I have to admit that the built in network transparency is kind of cool. However, I'd like to point out that X forwarding is currently horribly slow, if somewhat more flexible, compared to windows remote desktop. Part of this is due to X's design, where there are no fundamental widgets. Every single bitmap needs to be forwarded across the network with X forwarding, while on windows all of the widget graphics are known ahead of time.
Also, OSX does have native network forwarding, but they charge for it, which I must say I feel almost makes it equivalent to saying they have no native forwarding at all. Most people use VNC on OSX.
Probably X could be fixed up a bit, although I wonder if it is worth it, i.e. why it wouldn't be better to ship a window server that talks GTK natively, and just layer a rootless x server on top for backwards compatibility.
>I'm going to post this here because Slashdot's been full of MS shills for the past >couple of weeks What do you mean by "MS shill"? Do you actually mean you believe that Microsoft actually pays people to post on Slashdot, or is that just an all purpose term for people that disagree with you? If I vote for someone other than you will you also call me an "MS shill"?
Maybe MS shills are a secret conspiracy set up by "the man" to "keep you down". That sounds like the best bet to me.
>On the other hand show me a significant linux virus or OS X exploit being used in the wild. >Well? Where are they? Waiting.....
Please do not spread misinformation. It may be legitimate to choose linux over windows on a security basis, depending on what security concerns you have specifically, but it is simply untrue that linux is somehow magically immune to security threats. Both linux and osx have viruses and exploits which have been used "in the wild".
Just a little above this article is a slashdot article about a squirellmail exploit...
As for viruses for linux and osx, there are some out there. However, the reason they aren't as widespread as windows viruses is widely known... the amount of linux and osx machines on the network isn't dense enough. You can't spread a virus effectively if the affected species is really small and spread out. If you email 100 people at random with an email with a linux virus attached, it may not be received by a single linux user, thus that propagation mechanism just doesn't work. This is impossible with a windows virus.
Some of the major computational hurdles that the average Joe runs into, just aren't amenable to paralization. Video games are probably the biggest example. A traditional graphics engine is not a ridiculously parallelizable business. If you're bottleneck is your ability to generate polygons to pump into the graphics card, then more cores aren't going to do you a lot of good since actually pushing things to the graphics card needs to happen in a synchronized fashion anyway.
If you have a lot of raw computation that needs doing, then more cores can be great depending on the particular algorithm. However, most people aren't running into raw computational bottlenecks, but bottlenecks that have to do with latency between the CPU and harddrive, or the CPU and memory, or network latency. Other issues include having user processes compete with background tasks. Vista and to a lesser degree XP were both pretty bad in terms of constantly reading or writing from disk for some random reason, which will really screw any other IO intensive applications you are using.
Really, modern personal computers still seem slow in many ways, but those ways are largely due to IO limitations, and poor management of competition for IO by the operating system. Until these bottlenecks are addressed, there isn't that much incentive to make the CPU intensive part of applications, which are already fast, faster by using parallel programming techniques.
>I was starting to buy into your comments until I read "OSX on a 333MHZ PPC with 32MB of ram". >This is simply not possible. Even in Mac OS 9, you needed 64MB ram to run Netscape 6.
I did in fact use the setup I described... and you can check that imacs were sold with 32 megs on wikipedia. Please check your facts before calling me a lier.
What you are not considering is that 1. Netscape 6 was an incredibly bloated app for that era and difficult to run on any computer... it was the reason that people switched to IE. I think I used internet explorer on that computer, or maybe omniweb (this was before safari I believe). 2. OSX had *much* better virtual memory than OS8 and OS9. Although the OSX finder itself was more bloated than the OS9 finder, the system as a whole could actually handle higher memory load. Also, at some point (I forget if they'd done it by 10.1) OSX started compressing the backing store for windows, which is a neat optimization and freed up a lot of ram. 3. I'm not talking about OSX 10.5, which is a different beast and has a lot more services, but OSX 10.1, which was probably the most efficient OSX (fewer requirements than OSX 10.0). 4. I primarily used project builder (the precursor to xcode) on that computer and did opengl development.
Like I said, developers have gotten lazy, but it is entirely possible to develop a system with modern services and profile and optimize it to run on limited hardware. The average developers idea of what limited hardware is is incredibly ridiculous at this point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3 The original iMac had a 233 MHz PowerPC G3 (PowerPC 750) chip, with 512 KB L2 cache running at 116.6 MHz, which also ran in Apple's high-end Power Macintosh line at the time, though at higher speeds, with more expensive models shipping with 1 MB L2 cache. It sold for US$1,299, and had a 4 GB hard drive, 32 MB RAM, 2 MB video RAM, and shipped with Mac OS 8.1, which was soon upgraded to Mac OS 8.5.
>Technically speaking, OSX has a valid claim to being Unix, but could be accused of not >necessarily being true to the 'spirit' of Unix. Linux is absolutely not a Unix, but on >the other hand, people can certainly fairly claim Linux to being true to the spirit of Unix.
Absolutely! After all, if it isn't hard to use, it isn't in the spirit of unix. Really, lacking compatibility with other versions of unix makes it *more* in the spirit on unix, as historically and currently unixen have had huge compatibility problems (thus autotools/autoconf).
