I've seen a lot of knee jerk MS-is-evil stuff (this is Slashdot after all) but what are the actual facts of the case? Just because we don't like someone doesn't mean that they can't be right occasionally.
We're supposed to be geeks here - rational, logical, all that jazz. Let's base the arguments on the facts.
It seems to me that this is an editor problem. And a lot of the blame for the parlous state of editors at the moment can be laid at the feet of Cpp, the C preprocessor.
"In retrospect, maybe the worst aspect of Cpp is that it has stifled the development of programming environments for C. The anarchic and character-level operation of Cpp makes nontrivial tools for C and C++ larger, slower, less elegant, and less effective than one would have thought possible." - Stroustrup, Design and Evolution of C++.
We should have a much better view of a program than a bunch of files containing characters.
The official investigation concluded that they were spores from local algae, and that the initial DNA tests were flawed. Wikipedia has the details, as usual.
To go from "our test found no DNA" to "there is no DNA" to "they must be extraterrestrial" to "they look like the dust clouds in Monocerous" is a series of leaps that go wayyy ahead of the available evidence, in my view.
It would be very interesting to be proven wrong, however.
Build up from the very bottom. ARM assembly (disclaimer - I work for ARM) is ubiquitous and pretty close to an idealised assembler. Dev kits are available for cheap.
Then you build up through structured assembly, C-like languages (PASCAL?), and so on. Otherwise, it's like trying to build houses without understanding what bricks are.
That's the way I did it, except being as how I'm old and crusty the assembly language I started with was SC/MP, and we also had a load of BASIC thrown into the mix.
It will be very difficult for SCO to spin this one in a positive direction. Darl McBride isn't at SCO any more, which is a shame. It would have been good to see him go down with the ship.
I'm skeptical (as usual), but if true, bring it on, Larry Niven style.
Now our addictive types get toasted on wall current instead of having to steal and carjack their way to their next fix? That seems like a step forward to me.
Legalize it so we don't get a load of back-street ecstasy peddlers giving everyone deep bone infections.
And then treat it as a public health issue, and let those susceptible to its lure breed themselves out of the population. It's just evolution in action.
- Lower noise figures at various resolutions/speeds. - Better performance in low light (i.e. indoors without flash, to avoid that overexposed-lightbulb-head look in so many of my snaps). - Longer exposures
How long till the "pentawater" people seize on this as "proof" of their unfounded claims about their bottled magic-water?
(Slightly related - UK slashdotters can sign a petition to protest OfQuack (aka CNHC) certifying unproven Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine procedures.)
When I was young and knew no better, I used to read Perry Rhodan books. These were translated from the original Dutch for the English-speaking (i.e. American) market and were full of nonsensical conversions like this:
"The spatial distortion wrenched at the small fighter, as the enemy mothership surfaced from hyperspace less than 1000 kilometers (621.37 miles) away."
Everything, of course, would have been fine if they had materialized 621.38 miles away...
Indeed, probably true. Bu the point it that I couldn't find it. I spent several whole days trying to figure it out, in dribs and drabs. In the end, I decided on a solution and it worked, and I haven't worried about it since. That's a positive, successful result as far as I'm concerned.
I just objected a bit to the word "retard" in the original post - different people will find different solutions acceptable. Just because I've chosen a different one for my circumstances may mean that I have a different setup/requirement, rather than being wilfully perverse.
I had a fully wireless home setup. Pain in the backside, it was. Unexplained outages, unreliability, supposedly compatible devices having different chipsets in them, the works. I invested in a few powerline ethernet doohickeys and all my problems went away, without having to explain to the wife why I was gouging channels in the plasterwork for network cables.
I had a problem, it solved my problem. How retarded I am.
But on the other hand, some hardware is an utter pain under Windows, and just works under Linux. Case in point: my cheapo webcam and my video capture card. Under Linux, plug and play, under Windows, even the supplied driver disk didn't work.
As far as installing software is concerned, I find it much easier under Linux, and get a bit paranoid under Windows about downloading random stuff and running it. But that's just my opinion.
For most users (e.g. my wife), they genuinely don't care, and as long as everything is set up to start with, Linux is a perfectly viable option.
However, I think that there will not be "the year of Linux on the desktop", but this is OK, because instead there will be a gradual evolution away from "the desktop" as Windows users expect it to be. There may instead be a year of "the desktop replacement" and that could very easily be running on Linux. Mobile phones and netbooks are possibly the first widespread examples of computers without a traditional desktop.
Don't know about Intel, but ARM shipped 1 billion processors last quarter, according to their Q3 results statement.
Other things that must ship in the billions: screws, nails, paper clips, thumbtacks, staples, sweets (candy), baked beans, soda, LEDs (actually almost any discrete electronic component), copier paper, post-it notes, coins, pens, pencils, bin liners... it's too easy.
You've been living with someone for years, you develop a model of their behavior in your brain. With them there, this helps to predict where they are likely to be, what they said in that indistinct murmur from the other room, how they are likely to react when you say that you're late for the third time this week.
