America is not Europe, England, France, Japan, Sweden, Canada,... The solution that applies in any or all of the above does not necessarily apply here.
especially in light of the fact that they're going to have to port it to run over their BSD based MacOS X anyway
Err, umm, their "BSD-based" MacOS X
will use a window system (their Display PDF-based window system) that's not the X Window System used on, I suspect, most desktop free-UNIX boxes;
will have a MacOS API layer that most if not all free UNIXes have;
will have what I suspect is a "Son Of NeXTStEP" API layer (Cocoa), although that might be implementable by the GNUStep folk.
I.e., the mere fact that it has a bunch of Mach and BSD code at one layer is insufficient to make MacOS X so much like the free UNIXes of today to cause the availability of code for MacOS X to make a port to various free UNIXes a no-brainer.
But MIT isn't just an engineering college. They have significant departments for the humanities too
Did you follow the links in my posting? The statistics page from the MIT Online Women's Center showed that, of the students who weren't first-year students (and who thus haven't yet declared a major) or second-year students who had deferred selection of a major, most of them were, err, umm, engineering students (2,036 engineering; 913 science; 169 humanities and social science; 131 management; 78 architecture and planning; 14 "Third-year Special Students"), and the page with the graphs showed that in many of those engineering departments, a significant number of graduates (> 50%, for chemical engineering, materials science, biology, and chemistry) were women.
The latter page also mentioned the "adjusted ratio of women to men", i.e. the ratio of the fraction of all women at the school who are in the department to the fraction of all men at the school who are in the department; the ratios for degrees granted in 1991 and 1993 for EE/CS are closer to "women at MIT are only about half as likely as men to major in EECS" than to the 7-to-1 ratio the person in the posting to which I was responding spoke of. (For engineering as a whole, that page says "...for the School of Engineering overall, women and men major in engineering at the same rate."
Check out the ratios at engineering only schools like Caltech and Harvey Mudd.
To quote the page with the graphs:
All schools
except for CalTech showed significant disparity in the rate at which men were attracted to EE over women.
(emphasis mine). Unless I'm misreading the graphs, for CalTech, in EE, it looks as if, for 1991 degree recipients, about 17% of men, and about 23% of women, got degrees in EE - i.e., it appears that the chances that a randomly-chosen class-of-1991 woman at CalTech got her degree in EE are higher than the chances that a randomly-chosen class-of-1991 man at CalTech got his degree in EE. I.e., the "adjusted ratio of women to men" was greater than 1.
I am a coder, not a historian (and I don't use COBOL, though ancient buried history I did punchcard Fortran 77).
I'm not a historian, either, I'm just a middle-aged fart (an old fart is somebody who was around when COBOL was developed; I was around, but I wasn't precocious enough to be programming at the age of 5).
Interestingly enough, one of the people who was involved with GNU COBOL was a woman, Laura Tweedy, who'd also developed another piece of free software, libico, an LGPLed library to read Windows ".ico" files and libraries and to write XPM files; she says on her home page that she's not actively involved any more (she's working at a company that does "Natural Language Tools for Text Analysis and Message Management" - I found it amusing that on her Web site she spoke of an interest in natural language processing; the first thing that came to mind, given her work on GNU COBOL, was "as opposed to unnatural language processing?").
(Fine, laugh at Fortran, I did punchcard on Fortran 77 too, but if you would repsect the Cobol guy, at least respect the Fortran gal.)
It's "COBOL gal" and "FORTRAN guy" - Grace Hopper was one of the chief developers, if not the chief developer, of COBOL; John Backus was one of the chief developers, if not the chief developer, of FORTRAN.