Also, since OSX takes a subsystem that was horribly designed and whose implementations were buggy and broken, X11, and replaces it with a modern, slick, robust, and efficient subsystem, aqua, it is *clearly* committing the cardinal sin of unix. Given historical precedent it would be *much* more unixy to instead standardize on the bad design, and then try to fix it with a bunch of extensions which are in themselves problematic and inconsistently implemented.
Seriously, people who talk about how great the unix system design is have no understanding of the internals and how they compare to other modern operating systems. Everything is inconsistent and many things are fundamentally broken. Linux's approach to unix has been largely to take something broken, and add more broken and incompatible parts to it.
Now, I use and develop on Linux quite a bit, which is why I *know* there are so many things wrong with it. However, there is a reason why I use it, and it has its strong points. Permissive licensing, lots of drivers for commodity hardware, and a very efficient kernel are some of Linux's strong points compared to other OS's. System architecture is just not one of linux's strong points. Comparatively, OSX and solaris have a *much* more impressive unix architecture. Windows also has some strong points in some of its API's, although not the core win32 windowing API, which is disgustingly crufty).
The summary incorrectly states that KDE 4 is demonstrated on a "56Mb laptop with 1Ghz CPU and run-of-the-mill integrated graphics."
Actually, the article states that it was run on an X60. I have an X61 (almost identical) and let me tell you, those are not the specs. It has a core 2 duo with an embedded graphics card capable of playing halflife 2 and portal (although not at excellent frame rate).
The article states that he used CPU scaling and some kernel arguments to reduce the system settings. This is actually very misleading and isn't equivalent to a system that ran at 1GHZ, as some commenters on his site point out.
The CPU may be running at a lower clock rate and have one core disabled, but clock rate isn't the only thing that determines CPU speed. The core 2 duo comes with SSE3, which any real 1GHZ machine will not have, and is majorly impactful for graphics operations. Also, the core 2 duo is designed for energy efficiency much more than prior intel and AMD CPU's. So, it likely has significantly more instructions per clock than a real 1GHZ machine. Finally, the graphics card is actually pretty decent (vista aero runs on it fine...) so there's nothing surprising about the computer being able to offload a lot of work to it.
So to summarize this computer has: SSE3, more clocks per cycle, and a nice graphics card that real machines of the 1GHZ era will not have. I'd be surprised if a machine with a lot higher MHZ but lacking SSE3 and the grpahics card could compete.
Also, all he ran on it was an instant messenger... which he said started slow. If he'd down any significant work with that amount of ram given KDE apps, it would have started swapping endlessly. This is not much of an endorsement for KDE.
Also, even if the claims of this article were true, which they aren't, it wouldn't be that impressive. I used to run OSX on a 333MHZ PPC with 32MB of ram, and it had all of the graphical glitzy crap that KDE and Gnome barely make work on high end machines. That a 1GHZ machine would seem impressive just shows how bloated and horribly slow modern desktops like vista, KDE, and Gnome have become.
As a side note, if Gnome or KDE work on your hardware (good luck) then go with it. I know that at least Gnome is pretty well supported, and that makes using linux a bit easier. If not, I highly recommend XFCE. It lacks some features, but has a much lighter weight design, is more compatable with various hardware, and has a window manager that isn't a total piece of shit like metacity and friends. It is especially handy for a laptop with an external monitor. Since xinerama actually works in XFCE (it has major bugs in metacity) you can run both your external monitor at full resolution and your laptop at a lower one, and stick all of the small windows you want to monitor on it (instant messenger, email, etc).
>>Also, I'm putting my money on hoax. >For the simple reason that cats are hard to breed (require much more food and space than >small rodents) and hard to clone (usually the higher up in the evolution tree, the harder to clone).
Ignoring what the slashdot summary said, which you should always do, there's no reason to think this was a hoax. Just because some other korean researcher committed fraud doesn't mean that *this* guy did. You didn't start to ignore all american science after the cold fusion fiasco did you?
Also, that he cloned cats is not in question. As the article points out, the same guy also cloned cats back in 2004. Also, your argument about it being hard to clone animals "higher up on the evolutionary tree" is just silly. The first animals to be cloned were *sheep*. Don't you remember? It wasn't *that* many years ago... There's actually no reason that no humans have been cloned except for ethical concerns (or at least the reported clonings haven't been proven). There's no reason to think it would be difficult at all, or even to make flourescent humans.
There's no real reason to doubt this article. The same guy cloned cats before, and fluorescence has been added to mice before. This is just combining the two proven techniques.
that selection pressure has decreased. People have *fewer* children since the invention of industry and medicine, not more. Virtually all industrialized nations including the US reproduce at or below replacement rate. Immigration is largely what keeps populations from dipping, and countries that lack significant immigration do see decreases in population.
It is true that people are dying young less, but that doesn't mean that selection pressure has decreased, it has just changed.
Think about what sort of basis people are allowed to reproduce on now, and ask yourself what the likely outcomes are. There are a number of factors. People who are too uneducated or dumb to practice birth control are reproducing at a significantly higher rate than the educated population. People who are more physically attractive are more likely to find mates in general. Now that second point isn't really a problem as attractiveness is connected to health. However, let's look at the things that are no longer selected for.
