Machines are stronger but they don't reproduce themselves from a starting point of 2, or self repair or evolve.
If we put all these constraints on them then I think they'd end up being a lot less strong. So they are strong but need a big factory and a lot of industry to exist for them to be made and repaired - it's a different kind of vulnerability.
I think you are completely right about them developing their own agenda but I think that they will almost certainly wipe us out. Some human will start them off on that track but they'll just pick it up and run with it...
You're right and if the word has changed, then it can change back:-) The 1-in-10 is more useful. We have things like annihilate or eradicate or exterminate for the more absolute meaning.
Given the past history of contacts between "more" and "less" advanced peoples it is ridiculously optimistic to believe that they will be nicer than us.
We, for example, are inconceivably more complicated and "advanced" than ants but we still step on them.
There are lots of situations where a debugger is no use and only log output is. I wonder what you would do when you found that your standard way of doing things didn't work?
Great! Another deskop environment to mix things up
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 1
There's also GNUStep and XFCE and the ROX desktop and probably many more.
KDE and GNOME are slightly warmed over versions of Windows, perhaps with a few hints of OSX. Those are not the last word in UIs by such a long way...
The WPS was object oriented. Right now GNOME-devs are talking about making gnome more "applicaton oriented" which is really "back to the age of pitchforks". I'd like to see a desktop like the WPS on Linux so that GNOME and KDE devs have something better to copy their ideas from.
As said elsewhere, it looks like this is not about the GUI, unfortunately.
I am very seasoned and I can do all that stuff but I don't expect you to. Why bother? The GUI installer in Ubuntu rocks - you've no need to hit the commandline unless you want to.
If ou can't get some computer to work with wireless or something then that's a valid complaint. You can just stop at the point of saying "it did't work from the GUI". You have no need to type things and edit files - that's just the bonus with Linux - that if you really want to you can go beyond what's offered on the menu.
I do it because I've realised that I like all that playing around with things. I like playing with new broken software and seeing if I can make it do stuff. I don't see why you have to like that.
Re:Until Mom can run down to walmart..
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
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· Score: 1
Mom will probably be quite happy with all the puzzles she can download for free without going to walmart. Or the ones she can play online.
You're just complaining that it's possible to build unreleased versions of the software you want to use.
If you tried to do this on windows it would be a lot worse - imagine what it might take to build your own copy of the latest version of Photoshop for windows that some guy at Adobe started work on yesterday.
So this is pretty much the kind of complaint that people ignore because you are trying to do something you wouldn't even contemplate doing on windows.
You should just use the GUI and stick to it and stick to what your distribution offers and complain about that if it's not enough.
Who cares about protection? We wouldn't have had to put up with Microsoft's int 21 API. We might instead have had amazing things like a "standard C library" and portable software so that when the 80286 came out our non-protected programs would compile and run in protected mode.
So no - Microsoft bought a shitty OS from some guy and flogged it on to IBM. Yay. Aren't you defending the indefensible? Who's a zealot again?
I am definitely biased but the point to note is that the iPhone didn't have multitasking until now unlike smartphone OSes out there that have had it since the late 1990s.
The GP is a racist but to be fair the "fucking pathetic evil peoples" are 99.98% "indigenous", to use the reverse-racist term that from my homeland, Zimbabwe.
It's clever to frame the argument as BBC vs Murdoch. That's how party politics works. The players want you to think "it's me or him and look how awful he is".
The problem is that no other media delivery organisation has a chance while these giants exist and soak up the audience using the wads of money from captive audiences to perpetuate themselves.
One is a public monopoly and the other is a private one.
At least we can do something about the public one by demanding that it should do the uneconomic, noble, worthy cause stuff, since it's being subsidised.
An equivalent demand could be made of the private channels that they buy and screen a minimum amount of the worthy output.
Basically you write a normal program and you say what data structures you wish to be persistent. (e.g. the object representing your addressbook in an email program for example). That's really all you have to do. The next time you run your program that data structure and it's children start off with the values that they had when your program last ran.
i.e. there is none of the garbage that you have to deal with when you try to convert some in-memory data structure to fit into tables.
Your in-memory structure simply persists.
There are "checkpoints" and issues with versions (i.e. how old data is converted when you update your classes) but it is all really the kind of stuff that you'd have to deal with in any other database.
IBM AS/400s have one of these and they have enduring popularity as midrange servers.
