Someone was paid several million dollars to come up with the name "Exxon". I forget the exact figure, but it was more than $1 million per letter. Specifically, the request was for a name that was "Bold, Powerful, and Not a Dirty Word in Swahili". For why this is a desireable trait, you may want to look up the translation of "Coca Cola" into Chinese...
It's still VI vs. EMACS
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 2
An argument by any other name...
Personally, I believe the benefits of a one key search function are offset heavily by the penalty of having to hit the escape key before searching. The mode changes in vi are tricky to get used to, even for someone like me, who's been through ed, edlin, countless embedded IDE editors, vi, joe, jed, pico, emacs, and epsilon. Most of the time, you are either inserting or deleting text. Anything else takes extra keystrokes to change modes, or chorded keystrokes, regardless of which editor you use. BTW, Tom was complaining about being unable to do scanning by word with the exiled arrow keys: most sane editors (since wp4.0) have word scanning wired to control+arrow keys. Also, the "trill" of the jkjkjkjkjkj in vi is mostly wasted effort, imho. Why on earth would you need to keep going back and forth between two lines, without doing anything to them? If you feel the need for useless exercise, trill the left and right arrows.
VI bigotry aside, I believe there were several valid points about the non-ergonomic design of modern keyboards.
One's editor of choice is largely a matter of what makes sense to your fingers. I've personally settled on xemacs, and am quite capable of programming "in the zone" with it, but whatever works for you, eh? It's just a tool. Does it make that much of a difference whether you use Black&Decker or a Makita power drill to build that dog house? Probably not.
hope the series gives out more background information than the movie.
You just need to watch the 3 1/2 hour version of the movie. Most of what happens in the book is what goes on inside each characters head. This is extremely difficult to capture in movie form. The long version of the movie featured a lot of these internal thoughts (done as reverbed voice-overs), whereas they were the first things to go when making the movie shorter. Unfortunately the only DVD version I've found so far is the short version.
Personally, I thought the books were excellent. The first 2 or 3 hundred pages of the book is mostly setup and background information, kind of like setting up a chain of dominoes) and tends to read rather slowly. However, once I made it to the point where the dominoes start knocking each other over, I couldn't put it down. The same goes for most of the rest of the series, lots of setup, followed by intense action.
Should be interesting to see how the new interpretation compares to David Lynch's interpretation.
nobody can use the process that CDNow has developed.
How many different ways can there be to tie an html form to a cgi script that feeds options to a script that assembles the data for the cd and burns a copy to media?
As for prior art, someone had a "create your own Red Hat kickstart disk" on the web a while ago. You fill out the form, and you get a link to a raw floppy disk image that you use to automatically install the majority of the OS, and some of the initial configuration information too.
The theory is that since the data in question is useful to such a small percentage of the overall US population, charging just those who care about the information for the data (and transfer) costs is perfectly ok. No need for every person in America to subsidize the needs of 1% of its citizens.
That being said, a fair amount of data is available on the net at no cost. The USGS elevation data for the US is downloadable from the USGS. One company will package up to 20 MB of the US Census Bureau Tiger Line data sets for download as one zip file.
Ok, lets presume there is a wall between the marketing and editorial side of the fence. The editorial side is still providing a service to its readers. As are the advertisers who subsidise each issue. Assume the advertisers of Microsoft-based software don't mind the Linux issue. The editors are still people who need to eat. They need to keep the magazine churning out copies, and getting them in the hands of the consumers. If their consumer base dwindles, they starve. Therefore, by positioning themselves as a windows magazine, they *need* to continue with the windows coverage as their primary focus. The Linux issue is a wonderful way to say, "hey, all you windows folks who keep wondering what this linux stuff is, here you go". And that is a service to their readership. Turning into an all-linux magazine overnight is not.
There is a *remarkable* trend in Windows magazines to praise everything coming out of Redmond. Why? Count how many pages of advertising in the magazine are for Microsoft products. Compare that to every other advertiser in the magazine. Do the math.
Remember when Windows95 first came out? Not one magazine gave the Windows 95 beta releases a glowing review, even allowing for the "not officially released" factor. They panned the dramatic shift in the user interface. They railed against the instability (but keep in mind, it's still not the real thing). They hated the huge increase in disk usage just for the base OS. And for no noticeable performance game. When Win95 was officially released, however, *every* magazine praised the glorious new interface, its relative stability inncrease over Win3.x (not saying much, i know). They shrugged off the disk usage factor by listing all the cool "features" it provided. There was a dramatic change in general opinion around the time it was officially released, as every magazine realized that there magazines future for the next few years was tied into how many people would be running Windows 95, and software written for it, and used products that the advertisers made for Windows 95.
