2001 are odd
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Actually, there's more to it than that.
2,3,5,7,11,13,17,... share the property of having exactly two factors.
1 does not, it only has 1 factor.
Now, the union of {1} and {2,3,5,7,11,...} is a set of integers that are only divisible by themselves and 1. Which is all fine and dandy, but it turns out there are no other interesting properties the members of this set share.
On the other hand, the members of the set of prime numbers share many interesting properties. For example, if x is a member of the set of prime numbers, then sqrt(x) is irrational. Note that the sqrt(1) is not irrational.
So, 1 is not excluded from the set of prime numbers because it makes theorems prettier or any such nonsense. Nor is it an arbitrary decision. The set of prime numbers is an interesting set because all its members share some very interesting properties. 1 does not share these interesting properties, so it is not a member of the set! It wouldn't make any sense for it to be a member!
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Because then 1 only was 1 factor, itself. You can call it 1 and itself, 0.5+0.5 and itself, 2/2 and 1 and 6/3/2 and itself, or call it by as many other names as you like, but it's still only one number: 1. Prime numbers, on the other hand, always have exactly two factors. 1 doesn't qualify as prime for the same reason 4 doesn't == it doesn't have exactly 2 factors.
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How can it not be? The only way a number could be neither even nor odd would be for the result of the division of that number by 2 to be undefined. Last time I checked, 0 / 2 was not undefined but was in fact 0, which would make 0 even.
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Indeed. 1999-11-13 is the ISO (International Standards Organization) date format for the day in question, and is the only way it should be written for international use. Writing it 13/11/1999 is not being international, it's being every bit as local as Americans writing 11/13/1999. If you aren't yourself going to follow the ISO standard, you don't have much cause to complain when others don't either.
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Yes, the issues are resolved in QT2, but not in QT1. Since there is currently no version of KDE available based on QT2, it is irrelevant that these issues have been resolved in QT2. As long as the current version of KDE is based on QT1, it cannot be included in Debian.
Furthermore, when I check dselect's list of available packages, QT *is* available, in the non-free section. Why isn't KDE available in the non-free section therefore as well?
Why would KDE be in the non-free section? It's GPL, so it's free software. The problem with KDE is not that it's non-free or anything, the problem is that it's license conflicts with QT1's license in such a way that it's technically illegal to distribute KDE at all! This was pointed out to the KDE and QT developers. KDE never changed their license, and QT never changed their license for QT1, so as far as I know, it's still illegal to distribute QT1 based KDE. Most people do it anyways, but the Debian maintainers are somewhat pedantic. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of opinion, but that's the way it is...
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ex-face, perhaps?
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Then don't install KDE. Sheesh! It's not like your perfectly-configured-for-your-needs OS will suddenly become less perfect because some newbie somewhere else on the planet installs a GUI over the top of his or her installation.
Free software is about choice. Why do you want to deny other people a choice just because you personally wouldn't choose it?
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(Note to the humor imparied: yes, I know what a Meyer-Briggs test is, no need to reply explaining. Considering it's a personality test result, it's somewhat amusing to note that INTEGERP used to be called FIXP in MacLisp...)
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Now that is an impressive announcement.
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Naw, the "box" is supposed to represent a window. He's just milking the Windows interface for all its worth...
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63132
373176
166544
262184
340548
(executable sizes)
Well, bash is another shell that fits into the "extremely bloated" category. Not that I consider that necessarily bad with today's typical RAM configurations. Both take a healthy chunk or real-estate more than their "competition" if you're looking at small configurations (i.e. what shell do you put on RAM disk image for your diskless net-boot machine).
According to ps, memory usage among tcsh/bash/zsh is pretty close. ksh and ash have considerably smaller
footprints.
rwg 17543 0.0 0.1 1116 372 pts/7 S 01:14 0:00 ash
rwg 17544 0.0 0.3 1680 896 pts/7 S 01:14 0:00 bash
rwg 17545 0.0 0.1 1236 488 pts/7 S 01:14 0:00 ksh
rwg 17546 0.0 0.4 1948 1068 pts/7 S 01:14 0:00 -csh
rwg 17626 1.0 0.3 1700 956 pts/7 S 01:15 0:00 zsh
Wow! That surprises me. I never bothered to check since I just plain don't use csh (the inability to easily redirect stderr makes it all but useless in my book); I never would have guessed it's such a memory pig!
I've found that zsh's usefulness outweighs any excessive memory usage it may have. Little things like being able to change directories without using cd make it almost unbearable to go back to bash or [t]csh.
I agree entirely. I merely brought it up because for some people, memory use is an issue. If it is, stay away from zsh and bash (and apparently csh too). If you've got a healthy chunk of memory, though, I think zsh is worth it.
