I am intolerant of corrupt, stupid, anti-democratic presidents who have done more to harm the nation than to help it. Ah, another conservacliche. What's next? A rant about Jesse Jackson? Perhaps something about the libruhl media? Or maybe you'll even manage to slip in the good ol' "libruhls is lazy socialist hippies!"
(By the way, were you out protesting the "stupid fucking war" in Serbia, or are Democrats allowed to invade sovereign nations who pose no external threat?)
80% of my bitch is about the incompetence in which this war has been run. The Serbian war had ZERO American casualties. None. Nada. We were in, out, and for the most part done. But this arrogant fuck of a president and his controllers have this idealistic notion of how easy it would be to install a new government, and they have done NOTHING but fuck it up. To take one example, the looting immediately after the war -- that is costing the American people BILLIONS of dollars -- could have easily been prevented if Uncle Don had gotten his head out of his ass and listened to the experts that said we'd need tens of thousands of more troops in country. But no, he didn't. Instead they ridiculed that general, demoted him, and had him reassigned. Guess what. He was right. Rummy fucked up. AGAIN. And both our troops and the people of Iraq are still paying the price.
Is it just barely possible that maybe he really did believe that, and he was mistaken? Intelligence agencies have been known to make mistakes before. Never mind, I forgot he's from Texas and worked in the oil industry so he's obviously made a pact with Satan.
But of course. Nothing is his responsibility, is it? He never fucks up, and whenever there is a fuckup it's not his fault, it's someone elses. Intelligence failures. Failures of subordinates. An isolated incident. It wasn't really treason. Don't you get tired of having to find excuses for this guy?
And by the way: I'm fifth generation Texan.
It's amusing watching you guys get progressively more unhinged.
Avoid, my ass. There's nothing to avoid. After an almost endless line of lies and deceptions, let's just say that my skepticism about any of this shit is just a *weeeeeee* bit higher than normal. Winnebagoes of Mass Destruction, anyone? But I forgive you. You have to grasp at whatever straws you can. I mean, everything else this administration has said and done has turned out to be flat-out wrong. Your ego is far more important than the nation's security, after all. So I don't blame you for buying in to this whole hog.
No, on second thought I do. The Republican spin machine is going to get us all killed.
This was not an old shell either. Iraq didn't have binary chemical capabilities before the first Gulf War.
Is that what Hannity is parroting this week? Or maybe Fox News? Do tell, do you manage to find time to fit the "Kerry is boring" meme in, too? Or was that last weeks talking point? Now that I think about it, I think this week's meme is "the libruhl media isn't spending enough time on the Berg murder." Sorry, with all the lies it's hard to keep it all straight.
Tell ya what: FOAD. Bush lied, Bush continues to lie, and our country is far, FAR more in danger now than when we started this stupid fucking war. Bush said he was 100% certain that Saddam had massive stores of WMD and a nuclear program. That was a fucking lie.
Oh, but of course, he never ACTUALLY said it. He just IMPLIED it, which makes it all ok, doesn't it? It was a failure of intelligence, which means it ain't his fault! Nothing is his fault! And I mean shit, who needs morals when you're having to deal with them dirty hippie commie faggot libruhls and that libruhl media?
As mentioned in the article, HFS+ does defragging on the fly when files are opened if they are less than 20MB. The source code for this is available here, as is a discussion about it that contains input from some Darwin developers.
Not trolling, but an honest question: Why should I give a tinker's cuss? Judging by the flood of comments this story has generated, I'm hardly alone in my apathy.
If you are concerned about vendor lock in, I would suggest Hibernate as a data persistence layer. It lets you abstract out interactions with your database so that switching over from one vendor to another is a simple matter of changing a configuration file.
Further, Hibernate is battle tested, and used in the real world.
I tend to use vim when editing either HTML, XML, or other markup languages. (And, in fact, SQL stored procedures, because we use MS SQL Server at my work and it's native editor is t3h suck.) I use brace matching, incremental search, and vim's code folding functionality. Especially when working with large HTML or XML files, folding up large sections of code makes it much less... stressful to see what's going on.
Personal preferences differ, I'm sure. I like it.
Would you spend a day designing a better algorithm or finish the project and buy faster hardware?
It would depend upon the cost/benefit of each.
