So why wait for them sequentially? Even better, why not supply optional kernels tuned to modern hardware? I don't own a system with an ISA bus (even a faked-up one on the southbridge or similar), so let me skip probing for one.
Yeah, yeah, compile my own and all. But surely big distros like Ubuntu could make a legacy-free kernel available that skips ISA, serial, parallel, etc.
The Linux BIOS replaces the normal BIOS found on PCs and other machines. The BIOS boot and setup is eliminated and replaced by a very simple initialization phase, followed by a gunzip of a Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is then started and from there on the boot proceeds as normal. Amongst many other things, it provides a very fast boot time: 3 seconds from power-on to Linux console
* Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT3 filesystem boots in 24.5 seconds (on the Intel Core 2 Duo system);
* Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT4 filesystem boots in 21.4 seconds (on the Intel Core 2 Duo system)!
So what about reading EXT3 is so inherently slow that it adds that much overhead? Surely that whole 21.4 seconds wasn't spent waiting on the drive, so let's subtract 10 seconds from each number. That's 15s on EXT3 and 11s on EXT4. Does EXT3 really have a 30% read overhead? I call shenanigans.
So in order to be a "visionary", I merely have to decide what consumers might want (not that hard being one yourself), and then ask people smarter than yourself to make it happen with no actual technical insight on how to make it happen yourself?
That's correct. The fact is that certain things aren't actually impossible, just pretty difficult. No one has solved them because there's been no driving force to do so. There are certain people clever enough to ask if things are the way they are because they have to be or just because that's the way people have been doing them. I'm no big Apple fan, but I'd definitely put Jobs in that category.
Seriously, can you think of a compelling physical reason why a PC can't boot in a small number of seconds? Beyond certain fundamental limitations, such as a rotating-media drive having to spin up, I can't think of any.
the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale).
Although a commonly mentioned other requirement â" that the original owner be deprived of something â" is not, in fact, part of the above quoted Princeton WordNet definition [...]
Is Princeton WordNet a legal dictionary? If not, its definition is only a layman's paraphrase. For example, WordNet's definitions of "generator" are:
an apparatus that produces a vapor or gas
engine that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy by electromagnetic induction
someone who originates or causes or initiates something; "he was the generator of several complaints"
an electronic device for producing a signal voltage
You can't use a non-domain-specific dictionary to define technical jargon. It simply doesn't work.
I thought so, but the law holds many subtle surprises for this layman.
Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. I am not aware of a synonym for it.
Well, I guess a more direct form of my question is this: does "theft" require that the owner be deprived of their property as many people on Slashdot (like "whoever57" below) claim? If I steal your car, then you no longer have your car. If I "steal" your song, you still have it.
I don't mean this as a trap or anything. It's just that a lot of people (like "mi" below) say that copyright infringement is a form of stealing, and others say that nothing was stolen because the owner still possesses the item in question. While I believe you completely that infringement is not stealing, I don't know where to find the legal definition of stealing (or theft) so I can read it for myself. As it's being used as a term of legal jargon in this context, Webster isn't exactly authoritative.
Ray, something I've heard a lot is that copyright infringement is not theft because theft would imply that the original owners had been deprived of their copy. Is that true, and if so, where could I have gone to look this up for myself without having to pester a lawyer? Second, is theft the same as stealing?
I ask because a lot of people have authoritative-sounding but conflicting opinions on the issue, and it seems like this should be explicitly defined somewhere or another.
Cars are better now than they ever have been by pretty much any objective measure you care to use. They're more reliable, the last longer, they perform better, they're more comfortable, etc. I know a lot of folks like classic cars for their styling and nostalgia but they were worse mechanically in most cases.
My father-in-law likes to rhapsodize the advantages of old cars and their relative wonderfulness. One day he was talking about his old beloved Ford and how it had a problem starting when the temperature was below freezing. I blurted out "what a piece of crap!" before I could stop myself, everyone turned and stared at me slack-jawed, then we all started laughing. I explained that I liked my boring late-model sedan that always starts, always has heating or air conditioning, and unexcitingly goes along with whatever I ask from it.
I had a '68 Mustang with more "personality" than I could possibly tolerate now. I'd take a modern car over an old one for daily driving any time.
I've thought about replacing it many times but why bother? It consumes around 20 watts and doesn't even require any fans besides the one in the power supply. Any newer computer is going to consume at least two or three times as much juice and be a lot louder.
The WRT54G draws less than 6W while actively transmitting. Mine has an uptime of 126 on regular wall power, and can saturate my DSL connection even when terminating an OpenVPN connection. If you replace your 486, might I suggest something a little smaller?
Alternatively, you can buy music in small stores, in cash. In that case, it's better to wear sunglasses and a hat. You wouldn't want anyone to discover you're one of those people who actually are paying clients of the music industry.