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Indeed. Stalinism would be a better name for what the Soviet Union became after the death of Lenin. Many of the more totalitarian measures that Stalin did not himself put into place were "emergency measures" Lenin had put into place because they were fighting a war! They were supposed to be lifted, and Lenin was actually playing around free market ideas before he died. He warned everyone not to let Stalin replace him when he died, but unfortunately for Russia and her neighbors, Stalin had too much power...
Anyways, Russian history is a facinating topic. There are so many great "what ifs" that we'll never know. I'm certain that if Lenin had lived longer, though, we would have seen a very very different 20th century...
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Here's a sample zsh script to get the feel for it:
#!/bin/zsh
for file in "$@"
do
if [ "${file}" != "${(L)file}" -a ! -e "${(L)file}" ]
then
echo "${file} => ${(L)file}"
mv "${file}" "${(L)file}"
fi
done
Which naturally takes renames any file whose name is not all lowercase to be all lowercase. Great for junk imported from brain-damaged operating systems.
Anyways, try it out yourself. Worst that can happen is you won't like it and stop using it. I doubt it, though. Try it, you'll like it!
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These are, of course, not incompatible statements. Just because we're on GnuCrack doesn't mean emacs isn't a great IDE.
Besides, that's unfair. You make it sound like emacs is an addiction. It is not.
It's more of an obsession...
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Yikes! You can turn that off, right? I habitually save every time I pause to think for a moment, which is frequently right in the middle of writing something such that if a compile were attempted at that point it would produce a large number of errors. Not that I would mind that as much as it wasting time running the compiler and chewing up processor cycles and doing whatever else it does (popping up and output/error list, for example). This "feature" alone would stop me from using this product...
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You're contradicting yourself here. By saying they are "unproven", you're admitting they have yet to fail. Your point, at best, can be summarized as "OSS has yet to succeed." You would need to go much further to establish that it has failed or will fail.
For that matter, it makes no sense whatsoever to describe OSS has being a success or a failure without defining "successful at what" or "failed to do what". I find it funny to hear people talk about what Linux has to do to become successful when it is already wildly successful (a far greater success than I ever imagined it to be when I first started using it).
If by failed you mean "OSS failed to replace all proprietary software on the majority of computers by Nov 1, 1999" you are indeed correct, and your statement is undeniably true. But it's not a very significant truth.
If you mean to suggest "OSS will fail to replace all propriety software on the majority of ordinary users' desktop computers, ever" that's debateable, but I believe you're correct. However, I've never thought the point was to replace 100% of all proprietary software on all people's computer. Rather, it's to give people the option to run that way if they so choose. I don't want to be forced to buy a $100 imaging program because I have no alternatives. I do want to be able to buy a $100 imaging program is I decide I want to! If your vision of OSS is to drive such proprietary alternatives out of existence, I must say I oppose your vision of OSS. I still want to have that choice, I just want make sure it is a choice and not a necessity.
--
Of course, since everything in the universe interacts with everything else gravitationally, I ought to be able to deduce the superstructure of the universe and the motion of anything and everything in it by observing how my tea leaves settle on the bottom of my cup. With sensitive enough instruments, of course. My grandmother, for instance...
--
I disagree. Yes, it's true, I don't need GIMP or Netscape on a Palm. I haven't got one. I might buy one, though, if I can easily write applications for it under some OS I happen to actually use. If I can quickly and easily develop applications on my desktop and then simply recompile them for a Palm, I just might buy one. I don't care if I can run Netscape or StarOffice or some silly app best suited for the desktop, the real question I have when considering a handheld is, how easy is it to make it run programs I write. A Palm running Linux makes this much easier...
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I believe you can, but I'm honestly not sure. I never use linuxconf myself...
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Am I the only one doesn't care? I happen to be in the niche Linux is the market for, and it works beautifully. Why on Earth would I care whether some idiot in Anytown, USA thinks Linux is a good replacement for Windows 98? I was perfectly happy for years running Solaris on my SPARCstation, while the rest of the world was running MS-DOS on miscellaneous pieces of junk. It did not bother me any that the computer platform and OS of my choice were not the most popular. Why should I care whether Linux ever gets any more popular or not? Not being popular didn't hurt me then, why should I care now? I just don't get it. I suspect Linux will in fact become more popular, but if for some reason it doesn't and in fact shrinks down to being used by only as many people as used it a couple years ago, I don't see why this would or should bother me any. I don't see why I should be bothered by Judge Jackson's comments. I've always found computers and operating systems designed to fill a niche to be far better than overly general crap aimed at the lowest common denominator.
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Now does this make more sense? No one on
If you're a BSD-minded
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Dvorak is not paid to be fair. He's paid to be controversial and inflamatory. Don't expect him to become suddenly cluefull while his job description remains "Professional Flamebait"...
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