Engineers design to specs and requirements. Jobs tended to specify the high-level requirements. The engineers who worked for him are very clear on this -- Jobs was a micromanager who pushed hard for certain elements of design and usability. The Jobs approach was unique, and resulted in the distinctive Apple products of the 70s, 80, and 2000s. Unlike most CEOs, Steve Jobs had a close personal hand in the the successes and failures of Apple.
NB: I'm not a big fan of either Jobs or Apple. But his contributions are pretty clear.
The guy's video came after the Newton, but his (documented) push for a tablet dates back to 1981, per TFA. That's well before Apple came out with the Newton. The two companies were next door neighbors and collaborated on this tablet concept.
I deliberately did not provide my list of queries, for three reasons:
(1) As I said, the queries are relevant to me, personally. All queries include my first and last name. I have never posted my last name on slashdot, and do not intend to. I prefer not to have slashdot come up on searches for my name.
(2) I assume shills for both sides are present here. I don't want my test queries to become special cases.
(3) The point of my post is to test what is relevant to myself. Your needs could be different, and testing is easy. So you don't need to take anyone else's word for it, and shouldn't. Test for yourself.
That said, if you want to see my list of queries, post an email address (a throwaway email address is fine) and a promise not to post the list to the web or any public location.
I just tried bing on a list of sample (obscure, complicated) queries that are relevant to me, personally. google found the correct page in 3 out of 4. bing got 1 out of 4.
I wouldn't make any grandiose claims on a sample size of 4. But from a "quick and dirty check" perspective, I won't be trying bing again anytime soon.
BTW: since when are vendor competitiveness claims newsworthy? It always annoys me when stories like this show up on slashdot. Yes, the high-powered $vendor_X executive whose livelihood depends on $product_X has publically claimed that it is equivalent. This is a story? I don't care which vendor you're talking about: the vendor's own claims about relative competitiveness are not newsworthy. Wait for an (impartial) third party to declare that $vendor_X's products, which historically were viewed as inferior to $vendor_Y, are now equal or superior. Or wait for $vendor_X to announce a new feature. Then you have a story.
30 years ago, people weren't expected to be reachable. Now, IT folks, doctors, managers, and others are expected to reachable on their cell phones. Parents are expected to be reachable by their kids' schools.
If you think it's me vs. Madison, you've missed the point. Saying "Wasn't James Madison against this" conveniently leaves out that there were a number of his peers who were all for it. Ben Franklin was one such. Madison succeeded to the extent that the President isn't "His Royal Highness", but he lost to the extent that the President, Senators, and others do have titles that clearly differentiate them from regular citizens -- as Ben Franklin wanted. Madison's side lost to Franklin's side. If you want to reopen the issue, that's fine, but presenting just one side of the argument is misleading. Our Founders were not unified on this topic.
Referencing the Founding Fathers' individual beliefs and opinions is illogical. We have a democracy. We have voting and majority rule. Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and others had many beliefs, and often ended up disagreeing with each other. That's why the Constitutional Convention took months to write a relatively short document. That's why the US Constitution is full of compromises.
The three brances of government create the current state of law and custom. Until they intervene, the differing opinions of individuals, even individual founders, does not matter.
NASA hasn't stopped funding "meatbags in space". The ISS is still up there and receiving lots of NASA funding for operations and training. NASA is paying the Russians for rides to and from the ISS. NASA is paying SpaceX to send cargo to the ISS. NASA hopes to eventually pay SpaceX and other COTS providers to ferry humans to and from ISS. And the SLS is funded with lots of money to restore NASA's capability to send meatbags beyond Low Earth Orbit.
For better or for worse, NASA continues to fund both manned spaceflight and robotic spacecraft.
Historically, slashvertisements at least seemed to be mistakes. They were normally some editor accepting a story from a third party where the third party made a press release about their product look like news. Slashdot had plusible deniability: the editor had been duped. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
But this little incident seems blatant. There is no other explanation. Slashdot is posting an advertisement as a story.
At least where I live, in MD, larger supermarkets have a nice selection of magazines. To include Linux magazines.
[posting to undo a bad moderation.]
Re:What does the hell does NP Hard mean?
on
Pac-Man Is NP-Hard
·
· Score: 1
Augh. Correct.
