Ah, could we finally see the start of *real* competition in the desktop OS market? It would interesting to have a unix-based OS as competition to windows.
One can argue that this might lessen the rate of adoption of linux, but I think the opposite will be true because when developers support two platforms, they'll have to use cross-platform toolkits or code so going to three platforms is not that big a step.
I like the guy's humour. Either that or he is not smart for putting a reputation-ruining 'bomb' in the source code:-) But anyway... good programmers are supposed to be very critical of their code so even functionally correct code can be commented as though it were horrible.
This is the first time I'm hearing of either The Connection or MAKE. It's a bit unfortunate that there isn't a readable text there. I do have to question how an internet-based magazine expects to survive these days when the tinkerers are more likely to be on the internet anyway.
Actually, if two countries were to build a moon base, I'd say it's more likely that they will consider building in close proximity so they can assist one another in case of troubles. International cooperation does seem to be essential in getting real success over there.
And yes... if such a colony gets really big and thriving, it's quite likely they'll kick off the old-Earthians and declare themselves independent:-)
I've always wondered what kind of political issues could arise from sending people to new territories. After all, who owns the land of other planets? It seems that the moon is politically stable because it's really hard and expensive to actually settle a large portion of the land. It's good to see that these projects to some extent don't push national boundaries all the way into space.
There is considerable merit in open source when you've got many eyeballs you can drive out bugs and security holes and flaws and fix them more efficiently.
This is an argument commonly used in favour of open source products. It's positive to hear them coming from major commercial companies too now. Open Source has gotten a more "legit" status now that it is clearly demonstrated by IBM and Apple that commercial products can be made or based on OS. Not too long ago, a manager-type friend started inquiring about "open source"... it's generating some buzz these days.
As I recall, back in the day BeOS was designed to run on a system with 4 or 8 PowerPC processors. At some point, they made the same switch that Apple is now doing... perhaps it is an inevitable thing?
What he's stating seems rather obvious, but then again I might not be his target audience. One thing he seems to be missing is: who is paying for the test and is the one in whose favour the test turns out to be also the one who paid for it?
This makes me wonder to which extent the bureaucracy is to blame (or attribute) to "entrenched" managers or the whole system. In this case, it is apparently believed that the top layer of people keep an inefficient system intact. The question is: can one change the nature of a system by replacing the managing people in that system?
I haven't had problems with up2date on my production server... exactly the way I like it. I trust RH a bit more (but not too much more) than Debian to provide stable upgrades on their RHEL distro. For our own development, we made a couple python scripts that lets us fetch and build the libraries we need for our projects... that works quite well if you're working with a known set of libraries.
Okay, so they are more or less going for people officially being their customers (in a sense), rather that unofficially pirating the same software? It's interesting how piracy does seem to encourage such companies to drastically lower their prices...
Okay, that's quite far-fetched: which interest would Intel have to merge with Apple anymore than they would have had in the past to merge with Microsoft? Intel is a hardware company... and one that benefits tremendously from all the windows-based computers out there. Certainly, they wouldn't be interested in Windows suddenly working a lot better with AMD CPU's? Two people can play such a game...
As I understand from the article, this calculater is aimed at these school kids, so if HP wants schools to actively assist in the marketing for these things, they'd better cooperate. Speaking of which, can't they design calculators to be a bit more.. well.. "hip", e.g. like an ipod?
I've made some use of RTLinux myself - one aspect that we got to wonder about is to which extent you can move the controller outside of the computer and into its own embedded device. In this case, it seems that it's the diversity of experiments that is the deciding factor for using the computer.
It is a little odd that they talk about 1 millisecond, when the time between interrupts is 50 microseconds. To miss for "even" 1 millisecond would mean missing 20 interrupts! That's just some hype, IMHO. What I find more interesting (but can't find in TFA) is the tolerance for delay per interrupt: if the interrupts are 50 microseconds apart on average, but sometimes 20 apart and sometimes 70, what is the result for the experiment? I think that that's where you're going to see the real test for RT Linux.
I guess it's pretty cool to be chatting and posting to slashdot while you're flying. It's just so much more l33t. Speaking of which... controlling your botnet from 30k feet in the sky must make it feel more special too.
How does this impact issues with interference of electronic devices? Is that problem solved to a degree that (even?) wi-fi and affiliated devices are not an issue?
It amuses me to think back about arguments I've had several years ago about the merits of the internet and of using email. The other guy (management-ish type) didn't get the point and said that if he wanted to contact a person, he'd just pick up the phone and call them. Fast-forward to 2005...
Frankly though, I've had a bit of an internet-outage at home once or twice. To my own surprise, I found it a bit refreshing to not have access for a short while.
What isn't clear to me is: does Fedora become a Linux distro on its own? If so, what is the official RedHat distro then? Would that move to (non-free) Enterprise versions then?
I agree: they should at least take the proper steps if they expect proper action to be taken. We want hardcopy legal threats and not just emailed ones!