While in the past people with wealth and power tended to be selected for, and poor families tended to slowly die off, especially in feudal societies, this is no longer true as the wealthy tend to be educated and thus practice birth control. This might be good from a social justice picture, but it also means that intelligence has virtually no way of being selected for any more. After all, if intelligence didn't select for itself by helping to acquire wealth in human society, how did it select for itself?
The main question is now, is intelligence in any way still being selected for? If it isn't, then it seems likely that there will be a backwards slide in human intelligence until the situation changes.
I've spent a lot of time improving how I write code, and one of the most frustrating things that I've come up against are that a lot of people present programming techniques as magic bullets, but then when you go to use them, you find that they haven't actually been thought through very well.
Consider the famous patterns book by the gang of four. If you do a lot of software development, you probably know what I'm talking about. This book is referenced more in general software design discussions than any other. People often proscribe solving some software problem with a solution from the GOF book, or various article that present other patterns in a similar fashion. The problem is that some of the GOF patterns and derived patterns are inherently broken! They were written up perhaps because they were widely in use in some communities where certain sets of problems don't have to be dealt with, but if you take them outside of that, they can blow up in your face.
Probably the most obvious issue is the singleton pattern. In its most common implementation, it allows you to grab a universal single instance of an object through a static reference. It is highly convenient and almost universally used. However, it makes it almost impossible to do dependency injection, and breaks the ability to do light weight unit testing on many areas of the program! In practice, singleton is equivalent to and just as bad as a global variable, yet it is proscribed all over the place. I wish they'd revise the book with a "singleton considered harmful wrt software testing" warning.
Another pet peeve of mine is the visitor pattern, or at least how many people use a variant of it in practice to solve the double dispatch problem. This may be a bit esoteric for slashdot, but let it be known that visitor is in no way a good solution to double dispatch. Think about it! Every class in the hierarchy needs to know about every other class in the hierarchy. That is not encapsulation! An addition of a class requires changes to every single other class! It isn't even possible in many situations (if you have a lot of classes, or if you need to load some classes dynamically from a plugin). The visitor pattern is widely proscribed here, but a little thought and experimentation reveals it as a horrible hack! That said, the double dispatch problem doens't have a great solution in C++ and some other languages, but some form of dynamic typing (which is otherwise a bad idea in most statically typed languages like c++) is clearly necessary here.
Anyway, those are a couple of my pet peeves about how software development is practiced and taught. Generally I've found that coming up with flexible, correct, and efficient software is a difficult, but fascinating problem. While there's a lot of people who are domain experts and know how to write a compiler, a web app, a video game, or some other kind of software really well, I don't think I've seen a lot of good general approaches to the problem of software. Everyone seems to think they have general patterns, but this is largely due to the fact that people overly specialize and don't step outside their field enough. In practice, engineering seems to be about finding the simplest structure that solves the local problem (which is fine, great even for practical purposes) and we've yet to address a lot of the general problems of software development.
I think it is Dvorak being naive. Providing food to starving children solves nothing in the long run. Lack of food stems from underlying economic and political problems that food donation won't solve. You can feed those kids for one day, or one year, but inevitably donation fatigue sets in and the food stops coming, and either those kids or their kids starve to death.
On the other hand while donated money and food runs out, education lasts for a life time and can change the underlying economic picture. It is true, this won't help people who are starving to death right this moment, but unless their lack of food is a temporary situation, those people will starve to death eventually no matter what you do. It is a simple matter of triage. However, giving education to people now prevents them from being at risk in the future and will save more net lives and do more to improve the human condition.
Similarly domestically, I'm opposed to long term welfare for people that have demonstrated that they can't get a job for whatever reason, but I think that free education at all levels should be universal and much better funded. It makes more sense to spend money training people to support themselves and contribute to society then to spend money making people dependent on the state for their survival. In the long run, when the generosity of the state runs out, those dependent on it will die.
Although the position paper mistakes Ogg as being proprietary, I don't see what's so great about the format. Last time I checked no one actually uses Ogg, and I'd take that as a good indication that it isn't heads above the competing standards. I mean, if I didn't read slashdot I'd never have known that Ogg exists.
mpeg4, AAC, and h.264 are already pretty well supported, so I have to ask why anyone would look at a technology that has pretty much been ignored by the industry.
Also, lack of DRM support would make Ogg unusable for many people. You can argue all you want that companies shouldn't use DRM, and I would argue the same thing, but if that's one of their requirements, lack of it dooms practical adoption of the standard. If they start putting things in HTML 5 that no one is going to use, then they are only hurting adoption of HTML 5.
Obviously it would be difficult to deploy robots controlled by AI, but why aren't there more remote controlled robots on the battlefield?
It seems like it would be trivial to put together a small armored machine on treads with a machine gun and control it wirelessly from a secure location nearby. Since you could have such a device roll into situations that would be dangerous or suicidal to humans without hesitation, it seems like it would be pretty handy.
> As Wine proves, any reimplementation of the Win32 API is inevitably not going to be as > good as the real thing.
I just don't think this is really true. Win32 is a huge API, and so would take a huge effort to clone successfully. The wine project doesn't have the resources to even try to implement all of the resources of win32, and they don't have the resources to do proper reverse engineering on a large scale.
An effort by a company with more resources like apple could make wine a lot more usable. For instance, one problem with win32, is that some parts aren't sufficiently documented. Normally, people have to use black box testing to guess what the undocumented features should do. However, it is perfectly legal and practical to reverse engineer by reading the disassembly of real windows dlls, so long as the person who reads the disassembly doesn't write wine code, but instead just documents what he learns and hands it over to wine coders. A lot of progress could be made in this way.