Funny you should ask this. Where I work we have a bunch of AS/400's running on the back end handling all of our raw data. The code on these boxes is terrible: it works, but has been written by inexperienced coders over many years, and is basically a nightmare of obfuscation and redundant code. Well, these things typically run at around 80-95% utilization, depending upon the hour of the day. We recently had a project whose sole purpose was to speed up the AS/400 code, and we realized a whopping 200% improvement over all servers. Those servers went from ~85% utilization to an average of 30%.
Now, AS/400's are a bit more expensive than eMacs on eBay. Just a bit. So the time we spent optimizing this horrible, horrible code was worth it to the tune of several tens of thousands of dollars. If we had instead added another AS/400 to the cluster, we would have had to (a) purchase the system, (b) upgrade the support contract, (c) inject it into the cluster, (d) provide internal resources to monitor it and do basic support.
So in this case, anyway, optimizing the code was far cheaper than upgrading the hardware, especially in the long term. As our business grows, we will need to add/upgrade hardware at a slower rate due to this refactoring effort.
Secunia has given the series of patches a "highly critical" rating, which it explained was due to the Apple's dismissive attitude to one of the holes. Secunia described a vulnerability within AppleFileServer that allows for a buffer overflow as an attempt to "improve the handling of long passwords", but security specialists @stake warned that it could lead to the full system access.
These were the same guys who fired one of their employees because they had the temerity to say something bad and substantial about Microsoft.
You found out wrong. Drivers don't have to be part of the kernel. They can also be loaded as modules. You don't have to recompile your kernel.
Nope. I spent about a month researching this, and had several people tell me that even though it shouldn't be this way, it was. It's a Toshiba laptop with a combo sound/video card. I tried 6 separate distros, including Mandrake, Gentoo, Slackware, and Red Hat. The video card worked fine, just not the sound part. This was a little over a year ago, but things probably haven't changed that much since then.
Your complaint is that there is no pre-built binary for your sound-card. This is not a fault of Linux. It is either the fault of the distribution for not including the driver (if the source is available) or the fault of the manufacturer for not supporting Linux.
Don't care WHOSE fault it is, just that the problem exists. Every single time I've tried Linux I've wound up having to dink with crap that I have absolutely no love for dinking with. I want something that works out of the box. Linux has NEVER footed the bill insofar as that consideration is concerned.
Umm, but this is winning in the marketplace: you invent the technology first, so you gain temporary market monopoly for disclosing your invention through the patent system.
Which is exactly what MS is not doing in this case. Christ, they're trying to patent image compression, as if (a) this hasn't been done a gajillion different times before, (b) they'll be able to force it on the marketplace, and (c) they won't abuse this patent and sue people who implement related but non-patented algorithms like SVG.
In other words, rather than _never_ seeing the internals of what makes Windows tick (until someone releases the source code...) we're actually seeing the internals now.
No we're not. The patents describe the technologies, not how to implement them. And what good does it do you, anyway? If you know how something is done but are legally prevented from implementing it, it might as well be closed.
...use the courts. Admittedly, the government is responsible for laying out and enforcing the underlying rules of the market, but abuses can occur. I think it is not to much of a stretch to say that standards available to everyone -- starting with ASCII and progressing forward to HTML, XML, SVG, and others -- are what have made it possible for computers to be successful. You think we'd have the Internet if it weren't for the various RFCs being made available to everyone? Hell no.
This is an act of desparation, but that doesn't mean it won't have deleterious effects upon the market as a whole. And you KNOW that the overburdened patent office won't be able to properly check all these for the existence of prior art, which I'd bet would cause 99% of these patents to be rejected.
That is the Word right there, my brother! My last straw was when I got my wife a laptop for her grad school work, decided I'd put Linux + OO.org on it for her. She likes her music, and listens to headphones while she works. Long story short, I found out that in order to get Linux to work with the laptop's (proprietary) soundcard, I would have had to recompile the freaking kernel.
Uh-uh. No thank'ee. I ain't got neither the desire nor the time for that shit. I just want something that freaking WORKS.
So I installed WinXP on the laptop, and got myself a G5 last year. Happy I am.
You're forgetting another factor: Mozilla and its descendants are the defacto standard browsers for the free OSes.
