A factor in Windows dominance is the fact most computers come with Windows and people just stay with that by default. Engaging computer manufacturers to actually look at Linux as an alternative would probably help. This brings a second factor in that Linux is often very antipathetic to binary drivers even though such drivers would likely accelerate open source driver development as it would allow for back engineering to be made easier. Such binary drivers could provide support for hardware quickly and in a timely way until open source drivers become available. I think that Linux should provide a driver compatability layer for binary drivers. This would not impact open source drivers. Open source drivers could still be built for a particular kernel version. If someone buys a USB camera they just want to be able to plug it in and for it to work, not worry about if it will run on Linux. Thirdly is a lack of applications, but this sort of is the result of lack of users, due to the previously mentioned deficiencies.
Another recent problem with Linux is the extremely poor user interface introduced by Gnome 3 and Unity which are as bad as Windows 8 and actually seem to harm the opportunity for Linux to be able to take market share from Windows by staying with the traditional taskbar, desktop, start menu model which really is best for most desktop users. Though, on Linux there are alternatives that provide the traditional model.
I think that it would be nice of someone were to fund some sort of open source project to really get Wine to better than 99% compatability with all windows applications and for a project to be started to build a driver compatability layer that would allow Windows drivers to work on Linux. I think that would really move Linux to being a real alternative to Windows to the point where computer manufacturers could actually just start installing Linux by default. Perhaps computer manufacturers ought to fund this work as well.
When you are trying to download a file over FTP and you lose the connection 20% through a 10 GB file, FTP doesnt look too good at all. Its good to have a "guaranteed delivery" solution that will restart the file transfers which have been running even if the computer is rebooted, right from where it left off. This is like what Websphere MQ does. Even Rsync sort of sucks, if the process is interrupted, it has no idea where it stopped so it starts the whole process of scanning directories looking for updated files from the beginning. Just scanning directories and files looking for updates is a little archaic as the filesystem itself should provide an update log to show exactly which files have changed since the last backup eliminating the need for a filesystem wide scan.
DVDs are not less convenient. The picture quality is much worse with streaming, plus, many people do not have the fast internet connection needed for streaming. Its amazing how the article assumes that everyone has high speed internet. With some ISPs also enforcing download caps, this adds more trouble. Break-up of the picture is common, and if more than a few of your neighbors are trying to watch movies too, it just stops working. The following not relate to rentals, but you can have a used market for selling DVDs and Blu-ray disc while its very difficult for a used market to exist with streaming or files. Streaming doesnt give you your own copy of the movie at all. At least with a DVD i can pop it in at any time without having to pay a fee and get good picture quality. Blu-ray can provide picture quality that far surpasses what streaming can do with the internet connections most people have. Blu-ray has a HD picture which is always clean and beautiful, streaming for me almost always is filled with glitches, artifacts and poor picture quality.
Obviously, display server does matter to users. If users cannot use a whole set of applications because they are not compatable with Distro Xs display server, that is a problem for users. This can be addressed by distros standardizing around display servers that uses the same protocol. Its also possible, but more complex, is if distros using different display protocols support each others display protocols by running a copy of a rootless display server that supports the others display protocol. Relying on widget sets to support all display protocols is too unreliable as we are bound to end up with widget sets which do not support some display protocols. Needless to say, it is best to have a single standard, it would have been easiest and best if Canonical had gone with Wayland and actually worked with Wayland to address whatever needs they had.
Its also true a new display protocol wasnt really necessary. The issue with X was the lack of vertical syncronisation. X already has DRI, Xrender, Xcomposite, MIT SHM, and so on for other purposes. An X extension could have been created to allow a way for an application to get the timing of the display, the milliseconds between refreshes, the time of the next refresh, etc.. X applications could then use this timing information, starting its graphics operations just after the last refresh, X applications could then use an X command to place its finished graphics pixmap for a window into a "current completed buffer" for the window, allowing for double buffering to be used. This could be either a command to provide the memory address, or a shared memory location where the address would be placed. All of the current completed buffers for all windows are then composited in the server to generate the master video buffer for drawing to screen. There is a critical section during which the assembly of the master video buffer would occur, any current completed buffer swap by an application during that time by an application would have to be deferred for the next refresh cycle. A new XSetCompletedBuffer could be created which would provide a pointer to a pixmap, this is somewhat similar to XPutPixmap or setting the background of an X Window, but provided that XPutPixmap might do a memory copy it may not be appropriate, since the point is to provide a pointer to the pixmap that the X server would use in the next screen redraw. Said pixmaps would be used as drawables for opengl operations, traditional X primatives, and such. This scheme would work with all of the existing X drawing methods. the pixmaps are of course transferred using MIT SHM, its also possible to use GLX to do rendering server side, for use of x clients over the network, GLX is preferable, otherwise the entire pixmap for the window would have to be sent over the network. The GLX implementation already allows GL graphics to be rendered into a shared memory pixmap. Currently however, some drivers do not support GL rendering into a pixmap, only a pbuffer, which is not available in client memory at all, however, the DRI/GEM stuff is supposed to fix this and the X server should be updated to support GLX drawing to a pixmap with all such DRI drivers.
