"You're making the somewhat dangerous assumption that a general policy of "one sizs fits all" is what the Linux user base both wants and needs - this is entirely incorrect."
A one-size-fits-all solution is an absolute requirement if Linux is to gain any mainstream popularity. A balkanization of ways to do things is inherently harmful to a market with non-experts - e.g, the mainstream public. So, is one area where Windows gets it almost exactly right - compared to most Linux distros, installing software on Windows is a breeze. As I have previously commented here on slashdot, I think Ubuntu's decision to remove the compiler was at the same time both shocking and a huge step in the right direction towards more usability. (See my comment and subsequent reply for further explanation). In fact, if I had to pick the 3 things holding Linux back from becoming mainstream, I'd say it would be the inferior usability vis-a-vis Windows (especially where package management systems are concerned), lack of support for.doc files (OpenOffice is getting there, but is not there yet), and lack of drivers for cutting edge hardware.
Problems 2 and 3 are distro-neutral (a solution to those problems would carry over to all distros equally) So, I think ultimately if any distribution of Linux is to succeed in becoming mainstream, it will be the one that makes the correct decisions where usability is concerned - especially package management systems. And if I had to place a wager today, I'd say Ubuntu, because aside from some irritating initial configuration issues, I think their package management system is the closest to Windows in terms of ease-of-use (They took a hard-line with their default system configuration excludes packages containing non-free software; a case of deferring to the philisophical rather than usability concerns).
Assume this prediction comes to pass - that one distro 'gets it right' and goes mainstream. I think the effect on other distros would be mixed. Manufacturers would support hardware for the one popular distribution, so other distributions would benefit where drivers are concerned. Ditto for open-source apps (like openoffice) that would also become mainstream and thus improve through popularity. On the other hand, other distros that do things differently (especially Gentoo) would immediately become niche markets with the Linux community - the same status BSD now has within the OpenSource community. (In a word - living dinosaurs).
(Preface - My research group specializes in parallel computing) There are classes of problems so computationally intensive that the computers that can do them in a reasonable amount of time won't be invented for decades. Almost all of these are simulations of physical reactions (invitro drug simulation, climate simulation, biomolecular engineering sims, physics sims, 'etc). As a general rule, these problems scale weakly (meaning that as you add more computers, you can simulate more datapoints, and get more accurate results). If memory serves, the hardest problem I can recall involved hydrogen fusion simulations, requiring computers 10-1000 times faster than the best in the world today.
He has video of what are presumably illegal acts by anti-G8 demonstrators, which he refuses to turn over. Anybody - member of the old media or not - would be compelled to turn this over. And if they, the old media, don't have a right to withold evidence from a grand jury empaneled to investigate these crimes - why should he?
I'm curious - would it be possible to tweak something like this to do end-to-end encryption? (To make sure certain government agencies with three letter acronyms aren't listening in). Something like fast symmetric key encryption, using Diffie-Hellman key exchange?
If you ship the distro with a compiler, people will continue to require it. The only way to 'get them off the drug', so to speak, is to *force* them to find alternatives, and shipping the distro without a compiler built in (although easily installable with apt-get) is a nice way to do this.
IANAL, but I believe each DMCA complaint must include a statement along the lines of: "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
Using a bot to send out such notices would be dangerous, as any false positives would open the sender up to a countersuit- ala, Michael Crook.
I remember I nearly fell out out of my chair when I found out Ubuntu Dapper didn't come with gcc by default. The idea that Linux would (nay, could) be shipped without gcc was quite shocking. IMHO, where usability is concerned, it's a huge a step in the right direction (by not requiring the end user to compile his own code) but it was shocking nonetheless.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the list is missing John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, the guys who invented the transistor (With their manager, William Shockley, they won the Nobel prize in physics for it).
They are indeed questioning the constitutionality of the law. And, to (roughly) quote Larry Lessig, "In America, the way to ask a legal question is to sue somebody". Passing a state law rejecting the Federal one is just the first stepping stone to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which is really where this question will be authoritatively answered.
Wrong. Impeachment occurs when the US House of Representatives votes to bring about articles of impeachment. Following that, an impeachment trial occurs in the Senate, where a majority vote can cause removal from office.