No, I'm not. In fact, if anything that's another strike against Mozilla. The existance of Konqueror and Opera divide Mozilla's possible market share. While an overall increase in the number of Linux installs would, of course, increase their market share, this doesn't seem to be happening nor is there evidence it will in the forseeable future. In other words, such discussions are speculative, no matter how much we might wish them to come true.
XUL is fairly powerful. I still feel that it and it alone will determine Mozilla's long term success or failure.
Not much. Mail.app is much more elegant than Thunderbird, but it doesn't provide a newsgroup reader. I stick with Mail for - ahem - mail, and use Thunderbird for usenet. In fact, the #1 reason that I don't use TBird for Mail is that it doesn't integrate with Address Book.
Mozilla's success will ultimately happen -- or not -- because of the success or failure of XUL. Standards compliance is not reason enough for companies or individuals to switch to Mozilla, especially in large numbers. The only truly defining characteristic of Mozilla is XUL. If that catches on, Mozilla will survive. If it doesn't, it will remain a niche player, and will probably fade in significance.
In fact, turn IE users away at the door.
This is utopian and dumb. If you are running a business there is no way you would be so stupid as to turn away 90+% of your customers at the door simply because you don't like the way they are dressed. Idealistic, yes. Web standards are well and good, but the real world intervenes.
Oh, I know it's not slow (although there are many Java applications which are quite torturous to run, like WSAD or Eclipse).
Have you run Eclipse? That is my IDE of choice, and it can hardly be called "slow". And yes, it is written in Java.
Do you work for Microsoft?
You know, most developers targetting a desktop OS don't really care if their application runs on marginal OS's. If it can run on 95% of desktop computers, that's good enough.
a) Java runs on 100% of all desktop computers. Who would turn there nose up at extra customers? b) Desktop apps are hardly the moneymaker they once were. Still important, to be sure. But with the increased richness of webapps available, the desktop app is lessening in importance. I imagine it will continue to do so. (Although to be sure this has been forecast for a while now, and has not yet come to pass.)
There seem to be parties out there that have a self-interest in propagating this meme. For what it is worth, you lose credibility with this statement because of the simple fact that Java is not slow. It is, in fact, quite speedy. The JVM has been tweaked so that much code that us run under it now runs as fast as (and in some cases faster than) native code. Java is currently used in enterprise level applications that handle thousands of simulataneous users. It is not only battle-tested but battle hardened.
Best of all, the VM targets Windows 2000, XP, 2003, 98, ME, and NT 4.0 (!), meaning that all apps written in.
Great, but will it run on Solaris? OS X? AS/400? Linux? I am currently working in an environment where I do my development on a Windows machine, have a Linux staging environment, and a Solaris QA and production environment. The code that I run on my local machine -- written in Java - runs without change or kludge on all three of those platforms. I have a G5 at home, and have also been able to run the code unmodified on that machine, as well.
My father in law works at Texas Instruments and got ahold of one of those DLP projectors. Holy moly, that thing looks GREAT. We watched Two Towers on it, and he had put up a simple white sheet on the wall to watch the movie on. It looked very nice, like a smaller movie projection. Colors are extremely bright; I'd been so used to projectors losing brightness proportional to their distance that the brightness of this thing took me by surprise.
If California, or whatever state you happen to live in, concludes that Diebold electionic voting systems are crap, and yet they are implemented anyway, what are you going to do about it?
I'll venture a guess: absolutely nothing. Even if these systems are shown to be demonstrably anti-democratic, the American people will accept them. Supporters of whichever party these benefit -- apparently Republicans -- will embrace them and disregard objections as the ramblings of loony conspiracy theorists. But whatever the case, neither the media nor the American public will truly care, certainly not enough to do anything about it.
This is sad, because I believe this is something that we should be literally up in arms about.
Great. I keep hoping that we'll find definitive proof of abiogenesis occuring sponteaneously on another planet, and now look what the gods of chaos have given us: a huge, obvous excuse to give to the creationists. I'm sure we'll see this one crop up on the 700 Club if-and-when they ever find 100%-sure-fire-can't argue-with-that proof that life existed on Mars.
"But God planted the seeds of life in Eden, and he did smith the earth with a big rock, and it did spew forth flotsam into the universe, and it was good."
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Ah, liberal tolerance rears its head again.