So it's not as much about the gaps in your knowledge as a gap in the way you think about things. the way you make simple models and use them to reason about basic properties of any system that you are proposing to build. You can get the general outline logically correct before you try to make the details perfect.
Having said that, the subjects that opened my mind were:
Functional languages - make you think differently. You realise that there is another way and maybe you realise when and why you'd choose it.
Complexity is the most obvious thing that I find non-CS people don't understand. They optimize rather than choosing a good algorithm. Understanding various algorithms and how they scale (even why) is very useful in all work that I did later on.
Automata - finite state machines, non -deterministic finite state machines etc etc. This has always helped me to think about very complicated bits of logic in real programs.
Security - I remember learning a notation that helped you calculate how much information you had given away to someone else in a communication. It helped you to analyse a protocol to see if you were exposing information that could be useful to an attacker before you had created adequate trust. This was awesome and it made me think a lot about how insecure everything really is and how you need many layers and grades of security because some are bound to be penetrated.
Architecture - we studied the MIPS architecture i enough detail to feel that we really knew what happened inside a CPU to a very fine level of detail. This was probably an illusion but it was still eye opening and is the basis of so many decisions that I make nowadays that it's frightening. Nothing direct - it's all background but it is immensely useful.
Persistent databases - made me impatient with Relational DBs and it's one reason why I never want to write another line of SQL or use a Relational DB ever again.
Just listen to how people pick up each other's phrases. Or how they pick up on the idea that you mentioned last week and start talking about it as if it was their own. Then you realise that you actually read it somewhere. . . .
What is "fashion" after all other than a word for the currently most popularly copied ideas?
No artist or scientist has truly "paid" the originators for all the knowledge that they have based all of their own work upon. Do we send Newton's family trust 10c every time we use F=ma?
What this is all about is how we produce exceptional science and music by investing money in people and the current model seems to be to offer a great prize, e.g. a patent. and then let people find their own investment. It is obviously an imperfect model but has it's good features, like putting the judgement of whether the idea is good or not into the hands of the general public who will either buy products based on the idea or not.
We have invented some odd conditions (like pretending that copying ideas is shameful or in some way not desirable) to make this system work.
Now that we have a system it's abused and may actually slow down progress, since people cannot innovate without fear of stepping on some legal IED. So the protection for works should really be short.
Lectures were mostly a waste of time for me, since they were so one-way. I learned from the coursework and the tutorials where I had to put what I had just read into practice.
Lecturers rabbiting on was just a waste of time since they never went at my speed (probably rather slow) and I couldn't stop them and say "I just don't understand that" in any of the subjects where I needed to (e.g. maths) because the classes were too large and time too short.
So personally, I think **** lectures altogether. Some hours with the textbook and the examples are what I want, together with someone to call on when I am stuck.
What we needed at my university was a newsgroup where people could ask the lecturer questions after hours and everyone could see the replies.
It's written in C++ and the syscalls are asynchronous by default (very very nice when you're doing lots of comms). It has a microkernel and an extremely comprehensive api. It's even written in C++. The kernel is actually quite nice.
So *actually* Linux is a dinosaur by comparison if you consider modern-ness to be of any importance.
I don't but and I like linux a lot but Symbian is an operating system that deserves respect and it's dumb to believe that everything has to be done "one true way". The user-level programming experience is not nice due to the great efforts made to fit it onto early phone hardware (since it has been out there long before 600Mhz ARM chips arrived that could shift the weight of Linux or OSX).
But all of that's changing and as a result of pretty gargantuan efforts that few pundits have any appreciation of that this rough diamond is being cut and will dazzle.
ARM is 32-bit but then Intel Atoms are 32-bit also.
It has a very compact instruction set so it's quite lean on memory usage.
32-bit machines aren't in any way limited to 4GB of ram. It's usually individual processes that are limited and even then most systems have a way around it.
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Machines are stronger but they don't reproduce themselves from a starting point of 2, or self repair or evolve.
If we put all these constraints on them then I think they'd end up being a lot less strong. So they are strong but need a big factory and a lot of industry to exist for them to be made and repaired - it's a different kind of vulnerability.
I think you are completely right about them developing their own agenda but I think that they will almost certainly wipe us out. Some human will start them off on that track but they'll just pick it up and run with it...
You're right and if the word has changed, then it can change back :-) The 1-in-10 is more useful. We have things like annihilate or eradicate or exterminate for the more absolute meaning.