Clinton was impeached by House Resolution 581 on October 8, 1999, by a party-line vote of 258 to 163. Clinton was acquitted in the Senate by a vote of 55-45.
In the book 'Everything Bad is Good For You', they mentioned several studies that have come to the same general conclusion - staying mentally active tends to reduce both the incidence and seriousness of mental disease. One nunnery they studied, whose order believes than an idle mind is the devil's playground, the incidence of mental disease was a fraction of the total population, and the overall lifespans were tremendously greater (the two librarians were 97 and 99 years old)
Al Frankin (in Lies and the Lying Liars) said best. He took the 4 most common guests on Brit Hume's show (sorry, but I can't remember exactly who they were). 2 of them were ultra-conservatives and 2 were moderates. So, Frankin pointed out - "Imagine a game of political see-saw, with two people sitting on the extreme right end of the see-saw and two people sitting in the middle. See? That's how Fair and Balanced works on Fox News"
"If major players and decision makers begin reading Slashdot and become sensitive to it, that would be a very positive thing for us all." - actually, they have an even more pressing sensitivity - their responsibility to their corporate shardholers. This deal has turned SUSE developers into pariahs, and I'm sure a great many people are pissed off enough to avoid doing buisness with Novell. Both of these are enough to have a significant impact on Novell's bottom line (or at the very least, I hope to hell they do). This will cause the shareholders to become upset, and hopefully that will cause whatever moron cooked this up to lose his job.
I don't think so. I think Bush was waiting to see how the election turned out - if it weren't too bad for Republicans, he would keep Rummy. If they went otherwise, hee'd ditch Rummy. So it wasn't a lie so much as a calculated risk.
Oh, it's better than that. Bush said last week that no matter what happens, Rumsfeld would stay on until the end of his term (in 2008). Today was a huge flip-flop.
I happened to catch Fox News about 5 minutes before Bush's announcement began. They showed one of teh Fox News corrospondents standing outside the White House, talking about the impending announcement. If you listened really carefully, you could hear people in the background chanting "Na-na-nahh-na, na-na-nahh-na, hey, hey, hey...goodbye"
"If Jimmy Wales wasn't the chairperson, would Wikipedia have walked away from a $100 Million deal with AOL? Who knows, but I would guess they'd think longer about the offer."
There's been a lot if idle speculation floating around about deals in the offing related to Wikipedia. Let me be clear - there is no such deal. There never was any such deal.
There aren't many Wikipedia related things I don't know about (I'm a Wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and bureacrat, featured article director, and I'm on the Wikimedia Foundation's Press Committee), and this is the first time I've ever heard of this contest. I think it's fair to say it's been relatively low-profile.
The United States in unique in that the law explicitely states that the EM spectrum is the property of the American public. (This has been the law for almost a century, infact -- I think it goes all the way back to the 1912 Radio Act) Because it is a shared resource, however, the government issues licenses to use the spectrum. However, "moneyed interests" (corporations - especially clearchannel) dominate the landscape and the FCC does whatever the want, typically shafting the consumer in te process. The Communications Act of 1996 exacerbated the situation, because it removed rules governing how much of the spectrum one company could gobble up. So if these radio pirates are going to challenge the extremely corrupt FCC establishment, I say more power to them.
I had a similiar experience at my university. I came in with 59 AP credits and got credit for all of them; all but 3 of them in classes that actually helped towards graduation. However, owing to the inflexibility of my major (computer engineering - meaning that, unlike in humanities, each course is a direct prequisite for the next year) and my department (required courses were offered once per year) meant that scheduling was a NIGHTMARE.
In the end, however, I was able to make it all work out. I graduated in 3 years (if I had taken winter or summer courses, I would have shaved between 1/2 and 1 1/2 years off that). I'm now a third year grad student at that school, and I have absolutely no complaints. I learned a great deal, I didn't massively overload on credits (I took 15 to 17 every semester I was there) and saved a bundle by not having to pay for the fourth year.
Slashdot Mirror
"You're making the somewhat dangerous assumption that a general policy of "one sizs fits all" is what the Linux user base both wants and needs - this is entirely incorrect."
.doc files (OpenOffice is getting there, but is not there yet), and lack of drivers for cutting edge hardware.