Sophie Wilson is cited as the designer of the ARM instruction set; see her bio in the list of the management team at Element 14:
Sophie joined Acorn at its foundation in 1978. Over 20 years, she has designed or jointly designed all of Acorn's computers. She created Acorn's assembler, BASIC and operating system for Acorn's first computer ranges. Sophie's co-design and implementation of the BBC Microcomputer in 1981,however, generated Acorn's huge breakthrough. This feat included not only the joint design of the hardware, but also the single-handed design of BBC BASIC and operating system, leading to Acorn's explosive growth in 1981-1983 and culminating in Acorn's IPO in 1983. Sophie went on to design the ARM CPU instruction set architecture and its BASIC interpreter.She was a key participant in the design of all subsequent ARM chips during the late 1980s and, on the separation of the ARM microprocessor development into a separate company in 1990, has continued to provide consultancy on subsequent ARM cores. Within Acorn, she led teams to architect and implement two operating systems, create an image processing package and design and implement Replay (QuickTime equivalent). In 1994, she was appointed Chief Scientist in Acorn's Online Media.group and played a significant part in the design of set top boxes and in the architecture of next generation chipsets including a major unpublished program with Digital Semiconductors (now Intel). In 1996, she played a significant part in the design of the world's first Network Computer (NC1) for Oracle and architected related chips for this device and its successors.
I find that it's not just fems who don't respond well to aggressive criticism, it's most people.
Perhaps by "respond well" he meant "doesn't just back down"; backing down just because somebody calls your idea stupid is, arguably, not responding well, but responding aggressively but without solid evidence and reasoning from that evidence is also, arguably, not responding well. (For example, I'd consider neither acquiescent silence, or "No, your idea is stupid!" without solid justification for that assertion, to be good responses to "Your idea is stupid!")
In your experience, do men and women "not respond well" in the same fashion to aggressive criticism?
What does hold up is personalities. Particularly how men and woman collaberate. Men tend to be more confrontational. They are more likely to say "that's the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard" and respond aggresivly when told such a comment. Women build concensus, are more often self critical and don't respond well to agressive criticism.
In asynchronous CMC such as takes place in discussion lists and newsgroups on the Internet and Usenet, males are more likely to post longer messages, begin and close discussions in mixed-sex groups, assert opinions strongly as "facts", use crude language (including insults and profanity), and in general, manifest an adversarial orientation towards their interlocutors (Herring 1992, 1993, 1996b, forthcoming; Kramarae & Taylor 1992; Savicki et al. 1996; Sutton 1994). In contrast, females tend to post relatively short messages, and are more likely to qualify and justify their assertions, apologize, express support of others, and in general, manifest an "aligned" orientation towards their interlocutors (Hall 1996; Herring 1993, 1996b; Savicki et al. 1996). Males sometimes adopt an adversarial style even in cooperative exchanges, and females often appear to be aligned even when they disagree with one another, suggesting that gender socialization carried over from face-to-face interaction is at the root of these behaviors, rather than inherent character traits based on biological sex. Moreover, there is evidence that the minority gender in an online community tends to modify its communicative behavior in the direction of the majority gender: women tend to be more aggressive in male-dominated groups than among other women, and men tend to be less aggressive in female-dominated groups than in groups controlled by men (Baym 1996; Herring 1996b), an observation which suggests that the more numerous a gender group is online, the greater the influence it will have on shared discursive norms.
(I'm not entirely sure why males adopting an adversarial style in cooperative exchanges, and females adopting an "aligned" style even when disagreeing, suggests that these differences stem from socialization rather than biology - I'm not saying they do stem from biology; heck, they may not even stem from one single cause....)
I'm curious whether, as this might suggest, getting more women to contribute to computer-mediated communication forums would dampen the bad aspects of the stereotypical male style, e.g. cause fewer opinions to be asserted strongly as "facts" (and, in my aggressive confrontational male style, I'd suggest that, if that happened, it might considerably raise the quality-to-crap ratio of, say, USENET or Slashdot...).
In asynchronous CMC such as takes place in discussion lists and newsgroups on the Internet and Usenet, males are more likely to post longer messages, begin and close discussions in mixed-sex groups, assert opinions strongly as "facts", use crude language (including insults and profanity), and in general, manifest an adversarial orientation towards their interlocutors (Herring 1992, 1993, 1996b, forthcoming; Kramarae & Taylor 1992; Savicki et al. 1996; Sutton 1994).
which is, of course, not at all true of Slashdot - especially not the
assert opinions strongly as "facts"
part, which you never see on Slashdot.:-)
If, as indicated, those tendencies, especially the one I just cited, are more often exhibited by males than by females, I'd see that as one reason to try to increase female participation in CMC - it might help increase the clue level in discussions.
