kicking all kinds of ass as far as performance in scripting languages go
Um, NO.
It's kicking the ass of plain Lua, which was about 100x slower than Python. Given that Python itself is about 100x slower than C, beating plain Lua just means that you don't get an F in first-semester computer science.
I don't care very much how it affects him. I care how it affects the victims.
The guy making bad loans isn't threatening to kill anybody, he isn't making people terrified to be out in public, etc. He does hurt more people, and I do think that you can add that up, but there isn't the very real chance that he might pull the trigger of a gun or sink a big knife into somebody's heart or eye.
I didn't say "perfectly 100% pure evil". I said "generally evil". That's plenty, especially when you get to the death row people.
Of course, the non-evil ones are still nearly all worthless to society.
There certainly is a degree of evil in drug crimes (supporting criminal empires with murderous thugs) and prostitution (spreading disease among the general population). Even peeing in an alley is a problem; it damages property value because nobody wants to live or work where it smells like pee.
The thugs that occupy our jails really don't pose that much threat to society. In the scheme of things, armed robbery really isn't that bad. The truly evil people are busy starting purposeless, unwinnable wars and undermining our entire economic system. And they get off scot free, since it isn't even illegal.
Sounds like you!
You're "undermining our entire economic system" when you decide that armed robbery isn't that bad. That makes you one of the truly evil people, and you get off scott free.
Proper punishment for armed robbery:
First, do we need him for anything critical like organ donation? If so, strap him down and pull out the organs. Remember that the organs will be fresher if he isn't killed first.
Second, does the victim want to take a crack at him? Anything goes: nail in the eye, cock up the butt, battery acid injections, beating with a claw hammer, purposeful parasite infestation, sex change, skinned alive...
Third, will anybody pay to use him in a way that doesn't let him go free? He can perform movie stunts that are sure to be fatal, he can test new drugs on himself, he can be used to test treatments for spinal fracture, etc.
Fourth, if he's still there, we let the police dogs snack on him. (live, of course)
Your desire to have kids is partly inheritable. (brain-related genetics) It should be pretty obvious what will happen regarding evolution! We humans are currently facing HUGE selective pressure from birth control.
Prior to birth control, sex equaled reproduction. Sexual desire was thus equivalent to reproductive desire. We've been selected to desire sex.
Now that sexual desire and reproductive desire are no longer essentially the same, mere sexual desire is no longer a fitness criterion. Future generations will desire kids as strongly as people today desire sex. We'll go back to having huge families because everybody will want them.
I think my daughter ought to accept where food comes from and not be bothered by it. There is also a disection opportunity here, helping her to learn about the organs found in a typical mammal.
The rabbit is also excellent eating. For bonus points, make a fur hat or some ear warmers.
I'm a shameless speciesist (or is it species chauvinist?) and I'm always jarred by people treating animals as if they're as valuable, as humans. I know people who would rather use prisoners for medical research than animals.
I'm mostly with you on this one, but prisoners aren't random normal humans. They are generally evil. They also happen to be much better for medical research than animals. Prisoners really are the ideal choice, particularly those on death row.
Animals are not of significant value compared to normal humans. Prisoners are of negative value compared to normal humans.
Essentially you need to reduce your economic activity. You need to work half-time or less.
With less money to spend, you'll have less entertainment and fewer toys. Your environmental impact goes down.
The trouble is that you can't do this. Just try getting an engineering job at 15 hours per week. Tell the prospective employer that you only want to work 2 days per week. Even allowing for a proportionate drop in pay, you won't get this. We've standardized on a long work week. If you won't work long hours, somebody else will.
And why? Oh, probably an instinctive desire to aquire and display resources. It has something to do with preparing for hard times, and something to do with attracting females. We work far more than needed for survival.
suddenly the car jumps and changes up or down the gears
Pay attention when buying. The typical automatic has 4 speeds. A cheap one has 3, or even just 2. A nice one has 5 or even 6. A few cars have continuously variable transmissions.
I didn't have the problem of lame software holding the audio device until GNOME insisted on starting a stinking sound server. Yep, it's that sound server itself that caused the issue in the first place.
The proper kernel fix is to allow multiple opens of the device. The most recent opener is heard, while the others get/dev/null until the recent opener is done. Yeah you could mix, but that just sucks. (it degrades the sound, it adds latency, and I don't want to hear such a cacophony anyway)
By default, sound doesn't go everywhere. Given that quieting a device is much easier than searching for the obscure knob needed to make it go, this is an idiotic default.