The change physically sickened me, and I haven't bought a "Windows only" computer magazine since.
At my last job, the phrase "what if gets hit by a bus?" arose a few times. We, the work grunts, decided that being hit by a bus was the worst manner of death possible, so we started using the phrase "hit by the beer truck". Being hit by a beer truck was viewed as a more glamourous way of leaving this world. Somehow that made the morbid thoughts of what to do in case of someone's imminent death easier on the brain.
To quote Ziggy and his friend:
I want a death by misadventure, Wanna die face down in some dude's pool. Not gonna kick it in my sleep biting on my dentures, When I die, Jack, it's gonna be real cool.
Not gonna die from drugs, don't wanna go insane, Like that Pink Floyd guy, Syd. I wanna be on a bus that crashes into a train, Just like Ozzy Osbourne did.
(no man, it was a plane and a train, and it was Randy Rhodes)
MFC is nowhere near open source. The source is provided "for reference only". There is no guarantee that the source you have is the source that was used to compile the library you're linking against. There are no makefiles, or build environments to allow you to fix a bug if you find it. I once found a one-line-fix memory link in an old version of MFC (CString wouldn't free memory on reallocations for larger strings, for those keeping score), but had no means to fix it for my program. I just had to pray the program wouldn't be running long enough for it to be a problem.
At least the Symantec compiler guaranteed they library source and the batch files they give you were used to build the libraries, so you *could* fix any bugs you found. You were allowed to redistribute the product of such repairs, but not the source used to create them. Still not "Free", but closer...
They were expecting to see _Alien_... Oddly enough, I've seen Blair Witch (filmed about a half hour drive from my house), and recently watched Alien again, and oddly enough, I found the two movies to be quite similar. Alien hardly has any gore in it at all, apart from the chestburster scene. Incidentally, the start of that scene was a surprise to all the actors on the set. Pay attention to their reactions, that's real fear and disgust on their faces. Veronica Cartwright in particular has a good reaction. There was practically no gore in BWP, save one scene. There was *no* soundtrack at all in BWP. Despite the soundtrack available from music stores (allegedly the mix tape Josh recorded for the trip), there was no spooky music in the film itself. There was no warning when something spooky was going to happen; it just happened. Alien also has no score to speak of. There are a few soaring orchestral bits, to accent the unbelievably hugeness of space, but again, when spooky stuff happens, it just does. It may just be the ship's cat jumping out from behind that crate, or it may be a bloodthirsty xenophobe, you never know until it's too late. BWP is perhaps mostly known for the hand held camera shots. Alien also featured a few choice hand held shots to spice up the film. My favourite aspect of BWP is that a couple of people just went out and made a movie because that's what they wanted to make. It cost "as much as a fully-loaded Ford Taurus" film, and it's done better than most movies at the theaters this year. Keep in mind also, that the movie has been playing in many indie movie theaters before the Big Release, which accounts for a lot of the underground buzz that it has attained. When people speak of "the 'net" as the reason this movie is popular, it's not because of www.blairwitch.com. The young, hip, artsy-fartsy types that saw the movie at the underground theatres spread the word. And we heard.
I remember reading this from a computer magazine about 5 years ago. The secret to maintaining password security is to store them in clear text, in a file which is globally readable, but pick a file that no one would ever bother opening.
Dowload some shareware, say, a typing tutor, or something equally useless. Install it. Go to the directory where the software is installed, and you'll find a file called ORDER.FRM or PURCHASE.TXT or something like that. Type whatever you want into the exact middle of the file. In clear text. No one else will ever see them. =)
There are some markets where open source, end user applications just won't go. Medical software, Nuclear power plants, Military apps, etc. It's not like, say, the Gimp, where you can get several thousands, or even tens or hundreds of thousands of people to use it and sniff out the bugs. The "noone to sue" argument is irrelevant. The scale by which open source offers any benefit doesn't exist.
Also, the consequences of failing software in these instances are potentially high. This is not software where if it fails, the worst that happens is a core dump takes up some space on your hard drive. Even a forced reboot that leaves dirty filesystems does not compare to the potential for thermal nuclear meltdown, or radiation overdose.