I received my bachelor's degree in 1985 from a small engineering college on the East Coast. Formerly a men-only institution, they had been co-ed for at least 10 years by the time I matriculated. The male-to-female ratio was 7:1, and from what I hear this hasn't changed. Similar trends obtain nationwide.
I received my bachelor's degree in 1975 from an East Coast university paralyzed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpolarized around science and technology; a page there indicates that
Women have attended MIT since 1871. In 1995-96, there were 1,705 women enrolled as undergraduates (38%) and 1,308 as graduate students (24%).
The problem here is that it does not seem to be optional. (correct me if I am wrong, as I said, my knowledge level on this is VERY limited.)
Limited, indeed. The BBC News article linked to by the Slashdot article said:
Because the pirate continually transmits the phoney flag, the radio stays tuned in until the car goes out of range
or the driver switches off the RDS feature.
(emphasis mine). Read carefully first, and only then opine; yes, a radio that can always be forced to listen to station X rather than station Y would be bad, but that's not what RDS radios are.
What most voters in the USA don't realize is that the popular vote counts for DIDDLY. The electoral collage puts who they want into the office.
Nominally true, but
the electoral slate is what you vote for in a US presidential election, and they're made up of electors pledged to vote for the candidate specified by the slate;
I know of no cases in recent elections where enough electors voted for a candidate other than the one for whom they were pledged to make "the popular vote count for DIDDLY" - if you believe there are such cases, present some data to back up your belief.
We in the US aren't ready to give up our socialist ways, and so we will continue to have Wacos and these small scale tyrannies.
As opposed to the countries mentioned in other postings, e.g. the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, who have phrases mocking the US for actions such as these.
Funny, they also use those phrases to mock the US for being not "socialist" enough (cf. the comments about the lack of a strong social safety net).
Methinks blaming it all on "socialism" is a bit unwise; perhaps a more careful analysis is called for, looking at countries other than the US, and dividing things into more categories than "socialist" and "free". (Note: at least some of those "socialist" Western European countries, as well as our "socialist" neighbor to the north, have less restrictive laws on export of cryptographic equipment and software, and lack the sodomy laws that some US states have, and arguably restrict some freedoms less than does the US, even though they "choose to 'solve' social problems" to a greater extent than does the US.)
Need I remind you that you can't take a working binary from an i386 Linux system and run it on a PPC Linux system.
...which is irrelevant if the "Mac clones" to which the original poster referred would be PowerPC-based (the original ones that Jobs killed were, and the original poster said "return of Mac clones", so I suspect the intent was to imply PowerPC-based Mac clones - heck, if they're not PowerPC-based, I'm not sure I'd consider them "clones"...).
Notice the date on the pic from the webcame (1/1/9999)...
It now, for what it's worth, says just "01 01 99".
Of course, it also says "Fireworks New Years Eve", while displaying a picture that, if it's evening, is early evening (unless, just as it's summer this time of year in the Antipodes, it's "evening" at 7 AM:-)), and looks suspiciously as if it's morning, as per the "07:15:56" it was displaying when I checked it; there aren't any fireworks to be seen, either.
Optus Cable and Wireless is down now as far as I can tell and its 1:55am local time.
Which doesn't necessarily mean it's down due to a Y2K bug; the San Jose, California, USA Mercury News had an article yesterday that began with:
As New Year's Day 2000 rolls around, about all anyone can be certain of is that personal computers will crash, somewhere the power will fail, and airline flights will be canceled. You can bet that credit card billing statements will have mistakes and bank ATM machines will either refuse requests for money, keep your card, or both.
In other words, it will be business as usual.
Not all bugs that occur around the transition from 1999-12-31 to 2000-01-01 are Y2K bugs; there're plenty of bugs to go around....
On the 31st December the analogue mobile network begins to close down. Find out how Optus will be keeping you covered into the new millenium in our updated mobile coverage section.
Oi! Why wouldn't they use an unsigned for the time? Seems like Ken Thomson and Dennis Ritchie were planning on negitive times;)
Or support for times prior to 1970, at least.
However, the answer may be "what's an 'unsigned'?" According to the version of the C Reference Manual that came with 6th Edition UNIX, there was no unsigned data type - that was added later. That manual is online, but only in Postscript, and is linked to from Dennis Ritchie's home page; here's the document itself.
