Not only it ran Linux and was specifically designed for one particular use (schoolkid's computer), in the hands of geeks it also works just fine with Xubuntu (I have one, and I have ported Hardy and Intrepid to it).
It also happens to be the lowest hardware configuration of all netbooks ever produced.
Yes. Because then no one would be able to charge too much for those treatments, and someone will still provide them, so nothing of value will be lost (yes, I will gb2/b/ in a moment). "Expensive" treatments exist exactly for this reason -- because by depriving the poor providers can jack up the prices for the rich.
I thought the whole point of insurance was to protect me if something unforseen randomly happened, like getting in a car crash, that would really be a big financial strain.
Or like death, something that certainly will happen. Of course, insurance companies and libertarians may prefer to make sick people pay more, but just as well stores would prefer to get customers' money without giving them products. The world does not exist to provide them revenue, they exist to serve sick people.
That would throw too many programmers out of work.
Good!
Besides, the whole point of insurance is about risk management. If an insurance cannot manage the risk, it cannot operate as a company. Quite frankly the thing to do would be to deregulate all the coverage provided by insurance and get rid of all the various state mandates that make it more expensive.
The point of insurance is to keep people healthy. If society can't provide that with the current system, it has to decrease the (now exorbitant) prices until people, taken as a whole, can pay for it. Insurance is merely an intermediate in this process -- if it can't operate with a profit, make it a nonprofit.
The whole point of insurance is to have other people pay for your problems, you dumbass. If insurance doesn't do that, it is a scam that takes everyone's money and does not help people when they need it.
Yesss! Because the best way to repair the economy is to give more money to the rich instead of fixing structural problems that made those people rich in the first place.
Of three procedures that can improve quality of code -- writing, reviews and testing -- the first one is far more reliable than the rest. There is only one way to find a bug that already exists in the program in testing -- by an accident that it happens to be covered by a test case. What usually means, tests are written by a more intelligent person than the developer (and then why isn't that person a developer in the first place?). Reviews are better, however they rely on reviewer's ability to not only recognize what developer is trying to do but also to find situations where this intention does not match what the code actually does. What often is even more difficult.
I do expect many Microsoft shops to do more RIAs with Silverlight now that it's more capable and to create lightweight browser/desktop Silverlight 3 applications where they might have fashioned heavier-weight Windows Forms or WPF client applications," Heller says.
In other words, loyal Microsoft followers will use new Microsoft tool that produces Windows-only GUI software instead of older Microsoft tools that produces Windows-only GUI software.
Re:The Fundamental Fatal Flaw Of Desktop Linux
on
KDE 4.2.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
If you use an app that (quite understandably) tries to allocate two channels since it uses two channels, you have to write a script that maps two channels to the two channels you actually have in your two channel audio card!
Or you can read documentation and discover that channels are configurable in userspace. ALSA kernel interface is specifically designed to be close to hardware, so there will be more flexibility in userspace.
X.. well, for starters, run a minimal X app in valgrind. There's an hour of entrainment right there.
X libraries are not designed to work around false positives in Valgrind. Valgrind also does not notice X resources leakage, so it's not like it is supposed to be used to analyze X clients in the first place.
The architecture is already broken in spirit because of the frequent use of shared memory access extensions and OpenGL which essentially sidesteps the original command buffer oriented design of X.
Except, of course, shared memory access is an optional low-level protocol implementation feature. OpenGL works just fine without it, just like each and every other X component and extension. This can be seen when OpenGL application is running on a remote host.
So, while you think it's flexible, in practice it's just a very awkward frame-buffer.
And if you treat it as a "frame buffer" only, you obviously know nothing about X.
And again, the API is a heart breaker. It starts out easy enough until you get to the fonts and the colors and so on. Fonts by the way is one of those problems that keep getting "fixed" over and over.
Except, of course, font handling in X server is now a fallback mechanism, replaced with client-side rendering. You would have some kind of a point if you mentioned that some application (written by Windows programmers) make idiotic assumptions about screen resolution and availability of particular, usually proprietary, fonts, causing unexpected results on any computer other than developer's desktop. And I would have a long and precise refutation of your claim that it is a flaw of the system. However knowing nothing about this, you can only spew bullshit picked up in a few Google queries.
Trying to write multi-media apps for Linux is disheartening. It's not necessarily easy on the other platforms, but I have completed several audio/video processing applications on windows (what I used to do for a living). In trying to do similar things for Linux, I always find myself in the X11/ALSA quagmire. I am very impressed with apps like Renoise that seem to actually make it work.