Another issue is window position and visibility in how it relates to vertical synchronization. Simplistically the refresh cycle can be broken into an application render period and a master render period. If the X server has a whole pixmap buffer of a window, it grabs at a snapshot of the display window visibility/position state the beginning of the master rendering period and uses that to generate the final master pixmap by copying visible regions of windows into the master buffer.
It can be a good idea to allow the option for applications to only render areas of their windows that are visible, this saves on CPU resources and also avoid needless rasterization of offscreen vector data. In order to do this, applications would need to access visibility data at the beginning of the application render period. Applications would then have to, instead of providing a single
Its the not made here syndrome, plus the fact that Google and Apple want to create a fleet of applications that are totally incompatable with other platforms in order to create user lock in to their respective platforms. Obviously, business and political reasons and nothing to do with technical issues. X would have been a fine display platform for either but, then the platforms would be compatable with mainstream Linux distros and you would have portable applications so your users wouldnt be locked into your OS.
You did mention hardware accelerated compositing, and I wanted to clarify that X protocols can indeed support this, it is mainly internal improvements in the X server that may be needed to support them. You dont really need an entirely new windowing system for this.
I also forgot to mention X has had the X Composition Extension and X Render Extension which have allowed for alpha blending operations for quite some time. Your information is a bit out of date.
This is all wrong. X has something called GLX which allows you to do hardware accelerated OpenGL graphics. GLX allows OpenGL commands to be sent over the X protocol connection. X protocol is sent over Unix Domain Sockets when both client and server are on the same system, this uses shared memory so it is very fast, there is no latency of network transparency when X is used locally in this manner. MIT SHM also supports forms of shared memory for transmission of image data. Only when Applications when they are being used over a network, do they need to fall back to send data over TCP/IP. Given this, the benefits of having network transparency are many, but there is no downside because where an application is run locally, it can use the Unix domain sockets, the MIT SHM and DRI.
X has also had DRI for years which has allowed an X application direct access to video hardware.
As for support for traditional X graphics primatives, these have no negative impact on the performance of applications which do not use them and use a GLX or DRI channel instead. Its not as if hardware accelerated DRI commands have to pass through XDrawCircle, so the existance of XDrawCircle does not impact a DRI operation in any significant way. The amount of memory that this code consumes is insignificant, especially when compared to the amount used by Firefox. Maybe back in 1984 a few kilobytes was a lot of RAM, that is when many of these misconceptions started, but the fact is, these issues were generally found with any GUI that would run on 1980s hardware. People are just mindlessly repeating some myth started in the 1980s which has little relevance today. Today, X uses far less memory than Windows 8 does and the traditional graphics commands consume an insignificant amount that is not worth being worried about, and which is needed to support the multitude of X applications that still use them.
Much of the global warming skepticism has been fueled lately by the decade long pause in the global warming average. It seems what I can gather from this is while many areas are hotter than they were previously, other places are somewhat cooler, so it balances out.
Some of the skepticism does exhibit a recency bias, by simply ignoring everything prior to year 2000 or so. In a chart of temperatures during the past 100 years, the current pause does look rather insignificant and could be simply a temporary pause rather than a change in the trajectory. They have problems explaining away the previous 50 years of temperature increase.
While I disagree with the poster that climate change is a fiction, I disagree that this is flamebait. He has a right to express his opinion and we ought to respect that. "Flame" is just an excuse by some to suppress any opinion they disagree with. Come on people, grow up, we ought to be more mature about this here.