This is software that is reviewed line for line by independent auditors. Software where each individual change to the code is justified by at least a few paragraphs of design review, which include required documentation changes, and all manner of approvals and signoffs. I've been that auditor, and programmer, and documentor, and I even have a few KSLOC running in several of our nuclear power plants.
I don't see these people downloading "ReactorMonitor-0.3.1" and performing the task of documentation necessary to qualify the software for mission critial, safety of life applications. Not going to happen this lifetime. What you're paying for when you purchase such a program is the 6 foot stack of documentation that justifies the accuracy of every line of code in the program. If I were to perform that task of documentation (and I have), I would be reluctant to give it away (i.e. license by GPL or BSD or...), considering what the buyers are willing to pay for it, and considering that the target market for such software is so small.
However, an application based on an open source OS or open source libraries may be employed in such an environment, pursuant to the requesite code reviews and documentation, of course.
On a more promising note, one of the guys I used to do nuke work for told me, and I quote, "You'll never see Microsoft Windows of any kind in my control room." Linux was just barely on the map back then, so I never got his impression of it, but if any non-embedded OS came into his control room, it was guaranteed to be unix-based. =)
Simple point of clarity. Also a minor goof in the article:
"Linux is a 32-bit operating system and does not scale beyond four processors."
A suppose those alpha types have just been wasting 32 bits this whole time, eh? =)
Re:Illegal search and seizure...
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 1
>It won't matter what any one particular state has voted for, the same law will apply everywhere.
States are still allowed to customize UCC regulations on a per-state basis. Maryland, for example disallows certain warantee restrictions that are guaranteed by the universal commercial code. Think of it like a standards document. It's not exactly guaranteed to operate the same *everywhere*, but 90% of the time you can expect 90% of it to hold true, and the discrepancies are well known amongst those whose business it is to know (i.e. the laywers)
That's great and well for the CPU chassis, but if you want any output from the machine, the "snoopers" will have a much better target with that large electron gun you usually look at for results. (On a different note, that vendor does have documentation of EMI test results for each case to prove it meets the Tempest spec. right? =) Now if they sell boxes with lead walls, you may be able to purchase a secure working environment... until you need network connectivity, anyway.
Check out http://www.fair.org/ for even scarier information about biases in our news sources. Some of the people behind FAIR have also released a book that goes into great detail about where many of the biases in the press originate, and how they perpetuate. You'll never be so disgusted with mainstream media or politics in your life.
It's open source, dudes. It's all about technical superiority. If Mr. Jerk's changes were worthwhile, they could be merged back in with your source base, provided they weren't too buggy, and weren't totally backwards from the original design.
Instead of fighting over ownership of the code base, redirect any discussion to the technical matters at hand. Is this good for the program? Is there a better way to do this? The primary purpose as *maintainer* of a free software package is to manage the multitude of modifications that other people generate. You don't have to generate all the changes yourself, you just have to make sure the ones that are submitted are compatible with the code base. Getting other people to do the work is part of the fun. =)
You may also wish to check into the history behind the Xemacs/GNUemacs split. There were some fundamental design issues (and ego clashes) that resulted in the original split, but both groups borrow code from each other nowadays, and both versions of emacs are better for it.
Keep in mind that the filesystem test is on M$'s "home turf", namely the screwy SMB network file system. (personally, I want to see how NT serving via NFS compares to Linux and Solaris) Samba was developed outside of Microsoft, by reverse engineering the wire protocol, without the benefit of any documentation for said protocol. The Samba development team should be congratulated highly for the fact that Samba performs well enough to warrant ZD throwing a tiebreaker benchmark test. This is no small feat.
Likewise, The Linux developers should also be congratulated highly for the fact that Linux is even mentioned outside of academic journals. That Linux is good enough to be measured against M$'s finest by the mainstream PC-centric press is also no small feat.
Sure we're not the *fastest*, but seriously, who was expecting we would be? The point of this round of benchmarks wasn't to prove that Linux was faster than NT, but to show MindCraft that Linux was represented unfairly in their tests. And we showed them that Linux was about twice as fast as they claimed. Rejoice, for the truth shall now be known by all.
