Or worse yet! It'll be an amalgam crossover, and I'll be a mix of Bucky and Scud, under the name of Bucky the Disposable Sidekick. Oh no, wait... that would be redundant, he was already disposable.
You know, I first parsed that as Bucky from the comic Get Fuzzy. Which made the above an oxymoron, Bucky Katt is not that easy to get rid of.
Lord knows our modern operating systems are stoneage and an abomination. MacOSX is just an extremely polished old turd. Go beneeth the surface and the smell reeks.
That is true for pretty much any operating system (the based on old stuff bit).
Still, old does not necessarily mean bad. To give an example, the mainframes of old did a lot of interesting things with hypervisors / virtualisation; VMs on PCs is being touted as the new and shiny thing, but in many ways it is just a reimplementation of many of the concepts that were commonplace on mainframes of old.
So, riddle me this: If this God of yours intended to reveal objective truth through the Bible, why did he do such a shoddy job of it? The thing is so open to interpretation and riddled with contradictory statements that it can be used to justify pretty much anything as "God's will".
If he is so omnipotent/omniscient, why did he not encode his truth in the background radiation of the universe or at the very least use some other means of bringing this truth to us instead of using those books that he must have *known* would suffer from translation and interpretation problems? If this truth of his is so important, he should have spent some more godpower on packaging and stamps to make sure it got delivered to us in a usable state.
I see it as even worse than that. If this judeo-christian god created us, then he also made us smart enough to reason about the world around us. Why then, would he scatter all this circumstantial evidence around for an ancient universe, an old earth, evolution and so on? If he created us, then he would also expect us to use our brains. Then why does the old testament contradict what we learn about the world?
I'd rather believe that there is no god than believing in a deceitful trickster god.
Do you really not see the logic disconnect here? Just above you used popularity and volume of texts as the reason for choosing to believe that the Christian god is the true creator.
The deepest and most important questions can only be answered by faith. The fact that the humanity is incurably religious, abundantly proves of this.
That is also truth by popularity. I would consider it abundantly clear that we humans seem hardwired to need to be a part of and believe in something than is bigger than the individual. You see that in everything from religion to political groups to even the supporters of a football club.
The correct question would be why we have this need. You seem to be of the opinion that the reason is that there really is a god and that we humans need to connect with him. An other explanation might simply be that humans evolved as group/pack animals, and that this pack instinct is what makes us look for something larger.
And my counterpoint is: the linux nerds who keep bugging me about "you should use our software its so much betterz"
At the danger of being downmodded, I'll just add that Linux fanbois are probably doing more damage than good when it comes to bringing new users to the platform.
Linux is great if it works, and if one has the interest/need/time to customize a system there is practically no limit to what one can do. However, the out-of-box experience tends to be worse and one will need to enter the command line a lot faster than on a Windows system due to GUI configuration tools not covering enough aspects of the system yet.
Then there is hardware support. Some hardware is unfortunately not supported, or Linux drivers are only able to use a limited subset of the functionality of some hardware. Most linux users will be quick to tell you that this is due to hardware makers not providing drivers (or the information required to write drivers), and that is for the most part true. Still, the reason why a piece of hardware doesn't work doesn't really matter to the average end user. Complaining about Vista because of driver problems tends to get +1 Insightful around these parts, but doing the same for Linux tends to get a -1 Troll and replies telling you that it is really ATI/nVidia/Creative/etc's fault.
hunt through ridiculous amounts of message-board posts and wiki hunting to find "instructions" for distributions 2-3 generations back that no longer even work for the latest distro.
That situation has been getting progressively worse over the years. It used to be that you could give google a sensible set of search terms and you would get back good and updated documentation, these days one often ends up finding half-baked howtos and forum postings that were valid a couple years ago but no longer today. Many of them also just list the steps needed to get a particular thing working with a particular version of some software on a particular distribution, they seldom explain why (i.e., the Linux equivalent of listing the steps of how to fish with a particular fishing rod using a particular line and lure in a particular river, while neglecting to also include some of the generics of fishing so that a user has a hope to use the instructions if he happens to use a slightly different lure).
Also, a Linux distribution is really a collection of a lot of software from a lot of different sources; which also means that documentation for the different pieces are spread all over the place instead of one or a few places. There are a few places that are decent (like tldp.org and some distribution documentation/wiki sites), but it is getting increasingly harder to find good up-to-date instructions by googling.
That said, I for the most part love Linux. But that should not make us blind to the fact that Linux is not perfect, and that for some uses and some users going with Windows or Mac is the better option.