Re:What does the hell does NP Hard mean?
on
Pac-Man Is NP-Hard
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Mod parent down, please. The definition of NP above is circular -- if NP actually stood for non-polynomial, then P!=NP by definition. That would be begging the question.
Rather, NP means "nondeterministic polynomial time." It is the class of problems whose solutions can be verified in polynomial time. NP-hard are the "hardest" problems in this class. All algorithms known to solve problems in this class are super-polynomial. The question of "P==NP?" really amounts to "is there an undiscovered polynomial solution to every problem that we currently think is NP-hard?" or even more simply, "if a problem's solution can be verified in polynomial time, can the solution be discovered in polynomial time?"
If every act of lobbying resulted in bribery, then indeed, lobbying would imply bribery. However, most acts of lobbying do *not* involve bribery. Most lobbying by volume is the legal, non-bribing, grass-roots kind of lobbying. When you get 25000 signatures on a petition, that's lobbying. There are a whole lot of such petitions on the whitehouse petition site.
Lobbying just means asking a legislator to do something. At a basic level, lobbying is part of the process of having a republic with representatives. When you mail your representative about SOPA or some other issue, you are lobbying. If enough people do it, that's a grass roots lobbying effort, and could be successful. That's a good thing. It's how the system is supposed to work.
Of course, some people have more influence than others. When you, as an individual, mail your representative and say "this bill is bad for the computer business", the representative is probably not going to pay that much attention. If a major business person who lives in the representative's district/state -- say, Bill Gates calls Senator Murray -- the business person is much more likely to be listened to.
Another common type of lobbying is the professional. Various organizations hire lawyer specialists, former politicians/staffers, and other folks whose job it is to figure out how to get access to legislators or their staff and buttonhole them on the sponsoring company's issues. It's awfully hard to legally distinguish between private citizen lobbying and paid lobbyists. And it's not clear that paid lobbyists are that much of an abuse of the system.
The problem here is that lobbyists -- both paid and private -- can attempt to bribe politicians and staffers in various (legal) ways. These can vary from picking up the lunch tab to donations, and often is equivalent to bribery. But lobbying by itself is not inherently bribery.
In the case of film photography, the demand is gone. Legislation cannot recreate that demand.
In the case of music, the demand for music is still there, but is being met by illegal suppliers at below the legal suppliers' rates. The legislators hope to suppress the illegal suppliers through appropriate regulation. This makes economic sense. Their actual implementation may not make sense from the perspectives of how the Internet works, or due to constitutional / free speech concerns. But what they're doing does make economic sense.
There is a big difference between "people no longer have a use for any of your products" and "people still want your products but have figured out how to avoid paying for them."
Anyway, I don't get what the big deal is about duplication of effort -- if it makes people happier to reinvent the wheel than to copy someone else's wheel -- let 'em; it doesn't hurt you.
New distros and package formats hurt everyone:
1. The "Linux" community only has so many knowledgeable volunteers and developers at any one time. Maintaining a general-purpose distribution takes a whole fleet of people, each of whom understands the intricacies of one or more subsystems. When you create another distro, you are implicitly hoping that you can get a whole bunch of people to stop contributing to some other project and instead contribute to yours; and/or you are hoping to divert new volunteers from other projects. New distributions spread us more thinly.
If you can make a newer distro that is significantly better than anything else, you might be able to kill off an older distro and/or grow the community enough to compensate for the above. But if you create a distro that is only marginally better than its predecessors, you will needlessly consume a section of the volunteer base. It would be better to take your ideas to an existing distro and improve that, instead.
2. If a programmer wants to write and test software for "Linux", the number of different distributions to target and test on keeps getting higher.
3. COTS vendors who are tempted to support "Linux" sometimes look at the mess of distributions and give up. When they do provide support for some Linux distros, their Linux customers sometimes whine that they aren't supporting $distro_of_choice, which makes COTS vendors hate us. Unnecessary distros make this worse.
4. New packaging formats, in particular, create additional burdens on cross-distro tools for package management and file browsing.
No. It is about the 15 millionth "cyberwar." Ignoring for the moment the significant questions surrounding the dubious term "cyberwar," the internet has been a battleground of malware for decades. This may be a new incident, but it's not new.