Oh, and get back to hacking the source, we've got work to do. =)
"There are lies, damn lies and statistics" -- Mark Twain
How far would any of us get in life, without the support of the multitude around us? How many of you depend on, even take for granted, the farmers, butchers and bakers that feed us? How many depend on automotive engineers to provide us with relatively cheap and safe transportation? Try to find something you touch during your day that hasn't required the cooperation of thousands of people to create and deliver to you. Then tell me how useful a person alone is...
Most Eastern and Naturalist religions consider each person as part of a greater whole. It astounds me how readily most westerners can separate people, without looking at our collaborative society and how dependent on each other we are. Let alone how dependent on the rest of the planet we are...
My old flame filter was "avoid the 'Read More...' link". It kept the flames down, but didn't do much for the discussion at large. For us old fogies, i suspect this will work very well at keeping a large amount of the adolescent pissing contests out of a potentially useful discussion.
You may like to program, but trust me, you really don't want to program driver level code unless you have to. If you did, you'd have a program that only supported *one* sound card, and would require significant reworking to support any other sound card. Linux is (imho) all about portability, which means programming to a well defined API, or library. In most cases that means programming to the OSS or ALSA api, or some wrapper thereof. You think "oh, having the specs would be so great."? Study the specs for hardware out there that you *can* get the docs for. Be it hard drives, parallel ports, whatever. See if that's *really* where you want to spend your time programming. If so, contact companies out there that are in need of Linux drivers, and offer to help them support Linux. The worst that will happen is they'll say no.
Personally, I'm more than happy to leave the driver level stuff to the people who make the card. I long for the day I can buy a hot new video card, install the custom accelerated X server (or module) off of the CD, and be up and running. Same for a sound card. I personally prefer to play with my system as a whole, and not have to worry about compiling or hand reviewing everything that's on it. I'd never have time for Quake if I did. =)
Now if that's your thing, more power to you. There was a time when I was a bit twiddler, poking values to io ports, and polling for status returns. But, most people have no need for the intimate details of hardware specs. It's not something that *has* to be out there. More importantly, if driver level programming is your thing, get out where you can exercise it.
Admiral Rickover, mastermind behind the US nuclear submarine program, used to require the head engineers for a sub to go on it's first dive. Same theory behind QA. If their life *is* put on the line, they'll be a little more careful.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, these guys passed their OS courses in college with flying colours...
Someone was paid several million dollars to come up with the name "Exxon". I forget the exact figure, but it was more than $1 million per letter. Specifically, the request was for a name that was "Bold, Powerful, and Not a Dirty Word in Swahili". For why this is a desireable trait, you may want to look up the translation of "Coca Cola" into Chinese...
An argument by any other name...
Personally, I believe the benefits of a one key search function are offset heavily by the penalty of having to hit the escape key before searching. The mode changes in vi are tricky to get used to, even for someone like me, who's been through ed, edlin, countless embedded IDE editors, vi, joe, jed, pico, emacs, and epsilon. Most of the time, you are either inserting or deleting text. Anything else takes extra keystrokes to change modes, or chorded keystrokes, regardless of which editor you use. BTW, Tom was complaining about being unable to do scanning by word with the exiled arrow keys: most sane editors (since wp4.0) have word scanning wired to control+arrow keys. Also, the "trill" of the jkjkjkjkjkj in vi is mostly wasted effort, imho. Why on earth would you need to keep going back and forth between two lines, without doing anything to them? If you feel the need for useless exercise, trill the left and right arrows.
VI bigotry aside, I believe there were several valid points about the non-ergonomic design of modern keyboards.
One's editor of choice is largely a matter of what makes sense to your fingers. I've personally settled on xemacs, and am quite capable of programming "in the zone" with it, but whatever works for you, eh? It's just a tool. Does it make that much of a difference whether you use Black&Decker or a Makita power drill to build that dog house? Probably not.
You just need to watch the 3 1/2 hour version of the movie. Most of what happens in the book is what goes on inside each characters head. This is extremely difficult to capture in movie form. The long version of the movie featured a lot of these internal thoughts (done as reverbed voice-overs), whereas they were the first things to go when making the movie shorter. Unfortunately the only DVD version I've found so far is the short version.
Personally, I thought the books were excellent. The first 2 or 3 hundred pages of the book is mostly setup and background information, kind of like setting up a chain of dominoes) and tends to read rather slowly. However, once I made it to the point where the dominoes start knocking each other over, I couldn't put it down. The same goes for most of the rest of the series, lots of setup, followed by intense action.