So this model is going to be still running even after they have gone. You "know" that your spouse will be in the living room watching "Strictly Come Dancing" because it's 7pm. So your mental model will fill them in, and as you walk into the room it will take a little time for the model to adjust. Is this the "corner of the eye" effect at work?
OK, so I'm not a clinical psychologist, not even close. But it seems a very plausible model to me.
I would be worried that this would be badly worded and over-broad.
But, being a citizen of the UK, I know that even if legislation were made like this, then Her Majesty's Government would never abuse its powers and apply it to situations which were not originally intended.
Yup, spot on. I've eventually got a mostly-functional configuration using the "model" option, but the controls are still mislabelled and the mike input is (a) very low gain and yet (b) very noisy. I've just bought myself a decent USB mike to get around the problem. And yes, it "just works" under Linux.
This approach has worked very well with USB mass storage devices. The same driver talks to my camera, external hard drive, memory stick and Ogg Vorbis player. It doesn't seem to have stifled innovation any.
I think that the lesson here is that hardware support is very variable, on any OS.
I bought a digital TV card for my box at home, running Kubuntu, and it was the simplest installation of anything I have ever done. Pop it in, it just worked. No driver installs, no nothing.
I also bought a cheap webcam. On Linux, plug and go. On Windows, even the supplied disk of drivers failed to install (Error -1: Could not configure driver or some such nonsense), and then the drivers from the website regularly cause BSOD.
On the other hand, the in-built sound system (some Intel chipset) on my home box is complete pain in the ass under Linux. I've never got the mike input to work properly.
It is nice to see that some hardware makers are beginning to actively support Linux, or at least allow Linux developers to actively support their stuff by supplying test units and documentation.
Do I think that teaching creationism undermines the whole of science education? You betcha.
Evolution is just the start. It's the crack where the wedge goes in, because it's unpopular and easy to misrepresent.
A literal, biblical view of the world is at odds with most of science:
- Evolution (origins) - Biology (origins, classification) - Cosmology (age of universe, reference frames, size of universe) - Geology (age of the earth again) - Nuclear physics (age of the earth again) - The scientific method per se (primacy of revelation as a method for obtaining truth)
This is not an unsupported slippery-slope argument; just take a look at what is produced by Answers In Genesis or the Discovery Institute. All of these things are under attack from the biblical literalists.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a lot of knee jerk MS-is-evil stuff (this is Slashdot after all) but what are the actual facts of the case? Just because we don't like someone doesn't mean that they can't be right occasionally.
We're supposed to be geeks here - rational, logical, all that jazz. Let's base the arguments on the facts.
It seems to me that this is an editor problem. And a lot of the blame for the parlous state of editors at the moment can be laid at the feet of Cpp, the C preprocessor.
"In retrospect, maybe the worst aspect of Cpp is that it has stifled the development of programming environments for C. The anarchic and character-level operation of Cpp makes nontrivial tools for C and C++ larger, slower, less elegant, and less effective than one would have thought possible." - Stroustrup, Design and Evolution of C++.
We should have a much better view of a program than a bunch of files containing characters.
The official investigation concluded that they were spores from local algae, and that the initial DNA tests were flawed. Wikipedia has the details, as usual.
To go from "our test found no DNA" to "there is no DNA" to "they must be extraterrestrial" to "they look like the dust clouds in Monocerous" is a series of leaps that go wayyy ahead of the available evidence, in my view.
It would be very interesting to be proven wrong, however.
...his proof of the Turing-Lovecraft theorem: "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extradimensional Summoning"
Why not assembly language?
Build up from the very bottom. ARM assembly (disclaimer - I work for ARM) is ubiquitous and pretty close to an idealised assembler. Dev kits are available for cheap.
Then you build up through structured assembly, C-like languages (PASCAL?), and so on. Otherwise, it's like trying to build houses without understanding what bricks are.
That's the way I did it, except being as how I'm old and crusty the assembly language I started with was SC/MP, and we also had a load of BASIC thrown into the mix.
It will be very difficult for SCO to spin this one in a positive direction. Darl McBride isn't at SCO any more, which is a shame. It would have been good to see him go down with the ship.
Roll on the IBM case.
I'm skeptical (as usual), but if true, bring it on, Larry Niven style.
Now our addictive types get toasted on wall current instead of having to steal and carjack their way to their next fix? That seems like a step forward to me.
Legalize it so we don't get a load of back-street ecstasy peddlers giving everyone deep bone infections.
And then treat it as a public health issue, and let those susceptible to its lure breed themselves out of the population. It's just evolution in action.
I thought that that was discovered and patented by Gogrilla Mincefriend.
Given your mention of encryption-cracking clusters, I would be remiss not to post this XKCD comic in response.
- Lower noise figures at various resolutions/speeds.
- Better performance in low light (i.e. indoors without flash, to avoid that overexposed-lightbulb-head look in so many of my snaps).
- Longer exposures
How long till the "pentawater" people seize on this as "proof" of their unfounded claims about their bottled magic-water?
(Slightly related - UK slashdotters can sign a petition to protest OfQuack (aka CNHC) certifying unproven Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine procedures.)