A one-size-fits-all solution is an absolute requirement if Linux is to gain any mainstream popularity. A balkanization of ways to do things is inherently harmful to a market with non-experts - e.g, the mainstream public. So, is one area where Windows gets it almost exactly right - compared to most Linux distros, installing software on Windows is a breeze. As I have previously commented here on slashdot, I think Ubuntu's decision to remove the compiler was at the same time both shocking and a huge step in the right direction towards more usability. (See my comment and subsequent reply for further explanation). In fact, if I had to pick the 3 things holding Linux back from becoming mainstream, I'd say it would be the inferior usability vis-a-vis Windows (especially where package management systems are concerned), lack of support for
Problems 2 and 3 are distro-neutral (a solution to those problems would carry over to all distros equally) So, I think ultimately if any distribution of Linux is to succeed in becoming mainstream, it will be the one that makes the correct decisions where usability is concerned - especially package management systems. And if I had to place a wager today, I'd say Ubuntu, because aside from some irritating initial configuration issues, I think their package management system is the closest to Windows in terms of ease-of-use (They took a hard-line with their default system configuration excludes packages containing non-free software; a case of deferring to the philisophical rather than usability concerns).
Assume this prediction comes to pass - that one distro 'gets it right' and goes mainstream. I think the effect on other distros would be mixed. Manufacturers would support hardware for the one popular distribution, so other distributions would benefit where drivers are concerned. Ditto for open-source apps (like openoffice) that would also become mainstream and thus improve through popularity. On the other hand, other distros that do things differently (especially Gentoo) would immediately become niche markets with the Linux community - the same status BSD now has within the OpenSource community. (In a word - living dinosaurs).
(Preface - My research group specializes in parallel computing) There are classes of problems so computationally intensive that the computers that can do them in a reasonable amount of time won't be invented for decades. Almost all of these are simulations of physical reactions (invitro drug simulation, climate simulation, biomolecular engineering sims, physics sims, 'etc). As a general rule, these problems scale weakly (meaning that as you add more computers, you can simulate more datapoints, and get more accurate results). If memory serves, the hardest problem I can recall involved hydrogen fusion simulations, requiring computers 10-1000 times faster than the best in the world today.
He has video of what are presumably illegal acts by anti-G8 demonstrators, which he refuses to turn over. Anybody - member of the old media or not - would be compelled to turn this over. And if they, the old media, don't have a right to withold evidence from a grand jury empaneled to investigate these crimes - why should he?
I'm curious - would it be possible to tweak something like this to do end-to-end encryption? (To make sure certain government agencies with three letter acronyms aren't listening in). Something like fast symmetric key encryption, using Diffie-Hellman key exchange?
If you ship the distro with a compiler, people will continue to require it. The only way to 'get them off the drug', so to speak, is to *force* them to find alternatives, and shipping the distro without a compiler built in (although easily installable with apt-get) is a nice way to do this.
IANAL, but I believe each DMCA complaint must include a statement along the lines of: "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
Using a bot to send out such notices would be dangerous, as any false positives would open the sender up to a countersuit- ala, Michael Crook.
I remember I nearly fell out out of my chair when I found out Ubuntu Dapper didn't come with gcc by default. The idea that Linux would (nay, could) be shipped without gcc was quite shocking. IMHO, where usability is concerned, it's a huge a step in the right direction (by not requiring the end user to compile his own code) but it was shocking nonetheless.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the list is missing John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, the guys who invented the transistor (With their manager, William Shockley, they won the Nobel prize in physics for it).
They are indeed questioning the constitutionality of the law. And, to (roughly) quote Larry Lessig, "In America, the way to ask a legal question is to sue somebody". Passing a state law rejecting the Federal one is just the first stepping stone to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which is really where this question will be authoritatively answered.
"Clinton was never impeached"
Wrong. Impeachment occurs when the US House of Representatives votes to bring about articles of impeachment. Following that, an impeachment trial occurs in the Senate, where a majority vote can cause removal from office.
Clinton was impeached by House Resolution 581 on October 8, 1999, by a party-line vote of 258 to 163. Clinton was acquitted in the Senate by a vote of 55-45.
