I've never read such a plain dumb reply, it's really amazing... Here are a few pieces:
Meanwhile, an associate of mine asked Richard Stallman, who started with the Mach Kernel, why his GNU team could not build a kernel as fast as Torvalds. Mr. Stallman provided AdTI with a credible, believable set of reasons why building a kernel was not a simple task.
It is not trivial, but neither really that hard. The reason why GNU/Hurd takes so long is that coding micro-kernels is hard (and so said AT in his own replies on this topic). I guess RMS' quote might have been tricked from "building a micro-kernel" to "building a kernel".
But recently in a ZDNet interview last month, Torvalds insisted that he didn't start with Minix, but did get ideas from Unix(7).
Maybe Ken Brown isn't even aware that Minix is a micro-kernel, and thus a completely different architecture from a monolithic kernel. Does he even know the difference ?
Coincidently in a recent interview, Linus decided he was not the inventor of Linux commenting in a ZDNet story, "I'd agree that 'inventor' is not necessarily the right word...(9)"
This is a vocabulary issue. He's obviously not saying he's not the author of Linux, as Brown wants us to extrapolate.
Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry
Didn't he mean that Linux is the cancer of the software industry ? Reminds me from something...
Ken Brown's article is really, really lame, filled with wrong arguments, misquotes and lies. He's really trying to burn the latest tiny pieces of respect someone could hold for him.
shouldn't the lightweight consumer-grade routers (Linksys and such) with NAT be effective as well at blocking this sort of thing?
I don't expect everybody to use NAT. And in my opinion, you should be able to connect a decent computer (read OS) to the Internet without that extra step.
You seem to have misinterpreted what I wrote. Yes, I said you didn't need lethal weapons to mug people here, because most of the citizens don't carry them around either. This does not mean there is a huge crime rate. It is actually pretty low (not enough to my taste, but it never will be, and I'm sure it is lower than in most of the countries in the world already).
So, in a sense, it is indeed safer for the muggers because they probably won't see people defend themselves with weapons that could threaten their lives. But if you think about it, it is safer for everyone. Muggers, alright, but for the rest of the non-criminal population too.
So if we assume that the crime-rate is about the same as the usual mean (although it is very likely to be lower), it is just the same as your city, but without anybody's life being in danger. Or very less likely to be at least.
You are now completely at the mercy of your government
I don't know what you mean by that. If the government want to get money from me, they raise the taxes, that's easier;-)
They do not "forbid me to protect my life either", since my life is not being threatened. Instead, they make sure nobody's is (or, at least, they reduce the risks).
[China] where the government can censor anything it pleases.
Come on. Yes, censorship in China is really extreme. But it is at least equally vicious when you don't see it, and this is what is happening right now in most "civilized" countries (USA being the most common example, but it is not absent from most central european countries either).
Being completely helpless (and forcing others to be)
Most animals on Earth do not carry deadly weapons and yet, they seem to survive. I do not think a gun is a natural componant of one's daily equipment. I'm really worried if you are.
This depends on the environment. If you live in the jungle, you may have to carry a weapon even more powerful than a gun to protect your life from the environment (non-human in this example). Now if you go back to your city, you don't need that weapon anymore. But this does not mean you are helpless ; this is just unneeded.
Guns are not needed where I live. There is no "risk 0" (despite what media try to make you think). But the environment is less violent, less filled with fear and less threatening. It's not Disneyland, but it's relatively safe. Bringing guns there would disrupt that equilibrium : if everyone ("good" and "bad" guys) carry guns, it won't lower the crime-rate, it will just raise the tension.
Can't you accept that there exists places on Earth where guns are unneeded and unwanted ? Isn't it something worth fighting for ? Total peace is an utopia, but not pushing toward peace is the real foolishness.
I do not think "all americans are stupid people because they stick with their guns and we can live without guns". It's all part of the global environment people live in.
However, what is frightening is that it is so deeply anchored in people's mind that they cannot accept that normal people can live without weapons.
Guns are not a normal evolution of a society. They are the mirror of an important socio-psychologic problem (mostly set up by the media and the government, probably not even on purpose ; cf Bowling For Columbine). I really can't see a happy ending to it if people keep pushing toward violence (guns, "holy terrorism war", etc).
A more peaceful atmosphere is not reached thanks to weapons, but rather thanks to the acknowledgment of the problem and a strong wish to solve it.