Thats not true. You can tag text in a WYSIWG word processor and then update formatting information for the tag, which will automatically reformat all text tagged with a tag, and show you how its going to look instantly, giving you a whole document approach to being able to reform the entire document by simply changing settings of a few tags rather than pieces of text. This gives you the benefits that you would get with Lyx anyway, but with the advantages of WYSIWG as well, which Lyx cannot give you.
i never could figure out Lyx's refusal to show me what the document will look like. In a WYSIWG word processor you can create reuseable text "themes" and then tag text in the document with the theme, giving you the benefits you get with Lyx, but, with actually being able to see what the document is going to look like in real time. In a WYSIWG editor you absolutely CAN tag text with a "theme" and then you can change the font, size, color information for the theme, which will automatically reformate all text in the document tagged with that theme, and then automatically update the display so you can actually see what the document is going to look like right away. This is far superior to Lyx in my opinion and provides for a simpler work flow.
Google Docs is not free. Ask Stallman about this. The code is closed source and off limits to anyone except the anointed ones at Google. You never know if Google will data mine your data, basically you have given all of your sensitive data over to google.
A truly free package would be LibreOffice, open source, and which does not demand you hand over all of your data over an internet connection to Google's grid.
J.P. Rushton and others have made a strong and compelling argument for the heriditarian model of IQ. IQ has been estimated to be 60% genetic. The evidence is strong enough that there are racial differences in IQ and it is due to genetics that it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. IQ differences show up by age 3, long before education can have any effect. IQ is strongly coordinated with brain size. State of the art MRI scan studies have shown that the average size of the Black brain is 5 cubic square inches smaller than that of whites. IQ is strongly correlated with life history traits. Self dressing and toilet training earlier is associated with lower IQ. Black children dress and toilet train earlier, and sexually mature earlier, than Orientals and Whites, this is coordinated strongly with lower IQ levels, with Blacks having a lower IQ than whites and orientals.
This is why blacks avoid mathematics. They are unable to cope with it and therefore either want to become sports stars and when they realize thats not possible, they end up doing some other low skilled labor, or even worse, end up becoming gangsters and drug dealers.
Jesse Jackson has been so discredited as a race baiter and antagonist, that really its best to just ignore him. There is no racial discrimination. It all has to do with qualifications. The fact is, blacks need to stop flunking out of math class if they want these kinds of jobs. The lackadaisical attitude I would see from blacks in schools is indicative, they just didn't care and they did not want to learn the subject. Most of them want to play football and basketball and had little or no interest in mathematics. In most cases, it was the whites and orientals that took the most interest in and excel at mathematics and engineering. Blacks have had the same opportunities in schools but they refuse to avail themselves of it, so its their own fault.
The notion that giving Saudi Arabia an equal footing here as the US, is bone chilling. Its sort of well known that a lot of countries out there have no concept whatsoever of free speech. They burn christian churches down in Saudi Arabia and so on. This is a really bad idea.
The BSD kernels are descendants of the original Unix kernel by bloodline, though they do not contain any original AT&T code has it has been replaced. This was an issue with the USL lawsuit. It was once common for computer vendors to allow free copying of software, since the computer vendor made their money off the hardware and the software was bundled with the hardware in all cases. Computer vendors were getting money to develop the software no matter how much the software was being shared. There was a lawsuit from software only companies that required operating systems to be sold seperately from the hardware which changed that, though now we seem to be back to users being required to buy the OS with the computer but without the open sourceness being so common.
The original Unix sources have been open sourced, in the early 2000s, long after they were reimplemented by Linux and expunged from BSD.
Shared source commercial source code licenses have often been mentioned as an option that would allow programmers to charge for the ability to access their software but at the same time would provide sources to the consumer of the software. This could also allow the consumer to upload changes they make to the software to a revision control system provided by the programmers who own the software. Free software is not the only way that users of software could be granted access to source code, a commercial source code license is another means.
Id rather have the job where i am in at 9 and out by 5, 5 days a week, with a massive amount of vacation time. I dont care how nice another job would be, no job is a good job that keeps you there more than 40 hours a week. Life is short, and you need time to enjoy it, not sitting in some awful office. A huge plus would be the ability to work from home or these days with wireless, wherever i want.