>Personally, my favored way of avoiding this problem is to use GPL software... This *causes* legal problems, it doesn't solve them and is bad advice. How you can use GPL code in conjunction with your proprietary software is highly legally constrained. If you use GPL libraries, the GPL license then applies to your code. Supposedly LGPL gets around this, but not really due to ambiguities in the license (the license uses the ambiguous term "derives from" which has a different meaning when used with object oriented software). Note that glibc has a special exception, and that it is generally ok to use.
>We weren't told what license the issued product would be under, and it might BE under GPL. It doesn't matter whether the software he is releasing is under GPL. You can't just apply the GPL to someone else's non GPL code without their permission. You'd not only be opening up your company to lawsuit, but probably everyone who uses your code.
The GPL is not a magic license that you can invoke and use other people's software however you want. It is a useful license in many situations, but it clearly does nothing to help the OP.
If code is posted on a forum, whether or not it has a license attached to it may not matter. Many forums used by programmers require that posters give the right to use the example code posted, etc. Please check with forums FAQ before panicking.
You should probably just mention it to him and offer to rewrite it. It would be wise to not act in an accusatory manner when bringing it up. Remember that there are a lot of sources out there that are meant to be used as example code, and that if permission to copy is given it isn't "cheating" to do so.
We could go tomorrow, or at least start building the components to do so. We don't go because congress doesn't care anymore. I'm tired of all this nonsense "lets plan to go to mars in the future" from NASA and the president, as if planning is somehow contributing. We already have the *plans* we don't have the *money*. There's nothing special about the future that's going to change a lack of caring.
the sort of guy that many people in the administration wish they were.
Despite all of the continuous fuckups of this administration, it is clear that the only thing that they will regret when their eight years are up is that they have to leave at all. They've spent eight years consolidating power, but are still short of their holy grail.
>>the part where they disbanded the Iraqi army instead of giving them at least tokens of power is >>especially laughable in this respect >Hindsight is always 20/20 from our comfortable arm chairs.
So what is your point? That we can never tell what is going to happen before it happens? What a bunch of nonsense. Do you really think that everything in politics is a game of dice? Why bother studying the subject if you do. The truth is that competence is necessary for success in any field, and our administration's lack of it is why we've been losing this war.
There was also *foresight* in this case. Plenty of the administration's generals spoke out against their policies. Many in the public, including myself, immediately saw this as a blunder. The administration allowed anarchy to take hold in the days after the invasion, and instituted no law enforcement, and had no plans to institute law enforcement. Everyone watching this with any sense knew it was a failure in the making from day one. Saying we were watching from the sidelines doesn't change the validity of our judgments.
Machiavelli's point still stands and is not outdated in the slightest. If the infrastructure of the state actually works, as it did in Iraq, it makes no sense to destroy it and build it again from the ground up. No society has ever been destroyed and successfully remade from scratch by foreign invaders.
You say that many changes in world politics have happened since Machiavelli such as the rise of the nation state and the institution of sovereignty... which I think is kind of funny since it's pretty questionable whether that has ever happened in Iraq. Iraq is more or less a fictional state in the modern sense of the word. There are no "Iraqis" just Sunni's, Shiite's, and Kurds who live in the territory of Iraq. American's would never accept a foreign led insurgency in our country, but Iraq isn't America.
That's why the outcome of our policies in Iraq were so predictable and tragic. Nothing here required a cutting edge understanding of modern politics. A basic understanding of military power would have allowed us to achieve victory, but unfortunately no one calling the shots had this. There was no strategy, and no hope of success given the leadership we had.
The problem is that police and security guards perceive tasers as harmless, and feel free to abuse the crap out of them. They show little hesitation in using them even on people who are not resisting arrest.
I think that tasers are a good tool, but most police forces just don't seem to know how to use them properly.
There's also the well known problem that police work attracts some people who just want to be in a position of authority in order to bully people. I like to think that this is the minority, but everyone knows that these guys cause big problems for everyone and generate a lot of hostility between the police force and the general public. I wish departments would do some psychological screening and background checks on candidates and reject those with abusive personalities. I think if you got those guys out of the picture, you'd run into a lot fewer of these "accidental" killings.
Online word processors written largely in javascript taking on Microsoft word and the rest of the office suite? Anyone who takes that idea seriously needs to get their head screwed on straight.
Google already has such a service, as do several other companies. I see no evidence that they have or ever could make the slightest dent in Microsoft's office sales.
he only thing that *didn't* go wrong with the sequel was the actors, which is not to say the acting wasn't horrible.
If you look at some of the actors, particularly Natalie Portman, they're pretty good in other roles. Compare V for Vendetta to any of the Star Wars prequels. The acting sucked because the dialogue and plot sucked, and no actor, ever, could read those horrible emo lines seriously. The characters they had to portraTy were paper thin. I think it also seriously hurt them that they were acting on a blue screen for the entire movie.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to admit that the built in network transparency is kind of cool. However, I'd like to point out that X forwarding is currently horribly slow, if somewhat more flexible, compared to windows remote desktop. Part of this is due to X's design, where there are no fundamental widgets. Every single bitmap needs to be forwarded across the network with X forwarding, while on windows all of the widget graphics are known ahead of time.
