I bought my first Mac (SE) in 1987, when I started university. It had 1MB Ram (later upgraded to 4MB) , 2 floopy drives and (later) an external SCSI hard disk. There was no real multitasking yet but it worked well running 1 program at a time. During my 4 years in university, the Macs freshmen typically bought got progressiveley nicer, had color monitors and some basic (cooperative) multitasking. Mind you, they still crashed quite often, but were nice machines.
3 years ago I was in SanFrancisco and met up with some old friends from college. One of them had a new PowerPC mac with a nice 17 (or 19) inch monitor. Simply for old times sake, I asked him, 'show me some cool stuff on your Mac. I'd like to see what these machines can do'. So he fired up a new/cool game and the machine hung. We rebooted, tried another game and the machine crashed. We rebooted again, tried another (non-game) application only to have it hang during the application loading/startup. By that time I had been running Linux for a few years and certainly wasn't impressed by his crash-prone Mac with all it's pretty icons. I have never looked at a Mac again (here in Europe they're almost non-existant) and certainly don't miss them.
The point: I basically consider Macs the ultimate point-and-click box. This is fine when you're just trying to write a letter, but to me it's really annoying. I don't want to be shielded from the computer, I want to have full access to everything, rather than being relegated to clicking on 'OK' when something dies. The fact that the new IMacs are considered a major leap/success for Apple says enough. Why the pretty colors on the box matter is beyond me, but their success proves that Apple is right about the demand for such machines. It's just that by doing so they bascially have painted themselves in the opposite corner that Linux geeks inhabit; a corner I was in more than 10 years ago and don't care to return to... of course, there is the possibiity that Darwin will be the ultimate power OS with a nice presentation layer, but knowing Apple's history, I don't buy that for one second. Apple could have been Microsoft if they had opened up their products. They missed that chance and I don't see them developing anything of great relevance anymore... those who come too late are punished by life
In my experience (and I've been around some very smart people), extreme intelligence very seldom comes without any strings attached. It seemed that most hightly intelligent people I met/meet are either socially or otherwise different than what's generally considered normal.
Maybe that is the price of genious. You achieve great heights in one (or a few) things, but pay for by missing some very day-to-day 'talents' everybody else pretty much has.
Maybe this is a good thing. Great skill at something seems to require specialization (or at least extended learning) at the expense of other areas. Would you rather be average at a lot of things or brilliant at one or two and pay for that brilliance with other defects? Before you answer the question hastily, consider examples such as Mozart (died very young and impoverished), Stephen Hawking (suffers from MS) or Giordano Bruno (who simply held views not agreeable to the catholic church and thus was burned as a heretic)... sometimes I'm glad I'm average/normal.
I don't quite get what JK is complaining about. Yes, it's hard to keep up with everything that's going on, but noone is forcing you to pariticipate. If you want to, you can retreat to your appartment, surround yourself with hundredts of years old books about the philisophies of life (or whatever else interests you), ignore news and TV and dedicate your life to whatever happens to interest you.
My parents live their lives like this and are quite happy doing it. The result is that they don't use ATM machines, ignore most the news (and thus often have no idea what's been happening around the world), are not interrupted by email, cell phones or faxes and generally lead a happy but (when seen from my perspective) slow life.
Most of the slashdot readership lives in a free country. You can choose not to participate in the rat race, but the price you'll pay may be that you don't quite understand the world around you anymore after 20 years of (technological) seclusion. But if you think that you'd be happier living in a log cabin somewhere in the mountains surrounded by a few cows, goats and maybe even like-minded people, there's nothing stopping you from doing so.
You have choices in life. If you really hate the world around you, try to build one around you that suits your needs. Yes, you will have to give up some of the daily comforts/patterns you currently enjoy, but maybe long term this may be the right choice for you.
You only have one life; choose your path wisley...
> What Galileo knew (and many today apparently do > not) is that God and the hierarchy of the > Church often have very little to do with each > other! The assumption today is often that > travesties like Galileo's treatment invalidate > Christianity. They don't. They only invalidate > organized Christianity.