The folks who define the term "cyberwar" limit it to nation-state actions, to make it analogous to traditional war. Certain folks use this term with a very specific agenda: to justify expanding the scope and budget of military activities to include computer and computer network defense/offense. Most malware exists for vandalism or theft/fraud. From the perspective of jurisdiction, that means most malware falls under law enforcement rather than the military. As such, most malware is not in scope for "cyberwar". It's only "cyberwar" if it's the action of a nation-state.
It appears that a fair number of governments have used "cyberwar" type capabilities. "stuxnet" is probably the most famous example, and for good reasons: it was highly sophisticated and had physical-world implications. There have been other incidents, such as the attacks on Estonian and and Georgian websites. However, none these incidents has ever, AFAIK, been officially acknowledged by the perpetrating government.
The "oxOmar" incident was not directly initiated by a Palestinian government entity, but was publicly praised by a government entity, i.e. Hamas. That's the closest we've come to having an officially acknowledged cyberwar.
My favourite Arch feature is the AUR (Arch User Repository) where anyone can submit their own packages which other uses can then install.
Cool, thanks. That's a good differentiator. Most other distros have mechanisms to add unofficial repositories. But that's a lot of bother for the packager.
Next question: why did Arch need to reinvent the package management wheel? deb and rpm already existed. What does the Arch package format (format, not the pacman front-end) give you that other formats could not have?
I have no illusions about people here reading TFA and TFS. However, since it was my submission, I felt compelled to defend it.
Specifically, no, it's not news that Tolkien was denied the Nobel 50 years ago. We have indeed known that for 50 years. The news is in why Tolkien was denied the Nobel. That information was only just released.
The decisions behind the Nobel Prize are kept secret for 50 years. The justifications were only just released. This is described in TFA, and mentioned in TFS.
Slashdot Mirror
Engineers design to specs and requirements. Jobs tended to specify the high-level requirements. The engineers who worked for him are very clear on this -- Jobs was a micromanager who pushed hard for certain elements of design and usability. The Jobs approach was unique, and resulted in the distinctive Apple products of the 70s, 80, and 2000s. Unlike most CEOs, Steve Jobs had a close personal hand in the the successes and failures of Apple.
NB: I'm not a big fan of either Jobs or Apple. But his contributions are pretty clear.
The guy's video came after the Newton, but his (documented) push for a tablet dates back to 1981, per TFA. That's well before Apple came out with the Newton. The two companies were next door neighbors and collaborated on this tablet concept.
I deliberately did not provide my list of queries, for three reasons:
(1) As I said, the queries are relevant to me, personally. All queries include my first and last name. I have never posted my last name on slashdot, and do not intend to. I prefer not to have slashdot come up on searches for my name.
(2) I assume shills for both sides are present here. I don't want my test queries to become special cases.
(3) The point of my post is to test what is relevant to myself. Your needs could be different, and testing is easy. So you don't need to take anyone else's word for it, and shouldn't. Test for yourself.
That said, if you want to see my list of queries, post an email address (a throwaway email address is fine) and a promise not to post the list to the web or any public location.
verbatim is a google feature. GP was praising google, not bing.
I just tried bing on a list of sample (obscure, complicated) queries that are relevant to me, personally. google found the correct page in 3 out of 4. bing got 1 out of 4.
I wouldn't make any grandiose claims on a sample size of 4. But from a "quick and dirty check" perspective, I won't be trying bing again anytime soon.
BTW: since when are vendor competitiveness claims newsworthy? It always annoys me when stories like this show up on slashdot. Yes, the high-powered $vendor_X executive whose livelihood depends on $product_X has publically claimed that it is equivalent. This is a story? I don't care which vendor you're talking about: the vendor's own claims about relative competitiveness are not newsworthy. Wait for an (impartial) third party to declare that $vendor_X's products, which historically were viewed as inferior to $vendor_Y, are now equal or superior. Or wait for $vendor_X to announce a new feature. Then you have a story.
Todd McCaffrey is a son rather than a grandson of Anne McCaffrey.
30 years ago, people weren't expected to be reachable. Now, IT folks, doctors, managers, and others are expected to reachable on their cell phones. Parents are expected to be reachable by their kids' schools.