I am intolerant of corrupt, stupid, anti-democratic presidents who have done more to harm the nation than to help it. Ah, another conservacliche. What's next? A rant about Jesse Jackson? Perhaps something about the libruhl media? Or maybe you'll even manage to slip in the good ol' "libruhls is lazy socialist hippies!"
(By the way, were you out protesting the "stupid fucking war" in Serbia, or are Democrats allowed to invade sovereign nations who pose no external threat?)
80% of my bitch is about the incompetence in which this war has been run. The Serbian war had ZERO American casualties. None. Nada. We were in, out, and for the most part done. But this arrogant fuck of a president and his controllers have this idealistic notion of how easy it would be to install a new government, and they have done NOTHING but fuck it up. To take one example, the looting immediately after the war -- that is costing the American people BILLIONS of dollars -- could have easily been prevented if Uncle Don had gotten his head out of his ass and listened to the experts that said we'd need tens of thousands of more troops in country. But no, he didn't. Instead they ridiculed that general, demoted him, and had him reassigned. Guess what. He was right. Rummy fucked up. AGAIN. And both our troops and the people of Iraq are still paying the price.
Is it just barely possible that maybe he really did believe that, and he was mistaken? Intelligence agencies have been known to make mistakes before. Never mind, I forgot he's from Texas and worked in the oil industry so he's obviously made a pact with Satan.
But of course. Nothing is his responsibility, is it? He never fucks up, and whenever there is a fuckup it's not his fault, it's someone elses. Intelligence failures. Failures of subordinates. An isolated incident. It wasn't really treason. Don't you get tired of having to find excuses for this guy?
And by the way: I'm fifth generation Texan.
It's amusing watching you guys get progressively more unhinged.
You ain't seen nothin' yet, babycakes.
Avoid, my ass. There's nothing to avoid. After an almost endless line of lies and deceptions, let's just say that my skepticism about any of this shit is just a *weeeeeee* bit higher than normal. Winnebagoes of Mass Destruction, anyone? But I forgive you. You have to grasp at whatever straws you can. I mean, everything else this administration has said and done has turned out to be flat-out wrong. Your ego is far more important than the nation's security, after all. So I don't blame you for buying in to this whole hog.
No, on second thought I do. The Republican spin machine is going to get us all killed.
This was not an old shell either. Iraq didn't have binary chemical capabilities before the first Gulf War.
Is that what Hannity is parroting this week? Or maybe Fox News? Do tell, do you manage to find time to fit the "Kerry is boring" meme in, too? Or was that last weeks talking point? Now that I think about it, I think this week's meme is "the libruhl media isn't spending enough time on the Berg murder." Sorry, with all the lies it's hard to keep it all straight.
Tell ya what: FOAD. Bush lied, Bush continues to lie, and our country is far, FAR more in danger now than when we started this stupid fucking war. Bush said he was 100% certain that Saddam had massive stores of WMD and a nuclear program. That was a fucking lie.
Oh, but of course, he never ACTUALLY said it. He just IMPLIED it, which makes it all ok, doesn't it? It was a failure of intelligence, which means it ain't his fault! Nothing is his fault! And I mean shit, who needs morals when you're having to deal with them dirty hippie commie faggot libruhls and that libruhl media?
As mentioned in the article, HFS+ does defragging on the fly when files are opened if they are less than 20MB. The source code for this is available here, as is a discussion about it that contains input from some Darwin developers.
You knew it was true. Somebody leaked some memos to the Village Voice. The response from the accused? "You aren't supposed to have those!" Yup.
Not trolling, but an honest question: Why should I give a tinker's cuss? Judging by the flood of comments this story has generated, I'm hardly alone in my apathy.
If you are concerned about vendor lock in, I would suggest Hibernate as a data persistence layer. It lets you abstract out interactions with your database so that switching over from one vendor to another is a simple matter of changing a configuration file.
Further, Hibernate is battle tested, and used in the real world.
I tend to use vim when editing either HTML, XML, or other markup languages. (And, in fact, SQL stored procedures, because we use MS SQL Server at my work and it's native editor is t3h suck.) I use brace matching, incremental search, and vim's code folding functionality. Especially when working with large HTML or XML files, folding up large sections of code makes it much less... stressful to see what's going on. Personal preferences differ, I'm sure. I like it.
Would you spend a day designing a better algorithm or finish the project and buy faster hardware?
It would depend upon the cost/benefit of each.