This is the same argument that my Muslim friends use when I bring up the subject of bomb-throwing fundamentalists and the lets-just-say 'less than liberal' tendencies of some/a few/many islamic regimes: "But this has nothing to do with Islam, it's a perversion of Islam."
Maybe so, but if that's what the majority or any movement degenerates to, then that (in my eyes) IS the movement. I understand that your individual believes may be very different from the 'official' ones, but when the official church has the 'mindshare' (to use a geek term) and dominates public and cultural life, your argument is a bit odd. Most organized religious movements seem to claim that they are the only ones who know God's will and that all who disagree are sinners who have strayed from the true path and will find themselves in hell. That argument alone is enough to turn me off religion. I consider myself a spiritual person but given the/most faiths/churches' history, I want nothing to do with organized religion.
Strange, I started this as an argument but my last sentence seems to imply that we have somewhat similar believes about spirituality/religion.
While the "The Art of Computer Programming" is anything but easy reading, it's time well spent, even if you don't read the entire book. I bought the first 2 volumes a few years ago and the only way I could read through them, was to:
1) Read a few pages 2) Think about it 3) Re-read the pages from step 1 4) Let it sink in for a week or so 5) Re-read the pages from step 1 again.
Usually, once I had reached step 5, I felt that I actually understood what Knuth was talking about. If anybody ever tells you that languages like C and C++ are the past and Visual Whatever is the future, ask them a few questions about differnet sorting and searching algorithms... in most cases the response is a blank stare that sometimes makes me feel as if I were speaking Klingon. I'm very glad, that during my college years (10+ years ago), they shoved all sorts of algorithms down my throat... it seems that these days a lot of people graduating with IS (and to a lesser degree CS) degrees, wouldn't recognize an elegant algorithm if it came up and bit them in the ass...
Would this maybe be a good time to establish some kind of Linux defnese fund which would have the resources (through some kind of voluntary funding) to acutally deal with this kind of stuff?
With the increasing spread of Linux, attempts to claim some sort of ownership will probably only increase; some sort of a defense fund might deter these people and go after them if they can't be deterred...
While I generally have my reservations about cloning, I think this is (finally) a development/use of cloning that I can applaud without going into all sorts of moral contortions.
Would it not be great if the we could use this technology to save the threatened species from extinction. It doesn't look like we (the human species) will stop destroying the planet we live on anytime soon. Maybe this would at least enable us to keep the (potentially very useful DNA) of endangered (or soon to be extinct) species around, for fun (zoos, etc) and (of course) profit. I'd much rather see a cloned tiger in a zoo than not to see one at all. Of course I'd much rather see them in the wild, but I really doubt that that's an option our kids will have in a few decades...
I have no trouble with the fact that Bertelsman has a shitty online selection, but I despise their attempt to press the internet ever more firmly into their profit driven initiatives and rating-systems.
Maybe it's time that us Europeans learn from our US friends to fire off a letter at our representative/government when something like this happens. I have always found the typical US response of "write your congressperson about this" a good idea... Does anybody know of European groups (that we can support) that would lobby against this?
We should not leave politicians in their ignorance toward anything that's related to the internet and computers.
Caldera needs to wake up and realize that the only way to be fully accepted into the Linux community is to contribute (open source software) to the community. They should look at the examples set by VA, RedHat and Suse for a few successful examples of this. It seems that whenever they release a piece of software as open source, they do so reluctantly after some pushing by the community.
We should gently remind Caldera of this fact and point out that having the support of the community is beneficial to all of us (including Caldera). While we're at it, let's remind them of the fact that they need us more than we need them. There are at least 20 other linux distributions out there and while Caldera has some interesting products, they now are in an open market and should play by the rules.
Having said that, it seems that with some prodding from the community, they seem to (occasionally) get this point...
Yes, species go extinct all the time, but not at the rate at which we are causing it to happen. I think cloning represents the best bet yet that at least some of the species that are currently disapperaing very fast, will be around for our grandchildren to see...