When I was young and knew no better, I used to read Perry Rhodan books. These were translated from the original Dutch for the English-speaking (i.e. American) market and were full of nonsensical conversions like this:
"The spatial distortion wrenched at the small fighter, as the enemy mothership surfaced from hyperspace less than 1000 kilometers (621.37 miles) away."
Everything, of course, would have been fine if they had materialized 621.38 miles away...
Indeed, probably true. Bu the point it that I couldn't find it. I spent several whole days trying to figure it out, in dribs and drabs. In the end, I decided on a solution and it worked, and I haven't worried about it since. That's a positive, successful result as far as I'm concerned.
I just objected a bit to the word "retard" in the original post - different people will find different solutions acceptable. Just because I've chosen a different one for my circumstances may mean that I have a different setup/requirement, rather than being wilfully perverse.
I had a fully wireless home setup. Pain in the backside, it was. Unexplained outages, unreliability, supposedly compatible devices having different chipsets in them, the works. I invested in a few powerline ethernet doohickeys and all my problems went away, without having to explain to the wife why I was gouging channels in the plasterwork for network cables.
I had a problem, it solved my problem. How retarded I am.
Freescale and Pegatron showed a prototype at CES:
http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2009/01/meet-pegatron-199-arm-based-netbook.html
Got to be careful with this. It only takes an extension and a few more meeting rooms before you are asking people to meet in the Cradle of Filth.
See how effective it is? There is a relevant comment hidden in the above post - I challenge anyone to find it!
But on the other hand, some hardware is an utter pain under Windows, and just works under Linux. Case in point: my cheapo webcam and my video capture card. Under Linux, plug and play, under Windows, even the supplied driver disk didn't work.
As far as installing software is concerned, I find it much easier under Linux, and get a bit paranoid under Windows about downloading random stuff and running it. But that's just my opinion.
For most users (e.g. my wife), they genuinely don't care, and as long as everything is set up to start with, Linux is a perfectly viable option.
However, I think that there will not be "the year of Linux on the desktop", but this is OK, because instead there will be a gradual evolution away from "the desktop" as Windows users expect it to be. There may instead be a year of "the desktop replacement" and that could very easily be running on Linux. Mobile phones and netbooks are possibly the first widespread examples of computers without a traditional desktop.
Don't know about Intel, but ARM shipped 1 billion processors last quarter, according to their Q3 results statement.
Other things that must ship in the billions: screws, nails, paper clips, thumbtacks, staples, sweets (candy), baked beans, soda, LEDs (actually almost any discrete electronic component), copier paper, post-it notes, coins, pens, pencils, bin liners ... it's too easy.
You've been living with someone for years, you develop a model of their behavior in your brain. With them there, this helps to predict where they are likely to be, what they said in that indistinct murmur from the other room, how they are likely to react when you say that you're late for the third time this week.
So this model is going to be still running even after they have gone. You "know" that your spouse will be in the living room watching "Strictly Come Dancing" because it's 7pm. So your mental model will fill them in, and as you walk into the room it will take a little time for the model to adjust. Is this the "corner of the eye" effect at work?
OK, so I'm not a clinical psychologist, not even close. But it seems a very plausible model to me.
I would be worried that this would be badly worded and over-broad.
But, being a citizen of the UK, I know that even if legislation were made like this, then Her Majesty's Government would never abuse its powers and apply it to situations which were not originally intended.
Just like the anti-terrorism legislation.
Oh, hang on...
Yup, spot on. I've eventually got a mostly-functional configuration using the "model" option, but the controls are still mislabelled and the mike input is (a) very low gain and yet (b) very noisy. I've just bought myself a decent USB mike to get around the problem. And yes, it "just works" under Linux.
This approach has worked very well with USB mass storage devices. The same driver talks to my camera, external hard drive, memory stick and Ogg Vorbis player. It doesn't seem to have stifled innovation any.
I think that the lesson here is that hardware support is very variable, on any OS.
I bought a digital TV card for my box at home, running Kubuntu, and it was the simplest installation of anything I have ever done. Pop it in, it just worked. No driver installs, no nothing.
I also bought a cheap webcam. On Linux, plug and go. On Windows, even the supplied disk of drivers failed to install (Error -1: Could not configure driver or some such nonsense), and then the drivers from the website regularly cause BSOD.
On the other hand, the in-built sound system (some Intel chipset) on my home box is complete pain in the ass under Linux. I've never got the mike input to work properly.
It is nice to see that some hardware makers are beginning to actively support Linux, or at least allow Linux developers to actively support their stuff by supplying test units and documentation.
Do I think that teaching creationism undermines the whole of science education? You betcha.
Evolution is just the start. It's the crack where the wedge goes in, because it's unpopular and easy to misrepresent.
A literal, biblical view of the world is at odds with most of science:
- Evolution (origins)
- Biology (origins, classification)
- Cosmology (age of universe, reference frames, size of universe)
- Geology (age of the earth again)
- Nuclear physics (age of the earth again)
- The scientific method per se (primacy of revelation as a method for obtaining truth)
This is not an unsupported slippery-slope argument; just take a look at what is produced by Answers In Genesis or the Discovery Institute. All of these things are under attack from the biblical literalists.