Funny you should ask this. Where I work we have a bunch of AS/400's running on the back end handling all of our raw data. The code on these boxes is terrible: it works, but has been written by inexperienced coders over many years, and is basically a nightmare of obfuscation and redundant code. Well, these things typically run at around 80-95% utilization, depending upon the hour of the day. We recently had a project whose sole purpose was to speed up the AS/400 code, and we realized a whopping 200% improvement over all servers. Those servers went from ~85% utilization to an average of 30%.
Now, AS/400's are a bit more expensive than eMacs on eBay. Just a bit. So the time we spent optimizing this horrible, horrible code was worth it to the tune of several tens of thousands of dollars. If we had instead added another AS/400 to the cluster, we would have had to (a) purchase the system, (b) upgrade the support contract, (c) inject it into the cluster, (d) provide internal resources to monitor it and do basic support.
So in this case, anyway, optimizing the code was far cheaper than upgrading the hardware, especially in the long term. As our business grows, we will need to add/upgrade hardware at a slower rate due to this refactoring effort.
From the article:
Secunia has given the series of patches a "highly critical" rating, which it explained was due to the Apple's dismissive attitude to one of the holes. Secunia described a vulnerability within AppleFileServer that allows for a buffer overflow as an attempt to "improve the handling of long passwords", but security specialists @stake warned that it could lead to the full system access.
These were the same guys who fired one of their employees because they had the temerity to say something bad and substantial about Microsoft.
Link.
Pretty FUDdy article to me.
You found out wrong. Drivers don't have to be part of the kernel. They can also be loaded as modules. You don't have to recompile your kernel.
Nope. I spent about a month researching this, and had several people tell me that even though it shouldn't be this way, it was. It's a Toshiba laptop with a combo sound/video card. I tried 6 separate distros, including Mandrake, Gentoo, Slackware, and Red Hat. The video card worked fine, just not the sound part. This was a little over a year ago, but things probably haven't changed that much since then.
Your complaint is that there is no pre-built binary for your sound-card. This is not a fault of Linux. It is either the fault of the distribution for not including the driver (if the source is available) or the fault of the manufacturer for not supporting Linux.
Don't care WHOSE fault it is, just that the problem exists. Every single time I've tried Linux I've wound up having to dink with crap that I have absolutely no love for dinking with. I want something that works out of the box. Linux has NEVER footed the bill insofar as that consideration is concerned.
Umm, but this is winning in the marketplace: you invent the technology first, so you gain temporary market monopoly for disclosing your invention through the patent system.
Which is exactly what MS is not doing in this case. Christ, they're trying to patent image compression, as if (a) this hasn't been done a gajillion different times before, (b) they'll be able to force it on the marketplace, and (c) they won't abuse this patent and sue people who implement related but non-patented algorithms like SVG.
In other words, rather than _never_ seeing the internals of what makes Windows tick (until someone releases the source code ...) we're actually seeing the internals now.
No we're not. The patents describe the technologies, not how to implement them. And what good does it do you, anyway? If you know how something is done but are legally prevented from implementing it, it might as well be closed.
...use the courts. Admittedly, the government is responsible for laying out and enforcing the underlying rules of the market, but abuses can occur. I think it is not to much of a stretch to say that standards available to everyone -- starting with ASCII and progressing forward to HTML, XML, SVG, and others -- are what have made it possible for computers to be successful. You think we'd have the Internet if it weren't for the various RFCs being made available to everyone? Hell no.
This is an act of desparation, but that doesn't mean it won't have deleterious effects upon the market as a whole. And you KNOW that the overburdened patent office won't be able to properly check all these for the existence of prior art, which I'd bet would cause 99% of these patents to be rejected.
That is the Word right there, my brother! My last straw was when I got my wife a laptop for her grad school work, decided I'd put Linux + OO.org on it for her. She likes her music, and listens to headphones while she works. Long story short, I found out that in order to get Linux to work with the laptop's (proprietary) soundcard, I would have had to recompile the freaking kernel.
Uh-uh. No thank'ee. I ain't got neither the desire nor the time for that shit. I just want something that freaking WORKS.
So I installed WinXP on the laptop, and got myself a G5 last year. Happy I am.
You're forgetting another factor: Mozilla and its descendants are the defacto standard browsers for the free OSes.