So in reality your only "problem" is that you can't write Linux multimedia application using the same broken and idiotic model you are accustomed to on Windows. Assuming that you tried at all.
You presumably missed Economics 101, as Americans would probably call it. I'm not an expert, but I'll do my best.
Americans call a lot of things funny names. The rest of the world calls it propaganda.
Prices in an 'idealized' free-market economy are set by the (physical, not money) costs and benefits to those people involved in the transaction, directly or indirectly (a supplier's supplier, etc). These private benefits are called internal costs. Costs on third parties - pollution, noise, aesthetics, congestion, etc - are external costs (or benefits) and are not taken in to account because the participants don't care about them. A less idealized one will have monopolies, information asymmetries and so on, but that doesn't take external costs in to account, other than by chance. This distorts economic decision making and leads the economy to make sub-optimal choices (in a 'resources in':'economic welfare out' sense). Government environmental (and other) regulation and taxes attempt to distort them back the other way.
The problem is, people who want to decrease energy usage are not motivated by any kind of "costs". The actual motivation is to improve the lives of current and future generations of humans -- all humans. "Costs" are only a mechanism that is used to motivate people who don't understand anything else (because their heads are full of American ideology).
That's unlikely, even if we pretend everyone's needs are the same and the benefits gained from all modes of transport are equal. The level of environmental protection is irrelevant unless it's so high it prevents the optimal choice: the best choice is almost certainly permitted by those rules, it's just not chosen by the many individuals involved because external costs are not fully taken in to account in their choices.
According to the same American ideology, "The best choice" for each and every person is to become the supreme and absolute ruler of the Universe with unlimited resources at his disposal. The rest of the world unfortunately hinders this, causing the whole population of Earth to participate in the epic struggle for world domination, and since most humans' means are limited, it merely produces a society full of crooks and assholes.
Sane people, of course, know that this is a load of bullshit -- people should not seek things that are "optimal" for themselves at the expense of everyone else because this way they will have to deal with more enemies than they can possibly defeat, and the end result most likely will be disastrous (case in point -- current economic crisis caused by some Americans trying to swindle the whole world with their Ponzi scheme).
However this only becomes a matter of "costs" when society is willing to force those "costs" on people who cause them. Until then everyone infected with "American dream" will act like a total dipshit at every opportunity that is given to him -- including choosing the above mentioned mode of transportation as a relatively mild example.
Prices of resources are set by people based on idea of those resources' availability, and impact of their usage on the rest of society. It's obvious that with CURRENT availability of resources in US and CURRENT level of environmental protection, the all-around best mode of transportation is Ford Expedition carrying one driver. The problem is, if you try to scale this to the whole society, you will choke everyone or run out of oil long before you will run out of hard drives in Federal Reserve to keep the records of the issued credit.
Since when has demonstrable stupidity kept an idea from being spread?
Since forever?
But, now, do you at least see my point that "dismissing" other people's ideas as "worthless" and "stupid" isn't going to convince them? In fact, it's not really going to do anything except rally people who already agree with you, and anger those who don't.
Why would I want to convince stupid people? I would rather make sure that they won't convince others who are ignorant but not as stupid as they are.
And besides that, dismissing other people's ideas as worthless and stupid without addressing them with a sensible argument is just as irrational as "bible thumping".
Some politically correct Americans forgot that it's perfectly OK to have enemies. You don't even need government to assign them to you.
What I'm saying is, in that argument, you would each be arguing from a position of trying to protect something. It's possible that you're trying to protect your ego as much as the religious opposition might be trying to protect theirs.
And if I don't, where does it place your strawman argument?
Or possibly you're trying to protect your sense of "rational thought"
I merely demand them to apply scientific method to discussions about science. It's not my idea, and if they can't do that much, they should not pretend that their position has any kind of merit.
and they're trying to protect their ideas of "stable morality".
At which point I have no problem dismissing their words as worthless bible-thumping, and switching to a more important goal -- demonstrating their stupidity, so they won't be able to spread it to other people.
I don't believe the gp was so long that you had to reply to the first sentence and completely ignore the rest. Did you miss the whole part about the media's responsibility to be accurate?
This whole discussion is based on the premise that media can not possibly be accurate because it addresses people who can not understand essential details of the issues being described.
Re:The Fundamental Fatal Flaw Of Desktop Linux
on
KDE 4.2.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
I am a 9 year Linux user, and developer, which is why I feel like I do about those APIs.
Yeah, right.
I these things are "standard talking points" in any way, it's because they are true.