If you think it's me vs. Madison, you've missed the point. Saying "Wasn't James Madison against this" conveniently leaves out that there were a number of his peers who were all for it. Ben Franklin was one such. Madison succeeded to the extent that the President isn't "His Royal Highness", but he lost to the extent that the President, Senators, and others do have titles that clearly differentiate them from regular citizens -- as Ben Franklin wanted. Madison's side lost to Franklin's side. If you want to reopen the issue, that's fine, but presenting just one side of the argument is misleading. Our Founders were not unified on this topic.
Referencing the Founding Fathers' individual beliefs and opinions is illogical. We have a democracy. We have voting and majority rule. Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and others had many beliefs, and often ended up disagreeing with each other. That's why the Constitutional Convention took months to write a relatively short document. That's why the US Constitution is full of compromises.
The three brances of government create the current state of law and custom. Until they intervene, the differing opinions of individuals, even individual founders, does not matter.
NASA hasn't stopped funding "meatbags in space". The ISS is still up there and receiving lots of NASA funding for operations and training. NASA is paying the Russians for rides to and from the ISS. NASA is paying SpaceX to send cargo to the ISS. NASA hopes to eventually pay SpaceX and other COTS providers to ferry humans to and from ISS. And the SLS is funded with lots of money to restore NASA's capability to send meatbags beyond Low Earth Orbit.
For better or for worse, NASA continues to fund both manned spaceflight and robotic spacecraft.
Historically, slashvertisements at least seemed to be mistakes. They were normally some editor accepting a story from a third party where the third party made a press release about their product look like news. Slashdot had plusible deniability: the editor had been duped. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
But this little incident seems blatant. There is no other explanation. Slashdot is posting an advertisement as a story.
Has slashdot fallen this low?
At least where I live, in MD, larger supermarkets have a nice selection of magazines. To include Linux magazines.
[posting to undo a bad moderation.]
Augh. Correct.
Mod parent down, please. The definition of NP above is circular -- if NP actually stood for non-polynomial, then P!=NP by definition. That would be begging the question.
Rather, NP means "nondeterministic polynomial time." It is the class of problems whose solutions can be verified in polynomial time. NP-hard are the "hardest" problems in this class. All algorithms known to solve problems in this class are super-polynomial. The question of "P==NP?" really amounts to "is there an undiscovered polynomial solution to every problem that we currently think is NP-hard?" or even more simply, "if a problem's solution can be verified in polynomial time, can the solution be discovered in polynomial time?"
If every act of lobbying resulted in bribery, then indeed, lobbying would imply bribery. However, most acts of lobbying do *not* involve bribery. Most lobbying by volume is the legal, non-bribing, grass-roots kind of lobbying. When you get 25000 signatures on a petition, that's lobbying. There are a whole lot of such petitions on the whitehouse petition site.
Not even all paid lobbyists are doing bribes.
+1.
Lobbying just means asking a legislator to do something. At a basic level, lobbying is part of the process of having a republic with representatives. When you mail your representative about SOPA or some other issue, you are lobbying. If enough people do it, that's a grass roots lobbying effort, and could be successful. That's a good thing. It's how the system is supposed to work.
Of course, some people have more influence than others. When you, as an individual, mail your representative and say "this bill is bad for the computer business", the representative is probably not going to pay that much attention. If a major business person who lives in the representative's district/state -- say, Bill Gates calls Senator Murray -- the business person is much more likely to be listened to.
Another common type of lobbying is the professional. Various organizations hire lawyer specialists, former politicians/staffers, and other folks whose job it is to figure out how to get access to legislators or their staff and buttonhole them on the sponsoring company's issues. It's awfully hard to legally distinguish between private citizen lobbying and paid lobbyists. And it's not clear that paid lobbyists are that much of an abuse of the system.
The problem here is that lobbyists -- both paid and private -- can attempt to bribe politicians and staffers in various (legal) ways. These can vary from picking up the lunch tab to donations, and often is equivalent to bribery. But lobbying by itself is not inherently bribery.
In the case of film photography, the demand is gone. Legislation cannot recreate that demand.