No, I'm not. In fact, if anything that's another strike against Mozilla. The existance of Konqueror and Opera divide Mozilla's possible market share. While an overall increase in the number of Linux installs would, of course, increase their market share, this doesn't seem to be happening nor is there evidence it will in the forseeable future. In other words, such discussions are speculative, no matter how much we might wish them to come true.
XUL is fairly powerful. I still feel that it and it alone will determine Mozilla's long term success or failure.
Not much. Mail.app is much more elegant than Thunderbird, but it doesn't provide a newsgroup reader. I stick with Mail for - ahem - mail, and use Thunderbird for usenet. In fact, the #1 reason that I don't use TBird for Mail is that it doesn't integrate with Address Book.
In fact, turn IE users away at the door.
This is utopian and dumb. If you are running a business there is no way you would be so stupid as to turn away 90+% of your customers at the door simply because you don't like the way they are dressed. Idealistic, yes. Web standards are well and good, but the real world intervenes.
ms office - say what you will, its just damn useful and open office doesn't hold a candle to it - i've tried that for for a while too
What did you find that Office can do that OpenOffice cannot?
Oh, I know it's not slow (although there are many Java applications which are quite torturous to run, like WSAD or Eclipse).
Have you run Eclipse? That is my IDE of choice, and it can hardly be called "slow". And yes, it is written in Java.
Do you work for Microsoft?
You know, most developers targetting a desktop OS don't really care if their application runs on marginal OS's. If it can run on 95% of desktop computers, that's good enough.
a) Java runs on 100% of all desktop computers. Who would turn there nose up at extra customers? b) Desktop apps are hardly the moneymaker they once were. Still important, to be sure. But with the increased richness of webapps available, the desktop app is lessening in importance. I imagine it will continue to do so. (Although to be sure this has been forecast for a while now, and has not yet come to pass.)
Sure, Java can do all that too, but slowly.
There seem to be parties out there that have a self-interest in propagating this meme. For what it is worth, you lose credibility with this statement because of the simple fact that Java is not slow. It is, in fact, quite speedy. The JVM has been tweaked so that much code that us run under it now runs as fast as (and in some cases faster than) native code. Java is currently used in enterprise level applications that handle thousands of simulataneous users. It is not only battle-tested but battle hardened.
Best of all, the VM targets Windows 2000, XP, 2003, 98, ME, and NT 4.0 (!), meaning that all apps written in .
Great, but will it run on Solaris? OS X? AS/400? Linux? I am currently working in an environment where I do my development on a Windows machine, have a Linux staging environment, and a Solaris QA and production environment. The code that I run on my local machine -- written in Java - runs without change or kludge on all three of those platforms. I have a G5 at home, and have also been able to run the code unmodified on that machine, as well.
My father in law works at Texas Instruments and got ahold of one of those DLP projectors. Holy moly, that thing looks GREAT. We watched Two Towers on it, and he had put up a simple white sheet on the wall to watch the movie on. It looked very nice, like a smaller movie projection. Colors are extremely bright; I'd been so used to projectors losing brightness proportional to their distance that the brightness of this thing took me by surprise.
Plus those DLP chips are just so freakin' cool.
Umm.. maybe you should Google before you post.
If California, or whatever state you happen to live in, concludes that Diebold electionic voting systems are crap, and yet they are implemented anyway, what are you going to do about it?
I'll venture a guess: absolutely nothing. Even if these systems are shown to be demonstrably anti-democratic, the American people will accept them. Supporters of whichever party these benefit -- apparently Republicans -- will embrace them and disregard objections as the ramblings of loony conspiracy theorists. But whatever the case, neither the media nor the American public will truly care, certainly not enough to do anything about it.
This is sad, because I believe this is something that we should be literally up in arms about.
Ok, that was pretty funny. /wishin I had mod points.
Great. I keep hoping that we'll find definitive proof of abiogenesis occuring sponteaneously on another planet, and now look what the gods of chaos have given us: a huge, obvous excuse to give to the creationists. I'm sure we'll see this one crop up on the 700 Club if-and-when they ever find 100%-sure-fire-can't argue-with-that proof that life existed on Mars.
"But God planted the seeds of life in Eden, and he did smith the earth with a big rock, and it did spew forth flotsam into the universe, and it was good."
Grrr.