Wait a sec (pun intended)
0111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 would incriment to 1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 then 1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001 which are -0 and -1 respectively, right?
Right on machines using sign-magnitude representation, but not on machines using two's-complement representation, as most UNIX machines are (there existed, at least at one point, a UNIX port to the Univac 36-bit mainframes; those were, I think, one's complement).
Other than the "I have a problem with destroying farmland with concrete jungles" part (where they might agree, but not think the Government should do anything about it other than not encourage it by subsidizing it either directly or indirectly), I suspect Harry Browne should've been the one it picked for you.
In order to check whether the selector included Harry Browne, I entered what I thought would be the "hard-core Libertarian" choices, and it did put Harry Browne at the top...
...followed by Alan Keyes (I hit the "social issues" buttons pretty hard on the Libertarian side; I don't know whether it weighted them differently, or if the neutral stance I took on some - e.g., gay rights, as I suspect Libertarians would, in general, oppose both sodomy laws, etc. and anti-discrimination laws affecting private citizens - helped him out, or if he's just not as hard-assed on those issues as some of the other "social conservatives", or what).
I'm curious precisely how it makes its guesses about how well various candidates' positions fit somebody's positions. Does it give some answers a greater weight, based on, for example, a notion of how strongly people tend to believe in their positions on those issues?
he strikes me as the poster boy of moderate liberals, ie. just left of centre
Depends on the position. I suspect that
let no one think the Socialist Party has abandoned the goal of social ownership of the commanding heights of industry, combined with democratic control, and decentralization and community involvement
would be considered more than "just left of centre" even in many of the European social democracies - didn't the British Labour Party "abandon that goal" (although I have the impression not all members approved of that) in the past couple of years or so? (I'd check out their Web site, but it appears to have been designed by Yet Another Damn Javascript Rules OK Web designer - I select "Our policies" under "What are you looking for?", but see no sign of a "Go" button, so my suspicion is that it expects you to be running Javascript so that the page's code can take you there as soon as you select it; sorry, I'm running Netscape on a UNIX-flavored OS, and the main function of Javascript on those platforms appears to be to create files in your current directory with "core" in the name. BTW, the page in question has "Build and powered by Oracle", etc., on it; I'm not sure whether Oracle counts as one of the "commanding heights of industry" or not.)
I suspect the "maximum wage" proposal of no more than a 4x difference between minimum and maximum wages might be considered more than "just left of centre" in at least some of those countries as well; they have lower wage differences than the US, some significantly lower as far as I know, but I don't know how many of them have only a 4x difference.
On the other hand, more stringent gun control, a universal health plan, and a drug policy other than "fill up the prisons" would, I suspect, not even be considered left of center in most other industrialized countries. Various of those have, in the past, been proposed in the US by politicans other than those from the Socialist Party.
Yes, the center, in US politics, is significantly further to the right than the center in other countries (not that the centers in other countries are necessarily clustered closely together; I have the impression that the center in the UK would be to the right of the center in France, for example). I'm not sure that McReynolds would be only slightly to the left of center in other countries, however; I think that's a bit of an exaggeration of the situation.
(Personally, I wish the center in the US were further to the left. I suspect there are other "geeks" in the US who'd like to see it further to the left, some who'd like to see it further to the right, and some who think it's fine where it is. If you move from a one-dimensional scale to a multi-dimensional scale, to account for the fact that there isn't a 100% correlation between views on government health insurance and views on the minimum wage and views on free trade and views on teaching evolution in the schools and views on homosexuality and views on feminism and..., I suspect, as others have indicated, that the "geek community" wouldn't cluster narrowly in a small region of that space, although they might be less widely distributed than the population as a whole.
BTW, I'm not saying there's no correlation between views on various issues, I'm saying it's not 100%, and it's probably not 99%, either.)
Try reading the man pages for
verify and salvage. AdvFS does not need fsck.
...but it does need a salvager; I infer from the name that salvage is a salvager for AdvFS, just as fsck is a salvager for, for example, UFS.
So the original poster was right in his belief that file systems without salvagers are bad (anybody who believes otherwise either believes that restoring from a backup tape is Always The Right Answer, a claim of which I'm rather skeptical, or believes that disks, disk firmware, and file system software breaks sufficiently rarely that it's not an issue, another claim of which I'm rather skeptical), but wrong, apparently, in his belief that AdvFS lacks one.