They would be -- if nothing changed in Linux over the last 15 years.
Seriously, why the hell do you think people are wrapping the same crap over and over? The work is being re-done because the problem re-surfaces.
What problem? The fact that original ideas behind X11 were demonstrated to be absolutely right, and all attempts to squeeze a little more performance at the cost of poorly designed infrastructure ended up more resource-consuming and still less flexible? The fact that ALSA provides a nice, flexible interface to audio devices without stuffing massive amounts of code into kernel drivers?
If you can somehow bring the argument around to an admission that "evolution has happened" is not equivalent to "God doesn't exist," then suddenly you'll find that a lot of religious people are more open to evolution as a concept.
That does not make their arguments valid, it merely explains why they are clinging to invalid arguments.
And, of course, that does not make their belief in God any less of a dangerous superstition.
Re:The Fundamental Fatal Flaw Of Desktop Linux
on
KDE 4.2.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
Desktop Linux's problems are: * Audio APIs and drivers. * Graphics card drivers, and X11.
Microsoft marketdroids' standard talking points detected.
The theme here is is obscure 80's style C APIs
Do you, by any chance, know, where FindFirstFile() and FindNextFile() in your beloved Windows come from?
CP/M. And it was a stupid design in 80's just like it's a stupid design now.
Yeah, when the article is about tits telling other tits to GTFO. Not to mention the fact that research did not involve female tits (there are no girls...) thus leaving its most important question unanswered.
So if the media will publish nothing but conspiracy theories, it will perfectly perform it function -- distracting the public from real problems and creating distrust for all speech by polluting it to the level that it becomes unusable.
I admit it is more difficult in politics, economics and so on than in the hard sciences, but it should still be possible for a discerning citizen to root out the bullshit.
The problem is, politics and economics describe and prescribe how people are supposed to behave based on their knowledge of politics and economics. In other words, nothing but circular reasoning.
Without politicians people would not know that they have to hate those who support some but not other ideologies other than their own. Without economists most people would not even believe that they have to be greedy and selfish (if it was indeed "natural", people would not have to specially describe it as being opposed to "generous" and "altruistic" -- "natural" behavior would be in the middle of perceived scale).
Slashdot Mirror
THE first netbook was OLPC XO.
Not only it ran Linux and was specifically designed for one particular use (schoolkid's computer), in the hands of geeks it also works just fine with Xubuntu (I have one, and I have ported Hardy and Intrepid to it).
It also happens to be the lowest hardware configuration of all netbooks ever produced.
Yes. Because then no one would be able to charge too much for those treatments, and someone will still provide them, so nothing of value will be lost (yes, I will gb2/b/ in a moment). "Expensive" treatments exist exactly for this reason -- because by depriving the poor providers can jack up the prices for the rich.
I thought the whole point of insurance was to protect me if something unforseen randomly happened, like getting in a car crash, that would really be a big financial strain.
Or like death, something that certainly will happen. Of course, insurance companies and libertarians may prefer to make sick people pay more, but just as well stores would prefer to get customers' money without giving them products. The world does not exist to provide them revenue, they exist to serve sick people.
it will be expensive, very expensive.
No, it won't be. The cost of healthcare will be low if there won't be health insurance industry to throw money around.
That would throw too many programmers out of work.
Good!
Besides, the whole point of insurance is about risk management. If an insurance cannot manage the risk, it cannot operate as a company. Quite frankly the thing to do would be to deregulate all the coverage provided by insurance and get rid of all the various state mandates that make it more expensive.
The point of insurance is to keep people healthy. If society can't provide that with the current system, it has to decrease the (now exorbitant) prices until people, taken as a whole, can pay for it. Insurance is merely an intermediate in this process -- if it can't operate with a profit, make it a nonprofit.
The whole point of insurance is to have other people pay for your problems, you dumbass. If insurance doesn't do that, it is a scam that takes everyone's money and does not help people when they need it.
Yesss! Because the best way to repair the economy is to give more money to the rich instead of fixing structural problems that made those people rich in the first place.
The problem with Margaret Thatcher is that she is always wrong.
Of three procedures that can improve quality of code -- writing, reviews and testing -- the first one is far more reliable than the rest. There is only one way to find a bug that already exists in the program in testing -- by an accident that it happens to be covered by a test case. What usually means, tests are written by a more intelligent person than the developer (and then why isn't that person a developer in the first place?). Reviews are better, however they rely on reviewer's ability to not only recognize what developer is trying to do but also to find situations where this intention does not match what the code actually does. What often is even more difficult.