However, if a person who believes (hopes) in the "nothingness" theory lives for self, without love and regard to others
You are still a horrible person for believing that a lack of faith in god automatically means narcissism. You speak much of faith and hope, but you certainly show a horrible lack of faith in humans if you believe that we need some imagined judge in the sky in order to have compassion and love.
Who is a better person? Someone that finds in himself the reasons for love, compassion and regard for others, or someone who needs the threat of judgement day hanging over him?
I agree that MS is not the only one to blame. However, MS was the one that ran the "Windows Vista Capable" program and MS was the one that had final say on what the minimum hardware requirements were for allowing OEMs to slap "Vista Capable" on their machines.
In the generic case I agree with you, MS does not control the hardware market and the dynamics of the hardware market is such that manufacturers will try to cut corners to eke out a tiny profit margin. So I agree with you that blaming MS for sub-standard hardware is barking up the wrong tree.
However, in this particular case MS had full control of which machines got to carry the "Vista Capable" certification and which didn't. MS fumbled bad here, they should have set the standard higher. Since they didn't, customers were misled and people ended up with "$2100 email machines".
The problem isn't that people are cheap, it's that OEM's lied to consumers by convincing people they could be cheap, and in return they'll get the Ultimate (or perhaps Home basic:P) Computer Experience on a friggin platter.
And this entire article is about how MS aided and abetted that. See "Vista Capable"(r)(tm).
Relaunching programs that use these will cause the new values of CPUID to be picked up.
I suspect one could end up with devil in details problems if the guest OS suddenly saw different CPUID values. While it might work fine, the expectation has always been that CPUID won't change after boot-up so you could end up with all sorts of snafus.
What you could do is have the hypervisor trap CPUID and report a least common dominator set of capabilities for the CPUs in the cluster. Or have CPUID report more capabilities than the weakest/oldest CPUs but have the hypervisor trap and emulate those instructions when running on those CPUs.
This is actually becoming _harder_ as more and more virtualization technology is being put into the CPU silicon (Intel VT, AMD-V etc). Each new series has a few more features to make virtualization simpler, and you have to deal with making sure what was available to the VM on one CPU is identical to whats available on the new
I must admit that I'm not quite up to date on the details, but isn't the VT/AMD-V changes only visible to the hypervisor (ring -1)? It might make moving VM state harder (the hypervisor has to handle migrating AMD-V state to the equivalent VT state), but it should be invisible to the guest OS running inside the VM.
I would suspect that Guest OS visible changes (ring 0-3) would be harder to handle (like migrating from a CPU that has SSE2 to one that doesn't). The hypervisor would either have to trap and emulate the missing instructions, or trap cpuid and tell the guest OS that the CPU only supports a least common denominator set of extensions.
The cable modem has been unstable and the troubleshooting steps taught to the other people in the domicile is "restart all them boxes". So, no impressive uptime to paste.
In my experience, pretty much all home broadband routers are stable when they are using proper firmware like Tomato, dd-wrt or open-wrt. Just make sure you get one (e.g. WRT54GL) that is supported.
That's a top of the line system. Are you seriously complaining that a system built with the fastest parts of the latest generation costs a mere $2000? Try digging up prices from some years ago, and see how much a system built with the fastest parts of what was then the latest generation would set you back.
Besides, if you are on a budget you don't buy top of the line. Did you see the benchmarks on the much cheaper i7 920? Roughly equal performance to the previous generation's top performer (quad extreme) at a fraction of the price. Wait a little while for the X58 motherboards and DDR3 to fall a bit in price and you get last gen top performance at a much more friendly price.
There are solutions to this problem, the most promising is DKMS. Still, it requires that Linux distributions include it and that 3rd party drivers are packaged in a format that DKMS can use.
That was not much of an issue back when most people still believed in the what today is widely labeled "myth" of God and His judgement awaiting wrongdoers.
Right.. Because inquisition and witch burning was a much better way of doing it.
Again, you have a seriously sad and twisted view of your fellow man if you believe that people are not able of being good and moral without the Damocles Sword of purgatory hanging over them.
They old ways DID work just fine for centuries simply because the majority of people were not yet "enlightened" as most believe themselves to be today.
Do you want me to list all the acts of evil done in the name of the Lord or justified by some particular interpretation of the Bible? How do you decide whose interpretation is right?
The forced social systems are necessary today, but are we doing things really better than how our forebears did them?