What I read about many times before is MS would not change NT from it's current state (leave the OS 32 bit), but build an "emulator" that would run as a layer between NT and the hardware that would make the hardware believe NT was 64 bit.
That's how it runs on Alpha - 32-bit address space and, I think, 32-bit page table entries. On Alpha you can do 32-bit page-table entries by doing NT PALcode, as, on all existing Alpha processors, TLB misses are handled in software (well, PALcode, but that's just software loaded into memory from a ROM, running in a special mode that lets it get at processor-specific internal registers), so the software (PALcode) can control what PTEs look like.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not, in this case?
I have the impression that similar restrictions existed in at lest some US states at that time.
(And then there are those who had no right to vote because they were considered property....)
Err, umm, their "BSD-based" MacOS X
I.e., the mere fact that it has a bunch of Mach and BSD code at one layer is insufficient to make MacOS X so much like the free UNIXes of today to cause the availability of code for MacOS X to make a port to various free UNIXes a no-brainer.
Did you follow the links in my posting? The statistics page from the MIT Online Women's Center showed that, of the students who weren't first-year students (and who thus haven't yet declared a major) or second-year students who had deferred selection of a major, most of them were, err, umm, engineering students (2,036 engineering; 913 science; 169 humanities and social science; 131 management; 78 architecture and planning; 14 "Third-year Special Students"), and the page with the graphs showed that in many of those engineering departments, a significant number of graduates (> 50%, for chemical engineering, materials science, biology, and chemistry) were women.
The latter page also mentioned the "adjusted ratio of women to men", i.e. the ratio of the fraction of all women at the school who are in the department to the fraction of all men at the school who are in the department; the ratios for degrees granted in 1991 and 1993 for EE/CS are closer to "women at MIT are only about half as likely as men to major in EECS" than to the 7-to-1 ratio the person in the posting to which I was responding spoke of. (For engineering as a whole, that page says "...for the School of Engineering overall, women and men major in engineering at the same rate."
To quote the page with the graphs:
(emphasis mine). Unless I'm misreading the graphs, for CalTech, in EE, it looks as if, for 1991 degree recipients, about 17% of men, and about 23% of women, got degrees in EE - i.e., it appears that the chances that a randomly-chosen class-of-1991 woman at CalTech got her degree in EE are higher than the chances that a randomly-chosen class-of-1991 man at CalTech got his degree in EE. I.e., the "adjusted ratio of women to men" was greater than 1.
I'm not a historian, either, I'm just a middle-aged fart (an old fart is somebody who was around when COBOL was developed; I was around, but I wasn't precocious enough to be programming at the age of 5).
Interestingly enough, one of the people who was involved with GNU COBOL was a woman, Laura Tweedy, who'd also developed another piece of free software, libico, an LGPLed library to read Windows ".ico" files and libraries and to write XPM files; she says on her home page that she's not actively involved any more (she's working at a company that does "Natural Language Tools for Text Analysis and Message Management" - I found it amusing that on her Web site she spoke of an interest in natural language processing; the first thing that came to mind, given her work on GNU COBOL, was "as opposed to unnatural language processing?").
It's "COBOL gal" and "FORTRAN guy" - Grace Hopper was one of the chief developers, if not the chief developer, of COBOL; John Backus was one of the chief developers, if not the chief developer, of FORTRAN.
Sophie Wilson is cited as the designer of the ARM instruction set; see her bio in the list of the management team at Element 14:
Perhaps by "respond well" he meant "doesn't just back down"; backing down just because somebody calls your idea stupid is, arguably, not responding well, but responding aggressively but without solid evidence and reasoning from that evidence is also, arguably, not responding well. (For example, I'd consider neither acquiescent silence, or "No, your idea is stupid!" without solid justification for that assertion, to be good responses to "Your idea is stupid!")
In your experience, do men and women "not respond well" in the same fashion to aggressive criticism?