The main fallacy you're using here is False Dilemma. Obviously, there are a lot more options than the two extremes you're giving and it's easily observed that he's using one not in your list: making a complaint about the way things are going, likely in an attempt to go for improvement. Possibly, you're just trolling. In that case: congratulations, someone took the bait.
Is such an approach also useable for finding firefox leaks? As a user (not developer, alas) I'm noticing that it invariably gets sluggish after some period of time, even with few pages open.
Empirically, as a matter of science, it's clear that the reason scientists believe in science is that they have faith, not proof that the Universe is well-ordered. If the Universe were not well-ordered, science would be meaningless.
I think that the way science evolved is: "hey, if I smash these two rocks together, then there's fire... and if I do it again, it does the same thing" and that religion evolved from "there's thunder in the sky because you didn't obey oogabooga".
The problem with comparing faith in the scientific method with faith in a divine entity is that it seeks to find some sort of equivalency on a qualitative basis. The fact that some form of trust is needed does not make them equivalent children of the same tree. My faith in my girlfriend's fidelity is not religious. Faith in an entity that goes out of its way to be totally ambiguous and hard to detect and then basing a system of strong and unshakeable opinions on that... that is religious.
The answer to your question lies in the observation that you apparently think it's a religion if someone believes God would intervene but considers it a non-religion if they believe they can conclude God won't.
I think it has a scientific component if you deduce from a falling apple that mass attracts and I think it has a religious component if you justify a system of strong opinions and fear from the one time it doesn't fall. There will always be things that cannot be explained or done by contemporary science. Do we believe these days that diseases are a result of a god being angry with us? No, we know much more about the processes by which they spread and what we can do about it. If people honestly believed that diseases are their god's way of sending messages, then surely they would campaign against all medical research?
The lack of a god figure in an explanation is not the same as expressing the explanation in terms of the non-existence of that god figure. Without science, we wouldn't even know about Titan. If those phenomena can be accurately explained, will that mean people will stop believing in their god? No, they will move on to the next phenomenon. Explanations that don't depend on the (non-)existence of a god do of course leave open the existence of that god.
I don't consider myself an atheist, for the reason that all the things I do believe in (either rationally or irrationally) are very poorly represented by the label "this guy doesn't believe in god". I choose not to follow any of the mainstream religions for far more reasons than that I believe supernatural phenomena do not exist. I simply don't believe that any superintelligent being would be as smallminded as their gods appear to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, could we finally see the start of *real* competition in the desktop OS market? It would interesting to have a unix-based OS as competition to windows.
One can argue that this might lessen the rate of adoption of linux, but I think the opposite will be true because when developers support two platforms, they'll have to use cross-platform toolkits or code so going to three platforms is not that big a step.
Eek. You're right. Where is that edit button... ?
I like the guy's humour. Either that or he is not smart for putting a reputation-ruining 'bomb' in the source code :-) But anyway... good programmers are supposed to be very critical of their code so even functionally correct code can be commented as though it were horrible.
This is the first time I'm hearing of either The Connection or MAKE. It's a bit unfortunate that there isn't a readable text there. I do have to question how an internet-based magazine expects to survive these days when the tinkerers are more likely to be on the internet anyway.
Actually, if two countries were to build a moon base, I'd say it's more likely that they will consider building in close proximity so they can assist one another in case of troubles. International cooperation does seem to be essential in getting real success over there.
:-)
And yes... if such a colony gets really big and thriving, it's quite likely they'll kick off the old-Earthians and declare themselves independent
I've always wondered what kind of political issues could arise from sending people to new territories. After all, who owns the land of other planets? It seems that the moon is politically stable because it's really hard and expensive to actually settle a large portion of the land. It's good to see that these projects to some extent don't push national boundaries all the way into space.
Well, if I have to choose between "see Britney Spears naked" and "see Bill Gates" naked, I'll pick the first worm any day!
There is considerable merit in open source when you've got many eyeballs you can drive out bugs and security holes and flaws and fix them more efficiently.
This is an argument commonly used in favour of open source products. It's positive to hear them coming from major commercial companies too now. Open Source has gotten a more "legit" status now that it is clearly demonstrated by IBM and Apple that commercial products can be made or based on OS. Not too long ago, a manager-type friend started inquiring about "open source"... it's generating some buzz these days.
As I recall, back in the day BeOS was designed to run on a system with 4 or 8 PowerPC processors. At some point, they made the same switch that Apple is now doing... perhaps it is an inevitable thing?
What he's stating seems rather obvious, but then again I might not be his target audience. One thing he seems to be missing is: who is paying for the test and is the one in whose favour the test turns out to be also the one who paid for it?
This makes me wonder to which extent the bureaucracy is to blame (or attribute) to "entrenched" managers or the whole system. In this case, it is apparently believed that the top layer of people keep an inefficient system intact. The question is: can one change the nature of a system by replacing the managing people in that system?
I haven't had problems with up2date on my production server... exactly the way I like it. I trust RH a bit more (but not too much more) than Debian to provide stable upgrades on their RHEL distro. For our own development, we made a couple python scripts that lets us fetch and build the libraries we need for our projects... that works quite well if you're working with a known set of libraries.