Also, OSX does have native network forwarding, but they charge for it, which I must say I feel almost makes it equivalent to saying they have no native forwarding at all. Most people use VNC on OSX.
Probably X could be fixed up a bit, although I wonder if it is worth it, i.e. why it wouldn't be better to ship a window server that talks GTK natively, and just layer a rootless x server on top for backwards compatibility.
>I'm going to post this here because Slashdot's been full of MS shills for the past
>couple of weeks
What do you mean by "MS shill"? Do you actually mean you believe that Microsoft actually pays people to post on Slashdot, or is that just an all purpose term for people that disagree with you? If I vote for someone other than you will you also call me an "MS shill"?
Maybe MS shills are a secret conspiracy set up by "the man" to "keep you down". That sounds like the best bet to me.
>On the other hand show me a significant linux virus or OS X exploit being used in the wild.
>Well? Where are they? Waiting.....
Please do not spread misinformation. It may be legitimate to choose linux over windows on a security basis, depending on what security concerns you have specifically, but it is simply untrue that linux is somehow magically immune to security threats. Both linux and osx have viruses and exploits which have been used "in the wild".
Just a little above this article is a slashdot article about a squirellmail exploit...
As for viruses for linux and osx, there are some out there. However, the reason they aren't as widespread as windows viruses is widely known... the amount of linux and osx machines on the network isn't dense enough. You can't spread a virus effectively if the affected species is really small and spread out. If you email 100 people at random with an email with a linux virus attached, it may not be received by a single linux user, thus that propagation mechanism just doesn't work. This is impossible with a windows virus.
Some of the major computational hurdles that the average Joe runs into, just aren't amenable to paralization. Video games are probably the biggest example. A traditional graphics engine is not a ridiculously parallelizable business. If you're bottleneck is your ability to generate polygons to pump into the graphics card, then more cores aren't going to do you a lot of good since actually pushing things to the graphics card needs to happen in a synchronized fashion anyway.
If you have a lot of raw computation that needs doing, then more cores can be great depending on the particular algorithm. However, most people aren't running into raw computational bottlenecks, but bottlenecks that have to do with latency between the CPU and harddrive, or the CPU and memory, or network latency. Other issues include having user processes compete with background tasks. Vista and to a lesser degree XP were both pretty bad in terms of constantly reading or writing from disk for some random reason, which will really screw any other IO intensive applications you are using.
Really, modern personal computers still seem slow in many ways, but those ways are largely due to IO limitations, and poor management of competition for IO by the operating system. Until these bottlenecks are addressed, there isn't that much incentive to make the CPU intensive part of applications, which are already fast, faster by using parallel programming techniques.
>I was starting to buy into your comments until I read "OSX on a 333MHZ PPC with 32MB of ram".
>This is simply not possible. Even in Mac OS 9, you needed 64MB ram to run Netscape 6.
I did in fact use the setup I described... and you can check that imacs were sold with 32 megs on wikipedia. Please check your facts before calling me a lier.
What you are not considering is that
1. Netscape 6 was an incredibly bloated app for that era and difficult to run on any computer... it was the reason that people switched to IE. I think I used internet explorer on that computer, or maybe omniweb (this was before safari I believe).
2. OSX had *much* better virtual memory than OS8 and OS9. Although the OSX finder itself was more bloated than the OS9 finder, the system as a whole could actually handle higher memory load. Also, at some point (I forget if they'd done it by 10.1) OSX started compressing the backing store for windows, which is a neat optimization and freed up a lot of ram.
3. I'm not talking about OSX 10.5, which is a different beast and has a lot more services, but OSX 10.1, which was probably the most efficient OSX (fewer requirements than OSX 10.0).
4. I primarily used project builder (the precursor to xcode) on that computer and did opengl development.
Like I said, developers have gotten lazy, but it is entirely possible to develop a system with modern services and profile and optimize it to run on limited hardware. The average developers idea of what limited hardware is is incredibly ridiculous at this point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3
The original iMac had a 233 MHz PowerPC G3 (PowerPC 750) chip, with 512 KB L2 cache running at 116.6 MHz, which also ran in Apple's high-end Power Macintosh line at the time, though at higher speeds, with more expensive models shipping with 1 MB L2 cache. It sold for US$1,299, and had a 4 GB hard drive, 32 MB RAM, 2 MB video RAM, and shipped with Mac OS 8.1, which was soon upgraded to Mac OS 8.5.
when I try to go to their site:
"We are currently unable to serve your request
We apologize, but an error occurred and your request could not be completed.
This error has been logged. If you have additional information that you believe may have caused this error please report the problem here.
"
I think that gives a good demonstration of how they run their site...
>Technically speaking, OSX has a valid claim to being Unix, but could be accused of not
>necessarily being true to the 'spirit' of Unix. Linux is absolutely not a Unix, but on
>the other hand, people can certainly fairly claim Linux to being true to the spirit of Unix.
Absolutely! After all, if it isn't hard to use, it isn't in the spirit of unix. Really, lacking compatibility with other versions of unix makes it *more* in the spirit on unix, as historically and currently unixen have had huge compatibility problems (thus autotools/autoconf).