My idea is to allow full interoperability between ipv6 and ipv4 parts of the internet. The solution here is to use DNS. When a peer on an ipv4 network accesses a DNS address for an ipv6 peer, the DNS server works with the router, the DNS server realises the IPV4 client is asking for the address of an IPV6 site. The DNS server returns a private ipv4 NATed address to client and any further packets to the NATed address from the client are translated into Ipv6 addresses at the router to be sent up to an ipv6 network. Returning packets are NATed from the ipv6 address back into the Ipv4 NATed address. Or, the router could have a tunnel over ipv4 to another ipv6 network. Furthermore, create a new TLD, ipv6, and ipv4 peers could use an something like...a2e2.da2f.ipv6 or something like that to access a particular ipv6 address. The Router-DNS complex would do the NAT translation as above to make that work
Text files are not better for everything, especially where you want the best performance with being able to quickly access a record in a large file, an indexed format can be much faster. The Unix passwd database for instance has long been text. If you had thousands of users, your looking at slower performance to parse the file than if there were a b-tree index to find the records. I think admins should have a choice between text and binary formats in situations like these. If you have a standardised binary format, or one that uses a library that is widely used by a lot of programs, such as SQLite, you should be able to have a potentially large number of choices in clients to access the file since the file format is widely used, any reader of the format would work with files used for configuration of many different programs. SQLite has begun to fulfill this need. In many ways such a widely used binary format would make things potentially better than a text file, not only being ablwe to be accessed by a wide array of client programs, the files can also be easily programmatically accessed through an API. In fact, text files are far from standardized so if you needed to programmatically access values in say, apache.conf, its going to be rather complicated to do as you need a parser for that format in the file. So in many ways the idea text files are better is questionable, as you can have many advantages with a widely used binary format.
Local governments should own them, cities and special purpose districts within counties so that the local population can maintain accountability and direct influence over the operations. The municipal networks done so far have been a great success. While TWC et al will say that there is no way they can offer a gigabit internet service, Municipal governments have been doing it for years, because they dont have stock dividends and millions of dollars CEO salaries, to pay.
Whats a good slashdot alternative? Maybe someone here ought to set up a site realslashdot.org running the classic interface and then we will move over there.
I think Wine ought to focus on making sure 99.9% of WIndows apps run on x86 before it starts thinking about other platforms. As it stands now, Wine's support for applications is so spotty that it falls far short of allowing it to be a Windows replacement, and this really must be the goal of wine.
Slashdot Mirror
A factor in Windows dominance is the fact most computers come with Windows and people just stay with that by default. Engaging computer manufacturers to actually look at Linux as an alternative would probably help. This brings a second factor in that Linux is often very antipathetic to binary drivers even though such drivers would likely accelerate open source driver development as it would allow for back engineering to be made easier. Such binary drivers could provide support for hardware quickly and in a timely way until open source drivers become available. I think that Linux should provide a driver compatability layer for binary drivers. This would not impact open source drivers. Open source drivers could still be built for a particular kernel version. If someone buys a USB camera they just want to be able to plug it in and for it to work, not worry about if it will run on Linux. Thirdly is a lack of applications, but this sort of is the result of lack of users, due to the previously mentioned deficiencies.
Another recent problem with Linux is the extremely poor user interface introduced by Gnome 3 and Unity which are as bad as Windows 8 and actually seem to harm the opportunity for Linux to be able to take market share from Windows by staying with the traditional taskbar, desktop, start menu model which really is best for most desktop users. Though, on Linux there are alternatives that provide the traditional model.
I think that it would be nice of someone were to fund some sort of open source project to really get Wine to better than 99% compatability with all windows applications and for a project to be started to build a driver compatability layer that would allow Windows drivers to work on Linux. I think that would really move Linux to being a real alternative to Windows to the point where computer manufacturers could actually just start installing Linux by default. Perhaps computer manufacturers ought to fund this work as well.
When you are trying to download a file over FTP and you lose the connection 20% through a 10 GB file, FTP doesnt look too good at all. Its good to have a "guaranteed delivery" solution that will restart the file transfers which have been running even if the computer is rebooted, right from where it left off. This is like what Websphere MQ does. Even Rsync sort of sucks, if the process is interrupted, it has no idea where it stopped so it starts the whole process of scanning directories looking for updated files from the beginning. Just scanning directories and files looking for updates is a little archaic as the filesystem itself should provide an update log to show exactly which files have changed since the last backup eliminating the need for a filesystem wide scan.