Should be interesting to see how the new interpretation compares to David Lynch's interpretation.
How many different ways can there be to tie an html form to a cgi script that feeds options to a script that assembles the data for the cd and burns a copy to media?
As for prior art, someone had a "create your own Red Hat kickstart disk" on the web a while ago. You fill out the form, and you get a link to a raw floppy disk image that you use to automatically install the majority of the OS, and some of the initial configuration information too.
The theory is that since the data in question is useful to such a small percentage of the overall US population, charging just those who care about the information for the data (and transfer) costs is perfectly ok. No need for every person in America to subsidize the needs of 1% of its citizens.
That being said, a fair amount of data is available on the net at no cost. The USGS elevation data for the US is downloadable from the USGS. One company will package up to 20 MB of the US Census Bureau Tiger Line data sets for download as one zip file.
Ok, lets presume there is a wall between the marketing and editorial side of the fence. The editorial side is still providing a service to its readers. As are the advertisers who subsidise each issue. Assume the advertisers of Microsoft-based software don't mind the Linux issue. The editors are still people who need to eat. They need to keep the magazine churning out copies, and getting them in the hands of the consumers. If their consumer base dwindles, they starve. Therefore, by positioning themselves as a windows magazine, they *need* to continue with the windows coverage as their primary focus. The Linux issue is a wonderful way to say, "hey, all you windows folks who keep wondering what this linux stuff is, here you go". And that is a service to their readership. Turning into an all-linux magazine overnight is not.
There is a *remarkable* trend in Windows magazines to praise everything coming out of Redmond. Why? Count how many pages of advertising in the magazine are for Microsoft products. Compare that to every other advertiser in the magazine. Do the math.
Remember when Windows95 first came out? Not one magazine gave the Windows 95 beta releases a glowing review, even allowing for the "not officially released" factor. They panned the dramatic shift in the user interface. They railed against the instability (but keep in mind, it's still not the real thing). They hated the huge increase in disk usage just for the base OS. And for no noticeable performance game. When Win95 was officially released, however, *every* magazine praised the glorious new interface, its relative stability inncrease over Win3.x (not saying much, i know). They shrugged off the disk usage factor by listing all the cool "features" it provided. There was a dramatic change in general opinion around the time it was officially released, as every magazine realized that there magazines future for the next few years was tied into how many people would be running Windows 95, and software written for it, and used products that the advertisers made for Windows 95.
The change physically sickened me, and I haven't bought a "Windows only" computer magazine since.
At my last job, the phrase "what if gets hit by a bus?" arose a few times. We, the work grunts, decided that being hit by a bus was the worst manner of death possible, so we started using the phrase "hit by the beer truck". Being hit by a beer truck was viewed as a more glamourous way of leaving this world. Somehow that made the morbid thoughts of what to do in case of someone's imminent death easier on the brain.
To quote Ziggy and his friend:
I want a death by misadventure,
Wanna die face down in some dude's pool.
Not gonna kick it in my sleep biting on my dentures,
When I die, Jack, it's gonna be real cool.
Not gonna die from drugs, don't wanna go insane,
Like that Pink Floyd guy, Syd.
I wanna be on a bus that crashes into a train,
Just like Ozzy Osbourne did.
(no man, it was a plane and a train,
and it was Randy Rhodes)
Plane and a train? Righteous Cool Death!
> Actually the MFC is completely open source.
MFC is nowhere near open source. The source is provided "for reference only". There is no guarantee that the source you have is the source that was used to compile the library you're linking against. There are no makefiles, or build environments to allow you to fix a bug if you find it. I once found a one-line-fix memory link in an old version of MFC (CString wouldn't free memory on reallocations for larger strings, for those keeping score), but had no means to fix it for my program. I just had to pray the program wouldn't be running long enough for it to be a problem.
At least the Symantec compiler guaranteed they library source and the batch files they give you were used to build the libraries, so you *could* fix any bugs you found. You were allowed to redistribute the product of such repairs, but not the source used to create them. Still not "Free", but closer...