Go back to school, watch Bowling For Columbine, open your eyes, get a brain. Anything. But don't post such contradictory, slug-IQ-ed comments again. For the sake of humanity.
OS X has all the drivers it needs because hardware manufacturers create the drivers themselves, whereas only a few hardware manufacturers create drivers for linux, although many wonderful hackers have created fully functional drivers. Linux drivers still are almost always at least a few months later than windows and mac drivers.
I still haven't found Mac OS X drivers for my SMC 2835W (802.11g wireless card), whereas it works just fine with GNU/Linux. This might be an exception, but this is a quite popular card.
Personally, I don't like the feeling I get walking in areas where only the criminals have guns.
But you like the feeling you get walking in areas where everyone (criminals, honest people, kids et al) have guns ?
It is very impressive to note the social gap between countries. Here in my country, most criminals don't have guns. They don't need them. I've several friends that have been mugged, but never with a gun. Usually, they would be threatened by a large group of people. In the very worst case, there would be a knife, but this is extreme already.
Why's that ?
Well, you don't need guns to attack people if people don't carry guns themselves, right ? It'd be "overkill" and "illegal", whereas it is not illegal to walk in the city in large groups.
Now this does not solve the problem. People still get mugged. However, there are not more people getting mugged this way. Moreover, I much prefer this situation where there are no guns around at all. Maybe I can be mugged all the same, but at least I don't feel my life threatened. In the worst case, they beat the shit out of me, but there is no gun involved.
In other (supposedly american) replies, people have said that it's all in people's minds, that you are not physically more secure in, say, Paris, than you are in, say, New York. That you only think you are. These people have not understood that this is the whole point.
When people feel safe, they are less nervous, less violent, more secure. Life is better for everyone (even for the muggers?). And the hypothetical violence that might happen at times would not be lethal. People would be pissed off, not dead or wounded.
Guns leads to a violence spiral that make people think guns are needed. They are not. You can walk the street in most of the countries in the world without a gun and not risk being attacked by someone with a gun.
I'd say not only leave London, but move to a region where self-defense isn't a crime.
Excuse me ?
This is the most stupid post I've read in weeks, and I have to reply.
First, I don't know where you have found your statistics, but if you ask anyone in the streets (take someone in Sweden or Italy if you want them to be neutral), they will tell you that they are much more afraid of violence in countries that allow people to carry weapons around (e.g. the USA) than in countries where it is not allowed, no matter what the Official Crime Rate is.
Personnally, I've already walked alone in Paris and in its subway at night. Whereas I would not say I was totally confortable (but even here in Switzerland, you can be aggressed if you are really not lucky), it is nothing compared to the feeling I'd get if I were to walk in streets where half the people would carry guns.
The second thing is, self-defense is not restricted to carrying guns. I'd be interested to know how many times people really defend themselves with their guns (and what is the ratio against "gun accidents" for instance). Plus, if all the "Honest People" carry guns, why wouldn't your aggressor ? Then if both have guns, who wins ? Do you start a duel in the middle of the street ?
There are many different kind of self-defense, and weapons are probably the most stupid one (because violence triggers violence). You can learn how to defend yourself physically (kick the balls, aim at the throat or the eyes, etc). You can carry non-deadly weapons (pepper spray, etc). You can try to always be part of a small group of people. You can run (no, really).
But don't come and tell us that deadly weapons such as guns make for a more secure, less violent city !
And the Linux/Arm one ? And the Linux/alpha one ? etc.
This is the proprietary magic : you just don't have the control or the possibility to see them come unless Macromedia themselves choose to release one.
A simple and good reason not to use neither encourage or support this kind of proprietary, non-standard format.
This is enormous. This is politics going inside the Cannes palmares. A political move to ensure americans will talk about the movie and release it. Not saying that this is not a great movie, I'm very much looking forward to seing it ; but they were fantastic movies featured in Cannes.
This is really an important move from Cannes, the cinema culture, or the society in general.
Even Moore said "Jesus, what have you done ?" to the Jury when he came to receive his prize.
Cannes, the most pedantic cinema club, gave the Palme to a movie that is mostly a work made to make sure Bush won't be president anymore.
This is one of the most important socio-political event this year !
Wow, this is the first time I see a Slashdot news using the right unit, i.e. MiB = Mebibytes = 2^20 bytes = 1 048 576 bytes, as opposed to MB = Megabytes = 10^6 bytes = 1 000 000 bytes.