I suppose it's possible to run Linux on it by simply using Knoppix, or rather: the variant that will run on a PS3.
Okay, so they are more or less going for people officially being their customers (in a sense), rather that unofficially pirating the same software? It's interesting how piracy does seem to encourage such companies to drastically lower their prices...
Okay, that's quite far-fetched: which interest would Intel have to merge with Apple anymore than they would have had in the past to merge with Microsoft? Intel is a hardware company... and one that benefits tremendously from all the windows-based computers out there. Certainly, they wouldn't be interested in Windows suddenly working a lot better with AMD CPU's? Two people can play such a game...
As I understand from the article, this calculater is aimed at these school kids, so if HP wants schools to actively assist in the marketing for these things, they'd better cooperate. Speaking of which, can't they design calculators to be a bit more.. well.. "hip", e.g. like an ipod?
I've made some use of RTLinux myself - one aspect that we got to wonder about is to which extent you can move the controller outside of the computer and into its own embedded device. In this case, it seems that it's the diversity of experiments that is the deciding factor for using the computer.
It is a little odd that they talk about 1 millisecond, when the time between interrupts is 50 microseconds. To miss for "even" 1 millisecond would mean missing 20 interrupts! That's just some hype, IMHO. What I find more interesting (but can't find in TFA) is the tolerance for delay per interrupt: if the interrupts are 50 microseconds apart on average, but sometimes 20 apart and sometimes 70, what is the result for the experiment? I think that that's where you're going to see the real test for RT Linux.
I guess it's pretty cool to be chatting and posting to slashdot while you're flying. It's just so much more l33t. Speaking of which... controlling your botnet from 30k feet in the sky must make it feel more special too.
How does this impact issues with interference of electronic devices? Is that problem solved to a degree that (even?) wi-fi and affiliated devices are not an issue?
It amuses me to think back about arguments I've had several years ago about the merits of the internet and of using email. The other guy (management-ish type) didn't get the point and said that if he wanted to contact a person, he'd just pick up the phone and call them. Fast-forward to 2005...
Frankly though, I've had a bit of an internet-outage at home once or twice. To my own surprise, I found it a bit refreshing to not have access for a short while.
What isn't clear to me is: does Fedora become a Linux distro on its own? If so, what is the official RedHat distro then? Would that move to (non-free) Enterprise versions then?
I agree: they should at least take the proper steps if they expect proper action to be taken. We want hardcopy legal threats and not just emailed ones!
It's perhaps a folly, but not a fallacy... but if you insist it's a fallacy, maybe you can name it so I can look it up for myself.
The main fallacy you're using here is False Dilemma. Obviously, there are a lot more options than the two extremes you're giving and it's easily observed that he's using one not in your list: making a complaint about the way things are going, likely in an attempt to go for improvement. Possibly, you're just trolling. In that case: congratulations, someone took the bait.
Is such an approach also useable for finding firefox leaks? As a user (not developer, alas) I'm noticing that it invariably gets sluggish after some period of time, even with few pages open.
Empirically, as a matter of science, it's clear that the reason scientists believe in science is that they have faith, not proof that the Universe is well-ordered. If the Universe were not well-ordered, science would be meaningless.
I think that the way science evolved is: "hey, if I smash these two rocks together, then there's fire... and if I do it again, it does the same thing" and that religion evolved from "there's thunder in the sky because you didn't obey oogabooga".
The problem with comparing faith in the scientific method with faith in a divine entity is that it seeks to find some sort of equivalency on a qualitative basis. The fact that some form of trust is needed does not make them equivalent children of the same tree. My faith in my girlfriend's fidelity is not religious. Faith in an entity that goes out of its way to be totally ambiguous and hard to detect and then basing a system of strong and unshakeable opinions on that... that is religious.
The answer to your question lies in the observation that you apparently think it's a religion if someone believes God would intervene but considers it a non-religion if they believe they can conclude God won't.
I think it has a scientific component if you deduce from a falling apple that mass attracts and I think it has a religious component if you justify a system of strong opinions and fear from the one time it doesn't fall. There will always be things that cannot be explained or done by contemporary science. Do we believe these days that diseases are a result of a god being angry with us? No, we know much more about the processes by which they spread and what we can do about it. If people honestly believed that diseases are their god's way of sending messages, then surely they would campaign against all medical research?
The lack of a god figure in an explanation is not the same as expressing the explanation in terms of the non-existence of that god figure. Without science, we wouldn't even know about Titan. If those phenomena can be accurately explained, will that mean people will stop believing in their god? No, they will move on to the next phenomenon. Explanations that don't depend on the (non-)existence of a god do of course leave open the existence of that god.
I don't consider myself an atheist, for the reason that all the things I do believe in (either rationally or irrationally) are very poorly represented by the label "this guy doesn't believe in god". I choose not to follow any of the mainstream religions for far more reasons than that I believe supernatural phenomena do not exist. I simply don't believe that any superintelligent being would be as smallminded as their gods appear to be.