On e of the articles from that issue of the CPSR newsletter mentions something along those lines:
(I'm not entirely sure why males adopting an adversarial style in cooperative exchanges, and females adopting an "aligned" style even when disagreeing, suggests that these differences stem from socialization rather than biology - I'm not saying they do stem from biology; heck, they may not even stem from one single cause....)
I'm curious whether, as this might suggest, getting more women to contribute to computer-mediated communication forums would dampen the bad aspects of the stereotypical male style, e.g. cause fewer opinions to be asserted strongly as "facts" (and, in my aggressive confrontational male style, I'd suggest that, if that happened, it might considerably raise the quality-to-crap ratio of, say, USENET or Slashdot...).
The first of those articles says
which is, of course, not at all true of Slashdot - especially not the
part, which you never see on Slashdot. :-)
If, as indicated, those tendencies, especially the one I just cited, are more often exhibited by males than by females, I'd see that as one reason to try to increase female participation in CMC - it might help increase the clue level in discussions.
I received my bachelor's degree in 1975 from an East Coast university paralyzed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpolarized around science and technology; a page there indicates that
A report on "Women Undergraduate Enrollment in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT" has some statistics on degree recipients that appear to indicate that, in some engineering departments (chemical engineering, chemistry), more than 50% of the degree recipients were women.
However, it also indicates that, in EE and computer science, the percentage of degree recipients who were women was low.
The report might be worth reading for those who want to opine on this topic.
Do you have a reference for this?
Limited, indeed. The BBC News article linked to by the Slashdot article said:
(emphasis mine). Read carefully first, and only then opine; yes, a radio that can always be forced to listen to station X rather than station Y would be bad, but that's not what RDS radios are.
Nominally true, but
As opposed to the countries mentioned in other postings, e.g. the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, who have phrases mocking the US for actions such as these.
Funny, they also use those phrases to mock the US for being not "socialist" enough (cf. the comments about the lack of a strong social safety net).
Methinks blaming it all on "socialism" is a bit unwise; perhaps a more careful analysis is called for, looking at countries other than the US, and dividing things into more categories than "socialist" and "free". (Note: at least some of those "socialist" Western European countries, as well as our "socialist" neighbor to the north, have less restrictive laws on export of cryptographic equipment and software, and lack the sodomy laws that some US states have, and arguably restrict some freedoms less than does the US, even though they "choose to 'solve' social problems" to a greater extent than does the US.)
...which is irrelevant if the "Mac clones" to which the original poster referred would be PowerPC-based (the original ones that Jobs killed were, and the original poster said "return of Mac clones", so I suspect the intent was to imply PowerPC-based Mac clones - heck, if they're not PowerPC-based, I'm not sure I'd consider them "clones"...).
Kari Hurtta at the Finnish Meteorological Institute has been maintaining a patched version of Elm for a while; here's a page with his patches.
Hot Grits, Inc.'ll have to buy out the domain name first.
It now, for what it's worth, says just "01 01 99".
Of course, it also says "Fireworks New Years Eve", while displaying a picture that, if it's evening, is early evening (unless, just as it's summer this time of year in the Antipodes, it's "evening" at 7 AM :-)), and looks suspiciously as if it's morning, as per the "07:15:56" it was displaying when I checked it; there aren't any fireworks to be seen, either.
Which doesn't necessarily mean it's down due to a Y2K bug; the San Jose, California, USA Mercury News had an article yesterday that began with:
Not all bugs that occur around the transition from 1999-12-31 to 2000-01-01 are Y2K bugs; there're plenty of bugs to go around....
The Optus Y2K Site claims, as of when I last checked, that
and, for what it's worth, the Optus home page says
Or support for times prior to 1970, at least.
However, the answer may be "what's an 'unsigned'?" According to the version of the C Reference Manual that came with 6th Edition UNIX, there was no unsigned data type - that was added later. That manual is online, but only in Postscript, and is linked to from Dennis Ritchie's home page; here's the document itself.
Right on machines using sign-magnitude representation, but not on machines using two's-complement representation, as most UNIX machines are (there existed, at least at one point, a UNIX port to the Univac 36-bit mainframes; those were, I think, one's complement).
In two's complement, on a 32-bit machine,
1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
is -2147483648, and
1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001
is -2147483647.