I do that all the time (minus sunglasses and a hat), but I'm a paying client of the "used music" section of the store. The RIAA doesn't see a penny from me.
Did anyone ever wonder why all those kids going on a shooting spree did it at their school? Never at, say, a mall, where the potential amount of victims is usually way higher? Why didn't anyone ever ponder that?
Python was almost there, the perfect compromise between readability and conciseness. Until 3.0, when they went astray...
So what, specifically, don't you like about Py3K? I've appreciated what I've seen so far. I don't mean that as a troll - I'm genuinely curious. What's less readable or concise for you?
I agree, but for different reasons. Since old-Python's print is a statement, you can't pass it around to other functions. Instead, you have to write a named wrapper function to execute it:
This is incredibly annoying and not consistent with the most of the rest of the language. I can't think of any other statement you'd want to pass around, but print is definitely useful that way.
That's a very good answer, but any good answer would be one that didn't involve declaring an array of all the number between 0 and 100 and then iterating over the array.
I wish I could say you were being pessimistic but you're not. Really, this is exactly what will happen. Again, it's not that doctors want to do this but that some new regulation or contract stipulation will tell them that they have to. For example, when a patient is checking in at my wife's office, she is required to present them with a form asking if they having a living trust or if they'd be interested in getting more information about one. While that would make a lot of sense if she was an oncologist, she's actually a foot and ankle surgeon. You can never have too much documentation before she removes your ingrown toenail. I promise that she has no interest in all these things - she just wants to see her patients and get on with being a doctor - but that's just not an option anymore.
(that's not to say there aren't a fair share IN those cities, but the ratio is far higher in what is colloquially referred to as "middle america".
Yes, Kansas City is well known for the percentage of its residents in therapy and the percentage of low-income employees who are really performers and just doing this to make ends meet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather be assured that no memory is faulty because my BIOS has tested it,
So let the booting kernel test it. It can't take more than a second or two to read/write a few gigs of data.
and I'd rather have a test establish whether my CPU can handle a given clock speed/voltage setting and undo any changes.
Ah, I see the disconnect. I don't think the coreboot people have any interesting in pushing their hardware out of spec just to see what happens.
No, Coreboot is just a bad idea. Not doing a Power On Self Test (and sanity-checking configuration) is completely idiotic.
Good point. Those knuckleheads at Google, AMD, and VIA should bow to your superior wisdom.
Well, that would explain a lot.
legacy hardware. There's tons of timeouts.
So why wait for them sequentially? Even better, why not supply optional kernels tuned to modern hardware? I don't own a system with an ISA bus (even a faked-up one on the southbridge or similar), so let me skip probing for one.
Yeah, yeah, compile my own and all. But surely big distros like Ubuntu could make a legacy-free kernel available that skips ISA, serial, parallel, etc.
The BIOS. The BIOS is pretty much the sole reason PCs take so long to boot.
Regarding Coreboot (was: LinuxBIOS):
It doesn't have to be slow.
* Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT3 filesystem boots in 24.5 seconds (on the Intel Core 2 Duo system);
* Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT4 filesystem boots in 21.4 seconds (on the Intel Core 2 Duo system)!
So what about reading EXT3 is so inherently slow that it adds that much overhead? Surely that whole 21.4 seconds wasn't spent waiting on the drive, so let's subtract 10 seconds from each number. That's 15s on EXT3 and 11s on EXT4. Does EXT3 really have a 30% read overhead? I call shenanigans.
So in order to be a "visionary", I merely have to decide what consumers might want (not that hard being one yourself), and then ask people smarter than yourself to make it happen with no actual technical insight on how to make it happen yourself?
That's correct. The fact is that certain things aren't actually impossible, just pretty difficult. No one has solved them because there's been no driving force to do so. There are certain people clever enough to ask if things are the way they are because they have to be or just because that's the way people have been doing them. I'm no big Apple fan, but I'd definitely put Jobs in that category.
Seriously, can you think of a compelling physical reason why a PC can't boot in a small number of seconds? Beyond certain fundamental limitations, such as a rotating-media drive having to spin up, I can't think of any.
the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale).
Now define "appropriate".
Ugh. I snipped this sentence after giving the definition:
"However, none of those apply when discussing 'generators' in the context of Python where they are something else entirely."
Although a commonly mentioned other requirement â" that the original owner be deprived of something â" is not, in fact, part of the above quoted Princeton WordNet definition [...]
Is Princeton WordNet a legal dictionary? If not, its definition is only a layman's paraphrase. For example, WordNet's definitions of "generator" are:
You can't use a non-domain-specific dictionary to define technical jargon. It simply doesn't work.
Theft is a synonym for stealing.
I thought so, but the law holds many subtle surprises for this layman.
Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. I am not aware of a synonym for it.