Also, since OSX takes a subsystem that was horribly designed and whose implementations were buggy and broken, X11, and replaces it with a modern, slick, robust, and efficient subsystem, aqua, it is *clearly* committing the cardinal sin of unix. Given historical precedent it would be *much* more unixy to instead standardize on the bad design, and then try to fix it with a bunch of extensions which are in themselves problematic and inconsistently implemented.
Seriously, people who talk about how great the unix system design is have no understanding of the internals and how they compare to other modern operating systems. Everything is inconsistent and many things are fundamentally broken. Linux's approach to unix has been largely to take something broken, and add more broken and incompatible parts to it.
Now, I use and develop on Linux quite a bit, which is why I *know* there are so many things wrong with it. However, there is a reason why I use it, and it has its strong points. Permissive licensing, lots of drivers for commodity hardware, and a very efficient kernel are some of Linux's strong points compared to other OS's. System architecture is just not one of linux's strong points. Comparatively, OSX and solaris have a *much* more impressive unix architecture. Windows also has some strong points in some of its API's, although not the core win32 windowing API, which is disgustingly crufty).
The summary incorrectly states that KDE 4 is demonstrated on a "56Mb laptop with 1Ghz CPU and run-of-the-mill integrated graphics."
Actually, the article states that it was run on an X60. I have an X61 (almost identical) and let me tell you, those are not the specs. It has a core 2 duo with an embedded graphics card capable of playing halflife 2 and portal (although not at excellent frame rate).
The article states that he used CPU scaling and some kernel arguments to reduce the system settings. This is actually very misleading and isn't equivalent to a system that ran at 1GHZ, as some commenters on his site point out.
The CPU may be running at a lower clock rate and have one core disabled, but clock rate isn't the only thing that determines CPU speed. The core 2 duo comes with SSE3, which any real 1GHZ machine will not have, and is majorly impactful for graphics operations. Also, the core 2 duo is designed for energy efficiency much more than prior intel and AMD CPU's. So, it likely has significantly more instructions per clock than a real 1GHZ machine. Finally, the graphics card is actually pretty decent (vista aero runs on it fine...) so there's nothing surprising about the computer being able to offload a lot of work to it.
So to summarize this computer has: SSE3, more clocks per cycle, and a nice graphics card that real machines of the 1GHZ era will not have. I'd be surprised if a machine with a lot higher MHZ but lacking SSE3 and the grpahics card could compete.
Also, all he ran on it was an instant messenger... which he said started slow. If he'd down any significant work with that amount of ram given KDE apps, it would have started swapping endlessly. This is not much of an endorsement for KDE.
Also, even if the claims of this article were true, which they aren't, it wouldn't be that impressive. I used to run OSX on a 333MHZ PPC with 32MB of ram, and it had all of the graphical glitzy crap that KDE and Gnome barely make work on high end machines. That a 1GHZ machine would seem impressive just shows how bloated and horribly slow modern desktops like vista, KDE, and Gnome have become.
As a side note, if Gnome or KDE work on your hardware (good luck) then go with it. I know that at least Gnome is pretty well supported, and that makes using linux a bit easier. If not, I highly recommend XFCE. It lacks some features, but has a much lighter weight design, is more compatable with various hardware, and has a window manager that isn't a total piece of shit like metacity and friends. It is especially handy for a laptop with an external monitor. Since xinerama actually works in XFCE (it has major bugs in metacity) you can run both your external monitor at full resolution and your laptop at a lower one, and stick all of the small windows you want to monitor on it (instant messenger, email, etc).
>>Also, I'm putting my money on hoax.
>For the simple reason that cats are hard to breed (require much more food and space than
>small rodents) and hard to clone (usually the higher up in the evolution tree, the harder to clone).
Ignoring what the slashdot summary said, which you should always do, there's no reason to think this was a hoax. Just because some other korean researcher committed fraud doesn't mean that *this* guy did. You didn't start to ignore all american science after the cold fusion fiasco did you?
Also, that he cloned cats is not in question. As the article points out, the same guy also cloned cats back in 2004. Also, your argument about it being hard to clone animals "higher up on the evolutionary tree" is just silly. The first animals to be cloned were *sheep*. Don't you remember? It wasn't *that* many years ago... There's actually no reason that no humans have been cloned except for ethical concerns (or at least the reported clonings haven't been proven). There's no reason to think it would be difficult at all, or even to make flourescent humans.
There's no real reason to doubt this article. The same guy cloned cats before, and fluorescence has been added to mice before. This is just combining the two proven techniques.
that selection pressure has decreased. People have *fewer* children since the invention of industry and medicine, not more. Virtually all industrialized nations including the US reproduce at or below replacement rate. Immigration is largely what keeps populations from dipping, and countries that lack significant immigration do see decreases in population.
It is true that people are dying young less, but that doesn't mean that selection pressure has decreased, it has just changed.
Think about what sort of basis people are allowed to reproduce on now, and ask yourself what the likely outcomes are. There are a number of factors. People who are too uneducated or dumb to practice birth control are reproducing at a significantly higher rate than the educated population. People who are more physically attractive are more likely to find mates in general. Now that second point isn't really a problem as attractiveness is connected to health. However, let's look at the things that are no longer selected for.