Do you honestly see no advantage in having laws made in a democratic fashion instead of judging people based on some interpretation of an old book? If no, then you are no better than those advocating sharia law in muslim countries; the only difference between you and them is that you worship a different book than they do.
Just like people hurling venom at Vista should hurl it at NVidia/Creative/etc instead? Yup, I can definitely see people making that error being marked as troll/flamebait on/.
Installing updated 3rd party drivers in Linux is also often more difficult than in Windows, so I hope Linux distributions would get better at including updated drivers in the standard distro repositories.
Since we're into network horror stories. One particular version of windows (think it was the original Win2K) would bluescreen during install if the machine had an Intel eepro network card.
That is not to say that Linux is perfect (wifi and getting full functionality from multifunction printers are the current points of pain, in my experience), but Windows is not always a dance on roses either.
Windows does have one up Linux in the area of installing 3rd party drivers though. For Windows it involves downloading a driver disk from the manufacturer and pointing the hardware assistant at the driver directory. In Linux you often have to build a driver from source, which involves more (and often different) steps, not to mention that you have to rebuild the driver if you change/upgrade the kernel version.
open source may rule over traditional development in many ways, but one way corporations beat open source is in the marketing department
if they open sourced cars, would we get the chevy deathtrap?
The Chevy Deathtrap is exactly what it is, and the name is correct.
Minefield is the pre-alpha trunk of what is to become the next version of Firefox. The car analogy would be Chevy allowing people to try early design prototypes of the Chevy Supercar, a design prototype where suspensions, airbags, seat belts and the transmission have not gone through the crash-test dummy stage yet.
Calling that pre-alpha car the Chevy Deathtrap would be the right thing to do. Same as calling pre-alpha Firefox Minefield is the right thing to do. It keeps numbskulls like you away from it before it is ready for general public use.
Slashdot Mirror
Or worse yet! It'll be an amalgam crossover, and I'll be a mix of Bucky and Scud, under the name of Bucky the Disposable Sidekick. Oh no, wait... that would be redundant, he was already disposable.
You know, I first parsed that as Bucky from the comic Get Fuzzy. Which made the above an oxymoron, Bucky Katt is not that easy to get rid of.
Lord knows our modern operating systems are stoneage and an abomination. MacOSX is just an extremely polished old turd. Go beneeth the surface and the smell reeks.
That is true for pretty much any operating system (the based on old stuff bit).
Still, old does not necessarily mean bad. To give an example, the mainframes of old did a lot of interesting things with hypervisors / virtualisation; VMs on PCs is being touted as the new and shiny thing, but in many ways it is just a reimplementation of many of the concepts that were commonplace on mainframes of old.
Did God reveal objective truth to us or not?
So, riddle me this: If this God of yours intended to reveal objective truth through the Bible, why did he do such a shoddy job of it? The thing is so open to interpretation and riddled with contradictory statements that it can be used to justify pretty much anything as "God's will".
If he is so omnipotent/omniscient, why did he not encode his truth in the background radiation of the universe or at the very least use some other means of bringing this truth to us instead of using those books that he must have *known* would suffer from translation and interpretation problems? If this truth of his is so important, he should have spent some more godpower on packaging and stamps to make sure it got delivered to us in a usable state.
Only in monotheistic religions that believe their god suffers from multiple personality disorder.
I see it as even worse than that. If this judeo-christian god created us, then he also made us smart enough to reason about the world around us. Why then, would he scatter all this circumstantial evidence around for an ancient universe, an old earth, evolution and so on? If he created us, then he would also expect us to use our brains. Then why does the old testament contradict what we learn about the world?
I'd rather believe that there is no god than believing in a deceitful trickster god.
Since when has truth ever depended on popularity?
Do you really not see the logic disconnect here? Just above you used popularity and volume of texts as the reason for choosing to believe that the Christian god is the true creator.
The deepest and most important questions can only be answered by faith. The fact that the humanity is incurably religious, abundantly proves of this.
That is also truth by popularity. I would consider it abundantly clear that we humans seem hardwired to need to be a part of and believe in something than is bigger than the individual. You see that in everything from religion to political groups to even the supporters of a football club.
The correct question would be why we have this need. You seem to be of the opinion that the reason is that there really is a god and that we humans need to connect with him. An other explanation might simply be that humans evolved as group/pack animals, and that this pack instinct is what makes us look for something larger.
And my counterpoint is: the linux nerds who keep bugging me about "you should use our software its so much betterz"
At the danger of being downmodded, I'll just add that Linux fanbois are probably doing more damage than good when it comes to bringing new users to the platform.