Diversity of an ecosystem is important if you want it to be stable. Witness the Linux hydra which is constantly developing in unforseen ways...
Austria has some truly screwed up laws
on
Austria Bans Spam
·
· Score: 1
Haveing some (actually quite some) experience with Austria, I can only say that it's not a very liberal country (to say the least) with may laws literally dating back to early this century. Some laws, I would say, have slightly fascist touch. A very Austrian solution, banning what you don't like.
Yes, and I wish more people would join the fight. People generally don't seem to realuze that the only thing coorporations care about is money. Boycott them, speak out about why this is evil and tell people why infromation wants to be free. Deny them your money (and hope that enough other people do so) and they will get the message. At least now with the internet we have the power/ability to mobilize the (computer literate) masses and channel the storm of protest (witness Toshiba's reaction after they got swamped by angry mails after refusing to release their IR programming information).
In my experience, even computer illiterate can grasp the power/relevance of open source and free information if you only explain it to them using terms and analogies they are familiar with. Once they understand, I can usually get the to agree to the point the patents, closed source and all the other issues surrounding this are evil (or at least pretty bad).
Lets go spread the gospel, the world might just be ready for it...
Yes, the Bolsheviks were wonderful people. I guess that explains the civil wars, the millions of starved peasants and the Gulags. And before you say that those were later mistakes, please don't forget that the system of the Gulags began under Lenin; Stalin only expanded and 'perfected' it.
Come on guys, the internet has nothing to do with this. These are things (murder, sex, pornography, satanism, etc.) that have existed before the internet. The only thing that changes with the advent of the internet, is that these things are more accessible since you can search with the click of a button.
If being exposed to these things can turn you into a violent axe- (or in this case gun-)murderer, there's something wrong with you in the first place. If you have been drowned in such excessive doses of violent TV/Internet images that you actually feel the urge to act these things out in real life, there's something wrong with your social surroundings...
I realize that our US friends (I live in Europe) treasure their right to carry arms, but the simple availablilty of these guns makes things like this much more easier to happen. I have always found the prevalence of guns in US society somewhat puzzeling (yes, I lived in the US for a few years and know what I'm talking about). Maybe if guns were not so easlily available, these things wouldn't happen so often... then again, maybe these kids would have used knives or razor blades instead...
In my experience (I administer both NT and UNIX server) NT is fine as long as you don't throw high loads at it. We havea 4-CPU NT server (2 GB RAM) which still has to be rebooted from time to time because really random things break if we really bang on the server for a while.
Linux on the other hands, has been running in our office on an old crappy P90 laptop for 5 Months straight now handling web serving, web surfing and the occasional compiling of Gtk+/Gnome stuff.
Or Solaris machine which runs about 10 reasonably big Oracle databases, has been running without a hitch for something like a year now... although after being used to Linux, I find the default software Sun ships (no compilers, etc.) on the anemic side... I don't think a comercial UNIX can match the quiality and the amount of tools your typical Linux install comes with...
Of course NT beams you straight into GUI land from Hell which positiveley blows chunks once you're comfotable with the UNIX command line...
In my experience, SCO should worry about getting a decent product out the door rather than spouting about RH ripping off the Linux community. I guess he never noticed that they are funding quite a bit of defelopment and all their code is GLP'ed.
A few years ago (around Linux kernel time 1.0) I had the 'pleasure' to adimister a 486PC running SCO UNIX. It felt like a car at the demolition derby: somehow it kept going while bits and pieces seemed to be falling off left and right... in my experience Linux was more stable and complete back in those days; I would assume that by now SCO executives would get a heart attack if they actually spent some time behind a poroperly configured Linux box
Finally!! If I remember corerctly, my RH 5.2 distribution installed gcc/g++ 2.7.2 which may be a fine C compiler, but an aboluteley worthless C++ compiler as it doesn't support most modern features (such as member templates, etc.). I've never understood this default and am glad that egcs is finally becoming 'official'
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I bought my first Mac (SE) in 1987, when I started university. It had 1MB Ram (later upgraded to 4MB) , 2 floopy drives and (later) an external SCSI hard disk. There was no real multitasking yet but it worked well running 1 program at a time. During my 4 years in university, the Macs freshmen typically bought got progressiveley nicer, had color monitors and some basic (cooperative) multitasking. Mind you, they still crashed quite often, but were nice machines.