Given the past history of contacts between "more" and "less" advanced peoples it is ridiculously optimistic to believe that they will be nicer than us.
We, for example, are inconceivably more complicated and "advanced" than ants but we still step on them.
There are lots of situations where a debugger is no use and only log output is. I wonder what you would do when you found that your standard way of doing things didn't work?
There's also GNUStep and XFCE and the ROX desktop and probably many more.
KDE and GNOME are slightly warmed over versions of Windows, perhaps with a few hints of OSX. Those are not the last word in UIs by such a long way...
The WPS was object oriented. Right now GNOME-devs are talking about making gnome more "applicaton oriented" which is really "back to the age of pitchforks". I'd like to see a desktop like the WPS on Linux so that GNOME and KDE devs have something better to copy their ideas from.
As said elsewhere, it looks like this is not about the GUI, unfortunately.
I am very seasoned and I can do all that stuff but I don't expect you to. Why bother? The GUI installer in Ubuntu rocks - you've no need to hit the commandline unless you want to.
If ou can't get some computer to work with wireless or something then that's a valid complaint. You can just stop at the point of saying "it did't work from the GUI". You have no need to type things and edit files - that's just the bonus with Linux - that if you really want to you can go beyond what's offered on the menu.
I do it because I've realised that I like all that playing around with things. I like playing with new broken software and seeing if I can make it do stuff. I don't see why you have to like that.
Mom will probably be quite happy with all the puzzles she can download for free without going to walmart. Or the ones she can play online.
You're just complaining that it's possible to build unreleased versions of the software you want to use.
If you tried to do this on windows it would be a lot worse - imagine what it might take to build your own copy of the latest version of Photoshop for windows that some guy at Adobe started work on yesterday.
So this is pretty much the kind of complaint that people ignore because you are trying to do something you wouldn't even contemplate doing on windows.
You should just use the GUI and stick to it and stick to what your distribution offers and complain about that if it's not enough.
Cheers :-)
Who cares about protection? We wouldn't have had to put up with Microsoft's int 21 API. We might instead have had amazing things like a "standard C library" and portable software so that when the 80286 came out our non-protected programs would compile and run in protected mode.
So no - Microsoft bought a shitty OS from some guy and flogged it on to IBM. Yay. Aren't you defending the indefensible? Who's a zealot again?
I'm using it now and I like it, but Chrome is not stable for me.
It's problem is that it gets "stuck" in flash in such a way that nothing on my system can use the sound card.
I can kill off all the tabs but there's still a chrome process running and until I kill that manually I can't play any music.
I find this an incredible nuisance. Firefox has the same problem but when I kill it it's gone - no processes left behind.
I am definitely biased but the point to note is that the iPhone didn't have multitasking until now unlike smartphone OSes out there that have had it since the late 1990s.
Whether it matters or not is the question . . .
The GP is a racist but to be fair the "fucking pathetic evil peoples" are 99.98% "indigenous", to use the reverse-racist term that from my homeland, Zimbabwe.
Even more backwards:
It's our fault that this is true because we don't let people get into power unless they say what we want to hear.
It's clever to frame the argument as BBC vs Murdoch. That's how party politics works. The players want you to think "it's me or him and look how awful he is".
The problem is that no other media delivery organisation has a chance while these giants exist and soak up the audience using the wads of money from captive audiences to perpetuate themselves.
One is a public monopoly and the other is a private one.
At least we can do something about the public one by demanding that it should do the uneconomic, noble, worthy cause stuff, since it's being subsidised.
An equivalent demand could be made of the private channels that they buy and screen a minimum amount of the worthy output.
My terminology is poor. Sorry. Try Object Oriented Database Management Systems OODBMS.
e.g.
http://www.25hoursaday.com/WhyArentYouUsingAnOODBMS.html
http://www.service-architecture.com/object-oriented-databases/
http://www.ozone-db.org/frames/home/what.html
Basically you write a normal program and you say what data structures you wish to be persistent. (e.g. the object representing your addressbook in an email program for example). That's really all you have to do. The next time you run your program that data structure and it's children start off with the values that they had when your program last ran.
i.e. there is none of the garbage that you have to deal with when you try to convert some in-memory data structure to fit into tables.
Your in-memory structure simply persists.
There are "checkpoints" and issues with versions (i.e. how old data is converted when you update your classes) but it is all really the kind of stuff that you'd have to deal with in any other database.
IBM AS/400s have one of these and they have enduring popularity as midrange servers.