Linux is great if it works, and if one has the interest/need/time to customize a system there is practically no limit to what one can do. However, the out-of-box experience tends to be worse and one will need to enter the command line a lot faster than on a Windows system due to GUI configuration tools not covering enough aspects of the system yet.
Then there is hardware support. Some hardware is unfortunately not supported, or Linux drivers are only able to use a limited subset of the functionality of some hardware. Most linux users will be quick to tell you that this is due to hardware makers not providing drivers (or the information required to write drivers), and that is for the most part true. Still, the reason why a piece of hardware doesn't work doesn't really matter to the average end user. Complaining about Vista because of driver problems tends to get +1 Insightful around these parts, but doing the same for Linux tends to get a -1 Troll and replies telling you that it is really ATI/nVidia/Creative/etc's fault.
hunt through ridiculous amounts of message-board posts and wiki hunting to find "instructions" for distributions 2-3 generations back that no longer even work for the latest distro.
That situation has been getting progressively worse over the years. It used to be that you could give google a sensible set of search terms and you would get back good and updated documentation, these days one often ends up finding half-baked howtos and forum postings that were valid a couple years ago but no longer today. Many of them also just list the steps needed to get a particular thing working with a particular version of some software on a particular distribution, they seldom explain why (i.e., the Linux equivalent of listing the steps of how to fish with a particular fishing rod using a particular line and lure in a particular river, while neglecting to also include some of the generics of fishing so that a user has a hope to use the instructions if he happens to use a slightly different lure).
Also, a Linux distribution is really a collection of a lot of software from a lot of different sources; which also means that documentation for the different pieces are spread all over the place instead of one or a few places. There are a few places that are decent (like tldp.org and some distribution documentation/wiki sites), but it is getting increasingly harder to find good up-to-date instructions by googling.
That said, I for the most part love Linux. But that should not make us blind to the fact that Linux is not perfect, and that for some uses and some users going with Windows or Mac is the better option.
However, if a person who believes (hopes) in the "nothingness" theory lives for self, without love and regard to others
You are still a horrible person for believing that a lack of faith in god automatically means narcissism. You speak much of faith and hope, but you certainly show a horrible lack of faith in humans if you believe that we need some imagined judge in the sky in order to have compassion and love.
Who is a better person? Someone that finds in himself the reasons for love, compassion and regard for others, or someone who needs the threat of judgement day hanging over him?
but Microsoft takes all of the flak for it.
I agree that MS is not the only one to blame. However, MS was the one that ran the "Windows Vista Capable" program and MS was the one that had final say on what the minimum hardware requirements were for allowing OEMs to slap "Vista Capable" on their machines.
In the generic case I agree with you, MS does not control the hardware market and the dynamics of the hardware market is such that manufacturers will try to cut corners to eke out a tiny profit margin. So I agree with you that blaming MS for sub-standard hardware is barking up the wrong tree.
However, in this particular case MS had full control of which machines got to carry the "Vista Capable" certification and which didn't. MS fumbled bad here, they should have set the standard higher. Since they didn't, customers were misled and people ended up with "$2100 email machines".
The problem isn't that people are cheap, it's that OEM's lied to consumers by convincing people they could be cheap, and in return they'll get the Ultimate (or perhaps Home basic :P) Computer Experience on a friggin platter.
And this entire article is about how MS aided and abetted that. See "Vista Capable"(r)(tm).
or go back to 2 Linux boxes with drbd.
Oooh, neat! Could you comment on how well this works in real life? That is, how is performance, how well does it scale and how resilient is it?
Relaunching programs that use these will cause the new values of CPUID to be picked up.
I suspect one could end up with devil in details problems if the guest OS suddenly saw different CPUID values. While it might work fine, the expectation has always been that CPUID won't change after boot-up so you could end up with all sorts of snafus.
What you could do is have the hypervisor trap CPUID and report a least common dominator set of capabilities for the CPUs in the cluster. Or have CPUID report more capabilities than the weakest/oldest CPUs but have the hypervisor trap and emulate those instructions when running on those CPUs.
This is actually becoming _harder_ as more and more virtualization technology is being put into the CPU silicon (Intel VT, AMD-V etc). Each new series has a few more features to make virtualization simpler, and you have to deal with making sure what was available to the VM on one CPU is identical to whats available on the new
I must admit that I'm not quite up to date on the details, but isn't the VT/AMD-V changes only visible to the hypervisor (ring -1)? It might make moving VM state harder (the hypervisor has to handle migrating AMD-V state to the equivalent VT state), but it should be invisible to the guest OS running inside the VM.