I am aware of the arguments against goto. I could have easily wrapped the main portion of the code in a loop and then used break and continue when needed.
My programming teacher plainly told me that the less break/continue you use, the better the code. Basically, he argued that if your code is perfectly clean, you don't need them.
At first I was a bit unsure, but after a few lessons, and now after learning functional languages, I see that sometimes clever approaches make for much cleaner code.
There is no "new filesystem". WinFS is an abstraction layer on top of NTFS that will handle some directories like My Documents. It is not a full-fledged filesystem (the FS in WinFS does not stand for "filesystem" but "future storage" IIRC. Yes, this is stupid, and probably a late quickfix, as required by the company customs). And it will not be used for the whole disk, only for user files (multimedia, etc).
I just can't wait to see that ugly mess, supposedly innovative (there have been many smart filesystems before, like BeFS and soon reiser4, implemented in a much lower layer (i.e. more efficient)).
Eh.. IR LEDs.. Most "Night vision" rigs are sensitive to IR/UV. Blind him invisibly.
Great ! You go to the cinema theatre and because of the 1337 spod next to you that tries to blind the night-goggled projectionist with a UV lamp, you get a nice suntan !
What a wonderful way to become a popular (though cinema-obsessed) geek without putting a single toe on the beach !
Same for me (alright, not the MIT, but still the best I could manage and afford), except I bought the Powerbook to run Gentoo GNU/Linux on it. It runs smoothly, and probably more even than on most of the x86 laptops out there. The hardware is great too.
I was actually amazed to see how polished and clean Mac OS X was. As my experience of proprietary desktop OSes was mainly windows, I was suddenly wondering why so many people wouldn't use Mac OS X instead of that old, buggy ms crap. Yes, games, maybe...
I will keep Mac OS X just in case, but GNU/Linux on Apple laptops is definitely a bliss.
Features are one thing. Freedom is another. This is not just evangelisation : Adobe has modified Photoshop so that you cannot work on bank notes. There is nothing that would prevent them from forbidding you to do other things. They control what you can do with the software, that's as simple as that.
This is a matter of choice between features and freedom, but I'll take freedom, thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not trivial, but neither really that hard. The reason why GNU/Hurd takes so long is that coding micro-kernels is hard (and so said AT in his own replies on this topic). I guess RMS' quote might have been tricked from "building a micro-kernel" to "building a kernel".
Maybe Ken Brown isn't even aware that Minix is a micro-kernel, and thus a completely different architecture from a monolithic kernel. Does he even know the difference ?
This is a vocabulary issue. He's obviously not saying he's not the author of Linux, as Brown wants us to extrapolate.
Didn't he mean that Linux is the cancer of the software industry ? Reminds me from something
Ken Brown's article is really, really lame, filled with wrong arguments, misquotes and lies. He's really trying to burn the latest tiny pieces of respect someone could hold for him.
I don't expect everybody to use NAT. And in my opinion, you should be able to connect a decent computer (read OS) to the Internet without that extra step.
Right, as you've lowered the tone I will reply.
;-)
You seem to have misinterpreted what I wrote. Yes, I said you didn't need lethal weapons to mug people here, because most of the citizens don't carry them around either. This does not mean there is a huge crime rate. It is actually pretty low (not enough to my taste, but it never will be, and I'm sure it is lower than in most of the countries in the world already).
So, in a sense, it is indeed safer for the muggers because they probably won't see people defend themselves with weapons that could threaten their lives. But if you think about it, it is safer for everyone. Muggers, alright, but for the rest of the non-criminal population too.
So if we assume that the crime-rate is about the same as the usual mean (although it is very likely to be lower), it is just the same as your city, but without anybody's life being in danger. Or very less likely to be at least.
You are now completely at the mercy of your government
I don't know what you mean by that. If the government want to get money from me, they raise the taxes, that's easier
They do not "forbid me to protect my life either", since my life is not being threatened. Instead, they make sure nobody's is (or, at least, they reduce the risks).
[China] where the government can censor anything it pleases.
Come on. Yes, censorship in China is really extreme. But it is at least equally vicious when you don't see it, and this is what is happening right now in most "civilized" countries (USA being the most common example, but it is not absent from most central european countries either).
Being completely helpless (and forcing others to be)
Most animals on Earth do not carry deadly weapons and yet, they seem to survive. I do not think a gun is a natural componant of one's daily equipment. I'm really worried if you are.