While in the past people with wealth and power tended to be selected for, and poor families tended to slowly die off, especially in feudal societies, this is no longer true as the wealthy tend to be educated and thus practice birth control. This might be good from a social justice picture, but it also means that intelligence has virtually no way of being selected for any more. After all, if intelligence didn't select for itself by helping to acquire wealth in human society, how did it select for itself?
The main question is now, is intelligence in any way still being selected for? If it isn't, then it seems likely that there will be a backwards slide in human intelligence until the situation changes.
I've spent a lot of time improving how I write code, and one of the most frustrating things that I've come up against are that a lot of people present programming techniques as magic bullets, but then when you go to use them, you find that they haven't actually been thought through very well.
Consider the famous patterns book by the gang of four. If you do a lot of software development, you probably know what I'm talking about. This book is referenced more in general software design discussions than any other. People often proscribe solving some software problem with a solution from the GOF book, or various article that present other patterns in a similar fashion. The problem is that some of the GOF patterns and derived patterns are inherently broken! They were written up perhaps because they were widely in use in some communities where certain sets of problems don't have to be dealt with, but if you take them outside of that, they can blow up in your face.
Probably the most obvious issue is the singleton pattern. In its most common implementation, it allows you to grab a universal single instance of an object through a static reference. It is highly convenient and almost universally used. However, it makes it almost impossible to do dependency injection, and breaks the ability to do light weight unit testing on many areas of the program! In practice, singleton is equivalent to and just as bad as a global variable, yet it is proscribed all over the place. I wish they'd revise the book with a "singleton considered harmful wrt software testing" warning.
Another pet peeve of mine is the visitor pattern, or at least how many people use a variant of it in practice to solve the double dispatch problem. This may be a bit esoteric for slashdot, but let it be known that visitor is in no way a good solution to double dispatch. Think about it! Every class in the hierarchy needs to know about every other class in the hierarchy. That is not encapsulation! An addition of a class requires changes to every single other class! It isn't even possible in many situations (if you have a lot of classes, or if you need to load some classes dynamically from a plugin). The visitor pattern is widely proscribed here, but a little thought and experimentation reveals it as a horrible hack! That said, the double dispatch problem doens't have a great solution in C++ and some other languages, but some form of dynamic typing (which is otherwise a bad idea in most statically typed languages like c++) is clearly necessary here.
Anyway, those are a couple of my pet peeves about how software development is practiced and taught. Generally I've found that coming up with flexible, correct, and efficient software is a difficult, but fascinating problem. While there's a lot of people who are domain experts and know how to write a compiler, a web app, a video game, or some other kind of software really well, I don't think I've seen a lot of good general approaches to the problem of software. Everyone seems to think they have general patterns, but this is largely due to the fact that people overly specialize and don't step outside their field enough. In practice, engineering seems to be about finding the simplest structure that solves the local problem (which is fine, great even for practical purposes) and we've yet to address a lot of the general problems of software development.
I think it is Dvorak being naive. Providing food to starving children solves nothing in the long run. Lack of food stems from underlying economic and political problems that food donation won't solve. You can feed those kids for one day, or one year, but inevitably donation fatigue sets in and the food stops coming, and either those kids or their kids starve to death.
On the other hand while donated money and food runs out, education lasts for a life time and can change the underlying economic picture. It is true, this won't help people who are starving to death right this moment, but unless their lack of food is a temporary situation, those people will starve to death eventually no matter what you do. It is a simple matter of triage. However, giving education to people now prevents them from being at risk in the future and will save more net lives and do more to improve the human condition.
Similarly domestically, I'm opposed to long term welfare for people that have demonstrated that they can't get a job for whatever reason, but I think that free education at all levels should be universal and much better funded. It makes more sense to spend money training people to support themselves and contribute to society then to spend money making people dependent on the state for their survival. In the long run, when the generosity of the state runs out, those dependent on it will die.
Although the position paper mistakes Ogg as being proprietary, I don't see what's so great about the format. Last time I checked no one actually uses Ogg, and I'd take that as a good indication that it isn't heads above the competing standards. I mean, if I didn't read slashdot I'd never have known that Ogg exists.
mpeg4, AAC, and h.264 are already pretty well supported, so I have to ask why anyone would look at a technology that has pretty much been ignored by the industry.
Also, lack of DRM support would make Ogg unusable for many people. You can argue all you want that companies shouldn't use DRM, and I would argue the same thing, but if that's one of their requirements, lack of it dooms practical adoption of the standard. If they start putting things in HTML 5 that no one is going to use, then they are only hurting adoption of HTML 5.
Obviously it would be difficult to deploy robots controlled by AI, but why aren't there more remote controlled robots on the battlefield?
It seems like it would be trivial to put together a small armored machine on treads with a machine gun and control it wirelessly from a secure location nearby. Since you could have such a device roll into situations that would be dangerous or suicidal to humans without hesitation, it seems like it would be pretty handy.
> As Wine proves, any reimplementation of the Win32 API is inevitably not going to be as
> good as the real thing.
I just don't think this is really true. Win32 is a huge API, and so would take a huge effort to clone successfully. The wine project doesn't have the resources to even try to implement all of the resources of win32, and they don't have the resources to do proper reverse engineering on a large scale.