In the book 'Everything Bad is Good For You', they mentioned several studies that have come to the same general conclusion - staying mentally active tends to reduce both the incidence and seriousness of mental disease. One nunnery they studied, whose order believes than an idle mind is the devil's playground, the incidence of mental disease was a fraction of the total population, and the overall lifespans were tremendously greater (the two librarians were 97 and 99 years old)
Al Frankin (in Lies and the Lying Liars) said best. He took the 4 most common guests on Brit Hume's show (sorry, but I can't remember exactly who they were). 2 of them were ultra-conservatives and 2 were moderates. So, Frankin pointed out - "Imagine a game of political see-saw, with two people sitting on the extreme right end of the see-saw and two people sitting in the middle. See? That's how Fair and Balanced works on Fox News"
Given a number, that function calculates the inverse of the square root - which, according to TFA, is very common in graphics applications.
Hilarious! Oh my lord, you just made my day.
"If major players and decision makers begin reading Slashdot and become sensitive to it, that would be a very positive thing for us all." - actually, they have an even more pressing sensitivity - their responsibility to their corporate shardholers. This deal has turned SUSE developers into pariahs, and I'm sure a great many people are pissed off enough to avoid doing buisness with Novell. Both of these are enough to have a significant impact on Novell's bottom line (or at the very least, I hope to hell they do). This will cause the shareholders to become upset, and hopefully that will cause whatever moron cooked this up to lose his job.
I don't think so. I think Bush was waiting to see how the election turned out - if it weren't too bad for Republicans, he would keep Rummy. If they went otherwise, hee'd ditch Rummy. So it wasn't a lie so much as a calculated risk.
Oh, it's better than that. Bush said last week that no matter what happens, Rumsfeld would stay on until the end of his term (in 2008). Today was a huge flip-flop.
I happened to catch Fox News about 5 minutes before Bush's announcement began. They showed one of teh Fox News corrospondents standing outside the White House, talking about the impending announcement. If you listened really carefully, you could hear people in the background chanting "Na-na-nahh-na, na-na-nahh-na, hey, hey, hey...goodbye"
Jimbo's keeps the Foundation's press committee very well informed as to whom he is in discussions with, any deals that are in the works, 'etc.
"If Jimmy Wales wasn't the chairperson, would Wikipedia have walked away from a $100 Million deal with AOL? Who knows, but I would guess they'd think longer about the offer."
There's been a lot if idle speculation floating around about deals in the offing related to Wikipedia. Let me be clear - there is no such deal. There never was any such deal.
Why use Wikipedia then? There must be dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of free sources of regular text out there.
There aren't many Wikipedia related things I don't know about (I'm a Wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and bureacrat, featured article director, and I'm on the Wikimedia Foundation's Press Committee), and this is the first time I've ever heard of this contest. I think it's fair to say it's been relatively low-profile.
Clearly not true. The script for Wikipedia, the movie is coming along great
The United States in unique in that the law explicitely states that the EM spectrum is the property of the American public. (This has been the law for almost a century, infact -- I think it goes all the way back to the 1912 Radio Act) Because it is a shared resource, however, the government issues licenses to use the spectrum. However, "moneyed interests" (corporations - especially clearchannel) dominate the landscape and the FCC does whatever the want, typically shafting the consumer in te process. The Communications Act of 1996 exacerbated the situation, because it removed rules governing how much of the spectrum one company could gobble up. So if these radio pirates are going to challenge the extremely corrupt FCC establishment, I say more power to them.
I had a similiar experience at my university. I came in with 59 AP credits and got credit for all of them; all but 3 of them in classes that actually helped towards graduation. However, owing to the inflexibility of my major (computer engineering - meaning that, unlike in humanities, each course is a direct prequisite for the next year) and my department (required courses were offered once per year) meant that scheduling was a NIGHTMARE.
In the end, however, I was able to make it all work out. I graduated in 3 years (if I had taken winter or summer courses, I would have shaved between 1/2 and 1 1/2 years off that). I'm now a third year grad student at that school, and I have absolutely no complaints. I learned a great deal, I didn't massively overload on credits (I took 15 to 17 every semester I was there) and saved a bundle by not having to pay for the fourth year.