This depends on the environment. If you live in the jungle, you may have to carry a weapon even more powerful than a gun to protect your life from the environment (non-human in this example). Now if you go back to your city, you don't need that weapon anymore. But this does not mean you are helpless ; this is just unneeded.
Guns are not needed where I live. There is no "risk 0" (despite what media try to make you think). But the environment is less violent, less filled with fear and less threatening. It's not Disneyland, but it's relatively safe. Bringing guns there would disrupt that equilibrium : if everyone ("good" and "bad" guys) carry guns, it won't lower the crime-rate, it will just raise the tension.
Can't you accept that there exists places on Earth where guns are unneeded and unwanted ? Isn't it something worth fighting for ? Total peace is an utopia, but not pushing toward peace is the real foolishness.
I do not think "all americans are stupid people because they stick with their guns and we can live without guns". It's all part of the global environment people live in.
However, what is frightening is that it is so deeply anchored in people's mind that they cannot accept that normal people can live without weapons.
Guns are not a normal evolution of a society. They are the mirror of an important socio-psychologic problem (mostly set up by the media and the government, probably not even on purpose ; cf Bowling For Columbine). I really can't see a happy ending to it if people keep pushing toward violence (guns, "holy terrorism war", etc).
A more peaceful atmosphere is not reached thanks to weapons, but rather thanks to the acknowledgment of the problem and a strong wish to solve it.
How pathetic.
Go back to school, watch Bowling For Columbine, open your eyes, get a brain. Anything. But don't post such contradictory, slug-IQ-ed comments again. For the sake of humanity.
Reminds me of something called the Cold War ...
So if I invent a dangerous poison, you would make sure everyone has a bottle of it in its pocket so that we're sure not only "terrorists" have some ?
OS X has all the drivers it needs because hardware manufacturers create the drivers themselves, whereas only a few hardware manufacturers create drivers for linux, although many wonderful hackers have created fully functional drivers. Linux drivers still are almost always at least a few months later than windows and mac drivers.
I still haven't found Mac OS X drivers for my SMC 2835W (802.11g wireless card), whereas it works just fine with GNU/Linux. This might be an exception, but this is a quite popular card.
Personally, I don't like the feeling I get walking in areas where only the criminals have guns.
But you like the feeling you get walking in areas where everyone (criminals, honest people, kids et al) have guns ?
It is very impressive to note the social gap between countries. Here in my country, most criminals don't have guns. They don't need them. I've several friends that have been mugged, but never with a gun. Usually, they would be threatened by a large group of people. In the very worst case, there would be a knife, but this is extreme already.
Why's that ?
Well, you don't need guns to attack people if people don't carry guns themselves, right ? It'd be "overkill" and "illegal", whereas it is not illegal to walk in the city in large groups.
Now this does not solve the problem. People still get mugged. However, there are not more people getting mugged this way. Moreover, I much prefer this situation where there are no guns around at all. Maybe I can be mugged all the same, but at least I don't feel my life threatened. In the worst case, they beat the shit out of me, but there is no gun involved.
In other (supposedly american) replies, people have said that it's all in people's minds, that you are not physically more secure in, say, Paris, than you are in, say, New York. That you only think you are. These people have not understood that this is the whole point.
When people feel safe, they are less nervous, less violent, more secure. Life is better for everyone (even for the muggers?). And the hypothetical violence that might happen at times would not be lethal. People would be pissed off, not dead or wounded.
Guns leads to a violence spiral that make people think guns are needed. They are not. You can walk the street in most of the countries in the world without a gun and not risk being attacked by someone with a gun.
I'd say not only leave London, but move to a region where self-defense isn't a crime.
Excuse me ?
This is the most stupid post I've read in weeks, and I have to reply.
First, I don't know where you have found your statistics, but if you ask anyone in the streets (take someone in Sweden or Italy if you want them to be neutral), they will tell you that they are much more afraid of violence in countries that allow people to carry weapons around (e.g. the USA) than in countries where it is not allowed, no matter what the Official Crime Rate is.
Personnally, I've already walked alone in Paris and in its subway at night. Whereas I would not say I was totally confortable (but even here in Switzerland, you can be aggressed if you are really not lucky), it is nothing compared to the feeling I'd get if I were to walk in streets where half the people would carry guns.
The second thing is, self-defense is not restricted to carrying guns. I'd be interested to know how many times people really defend themselves with their guns (and what is the ratio against "gun accidents" for instance). Plus, if all the "Honest People" carry guns, why wouldn't your aggressor ? Then if both have guns, who wins ? Do you start a duel in the middle of the street ?