... of course, there is the possibiity that Darwin will be the ultimate power OS with a nice presentation layer, but knowing Apple's history, I don't buy that for one second. Apple could have been Microsoft if they had opened up their products. They missed that chance and I don't see them developing anything of great relevance anymore ... those who come too late are punished by life
3 years ago I was in SanFrancisco and met up with some old friends from college. One of them had a new PowerPC mac with a nice 17 (or 19) inch monitor. Simply for old times sake, I asked him, 'show me some cool stuff on your Mac. I'd like to see what these machines can do'. So he fired up a new/cool game and the machine hung. We rebooted, tried another game and the machine crashed. We rebooted again, tried another (non-game) application only to have it hang during the application loading/startup. By that time I had been running Linux for a few years and certainly wasn't impressed by his crash-prone Mac with all it's pretty icons. I have never looked at a Mac again (here in Europe they're almost non-existant) and certainly don't miss them.
The point: I basically consider Macs the ultimate point-and-click box. This is fine when you're just trying to write a letter, but to me it's really annoying. I don't want to be shielded from the computer, I want to have full access to everything, rather than being relegated to clicking on 'OK' when something dies. The fact that the new IMacs are considered a major leap/success for Apple says enough. Why the pretty colors on the box matter is beyond me, but their success proves that Apple is right about the demand for such machines. It's just that by doing so they bascially have painted themselves in the opposite corner that Linux geeks inhabit; a corner I was in more than 10 years ago and don't care to return to
In my experience (and I've been around some very smart people), extreme intelligence very seldom comes without any strings attached. It seemed that most hightly intelligent people I met/meet are either socially or otherwise different than what's generally considered normal.
... sometimes I'm glad I'm average/normal.
Maybe that is the price of genious. You achieve great heights in one (or a few) things, but pay for by missing some very day-to-day 'talents' everybody else pretty much has.
Maybe this is a good thing. Great skill at something seems to require specialization (or at least extended learning) at the expense of other areas. Would you rather be average at a lot of things or brilliant at one or two and pay for that brilliance with other defects? Before you answer the question hastily, consider examples such as Mozart (died very young and impoverished), Stephen Hawking (suffers from MS) or Giordano Bruno (who simply held views not agreeable to the catholic church and thus was burned as a heretic)
I don't quite get what JK is complaining about. Yes, it's hard to keep up with everything that's going on, but noone is forcing you to pariticipate. If you want to, you can retreat to your appartment, surround yourself with hundredts of years old books about the philisophies of life (or whatever else interests you), ignore news and TV and dedicate your life to whatever happens to interest you.
...
My parents live their lives like this and are quite happy doing it. The result is that they don't use ATM machines, ignore most the news (and thus often have no idea what's been happening around the world), are not interrupted by email, cell phones or faxes and generally lead a happy but (when seen from my perspective) slow life.
Most of the slashdot readership lives in a free country. You can choose not to participate in the rat race, but the price you'll pay may be that you don't quite understand the world around you anymore after 20 years of (technological) seclusion. But if you think that you'd be happier living in a log cabin somewhere in the mountains surrounded by a few cows, goats and maybe even like-minded people, there's nothing stopping you from doing so.
You have choices in life. If you really hate the world around you, try to build one around you that suits your needs. Yes, you will have to give up some of the daily comforts/patterns you currently enjoy, but maybe long term this may be the right choice for you.
You only have one life; choose your path wisley
> What Galileo knew (and many today apparently do
> not) is that God and the hierarchy of the
> Church often have very little to do with each
> other! The assumption today is often that
> travesties like Galileo's treatment invalidate
> Christianity. They don't. They only invalidate
> organized Christianity.