I herd, you like volcanoes...
(yes, I realize that now I am supposed to gb2/b/ ).
I do expect many Microsoft shops to do more RIAs with Silverlight now that it's more capable and to create lightweight browser/desktop Silverlight 3 applications where they might have fashioned heavier-weight Windows Forms or WPF client applications," Heller says.
In other words, loyal Microsoft followers will use new Microsoft tool that produces Windows-only GUI software instead of older Microsoft tools that produces Windows-only GUI software.
If you use an app that (quite understandably) tries to allocate two channels since it uses two channels, you have to write a script that maps two channels to the two channels you actually have in your two channel audio card!
Or you can read documentation and discover that channels are configurable in userspace. ALSA kernel interface is specifically designed to be close to hardware, so there will be more flexibility in userspace.
X.. well, for starters, run a minimal X app in valgrind. There's an hour of entrainment right there.
X libraries are not designed to work around false positives in Valgrind.
Valgrind also does not notice X resources leakage, so it's not like it is supposed to be used to analyze X clients in the first place.
The architecture is already broken in spirit because of the frequent use of shared memory access extensions and OpenGL which essentially sidesteps the original command buffer oriented design of X.
Except, of course, shared memory access is an optional low-level protocol implementation feature. OpenGL works just fine without it, just like each and every other X component and extension. This can be seen when OpenGL application is running on a remote host.
So, while you think it's flexible, in practice it's just a very awkward frame-buffer.
And if you treat it as a "frame buffer" only, you obviously know nothing about X.
And again, the API is a heart breaker. It starts out easy enough until you get to the fonts and the colors and so on.
Fonts by the way is one of those problems that keep getting "fixed" over and over.
Except, of course, font handling in X server is now a fallback mechanism, replaced with client-side rendering. You would have some kind of a point if you mentioned that some application (written by Windows programmers) make idiotic assumptions about screen resolution and availability of particular, usually proprietary, fonts, causing unexpected results on any computer other than developer's desktop. And I would have a long and precise refutation of your claim that it is a flaw of the system. However knowing nothing about this, you can only spew bullshit picked up in a few Google queries.
Trying to write multi-media apps for Linux is disheartening. It's not necessarily easy on the other platforms, but I have completed several audio/video processing applications on windows (what I used to do for a living).
In trying to do similar things for Linux, I always find myself in the X11/ALSA quagmire. I am very impressed with apps like Renoise that seem to actually make it work.
So in reality your only "problem" is that you can't write Linux multimedia application using the same broken and idiotic model you are accustomed to on Windows. Assuming that you tried at all.
You presumably missed Economics 101, as Americans would probably call it. I'm not an expert, but I'll do my best.
Americans call a lot of things funny names. The rest of the world calls it propaganda.
Prices in an 'idealized' free-market economy are set by the (physical, not money) costs and benefits to those people involved in the transaction, directly or indirectly (a supplier's supplier, etc). These private benefits are called internal costs. Costs on third parties - pollution, noise, aesthetics, congestion, etc - are external costs (or benefits) and are not taken in to account because the participants don't care about them. A less idealized one will have monopolies, information asymmetries and so on, but that doesn't take external costs in to account, other than by chance. This distorts economic decision making and leads the economy to make sub-optimal choices (in a 'resources in':'economic welfare out' sense). Government environmental (and other) regulation and taxes attempt to distort them back the other way.
The problem is, people who want to decrease energy usage are not motivated by any kind of "costs". The actual motivation is to improve the lives of current and future generations of humans -- all humans. "Costs" are only a mechanism that is used to motivate people who don't understand anything else (because their heads are full of American ideology).
That's unlikely, even if we pretend everyone's needs are the same and the benefits gained from all modes of transport are equal. The level of environmental protection is irrelevant unless it's so high it prevents the optimal choice: the best choice is almost certainly permitted by those rules, it's just not chosen by the many individuals involved because external costs are not fully taken in to account in their choices.
According to the same American ideology, "The best choice" for each and every person is to become the supreme and absolute ruler of the Universe with unlimited resources at his disposal. The rest of the world unfortunately hinders this, causing the whole population of Earth to participate in the epic struggle for world domination, and since most humans' means are limited, it merely produces a society full of crooks and assholes.
Sane people, of course, know that this is a load of bullshit -- people should not seek things that are "optimal" for themselves at the expense of everyone else because this way they will have to deal with more enemies than they can possibly defeat, and the end result most likely will be disastrous (case in point -- current economic crisis caused by some Americans trying to swindle the whole world with their Ponzi scheme).