What I really need is something like iptables and friends for sound. Yep, in the kernel, routing every which way. If I want to route the console beep out over VoIP, I should be able to just issue a few commands to set up audio routing and tunneling to do that.
10 years ago, you couldn't play two sounds at the same time unless your card could handle it in hardware.
No cacophony? Sweet! Sign me up!
Unfortunately OSS version 4 (part of FreeBSD and OpenSolaris) does mix sounds. It's in the kernel too, so things JUST WORK.
Also, that's about when (IIRC) they started introducing cards (e.g. AC97) that could only two one or two rates or (in some cases) could only do stereo. The driver would simply refuse to handle mono or 8 kHz so you had to resample by yourself.
OSS 4 resamples too. FWIW, the old OSS did stereo and fast rates if you used an ioctl to request them or if you opened/dev/dsp as the device.
Uhm. No, it doesn't. The first floating point exception will ruin your whole day.
The kernel has exception handling tables. This is used for a variety of things, primarily access to user space memory. My day is not ruined.
Of course, I'd rather just disable FPU exceptions.
Why would you imagine the kernel includes functions to enable FPU access? You think they would exist but not actually work? Sorry, they work quite nicely.
FYI, I actually write kernel code. It pays well.
"The same goes for pretty much anything else, Bluetooth included if you actually care."
Again, no. You need support from the userspace for Bluetooth.
No. Look, I could eliminate userspace entirely if I wanted to. (it's just a trivial change to not exec init) I can throw pretty much anything into the kernel. The kernel rules all.
"Even better, in the kernel I can get the ultimate in real-time performance."
Wrong. Kernel threads are not any different from the userspace threads.
Um??? They sure are, and I'm not limited to threads. I can use tasklets, softirqs, regular old interrupt handlers, or my own evil invention. I can even disable interrupts if I please.
"I can get working fine-grained security like SE Linux instead of crap like that offered by the X server."
Wrong, as usual. PulseAudio does not depend on the X-server and you can use SELinux just fine. In fact, PulseAudio works under a non-privileged account, so a flaw somewhere in the mixer code won't give the attacker the instant system-level access.
I didn't suggest it required the X server. I said it was the same sort of thing. It's a userspace program that is unable to create hooks for SE Linux policy or get capability bit allocations. Sure, I can use SE Linux as a big hammer, but I can't ask SE Linux to control the internals of non-kernel code.
The problems started with ESD or esound, the Enlightenment Sound Daemon. Prior to that, sound daemons were unusual. Nobody actually ran one. Enlightenment (the insane game-inspired window manager) got one, GNOME briefly used Enlightenment, and we've been stuck with sound daemons ever since.
The OSS to ALSA transition was the other botch. It used to be that an app just did open() on/dev/audio or/dev/dsp and made sound. Any competant UNIX programmer could handle that. Now we have a kernel API that is essentially unusable, so you have to use ALSA libraries to do anything. Actually, those are **barely** usable.
Really, it wasn't always like this. My 486 DX4-75 with 8 MB RAM (slackware, fvwm-1.x) could handle audio. Back then, programmers didn't fuck around adding bugs and bloat. They wrote stuff that worked, nice and solid, on the hardware that we had.
The FPU works perfectly fine in a Linux kernel. The RAID code can even use MMX, SSE, AltiVec, and so on. Observe:
kernel_fpu_begin(); do_stuff(); kernel_fpu_end();
The same goes for pretty much anything else, Bluetooth included if you actually care.
Even better, in the kernel I can get the ultimate in real-time performance. I can get working fine-grained security like SE Linux instead of crap like that offered by the X server.
"Majoring in a scientific or technological discipline, earning good grades, persisting to degree completion, getting and staying married, and not having dependent children are all actions that substantially increase the likelihood of repayment and lower the likelihood of default."
You have to pay to get the full publication I guess, but that first part says what should be obvious: people with nerd degrees don't default.
That just got modded "flamebait" by somebody who clearly resents being reminded that some degrees (his own most likely) have nearly zero economic value.
It's an annoying way to stifle debate, but at least I find it amusing.:-/
You'd rather attend an expensive school, because then employers will think you are more upper-class. (used to be called "good breeding" before that got offensive)
You'd rather attend the school with beautiful landscaping, fine dining, easy access to an exciting nightlife, and so on. Well, duh, you're going to pay for that. In part this is because providing those things is costly. In part it's because you're in a bidding war with all the other potential students.