Other than the "I have a problem with destroying farmland with concrete jungles" part (where they might agree, but not think the Government should do anything about it other than not encourage it by subsidizing it either directly or indirectly), I suspect Harry Browne should've been the one it picked for you.
In order to check whether the selector included Harry Browne, I entered what I thought would be the "hard-core Libertarian" choices, and it did put Harry Browne at the top...
...followed by Alan Keyes (I hit the "social issues" buttons pretty hard on the Libertarian side; I don't know whether it weighted them differently, or if the neutral stance I took on some - e.g., gay rights, as I suspect Libertarians would, in general, oppose both sodomy laws, etc. and anti-discrimination laws affecting private citizens - helped him out, or if he's just not as hard-assed on those issues as some of the other "social conservatives", or what).
I'm curious precisely how it makes its guesses about how well various candidates' positions fit somebody's positions. Does it give some answers a greater weight, based on, for example, a notion of how strongly people tend to believe in their positions on those issues?
Depends on the position. I suspect that
would be considered more than "just left of centre" even in many of the European social democracies - didn't the British Labour Party "abandon that goal" (although I have the impression not all members approved of that) in the past couple of years or so? (I'd check out their Web site, but it appears to have been designed by Yet Another Damn Javascript Rules OK Web designer - I select "Our policies" under "What are you looking for?", but see no sign of a "Go" button, so my suspicion is that it expects you to be running Javascript so that the page's code can take you there as soon as you select it; sorry, I'm running Netscape on a UNIX-flavored OS, and the main function of Javascript on those platforms appears to be to create files in your current directory with "core" in the name. BTW, the page in question has "Build and powered by Oracle", etc., on it; I'm not sure whether Oracle counts as one of the "commanding heights of industry" or not.)
I suspect the "maximum wage" proposal of no more than a 4x difference between minimum and maximum wages might be considered more than "just left of centre" in at least some of those countries as well; they have lower wage differences than the US, some significantly lower as far as I know, but I don't know how many of them have only a 4x difference.
On the other hand, more stringent gun control, a universal health plan, and a drug policy other than "fill up the prisons" would, I suspect, not even be considered left of center in most other industrialized countries. Various of those have, in the past, been proposed in the US by politicans other than those from the Socialist Party.
Yes, the center, in US politics, is significantly further to the right than the center in other countries (not that the centers in other countries are necessarily clustered closely together; I have the impression that the center in the UK would be to the right of the center in France, for example). I'm not sure that McReynolds would be only slightly to the left of center in other countries, however; I think that's a bit of an exaggeration of the situation.
(Personally, I wish the center in the US were further to the left. I suspect there are other "geeks" in the US who'd like to see it further to the left, some who'd like to see it further to the right, and some who think it's fine where it is. If you move from a one-dimensional scale to a multi-dimensional scale, to account for the fact that there isn't a 100% correlation between views on government health insurance and views on the minimum wage and views on free trade and views on teaching evolution in the schools and views on homosexuality and views on feminism and..., I suspect, as others have indicated, that the "geek community" wouldn't cluster narrowly in a small region of that space, although they might be less widely distributed than the population as a whole.
BTW, I'm not saying there's no correlation between views on various issues, I'm saying it's not 100%, and it's probably not 99%, either.)
Yup. You don't need a 64-bit processor to do 64-bit integer operations; however, you're likely to be able to do it faster on a 64-bit processor.
...but it does need a salvager; I infer from the name that salvage is a salvager for AdvFS, just as fsck is a salvager for, for example, UFS.
So the original poster was right in his belief that file systems without salvagers are bad (anybody who believes otherwise either believes that restoring from a backup tape is Always The Right Answer, a claim of which I'm rather skeptical, or believes that disks, disk firmware, and file system software breaks sufficiently rarely that it's not an issue, another claim of which I'm rather skeptical), but wrong, apparently, in his belief that AdvFS lacks one.
That's how it runs on Alpha - 32-bit address space and, I think, 32-bit page table entries. On Alpha you can do 32-bit page-table entries by doing NT PALcode, as, on all existing Alpha processors, TLB misses are handled in software (well, PALcode, but that's just software loaded into memory from a ROM, running in a special mode that lets it get at processor-specific internal registers), so the software (PALcode) can control what PTEs look like.
I don't know whether IA-64 will do that or not.