This is the same argument that my Muslim friends use when I bring up the subject of bomb-throwing fundamentalists and the lets-just-say 'less than liberal' tendencies of some/a few/many islamic regimes: "But this has nothing to do with Islam, it's a perversion of Islam."
Maybe so, but if that's what the majority or any movement degenerates to, then that (in my eyes) IS the movement. I understand that your individual believes may be very different from the 'official' ones, but when the official church has the 'mindshare' (to use a geek term) and dominates public and cultural life, your argument is a bit odd. Most organized religious movements seem to claim that they are the only ones who know God's will and that all who disagree are sinners who have strayed from the true path and will find themselves in hell. That argument alone is enough to turn me off religion. I consider myself a spiritual person but given the/most faiths/churches' history, I want nothing to do with organized religion.
Strange, I started this as an argument but my last sentence seems to imply that we have somewhat similar believes about spirituality/religion.
While the "The Art of Computer Programming" is anything but easy reading, it's time well spent, even if you don't read the entire book. I bought the first 2 volumes a few years ago and the only way I could read through them, was to:
... in most cases the response is a blank stare that sometimes makes me feel as if I were speaking Klingon. I'm very glad, that during my college years (10+ years ago), they shoved all sorts of algorithms down my throat ... it seems that these days a lot of people graduating with IS (and to a lesser degree CS) degrees, wouldn't recognize an elegant algorithm if it came up and bit them in the ass ...
1) Read a few pages
2) Think about it
3) Re-read the pages from step 1
4) Let it sink in for a week or so
5) Re-read the pages from step 1 again.
Usually, once I had reached step 5, I felt that I actually understood what Knuth was talking about. If anybody ever tells you that languages like C and C++ are the past and Visual Whatever is the future, ask them a few questions about differnet sorting and searching algorithms
--> Robert
Would this maybe be a good time to establish some kind of Linux defnese fund which would have the resources (through some kind of voluntary funding) to acutally deal with this kind of stuff?
...
With the increasing spread of Linux, attempts to claim some sort of ownership will probably only increase; some sort of a defense fund might deter these people and go after them if they can't be deterred
--> R
While I generally have my reservations about cloning, I think this is (finally) a development/use of cloning that I can applaud without going into all sorts of moral contortions.
...
Would it not be great if the we could use this technology to save the threatened species from extinction. It doesn't look like we (the human
species) will stop destroying the planet we live on anytime soon. Maybe this would at least enable us to keep the (potentially very useful DNA) of endangered (or soon to be extinct) species around, for fun (zoos, etc) and (of course) profit. I'd much rather see a cloned tiger in a zoo than not to see one at all. Of course I'd much rather see them in the wild, but I really doubt that that's an option our kids will have in a few decades
I have no trouble with the fact that Bertelsman has a shitty online selection, but I despise their attempt to press the internet ever more firmly into their profit driven initiatives and rating-systems.
... Does anybody know of European groups (that we can support) that would lobby against this?
Maybe it's time that us Europeans learn from our US friends to fire off a letter at our representative/government when something like this happens. I have always found the typical US response of "write your congressperson about this" a good idea
We should not leave politicians in their ignorance toward anything that's related to the internet and computers.
Caldera needs to wake up and realize that the only way to be fully accepted into the Linux community is to contribute (open source software) to the community. They should look at the examples set by VA, RedHat and Suse for a few successful examples of this. It seems that whenever they release a piece of software as open source, they do so reluctantly after some pushing by the community.
...
We should gently remind Caldera of this fact and point out that having the support of the community is beneficial to all of us (including Caldera). While we're at it, let's remind them of the fact that they need us more than we need them. There are at least 20 other linux distributions out there and while Caldera has some interesting products, they now are in an open market and should play by the rules.
Having said that, it seems that with some prodding from the community, they seem to (occasionally) get this point
Yes, species go extinct all the time, but not at the rate at which we are causing it to happen. I think cloning represents the best bet yet that at least some of the species that are currently disapperaing very fast, will be around for our grandchildren to see ...