I would suspect that Guest OS visible changes (ring 0-3) would be harder to handle (like migrating from a CPU that has SSE2 to one that doesn't). The hypervisor would either have to trap and emulate the missing instructions, or trap cpuid and tell the guest OS that the CPU only supports a least common denominator set of extensions.
I don't have much experience with BGP, but running ipsec on a Cisco 160x wasn't exactly fast either.
Your Mileage May Vary
That's actually a funny coincidence. Car analogies is a /. meme and that expression originated as a car advertisement disclaimer.
The cable modem has been unstable and the troubleshooting steps taught to the other people in the domicile is "restart all them boxes". So, no impressive uptime to paste.
In my experience, pretty much all home broadband routers are stable when they are using proper firmware like Tomato, dd-wrt or open-wrt. Just make sure you get one (e.g. WRT54GL) that is supported.
Or one could redirect the output of a program to someone else's terminal.
echo "I'm alive! Time to conquer the world!" > /dev/tty1
'apropos' is kinda like google. It is very useful, provided you know what to search for.
These days I am more surprised/annoyed when I come across a system that doesn't do tab completion.
As for useful tools.
screen has been mentioned already, I really wish there was a proper equivalent for X programs.
cut
tail -f and -F
ssh -X user@machine programname
apropos
locate
the -h option to df and du
That's a top of the line system. Are you seriously complaining that a system built with the fastest parts of the latest generation costs a mere $2000? Try digging up prices from some years ago, and see how much a system built with the fastest parts of what was then the latest generation would set you back.
Besides, if you are on a budget you don't buy top of the line. Did you see the benchmarks on the much cheaper i7 920? Roughly equal performance to the previous generation's top performer (quad extreme) at a fraction of the price. Wait a little while for the X58 motherboards and DDR3 to fall a bit in price and you get last gen top performance at a much more friendly price.
There are solutions to this problem, the most promising is DKMS. Still, it requires that Linux distributions include it and that 3rd party drivers are packaged in a format that DKMS can use.
That was not much of an issue back when most people still believed in the what today is widely labeled "myth" of God and His judgement awaiting wrongdoers.
Right.. Because inquisition and witch burning was a much better way of doing it.
Again, you have a seriously sad and twisted view of your fellow man if you believe that people are not able of being good and moral without the Damocles Sword of purgatory hanging over them.
They old ways DID work just fine for centuries simply because the majority of people were not yet "enlightened" as most believe themselves to be today.
Do you want me to list all the acts of evil done in the name of the Lord or justified by some particular interpretation of the Bible? How do you decide whose interpretation is right?
The forced social systems are necessary today, but are we doing things really better than how our forebears did them?
Do you honestly see no advantage in having laws made in a democratic fashion instead of judging people based on some interpretation of an old book? If no, then you are no better than those advocating sharia law in muslim countries; the only difference between you and them is that you worship a different book than they do.
Just like people hurling venom at Vista should hurl it at NVidia/Creative/etc instead? Yup, I can definitely see people making that error being marked as troll/flamebait on /.
Installing updated 3rd party drivers in Linux is also often more difficult than in Windows, so I hope Linux distributions would get better at including updated drivers in the standard distro repositories.
Since we're into network horror stories. One particular version of windows (think it was the original Win2K) would bluescreen during install if the machine had an Intel eepro network card.
That is not to say that Linux is perfect (wifi and getting full functionality from multifunction printers are the current points of pain, in my experience), but Windows is not always a dance on roses either.
Windows does have one up Linux in the area of installing 3rd party drivers though. For Windows it involves downloading a driver disk from the manufacturer and pointing the hardware assistant at the driver directory. In Linux you often have to build a driver from source, which involves more (and often different) steps, not to mention that you have to rebuild the driver if you change/upgrade the kernel version.
minefield? really?
open source may rule over traditional development in many ways, but one way corporations beat open source is in the marketing department
if they open sourced cars, would we get the chevy deathtrap?
The Chevy Deathtrap is exactly what it is, and the name is correct.
Minefield is the pre-alpha trunk of what is to become the next version of Firefox. The car analogy would be Chevy allowing people to try early design prototypes of the Chevy Supercar, a design prototype where suspensions, airbags, seat belts and the transmission have not gone through the crash-test dummy stage yet.
Calling that pre-alpha car the Chevy Deathtrap would be the right thing to do. Same as calling pre-alpha Firefox Minefield is the right thing to do. It keeps numbskulls like you away from it before it is ready for general public use.