However this only becomes a matter of "costs" when society is willing to force those "costs" on people who cause them. Until then everyone infected with "American dream" will act like a total dipshit at every opportunity that is given to him -- including choosing the above mentioned mode of transportation as a relatively mild example.
Wouldn't it make more sense to change it to "Ninja"?
Money?
Prices of resources are set by people based on idea of those resources' availability, and impact of their usage on the rest of society. It's obvious that with CURRENT availability of resources in US and CURRENT level of environmental protection, the all-around best mode of transportation is Ford Expedition carrying one driver. The problem is, if you try to scale this to the whole society, you will choke everyone or run out of oil long before you will run out of hard drives in Federal Reserve to keep the records of the issued credit.
Since when has demonstrable stupidity kept an idea from being spread?
Since forever?
But, now, do you at least see my point that "dismissing" other people's ideas as "worthless" and "stupid" isn't going to convince them? In fact, it's not really going to do anything except rally people who already agree with you, and anger those who don't.
Why would I want to convince stupid people? I would rather make sure that they won't convince others who are ignorant but not as stupid as they are.
And besides that, dismissing other people's ideas as worthless and stupid without addressing them with a sensible argument is just as irrational as "bible thumping".
Some politically correct Americans forgot that it's perfectly OK to have enemies. You don't even need government to assign them to you.
What I'm saying is, in that argument, you would each be arguing from a position of trying to protect something. It's possible that you're trying to protect your ego as much as the religious opposition might be trying to protect theirs.
And if I don't, where does it place your strawman argument?
Or possibly you're trying to protect your sense of "rational thought"
I merely demand them to apply scientific method to discussions about science. It's not my idea, and if they can't do that much, they should not pretend that their position has any kind of merit.
and they're trying to protect their ideas of "stable morality".
At which point I have no problem dismissing their words as worthless bible-thumping, and switching to a more important goal -- demonstrating their stupidity, so they won't be able to spread it to other people.
I don't believe the gp was so long that you had to reply to the first sentence and completely ignore the rest. Did you miss the whole part about the media's responsibility to be accurate?
This whole discussion is based on the premise that media can not possibly be accurate because it addresses people who can not understand essential details of the issues being described.
I am a 9 year Linux user, and developer, which is why I feel like I do about those APIs.
Yeah, right.
I these things are "standard talking points" in any way, it's because they are true.
They would be -- if nothing changed in Linux over the last 15 years.
Seriously, why the hell do you think people are wrapping the same crap over and over? The work is being re-done because the problem re-surfaces.
What problem? The fact that original ideas behind X11 were demonstrated to be absolutely right, and all attempts to squeeze a little more performance at the cost of poorly designed infrastructure ended up more resource-consuming and still less flexible? The fact that ALSA provides a nice, flexible interface to audio devices without stuffing massive amounts of code into kernel drivers?
It's "Academy [of Sciences] town" in Russian.
If you can somehow bring the argument around to an admission that "evolution has happened" is not equivalent to "God doesn't exist," then suddenly you'll find that a lot of religious people are more open to evolution as a concept.
That does not make their arguments valid, it merely explains why they are clinging to invalid arguments.
And, of course, that does not make their belief in God any less of a dangerous superstition.
Desktop Linux's problems are:
* Audio APIs and drivers.
* Graphics card drivers, and X11.
Microsoft marketdroids' standard talking points detected.
The theme here is is obscure 80's style C APIs
Do you, by any chance, know, where FindFirstFile() and FindNextFile() in your beloved Windows come from?
CP/M. And it was a stupid design in 80's just like it's a stupid design now.
(Lets act like adults)
Yeah, when the article is about tits telling other tits to GTFO. Not to mention the fact that research did not involve female tits (there are no girls...) thus leaving its most important question unanswered.
Oh, wow.
So if the media will publish nothing but conspiracy theories, it will perfectly perform it function -- distracting the public from real problems and creating distrust for all speech by polluting it to the level that it becomes unusable.
I admit it is more difficult in politics, economics and so on than in the hard sciences, but it should still be possible for a discerning citizen to root out the bullshit.
The problem is, politics and economics describe and prescribe how people are supposed to behave based on their knowledge of politics and economics. In other words, nothing but circular reasoning.
Without politicians people would not know that they have to hate those who support some but not other ideologies other than their own. Without economists most people would not even believe that they have to be greedy and selfish (if it was indeed "natural", people would not have to specially describe it as being opposed to "generous" and "altruistic" -- "natural" behavior would be in the middle of perceived scale).