...
Diversity of an ecosystem is important if you want it to be stable. Witness the Linux hydra which is constantly developing in unforseen ways
Haveing some (actually quite some) experience with Austria, I can only say that it's not a very liberal country (to say the least) with may laws literally dating back to early this century. Some laws, I would say, have slightly fascist touch. A very Austrian solution, banning what you don't like.
Yes, and I wish more people would join the fight. People generally don't seem to realuze that the only thing coorporations care about is money. Boycott them, speak out about why this is evil and tell people why infromation wants to be free. Deny them your money (and hope that enough other people do so) and they will get the message. At least now with the internet we have the power/ability to mobilize the (computer literate) masses and channel the storm of protest (witness Toshiba's reaction after they got swamped by angry mails after refusing to release their IR programming information).
...
In my experience, even computer illiterate can grasp the power/relevance of open source and free information if you only explain it to them using terms and analogies they are familiar with. Once they understand, I can usually get the to agree to the point the patents, closed source and all the other issues surrounding this are evil (or at least pretty bad).
Lets go spread the gospel, the world might just be ready for it
Yes, the Bolsheviks were wonderful people. I guess that explains the civil wars, the millions of starved peasants and the Gulags. And before you say that those were later mistakes, please don't forget that the system of the Gulags began under Lenin; Stalin only expanded and 'perfected' it.
--> R
Come on guys, the internet has nothing to do with this. These are things (murder, sex, pornography, satanism, etc.) that have existed before the internet. The only thing that changes with the advent of the internet, is that these things are more accessible since you can search with the click of a button.
...
... then again, maybe these kids would have used knives or razor blades instead ...
If being exposed to these things can turn you into a violent axe- (or in this case gun-)murderer, there's something wrong with you in the first place. If you have been drowned in such excessive doses of violent TV/Internet images that you actually feel the urge to act these things out in real life, there's something wrong with your social surroundings
I realize that our US friends (I live in Europe) treasure their right to carry arms, but the simple availablilty of these guns makes things like this much more easier to happen. I have always found the prevalence of guns in US society somewhat puzzeling (yes, I lived in the US for a few years and know what I'm talking about). Maybe if guns were not so easlily available, these things wouldn't happen so often
In my experience (I administer both NT and UNIX server) NT is fine as long as you don't throw high loads at it. We havea 4-CPU NT server (2 GB RAM) which still has to be rebooted from time to time because really random things break if we really bang on the server for a while.
... although after being used to Linux, I find the default software Sun ships (no compilers, etc.) on the anemic side ... I don't think a comercial UNIX can match the quiality and the amount of tools your typical Linux install comes with ...
...
Linux on the other hands, has been running in our office on an old crappy P90 laptop for 5 Months straight now handling web serving, web surfing and the occasional compiling of Gtk+/Gnome stuff.
Or Solaris machine which runs about 10 reasonably big Oracle databases, has been running without a hitch for something like a year now
Of course NT beams you straight into GUI land from Hell which positiveley blows chunks once you're comfotable with the UNIX command line
In my experience, SCO should worry about getting a decent product out the door rather than spouting about RH ripping off the Linux community. I guess he never noticed that they are funding quite a bit of defelopment and all their code is GLP'ed.
... in my experience Linux was more stable and complete back in those days; I would assume that by now SCO executives would get a heart attack if they actually spent some time behind a poroperly configured Linux box
A few years ago (around Linux kernel time 1.0) I had the 'pleasure' to adimister a 486PC running SCO UNIX. It felt like a car at the demolition derby: somehow it kept going while bits and pieces seemed to be falling off left and right
Finally!! If I remember corerctly, my RH 5.2 distribution installed gcc/g++ 2.7.2 which may be a fine C compiler, but an aboluteley worthless C++ compiler as it doesn't support most modern features (such as member templates, etc.). I've never understood this default and am glad that egcs is finally becoming 'official'