DVDs are not less convenient. The picture quality is much worse with streaming, plus, many people do not have the fast internet connection needed for streaming. Its amazing how the article assumes that everyone has high speed internet. With some ISPs also enforcing download caps, this adds more trouble. Break-up of the picture is common, and if more than a few of your neighbors are trying to watch movies too, it just stops working. The following not relate to rentals, but you can have a used market for selling DVDs and Blu-ray disc while its very difficult for a used market to exist with streaming or files. Streaming doesnt give you your own copy of the movie at all. At least with a DVD i can pop it in at any time without having to pay a fee and get good picture quality. Blu-ray can provide picture quality that far surpasses what streaming can do with the internet connections most people have. Blu-ray has a HD picture which is always clean and beautiful, streaming for me almost always is filled with glitches, artifacts and poor picture quality.
Obviously, display server does matter to users. If users cannot use a whole set of applications because they are not compatable with Distro Xs display server, that is a problem for users. This can be addressed by distros standardizing around display servers that uses the same protocol. Its also possible, but more complex, is if distros using different display protocols support each others display protocols by running a copy of a rootless display server that supports the others display protocol. Relying on widget sets to support all display protocols is too unreliable as we are bound to end up with widget sets which do not support some display protocols. Needless to say, it is best to have a single standard, it would have been easiest and best if Canonical had gone with Wayland and actually worked with Wayland to address whatever needs they had.
Its also true a new display protocol wasnt really necessary. The issue with X was the lack of vertical syncronisation. X already has DRI, Xrender, Xcomposite, MIT SHM, and so on for other purposes. An X extension could have been created to allow a way for an application to get the timing of the display, the milliseconds between refreshes, the time of the next refresh, etc.. X applications could then use this timing information, starting its graphics operations just after the last refresh, X applications could then use an X command to place its finished graphics pixmap for a window into a "current completed buffer" for the window, allowing for double buffering to be used. This could be either a command to provide the memory address, or a shared memory location where the address would be placed. All of the current completed buffers for all windows are then composited in the server to generate the master video buffer for drawing to screen. There is a critical section during which the assembly of the master video buffer would occur, any current completed buffer swap by an application during that time by an application would have to be deferred for the next refresh cycle. A new XSetCompletedBuffer could be created which would provide a pointer to a pixmap, this is somewhat similar to XPutPixmap or setting the background of an X Window, but provided that XPutPixmap might do a memory copy it may not be appropriate, since the point is to provide a pointer to the pixmap that the X server would use in the next screen redraw. Said pixmaps would be used as drawables for opengl operations, traditional X primatives, and such. This scheme would work with all of the existing X drawing methods. the pixmaps are of course transferred using MIT SHM, its also possible to use GLX to do rendering server side, for use of x clients over the network, GLX is preferable, otherwise the entire pixmap for the window would have to be sent over the network. The GLX implementation already allows GL graphics to be rendered into a shared memory pixmap. Currently however, some drivers do not support GL rendering into a pixmap, only a pbuffer, which is not available in client memory at all, however, the DRI/GEM stuff is supposed to fix this and the X server should be updated to support GLX drawing to a pixmap with all such DRI drivers.
Another issue is window position and visibility in how it relates to vertical synchronization. Simplistically the refresh cycle can be broken into an application render period and a master render period. If the X server has a whole pixmap buffer of a window, it grabs at a snapshot of the display window visibility/position state the beginning of the master rendering period and uses that to generate the final master pixmap by copying visible regions of windows into the master buffer.
It can be a good idea to allow the option for applications to only render areas of their windows that are visible, this saves on CPU resources and also avoid needless rasterization of offscreen vector data. In order to do this, applications would need to access visibility data at the beginning of the application render period. Applications would then have to, instead of providing a single
Its the not made here syndrome, plus the fact that Google and Apple want to create a fleet of applications that are totally incompatable with other platforms in order to create user lock in to their respective platforms. Obviously, business and political reasons and nothing to do with technical issues. X would have been a fine display platform for either but, then the platforms would be compatable with mainstream Linux distros and you would have portable applications so your users wouldnt be locked into your OS.
You did mention hardware accelerated compositing, and I wanted to clarify that X protocols can indeed support this, it is mainly internal improvements in the X server that may be needed to support them. You dont really need an entirely new windowing system for this.
I also forgot to mention X has had the X Composition Extension and X Render Extension which have allowed for alpha blending operations for quite some time. Your information is a bit out of date.