Is it any surprise that schools offer you what you demand? It seems that you didn't take the economics courses at your school.
People want to go to expensive schools because those schools have good reputations, but schools get those reputations from being exclusive. In other words, expensive schools are more desirable in part because they are so expensive.
When you graduate from a pricy school, you signal to others that you are high class.
Every degree is valuable, you know? Every student must get a degree! (probably because we already watered down the high school diploma by insisting that every student must get one, no matter if they can't effectively understand math usage or the meaning of something they read)
Imagine the outrage if it were suggested that physics, engineering, and math were more worthy than black studies, women's studies, and LGBT studies. We're going to Hell in a very nicely woven handbasket.
Perhaps the worst thing is that this perpetuates the idea that college education is generally worthless. When people see college graduates failing in the job market, they often conclude that education is not worth any effort. The correct conclusion is of course that your field of study matters, but that doesn't generally sink in.
Doing something for ~8 hours a day can lower ones intensity to do it in their "free time".
Sure. If the desire can get lowered all the way to zero, then there isn't much desire in the first place.
Even us married hackers with kids find a bit of time here and there. It could be teaching the kids assembly language. It could be a weekend patching X.org drivers while the wife is off visiting her sister. It could be a night spent hacking filesystem driver code while the fucking the wife. Whatever! If programming is your passion, you will find some time.
He has no idea what "those parts" feel like from the perspective of the owner. The pain caused by needlessly cutting and stitching them (an episiotomy for example) isn't something that he will ever fully understand.
Slashdot Mirror
kicking all kinds of ass as far as performance in scripting languages go
Um, NO.
It's kicking the ass of plain Lua, which was about 100x slower than Python. Given that Python itself is about 100x slower than C, beating plain Lua just means that you don't get an F in first-semester computer science.
You can't sentence someone for "being a bad person".
Clearly you haven't heard about the 3-strikes laws. :-)
Probably we should instead harvest their organs until it kills them.
But what do they get, a couple hundred dollars?
I don't care very much how it affects him. I care how it affects the victims.
The guy making bad loans isn't threatening to kill anybody, he isn't making people terrified to be out in public, etc. He does hurt more people, and I do think that you can add that up, but there isn't the very real chance that he might pull the trigger of a gun or sink a big knife into somebody's heart or eye.
You ended up with cases where a person could be sentenced to a life term in prison for a relatively minor crime, e.g. shoplifting.
No, they are sentenced to a life term for being a habitual criminal who won't reform.
Sure, shoplifting may be the final trigger, but that certainly isn't why we put them away for life.
Likewise, if you overload a bridge with a convoy of 70-ton tanks and then it breaks when a butterfly lands, we don't blame the butterfly.
I didn't say "perfectly 100% pure evil". I said "generally evil". That's plenty, especially when you get to the death row people.
Of course, the non-evil ones are still nearly all worthless to society.
There certainly is a degree of evil in drug crimes (supporting criminal empires with murderous thugs) and prostitution (spreading disease among the general population). Even peeing in an alley is a problem; it damages property value because nobody wants to live or work where it smells like pee.
The thugs that occupy our jails really don't pose that much threat to society. In the scheme of things, armed robbery really isn't that bad. The truly evil people are busy starting purposeless, unwinnable wars and undermining our entire economic system. And they get off scot free, since it isn't even illegal.
Sounds like you!
You're "undermining our entire economic system" when you decide that armed robbery isn't that bad. That makes you one of the truly evil people, and you get off scott free.
Proper punishment for armed robbery:
First, do we need him for anything critical like organ donation? If so, strap him down and pull out the organs. Remember that the organs will be fresher if he isn't killed first.
Second, does the victim want to take a crack at him? Anything goes: nail in the eye, cock up the butt, battery acid injections, beating with a claw hammer, purposeful parasite infestation, sex change, skinned alive...
Third, will anybody pay to use him in a way that doesn't let him go free? He can perform movie stunts that are sure to be fatal, he can test new drugs on himself, he can be used to test treatments for spinal fracture, etc.
Fourth, if he's still there, we let the police dogs snack on him. (live, of course)
Fifth, dead or alive, we mulch him and flush him.