There are many different kind of self-defense, and weapons are probably the most stupid one (because violence triggers violence). You can learn how to defend yourself physically (kick the balls, aim at the throat or the eyes, etc). You can carry non-deadly weapons (pepper spray, etc). You can try to always be part of a small group of people. You can run (no, really).
But don't come and tell us that deadly weapons such as guns make for a more secure, less violent city !
And the Linux/Arm one ? And the Linux/alpha one ? etc.
This is the proprietary magic : you just don't have the control or the possibility to see them come unless Macromedia themselves choose to release one.
A simple and good reason not to use neither encourage or support this kind of proprietary, non-standard format.
This is enormous. This is politics going inside the Cannes palmares. A political move to ensure americans will talk about the movie and release it. Not saying that this is not a great movie, I'm very much looking forward to seing it ; but they were fantastic movies featured in Cannes.
This is really an important move from Cannes, the cinema culture, or the society in general.
Even Moore said "Jesus, what have you done ?" to the Jury when he came to receive his prize.
Cannes, the most pedantic cinema club, gave the Palme to a movie that is mostly a work made to make sure Bush won't be president anymore.
This is one of the most important socio-political event this year !
If you don't consider Quantum Physics evil, you've definitely never been in a technical university.
Yes, but does the license allow you to freely change the code to suit your needs (and possibly, to redistribute these modifications) ?
Having the source is not a synonym for Free Software. You may have access to the whole code but no right to do anything with it, let alone modify it.
Wow, this is the first time I see a Slashdot news using the right unit, i.e. MiB = Mebibytes = 2^20 bytes = 1 048 576 bytes, as opposed to MB = Megabytes = 10^6 bytes = 1 000 000 bytes.
Congrats !
My programming teacher plainly told me that the less break/continue you use, the better the code. Basically, he argued that if your code is perfectly clean, you don't need them.
At first I was a bit unsure, but after a few lessons, and now after learning functional languages, I see that sometimes clever approaches make for much cleaner code.
There is no "new filesystem". WinFS is an abstraction layer on top of NTFS that will handle some directories like My Documents. It is not a full-fledged filesystem (the FS in WinFS does not stand for "filesystem" but "future storage" IIRC. Yes, this is stupid, and probably a late quickfix, as required by the company customs). And it will not be used for the whole disk, only for user files (multimedia, etc).
I just can't wait to see that ugly mess, supposedly innovative (there have been many smart filesystems before, like BeFS and soon reiser4, implemented in a much lower layer (i.e. more efficient)).
Too bad the fun is not gonna begin before 2006.
Looking at the website, I would say they were not aware of that.
Eh.. IR LEDs.. Most "Night vision" rigs are sensitive to IR/UV. Blind him invisibly.
Great ! You go to the cinema theatre and because of the 1337 spod next to you that tries to blind the night-goggled projectionist with a UV lamp, you get a nice suntan !
What a wonderful way to become a popular (though cinema-obsessed) geek without putting a single toe on the beach !
MIST : May I Save This ?
Same for me (alright, not the MIT, but still the best I could manage and afford), except I bought the Powerbook to run Gentoo GNU/Linux on it. It runs smoothly, and probably more even than on most of the x86 laptops out there. The hardware is great too.
...
I was actually amazed to see how polished and clean Mac OS X was. As my experience of proprietary desktop OSes was mainly windows, I was suddenly wondering why so many people wouldn't use Mac OS X instead of that old, buggy ms crap. Yes, games, maybe
I will keep Mac OS X just in case, but GNU/Linux on Apple laptops is definitely a bliss.
Features are one thing. Freedom is another. This is not just evangelisation : Adobe has modified Photoshop so that you cannot work on bank notes. There is nothing that would prevent them from forbidding you to do other things. They control what you can do with the software, that's as simple as that.
This is a matter of choice between features and freedom, but I'll take freedom, thank you.
I'm expected to pay for everything
You aren't.
That's the whole point of Free Software.
Maybe Lucas has lost his Joseph Campbell book ?
Dan Simmon's Hyperion (+Endymion, though I've only read Hyperion yet) series is quite deep and interesting. Check it out !
It will first be called Phoenix Linux (and you know the rest ...)
What do you mean, (Score:3, Interesting) ? ...
I'd have modded it +1 Funny
Lucky nobody modded it +1 Informative though.