An effort by a company with more resources like apple could make wine a lot more usable. For instance, one problem with win32, is that some parts aren't sufficiently documented. Normally, people have to use black box testing to guess what the undocumented features should do. However, it is perfectly legal and practical to reverse engineer by reading the disassembly of real windows dlls, so long as the person who reads the disassembly doesn't write wine code, but instead just documents what he learns and hands it over to wine coders. A lot of progress could be made in this way.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/04/1649211
I wish they'd just google for the old title... that would catch most of these dupes.
>Personally, my favored way of avoiding this problem is to use GPL software...
This *causes* legal problems, it doesn't solve them and is bad advice. How you can use GPL code in conjunction with your proprietary software is highly legally constrained. If you use GPL libraries, the GPL license then applies to your code. Supposedly LGPL gets around this, but not really due to ambiguities in the license (the license uses the ambiguous term "derives from" which has a different meaning when used with object oriented software). Note that glibc has a special exception, and that it is generally ok to use.
>We weren't told what license the issued product would be under, and it might BE under GPL.
It doesn't matter whether the software he is releasing is under GPL. You can't just apply the GPL to someone else's non GPL code without their permission. You'd not only be opening up your company to lawsuit, but probably everyone who uses your code.
The GPL is not a magic license that you can invoke and use other people's software however you want. It is a useful license in many situations, but it clearly does nothing to help the OP.
If code is posted on a forum, whether or not it has a license attached to it may not matter. Many forums used by programmers require that posters give the right to use the example code posted, etc. Please check with forums FAQ before panicking.
You should probably just mention it to him and offer to rewrite it. It would be wise to not act in an accusatory manner when bringing it up. Remember that there are a lot of sources out there that are meant to be used as example code, and that if permission to copy is given it isn't "cheating" to do so.
We could go tomorrow, or at least start building the components to do so. We don't go because congress doesn't care anymore. I'm tired of all this nonsense "lets plan to go to mars in the future" from NASA and the president, as if planning is somehow contributing. We already have the *plans* we don't have the *money*. There's nothing special about the future that's going to change a lack of caring.
last time I checked you could download it from apple's developer site
"containing proton-rich liquid scintillators in two planes."
does this sound delicious to anyone else?
the sort of guy that many people in the administration wish they were.
Despite all of the continuous fuckups of this administration, it is clear that the only thing that they will regret when their eight years are up is that they have to leave at all. They've spent eight years consolidating power, but are still short of their holy grail.
>>the part where they disbanded the Iraqi army instead of giving them at least tokens of power is
>>especially laughable in this respect
>Hindsight is always 20/20 from our comfortable arm chairs.
So what is your point? That we can never tell what is going to happen before it happens? What a bunch of nonsense. Do you really think that everything in politics is a game of dice? Why bother studying the subject if you do. The truth is that competence is necessary for success in any field, and our administration's lack of it is why we've been losing this war.
There was also *foresight* in this case. Plenty of the administration's generals spoke out against their policies. Many in the public, including myself, immediately saw this as a blunder. The administration allowed anarchy to take hold in the days after the invasion, and instituted no law enforcement, and had no plans to institute law enforcement. Everyone watching this with any sense knew it was a failure in the making from day one. Saying we were watching from the sidelines doesn't change the validity of our judgments.
Machiavelli's point still stands and is not outdated in the slightest. If the infrastructure of the state actually works, as it did in Iraq, it makes no sense to destroy it and build it again from the ground up. No society has ever been destroyed and successfully remade from scratch by foreign invaders.
You say that many changes in world politics have happened since Machiavelli such as the rise of the nation state and the institution of sovereignty... which I think is kind of funny since it's pretty questionable whether that has ever happened in Iraq. Iraq is more or less a fictional state in the modern sense of the word. There are no "Iraqis" just Sunni's, Shiite's, and Kurds who live in the territory of Iraq. American's would never accept a foreign led insurgency in our country, but Iraq isn't America.
That's why the outcome of our policies in Iraq were so predictable and tragic. Nothing here required a cutting edge understanding of modern politics. A basic understanding of military power would have allowed us to achieve victory, but unfortunately no one calling the shots had this. There was no strategy, and no hope of success given the leadership we had.
The problem is that police and security guards perceive tasers as harmless, and feel free to abuse the crap out of them. They show little hesitation in using them even on people who are not resisting arrest.
I think that tasers are a good tool, but most police forces just don't seem to know how to use them properly.
There's also the well known problem that police work attracts some people who just want to be in a position of authority in order to bully people. I like to think that this is the minority, but everyone knows that these guys cause big problems for everyone and generate a lot of hostility between the police force and the general public. I wish departments would do some psychological screening and background checks on candidates and reject those with abusive personalities. I think if you got those guys out of the picture, you'd run into a lot fewer of these "accidental" killings.
Online word processors written largely in javascript taking on Microsoft word and the rest of the office suite? Anyone who takes that idea seriously needs to get their head screwed on straight.
Google already has such a service, as do several other companies. I see no evidence that they have or ever could make the slightest dent in Microsoft's office sales.
he only thing that *didn't* go wrong with the sequel was the actors, which is not to say the acting wasn't horrible.
If you look at some of the actors, particularly Natalie Portman, they're pretty good in other roles. Compare V for Vendetta to any of the Star Wars prequels. The acting sucked because the dialogue and plot sucked, and no actor, ever, could read those horrible emo lines seriously. The characters they had to portraTy were paper thin. I think it also seriously hurt them that they were acting on a blue screen for the entire movie.