Your desire to have kids is partly inheritable. (brain-related genetics) It should be pretty obvious what will happen regarding evolution! We humans are currently facing HUGE selective pressure from birth control.
Prior to birth control, sex equaled reproduction. Sexual desire was thus equivalent to reproductive desire. We've been selected to desire sex.
Now that sexual desire and reproductive desire are no longer essentially the same, mere sexual desire is no longer a fitness criterion. Future generations will desire kids as strongly as people today desire sex. We'll go back to having huge families because everybody will want them.
I think my daughter ought to accept where food comes from and not be bothered by it. There is also a disection opportunity here, helping her to learn about the organs found in a typical mammal.
The rabbit is also excellent eating. For bonus points, make a fur hat or some ear warmers.
I'm a shameless speciesist (or is it species chauvinist?) and I'm always jarred by people treating animals as if they're as valuable, as humans. I know people who would rather use prisoners for medical research than animals.
I'm mostly with you on this one, but prisoners aren't random normal humans. They are generally evil. They also happen to be much better for medical research than animals. Prisoners really are the ideal choice, particularly those on death row.
Animals are not of significant value compared to normal humans. Prisoners are of negative value compared to normal humans.
Essentially you need to reduce your economic activity. You need to work half-time or less.
With less money to spend, you'll have less entertainment and fewer toys. Your environmental impact goes down.
The trouble is that you can't do this. Just try getting an engineering job at 15 hours per week. Tell the prospective employer that you only want to work 2 days per week. Even allowing for a proportionate drop in pay, you won't get this. We've standardized on a long work week. If you won't work long hours, somebody else will.
And why? Oh, probably an instinctive desire to aquire and display resources. It has something to do with preparing for hard times, and something to do with attracting females. We work far more than needed for survival.
Stallman, is that you again? Quit trying to rename
my operating system for your own glory.
suddenly the car jumps and changes up or down the gears
Pay attention when buying. The typical automatic has 4 speeds. A cheap one has 3, or even just 2. A nice one has 5 or even 6. A few cars have continuously variable transmissions.
I never tried to do such a horrible thing.
I didn't have the problem of lame software holding the audio device until GNOME insisted on starting a stinking sound server. Yep, it's that sound server itself that caused the issue in the first place.
The proper kernel fix is to allow multiple opens of the device. The most recent opener is heard, while the others get /dev/null until the recent opener is done. Yeah you could mix, but that just sucks. (it degrades the sound, it adds latency, and I don't want to hear such a cacophony anyway)
By default, sound doesn't go everywhere. Given that quieting a device is much easier than searching for the obscure knob needed to make it go, this is an idiotic default.
What I really need is something like iptables and friends for sound. Yep, in the kernel, routing every which way. If I want to route the console beep out over VoIP, I should be able to just issue a few commands to set up audio routing and tunneling to do that.
10 years ago, you couldn't play two sounds at the same time unless your card could handle it in hardware.
No cacophony? Sweet! Sign me up!
Unfortunately OSS version 4 (part of FreeBSD and OpenSolaris) does mix sounds. It's in the kernel too, so things JUST WORK.
Also, that's about when (IIRC) they started introducing cards (e.g. AC97) that could only two one or two rates or (in some cases) could only do stereo. The driver would simply refuse to handle mono or 8 kHz so you had to resample by yourself.
OSS 4 resamples too. FWIW, the old OSS did stereo and fast rates if you used an ioctl to request them or if you opened /dev/dsp as the device.
"The FPU works perfectly fine in a Linux kernel."
Uhm. No, it doesn't. The first floating point exception will ruin your whole day.
The kernel has exception handling tables. This is used for a variety of things, primarily access to user space memory. My day is not ruined.
Of course, I'd rather just disable FPU exceptions.
Why would you imagine the kernel includes functions to enable FPU access? You think they would exist but not actually work? Sorry, they work quite nicely.
FYI, I actually write kernel code. It pays well.
"The same goes for pretty much anything else, Bluetooth included if you actually care."
Again, no. You need support from the userspace for Bluetooth.
No. Look, I could eliminate userspace entirely if I wanted to. (it's just a trivial change to not exec init) I can throw pretty much anything into the kernel. The kernel rules all.
"Even better, in the kernel I can get the ultimate in real-time performance."
Wrong. Kernel threads are not any different from the userspace threads.