So it's not as much about the gaps in your knowledge as a gap in the way you think about things. the way you make simple models and use them to reason about basic properties of any system that you are proposing to build. You can get the general outline logically correct before you try to make the details perfect.
Having said that, the subjects that opened my mind were:
Functional languages - make you think differently. You realise that there is another way and maybe you realise when and why you'd choose it.
Complexity is the most obvious thing that I find non-CS people don't understand. They optimize rather than choosing a good algorithm. Understanding various algorithms and how they scale (even why) is very useful in all work that I did later on.
Automata - finite state machines, non -deterministic finite state machines etc etc. This has always helped me to think about very complicated bits of logic in real programs.
Security - I remember learning a notation that helped you calculate how much information you had given away to someone else in a communication. It helped you to analyse a protocol to see if you were exposing information that could be useful to an attacker before you had created adequate trust. This was awesome and it made me think a lot about how insecure everything really is and how you need many layers and grades of security because some are bound to be penetrated.
Architecture - we studied the MIPS architecture i enough detail to feel that we really knew what happened inside a CPU to a very fine level of detail. This was probably an illusion but it was still eye opening and is the basis of so many decisions that I make nowadays that it's frightening. Nothing direct - it's all background but it is immensely useful.
Persistent databases - made me impatient with Relational DBs and it's one reason why I never want to write another line of SQL or use a Relational DB ever again.
Cheers,
Tim
Because it's a huge step backwards to live in small apartment if you had a house with a garden. I feel that way anyhow.
I'd mod you up if I could. You said it very succinctly.
Just listen to how people pick up each other's phrases. Or how they pick up on the idea that you mentioned last week and start talking about it as if it was their own. Then you realise that you actually read it somewhere. . . .
What is "fashion" after all other than a word for the currently most popularly copied ideas?
No artist or scientist has truly "paid" the originators for all the knowledge that they have based all of their own work upon. Do we send Newton's family trust 10c every time we use F=ma?
What this is all about is how we produce exceptional science and music by investing money in people and the current model seems to be to offer a great prize, e.g. a patent. and then let people find their own investment. It is obviously an imperfect model but has it's good features, like putting the judgement of whether the idea is good or not into the hands of the general public who will either buy products based on the idea or not.
We have invented some odd conditions (like pretending that copying ideas is shameful or in some way not desirable) to make this system work.
Now that we have a system it's abused and may actually slow down progress, since people cannot innovate without fear of stepping on some legal IED. So the protection for works should really be short.
No, I'm long past it all - I got through with very good results. It was all much better after I realised how to deal with it.
But you are right that 4/5ths of it was a complete waste of time other than for putting on my CV.
Lectures were mostly a waste of time for me, since they were so one-way. I learned from the coursework and the tutorials where I had to put what I had just read into practice.
Lecturers rabbiting on was just a waste of time since they never went at my speed (probably rather slow) and I couldn't stop them and say "I just don't understand that" in any of the subjects where I needed to (e.g. maths) because the classes were too large and time too short.
So personally, I think **** lectures altogether. Some hours with the textbook and the examples are what I want, together with someone to call on when I am stuck.
What we needed at my university was a newsgroup where people could ask the lecturer questions after hours and everyone could see the replies.
I am biased as I work "with it" every day.
It's written in C++ and the syscalls are asynchronous by default (very very nice when you're doing lots of comms). It has a microkernel and an extremely comprehensive api. It's even written in C++. The kernel is actually quite nice.
So *actually* Linux is a dinosaur by comparison if you consider modern-ness to be of any importance.
I don't but and I like linux a lot but Symbian is an operating system that deserves respect and it's dumb to believe that everything has to be done "one true way". The user-level programming experience is not nice due to the great efforts made to fit it onto early phone hardware (since it has been out there long before 600Mhz ARM chips arrived that could shift the weight of Linux or OSX).
But all of that's changing and as a result of pretty gargantuan efforts that few pundits have any appreciation of that this rough diamond is being cut and will dazzle.
ARM is 32-bit but then Intel Atoms are 32-bit also.
It has a very compact instruction set so it's quite lean on memory usage.
32-bit machines aren't in any way limited to 4GB of ram. It's usually individual processes that are limited and even then most systems have a way around it.
Try this on your atom:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5gYSgqka1A&feature=related
I think it just makes nonsense out of your performance argument.
i.e. including all those people who don't have PCs yet in this world of 6 billion people.