They were expecting to see _Alien_... Oddly enough, I've seen Blair Witch (filmed about a half hour drive from my house), and recently watched Alien again, and oddly enough, I found the two movies to be quite similar. Alien hardly has any gore in it at all, apart from the chestburster scene. Incidentally, the start of that scene was a surprise to all the actors on the set. Pay attention to their reactions, that's real fear and disgust on their faces. Veronica Cartwright in particular has a good reaction. There was practically no gore in BWP, save one scene. There was *no* soundtrack at all in BWP. Despite the soundtrack available from music stores (allegedly the mix tape Josh recorded for the trip), there was no spooky music in the film itself. There was no warning when something spooky was going to happen; it just happened. Alien also has no score to speak of. There are a few soaring orchestral bits, to accent the unbelievably hugeness of space, but again, when spooky stuff happens, it just does. It may just be the ship's cat jumping out from behind that crate, or it may be a bloodthirsty xenophobe, you never know until it's too late. BWP is perhaps mostly known for the hand held camera shots. Alien also featured a few choice hand held shots to spice up the film. My favourite aspect of BWP is that a couple of people just went out and made a movie because that's what they wanted to make. It cost "as much as a fully-loaded Ford Taurus" film, and it's done better than most movies at the theaters this year. Keep in mind also, that the movie has been playing in many indie movie theaters before the Big Release, which accounts for a lot of the underground buzz that it has attained. When people speak of "the 'net" as the reason this movie is popular, it's not because of www.blairwitch.com. The young, hip, artsy-fartsy types that saw the movie at the underground theatres spread the word. And we heard.
I remember reading this from a computer magazine about 5 years ago. The secret to maintaining password security is to store them in clear text, in a file which is globally readable, but pick a file that no one would ever bother opening.
Dowload some shareware, say, a typing tutor, or something equally useless. Install it. Go to the directory where the software is installed, and you'll find a file called ORDER.FRM or PURCHASE.TXT or something like that. Type whatever you want into the exact middle of the file. In clear text. No one else will ever see them. =)
There are some markets where open source, end user applications just won't go. Medical software, Nuclear power plants, Military apps, etc. It's not like, say, the Gimp, where you can get several thousands, or even tens or hundreds of thousands of people to use it and sniff out the bugs. The "noone to sue" argument is irrelevant. The scale by which open source offers any benefit doesn't exist.
...), considering what the buyers are willing to pay for it, and considering that the target market for such software is so small.
Also, the consequences of failing software in these instances are potentially high. This is not software where if it fails, the worst that happens is a core dump takes up some space on your hard drive. Even a forced reboot that leaves dirty filesystems does not compare to the potential for thermal nuclear meltdown, or radiation overdose.
This is software that is reviewed line for line by independent auditors. Software where each individual change to the code is justified by at least a few paragraphs of design review, which include required documentation changes, and all manner of approvals and signoffs. I've been that auditor, and programmer, and documentor, and I even have a few KSLOC running in several of our nuclear power plants.
I don't see these people downloading "ReactorMonitor-0.3.1" and performing the task of documentation necessary to qualify the software for mission critial, safety of life applications. Not going to happen this lifetime. What you're paying for when you purchase such a program is the 6 foot stack of documentation that justifies the accuracy of every line of code in the program. If I were to perform that task of documentation (and I have), I would be reluctant to give it away (i.e. license by GPL or BSD or
However, an application based on an open source OS or open source libraries may be employed in such an environment, pursuant to the requesite code reviews and documentation, of course.
On a more promising note, one of the guys I used to do nuke work for told me, and I quote, "You'll never see Microsoft Windows of any kind in my control room." Linux was just barely on the map back then, so I never got his impression of it, but if any non-embedded OS came into his control room, it was guaranteed to be unix-based. =)
Simple point of clarity. Also a minor goof in the article:
"Linux is a 32-bit operating system and does not scale beyond four processors."
A suppose those alpha types have just been wasting 32 bits this whole time, eh? =)
>It won't matter what any one particular state has voted for, the same law will apply everywhere.
States are still allowed to customize UCC regulations on a per-state basis. Maryland, for example disallows certain warantee restrictions that are guaranteed by the universal commercial code. Think of it like a standards document. It's not exactly guaranteed to operate the same *everywhere*, but 90% of the time you can expect 90% of it to hold true, and the discrepancies are well known amongst those whose business it is to know (i.e. the laywers)
That's great and well for the CPU chassis, but if you want any output from the machine, the "snoopers" will have a much better target with that large electron gun you usually look at for results. (On a different note, that vendor does have documentation of EMI test results for each case to prove it meets the Tempest spec. right? =) Now if they sell boxes with lead walls, you may be able to purchase a secure working environment... until you need network connectivity, anyway.