This is all wrong. X has something called GLX which allows you to do hardware accelerated OpenGL graphics. GLX allows OpenGL commands to be sent over the X protocol connection. X protocol is sent over Unix Domain Sockets when both client and server are on the same system, this uses shared memory so it is very fast, there is no latency of network transparency when X is used locally in this manner. MIT SHM also supports forms of shared memory for transmission of image data. Only when Applications when they are being used over a network, do they need to fall back to send data over TCP/IP. Given this, the benefits of having network transparency are many, but there is no downside because where an application is run locally, it can use the Unix domain sockets, the MIT SHM and DRI.
X has also had DRI for years which has allowed an X application direct access to video hardware.
As for support for traditional X graphics primatives, these have no negative impact on the performance of applications which do not use them and use a GLX or DRI channel instead. Its not as if hardware accelerated DRI commands have to pass through XDrawCircle, so the existance of XDrawCircle does not impact a DRI operation in any significant way. The amount of memory that this code consumes is insignificant, especially when compared to the amount used by Firefox. Maybe back in 1984 a few kilobytes was a lot of RAM, that is when many of these misconceptions started, but the fact is, these issues were generally found with any GUI that would run on 1980s hardware. People are just mindlessly repeating some myth started in the 1980s which has little relevance today. Today, X uses far less memory than Windows 8 does and the traditional graphics commands consume an insignificant amount that is not worth being worried about, and which is needed to support the multitude of X applications that still use them.
Much of the global warming skepticism has been fueled lately by the decade long pause in the global warming average. It seems what I can gather from this is while many areas are hotter than they were previously, other places are somewhat cooler, so it balances out.
Some of the skepticism does exhibit a recency bias, by simply ignoring everything prior to year 2000 or so. In a chart of temperatures during the past 100 years, the current pause does look rather insignificant and could be simply a temporary pause rather than a change in the trajectory. They have problems explaining away the previous 50 years of temperature increase.
Warming may have an effect on precipitation patterns, however. As others have said, plants can also have trouble tolerating higher temperatures.
While I disagree with the poster that climate change is a fiction, I disagree that this is flamebait. He has a right to express his opinion and we ought to respect that. "Flame" is just an excuse by some to suppress any opinion they disagree with. Come on people, grow up, we ought to be more mature about this here.
Thats not true. You can tag text in a WYSIWG word processor and then update formatting information for the tag, which will automatically reformat all text tagged with a tag, and show you how its going to look instantly, giving you a whole document approach to being able to reform the entire document by simply changing settings of a few tags rather than pieces of text. This gives you the benefits that you would get with Lyx anyway, but with the advantages of WYSIWG as well, which Lyx cannot give you.
i never could figure out Lyx's refusal to show me what the document will look like. In a WYSIWG word processor you can create reuseable text "themes" and then tag text in the document with the theme, giving you the benefits you get with Lyx, but, with actually being able to see what the document is going to look like in real time. In a WYSIWG editor you absolutely CAN tag text with a "theme" and then you can change the font, size, color information for the theme, which will automatically reformate all text in the document tagged with that theme, and then automatically update the display so you can actually see what the document is going to look like right away. This is far superior to Lyx in my opinion and provides for a simpler work flow.
Google Docs is not free. Ask Stallman about this. The code is closed source and off limits to anyone except the anointed ones at Google. You never know if Google will data mine your data, basically you have given all of your sensitive data over to google.
A truly free package would be LibreOffice, open source, and which does not demand you hand over all of your data over an internet connection to Google's grid.
J.P. Rushton and others have made a strong and compelling argument for the heriditarian model of IQ. IQ has been estimated to be 60% genetic. The evidence is strong enough that there are racial differences in IQ and it is due to genetics that it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. IQ differences show up by age 3, long before education can have any effect. IQ is strongly coordinated with brain size. State of the art MRI scan studies have shown that the average size of the Black brain is 5 cubic square inches smaller than that of whites. IQ is strongly correlated with life history traits. Self dressing and toilet training earlier is associated with lower IQ. Black children dress and toilet train earlier, and sexually mature earlier, than Orientals and Whites, this is coordinated strongly with lower IQ levels, with Blacks having a lower IQ than whites and orientals.
This is why blacks avoid mathematics. They are unable to cope with it and therefore either want to become sports stars and when they realize thats not possible, they end up doing some other low skilled labor, or even worse, end up becoming gangsters and drug dealers.