Well, I guess a more direct form of my question is this: does "theft" require that the owner be deprived of their property as many people on Slashdot (like "whoever57" below) claim? If I steal your car, then you no longer have your car. If I "steal" your song, you still have it.
I don't mean this as a trap or anything. It's just that a lot of people (like "mi" below) say that copyright infringement is a form of stealing, and others say that nothing was stolen because the owner still possesses the item in question. While I believe you completely that infringement is not stealing, I don't know where to find the legal definition of stealing (or theft) so I can read it for myself. As it's being used as a term of legal jargon in this context, Webster isn't exactly authoritative.
Ray, something I've heard a lot is that copyright infringement is not theft because theft would imply that the original owners had been deprived of their copy. Is that true, and if so, where could I have gone to look this up for myself without having to pester a lawyer? Second, is theft the same as stealing?
I ask because a lot of people have authoritative-sounding but conflicting opinions on the issue, and it seems like this should be explicitly defined somewhere or another.
Cars are better now than they ever have been by pretty much any objective measure you care to use. They're more reliable, the last longer, they perform better, they're more comfortable, etc. I know a lot of folks like classic cars for their styling and nostalgia but they were worse mechanically in most cases.
My father-in-law likes to rhapsodize the advantages of old cars and their relative wonderfulness. One day he was talking about his old beloved Ford and how it had a problem starting when the temperature was below freezing. I blurted out "what a piece of crap!" before I could stop myself, everyone turned and stared at me slack-jawed, then we all started laughing. I explained that I liked my boring late-model sedan that always starts, always has heating or air conditioning, and unexcitingly goes along with whatever I ask from it.
I had a '68 Mustang with more "personality" than I could possibly tolerate now. I'd take a modern car over an old one for daily driving any time.
Ah, OK. I didn't get that you were using it for other things, too. I have a much beefier machine on the other side of the firewall for that stuff.
I prefer the flexibility of having a full fledged Linux box that I can access from anywhere in the world if I need to.
What more are you doing with your router? :-)
I've thought about replacing it many times but why bother? It consumes around 20 watts and doesn't even require any fans besides the one in the power supply. Any newer computer is going to consume at least two or three times as much juice and be a lot louder.
The WRT54G draws less than 6W while actively transmitting. Mine has an uptime of 126 on regular wall power, and can saturate my DSL connection even when terminating an OpenVPN connection. If you replace your 486, might I suggest something a little smaller?
Alternatively, you can buy music in small stores, in cash. In that case, it's better to wear sunglasses and a hat. You wouldn't want anyone to discover you're one of those people who actually are paying clients of the music industry.
I do that all the time (minus sunglasses and a hat), but I'm a paying client of the "used music" section of the store. The RIAA doesn't see a penny from me.
Did anyone ever wonder why all those kids going on a shooting spree did it at their school? Never at, say, a mall, where the potential amount of victims is usually way higher? Why didn't anyone ever ponder that?
Because they do that too.
That later go on to become officials.
My daughter: Daddy, could I be President some day?
Me: Dear God, I hope not.
Python was almost there, the perfect compromise between readability and conciseness. Until 3.0, when they went astray...
So what, specifically, don't you like about Py3K? I've appreciated what I've seen so far. I don't mean that as a troll - I'm genuinely curious. What's less readable or concise for you?
The reason is consistency.
I agree, but for different reasons. Since old-Python's print is a statement, you can't pass it around to other functions. Instead, you have to write a named wrapper function to execute it:
This is incredibly annoying and not consistent with the most of the rest of the language. I can't think of any other statement you'd want to pass around, but print is definitely useful that way.
Heh! No, we all got the gist of it. But we're programmers, after all, and genetically predisposed to find the flaws in everything we see.
That's a very good answer, but any good answer would be one that didn't involve declaring an array of all the number between 0 and 100 and then iterating over the array.
Even implicitly?
I wish I could say you were being pessimistic but you're not. Really, this is exactly what will happen. Again, it's not that doctors want to do this but that some new regulation or contract stipulation will tell them that they have to. For example, when a patient is checking in at my wife's office, she is required to present them with a form asking if they having a living trust or if they'd be interested in getting more information about one. While that would make a lot of sense if she was an oncologist, she's actually a foot and ankle surgeon. You can never have too much documentation before she removes your ingrown toenail. I promise that she has no interest in all these things - she just wants to see her patients and get on with being a doctor - but that's just not an option anymore.
(that's not to say there aren't a fair share IN those cities, but the ratio is far higher in what is colloquially referred to as "middle america".
Yes, Kansas City is well known for the percentage of its residents in therapy and the percentage of low-income employees who are really performers and just doing this to make ends meet.
I don't suppose she's accepting new patients in the Binghamton NY area?
No, but if you ever break your foot in Nebraska, give me a call. :-)