Check out http://www.fair.org/ for even scarier information about biases in our news sources. Some of the people behind FAIR have also released a book that goes into great detail about where many of the biases in the press originate, and how they perpetuate. You'll never be so disgusted with mainstream media or politics in your life.
It's open source, dudes. It's all about technical superiority. If Mr. Jerk's changes were worthwhile, they could be merged back in with your source base, provided they weren't too buggy, and weren't totally backwards from the original design.
Instead of fighting over ownership of the code base, redirect any discussion to the technical matters at hand. Is this good for the program? Is there a better way to do this? The primary purpose as *maintainer* of a free software package is to manage the multitude of modifications that other people generate. You don't have to generate all the changes yourself, you just have to make sure the ones that are submitted are compatible with the code base. Getting other people to do the work is part of the fun. =)
You may also wish to check into the history behind the Xemacs/GNUemacs split. There were some fundamental design issues (and ego clashes) that resulted in the original split, but both groups borrow code from each other nowadays, and both versions of emacs are better for it.
Good luck on P.
Keep in mind that the filesystem test is on M$'s "home turf", namely the screwy SMB network file system. (personally, I want to see how NT serving via NFS compares to Linux and Solaris) Samba was developed outside of Microsoft, by reverse engineering the wire protocol, without the benefit of any documentation for said protocol. The Samba development team should be congratulated highly for the fact that Samba performs well enough to warrant ZD throwing a tiebreaker benchmark test. This is no small feat.
Likewise, The Linux developers should also be congratulated highly for the fact that Linux is even mentioned outside of academic journals. That Linux is good enough to be measured against M$'s finest by the mainstream PC-centric press is also no small feat.
Sure we're not the *fastest*, but seriously, who was expecting we would be? The point of this round of benchmarks wasn't to prove that Linux was faster than NT, but to show MindCraft that Linux was represented unfairly in their tests. And we showed them that Linux was about twice as fast as they claimed. Rejoice, for the truth shall now be known by all.
Oh, and get back to hacking the source, we've got work to do. =)
"There are lies, damn lies and statistics" -- Mark Twain
one word: Television.
How far would any of us get in life, without the support of the multitude around us? How many of you depend on, even take for granted, the farmers, butchers and bakers that feed us? How many depend on automotive engineers to provide us with relatively cheap and safe transportation? Try to find something you touch during your day that hasn't required the cooperation of thousands of people to create and deliver to you. Then tell me how useful a person alone is...
Most Eastern and Naturalist religions consider each person as part of a greater whole. It astounds me how readily most westerners can separate people, without looking at our collaborative society and how dependent on each other we are. Let alone how dependent on the rest of the planet we are...
My old flame filter was "avoid the 'Read More...' link". It kept the flames down, but didn't do much for the discussion at large. For us old fogies, i suspect this will work very well at keeping a large amount of the adolescent pissing contests out of a potentially useful discussion.
Great work, Rob. Keep it up.
You may like to program, but trust me, you really don't want to program driver level code unless you have to. If you did, you'd have a program that only supported *one* sound card, and would require significant reworking to support any other sound card. Linux is (imho) all about portability, which means programming to a well defined API, or library. In most cases that means programming to the OSS or ALSA api, or some wrapper thereof. You think "oh, having the specs would be so great."? Study the specs for hardware out there that you *can* get the docs for. Be it hard drives, parallel ports, whatever. See if that's *really* where you want to spend your time programming. If so, contact companies out there that are in need of Linux drivers, and offer to help them support Linux. The worst that will happen is they'll say no.
Personally, I'm more than happy to leave the driver level stuff to the people who make the card. I long for the day I can buy a hot new video card, install the custom accelerated X server (or module) off of the CD, and be up and running. Same for a sound card. I personally prefer to play with my system as a whole, and not have to worry about compiling or hand reviewing everything that's on it. I'd never have time for Quake if I did. =)
Now if that's your thing, more power to you. There was a time when I was a bit twiddler, poking values to io ports, and polling for status returns. But, most people have no need for the intimate details of hardware specs. It's not something that *has* to be out there. More importantly, if driver level programming is your thing, get out where you can exercise it.
Admiral Rickover, mastermind behind the US nuclear submarine program, used to require the head engineers for a sub to go on it's first dive. Same theory behind QA. If their life *is* put on the line, they'll be a little more careful.