Um??? They sure are, and I'm not limited to threads. I can use tasklets, softirqs, regular old interrupt handlers, or my own evil invention. I can even disable interrupts if I please.
"I can get working fine-grained security like SE Linux instead of crap like that offered by the X server."
Wrong, as usual. PulseAudio does not depend on the X-server and you can use SELinux just fine. In fact, PulseAudio works under a non-privileged account, so a flaw somewhere in the mixer code won't give the attacker the instant system-level access.
I didn't suggest it required the X server. I said it was the same sort of thing. It's a userspace program that is unable to create hooks for SE Linux policy or get capability bit allocations. Sure, I can use SE Linux as a big hammer, but I can't ask SE Linux to control the internals of non-kernel code.
That was on 486 hardware and even worse!
The problems started with ESD or esound, the Enlightenment Sound Daemon. Prior to that, sound daemons were unusual. Nobody actually ran one. Enlightenment (the insane game-inspired window manager) got one, GNOME briefly used Enlightenment, and we've been stuck with sound daemons ever since.
The OSS to ALSA transition was the other botch. It used to be that an app just did open() on /dev/audio or /dev/dsp and made sound. Any competant UNIX programmer could handle that. Now we have a kernel API that is essentially unusable, so you have to use ALSA libraries to do anything. Actually, those are **barely** usable.
Really, it wasn't always like this. My 486 DX4-75 with 8 MB RAM (slackware, fvwm-1.x) could handle audio. Back then, programmers didn't fuck around adding bugs and bloat. They wrote stuff that worked, nice and solid, on the hardware that we had.
The FPU works perfectly fine in a Linux kernel. The RAID code can even use MMX, SSE, AltiVec, and so on. Observe:
kernel_fpu_begin();
do_stuff();
kernel_fpu_end();
The same goes for pretty much anything else, Bluetooth included if you actually care.
Even better, in the kernel I can get the ultimate in real-time performance. I can get working fine-grained security like SE Linux instead of crap like that offered by the X server.
Win, win, win. Kernel code rules.
According to http://www.springerlink.com/content/u380751518251x56/
"Majoring in a scientific or technological discipline, earning good grades, persisting to degree completion, getting and staying married, and not having dependent children are all actions that substantially increase the likelihood of repayment and lower the likelihood of default."
You have to pay to get the full publication I guess, but that first part says what should be obvious: people with nerd degrees don't default.
That just got modded "flamebait" by somebody who clearly resents being reminded that some degrees (his own most likely) have nearly zero economic value.
It's an annoying way to stifle debate, but at least I find it amusing. :-/
You can get a fine education at a cheap school.
You'd rather attend an expensive school, because then employers will think you are more upper-class. (used to be called "good breeding" before that got offensive)
You'd rather attend the school with beautiful landscaping, fine dining, easy access to an exciting nightlife, and so on. Well, duh, you're going to pay for that. In part this is because providing those things is costly. In part it's because you're in a bidding war with all the other potential students.
Is it any surprise that schools offer you what you demand? It seems that you didn't take the economics courses at your school.
People want to go to expensive schools because those schools have good reputations, but schools get those reputations from being exclusive. In other words, expensive schools are more desirable in part because they are so expensive.
When you graduate from a pricy school, you signal to others that you are high class.
Every degree is valuable, you know? Every student must get a degree! (probably because we already watered down the high school diploma by insisting that every student must get one, no matter if they can't effectively understand math usage or the meaning of something they read)
Imagine the outrage if it were suggested that physics, engineering, and math were more worthy than black studies, women's studies, and LGBT studies. We're going to Hell in a very nicely woven handbasket.
Perhaps the worst thing is that this perpetuates the idea that college education is generally worthless. When people see college graduates failing in the job market, they often conclude that education is not worth any effort. The correct conclusion is of course that your field of study matters, but that doesn't generally sink in.
Doing something for ~8 hours a day can lower ones intensity to do it in their "free time".
Sure. If the desire can get lowered all the way to zero, then there isn't much desire in the first place.
Even us married hackers with kids find a bit of time here and there. It could be teaching the kids assembly language. It could be a weekend patching X.org drivers while the wife is off visiting her sister. It could be a night spent hacking filesystem driver code while the fucking the wife. Whatever! If programming is your passion, you will find some time.
He has no idea what "those parts" feel like from the perspective of the owner. The pain caused by needlessly cutting and stitching them (an episiotomy for example) isn't something that he will ever fully understand.