In the case of music, the demand for music is still there, but is being met by illegal suppliers at below the legal suppliers' rates. The legislators hope to suppress the illegal suppliers through appropriate regulation. This makes economic sense. Their actual implementation may not make sense from the perspectives of how the Internet works, or due to constitutional / free speech concerns. But what they're doing does make economic sense.
There is a big difference between "people no longer have a use for any of your products" and "people still want your products but have figured out how to avoid paying for them."
Anyway, I don't get what the big deal is about duplication of effort -- if it makes people happier to reinvent the wheel than to copy someone else's wheel -- let 'em; it doesn't hurt you.
New distros and package formats hurt everyone:
1. The "Linux" community only has so many knowledgeable volunteers and developers at any one time. Maintaining a general-purpose distribution takes a whole fleet of people, each of whom understands the intricacies of one or more subsystems. When you create another distro, you are implicitly hoping that you can get a whole bunch of people to stop contributing to some other project and instead contribute to yours; and/or you are hoping to divert new volunteers from other projects. New distributions spread us more thinly.
If you can make a newer distro that is significantly better than anything else, you might be able to kill off an older distro and/or grow the community enough to compensate for the above. But if you create a distro that is only marginally better than its predecessors, you will needlessly consume a section of the volunteer base. It would be better to take your ideas to an existing distro and improve that, instead.
2. If a programmer wants to write and test software for "Linux", the number of different distributions to target and test on keeps getting higher.
3. COTS vendors who are tempted to support "Linux" sometimes look at the mess of distributions and give up. When they do provide support for some Linux distros, their Linux customers sometimes whine that they aren't supporting $distro_of_choice, which makes COTS vendors hate us. Unnecessary distros make this worse.
4. New packaging formats, in particular, create additional burdens on cross-distro tools for package management and file browsing.
No. It is about the 15 millionth "cyberwar." Ignoring for the moment the significant questions surrounding the dubious term "cyberwar," the internet has been a battleground of malware for decades. This may be a new incident, but it's not new.
The folks who define the term "cyberwar" limit it to nation-state actions, to make it analogous to traditional war. Certain folks use this term with a very specific agenda: to justify expanding the scope and budget of military activities to include computer and computer network defense/offense. Most malware exists for vandalism or theft/fraud. From the perspective of jurisdiction, that means most malware falls under law enforcement rather than the military. As such, most malware is not in scope for "cyberwar". It's only "cyberwar" if it's the action of a nation-state.
It appears that a fair number of governments have used "cyberwar" type capabilities. "stuxnet" is probably the most famous example, and for good reasons: it was highly sophisticated and had physical-world implications. There have been other incidents, such as the attacks on Estonian and and Georgian websites. However, none these incidents has ever, AFAIK, been officially acknowledged by the perpetrating government.
The "oxOmar" incident was not directly initiated by a Palestinian government entity, but was publicly praised by a government entity, i.e. Hamas. That's the closest we've come to having an officially acknowledged cyberwar.
My favourite Arch feature is the AUR (Arch User Repository) where anyone can submit their own packages which other uses can then install.
Cool, thanks. That's a good differentiator. Most other distros have mechanisms to add unofficial repositories. But that's a lot of bother for the packager.
Next question: why did Arch need to reinvent the package management wheel? deb and rpm already existed. What does the Arch package format (format, not the pacman front-end) give you that other formats could not have?
- OP
Russian President Medvedev threatened to prosecute those responsible for the space failures. No surprise that the individuals in question are now looking to blame someone else.
What I think is hilarious is that I've never, not once, heard anyone actually say that "six days" was exact
Good for you. But I've met plenty of fundamentalists with that view. They're typically called "Young Earth Creationists". And they're common -- the linked poll claims that 40% of Americans believe that the Earth is less than 10K years old. It was the basis of the Scopes Trial, and has been in an issue in a number of court decisions since then. This is very much an ongoing issue.
I have no illusions about people here reading TFA and TFS. However, since it was my submission, I felt compelled to defend it.
Specifically, no, it's not news that Tolkien was denied the Nobel 50 years ago. We have indeed known that for 50 years. The news is in why Tolkien was denied the Nobel. That information was only just released.
The decisions behind the Nobel Prize are kept secret for 50 years. The justifications were only just released. This is described in TFA, and mentioned in TFS.
- Morty