Jesse Jackson has been so discredited as a race baiter and antagonist, that really its best to just ignore him. There is no racial discrimination. It all has to do with qualifications. The fact is, blacks need to stop flunking out of math class if they want these kinds of jobs. The lackadaisical attitude I would see from blacks in schools is indicative, they just didn't care and they did not want to learn the subject. Most of them want to play football and basketball and had little or no interest in mathematics. In most cases, it was the whites and orientals that took the most interest in and excel at mathematics and engineering. Blacks have had the same opportunities in schools but they refuse to avail themselves of it, so its their own fault.
The notion that giving Saudi Arabia an equal footing here as the US, is bone chilling. Its sort of well known that a lot of countries out there have no concept whatsoever of free speech. They burn christian churches down in Saudi Arabia and so on. This is a really bad idea.
The BSD kernels are descendants of the original Unix kernel by bloodline, though they do not contain any original AT&T code has it has been replaced. This was an issue with the USL lawsuit. It was once common for computer vendors to allow free copying of software, since the computer vendor made their money off the hardware and the software was bundled with the hardware in all cases. Computer vendors were getting money to develop the software no matter how much the software was being shared. There was a lawsuit from software only companies that required operating systems to be sold seperately from the hardware which changed that, though now we seem to be back to users being required to buy the OS with the computer but without the open sourceness being so common.
The original Unix sources have been open sourced, in the early 2000s, long after they were reimplemented by Linux and expunged from BSD.
Shared source commercial source code licenses have often been mentioned as an option that would allow programmers to charge for the ability to access their software but at the same time would provide sources to the consumer of the software. This could also allow the consumer to upload changes they make to the software to a revision control system provided by the programmers who own the software. Free software is not the only way that users of software could be granted access to source code, a commercial source code license is another means.
Id rather have the job where i am in at 9 and out by 5, 5 days a week, with a massive amount of vacation time. I dont care how nice another job would be, no job is a good job that keeps you there more than 40 hours a week. Life is short, and you need time to enjoy it, not sitting in some awful office. A huge plus would be the ability to work from home or these days with wireless, wherever i want.
My idea is to allow full interoperability between ipv6 and ipv4 parts of the internet. The solution here is to use DNS. When a peer on an ipv4 network accesses a DNS address for an ipv6 peer, the DNS server works with the router, the DNS server realises the IPV4 client is asking for the address of an IPV6 site. The DNS server returns a private ipv4 NATed address to client and any further packets to the NATed address from the client are translated into Ipv6 addresses at the router to be sent up to an ipv6 network. Returning packets are NATed from the ipv6 address back into the Ipv4 NATed address. Or, the router could have a tunnel over ipv4 to another ipv6 network. Furthermore, create a new TLD, ipv6, and ipv4 peers could use an something like ...a2e2.da2f.ipv6 or something like that to access a particular ipv6 address. The Router-DNS complex would do the NAT translation as above to make that work
Text files are not better for everything, especially where you want the best performance with being able to quickly access a record in a large file, an indexed format can be much faster. The Unix passwd database for instance has long been text. If you had thousands of users, your looking at slower performance to parse the file than if there were a b-tree index to find the records. I think admins should have a choice between text and binary formats in situations like these. If you have a standardised binary format, or one that uses a library that is widely used by a lot of programs, such as SQLite, you should be able to have a potentially large number of choices in clients to access the file since the file format is widely used, any reader of the format would work with files used for configuration of many different programs. SQLite has begun to fulfill this need. In many ways such a widely used binary format would make things potentially better than a text file, not only being ablwe to be accessed by a wide array of client programs, the files can also be easily programmatically accessed through an API. In fact, text files are far from standardized so if you needed to programmatically access values in say, apache.conf, its going to be rather complicated to do as you need a parser for that format in the file. So in many ways the idea text files are better is questionable, as you can have many advantages with a widely used binary format.
Local governments should own them, cities and special purpose districts within counties so that the local population can maintain accountability and direct influence over the operations. The municipal networks done so far have been a great success. While TWC et al will say that there is no way they can offer a gigabit internet service, Municipal governments have been doing it for years, because they dont have stock dividends and millions of dollars CEO salaries, to pay.
Whats a good slashdot alternative? Maybe someone here ought to set up a site realslashdot.org running the classic interface and then we will move over there.
I think Wine ought to focus on making sure 99.9% of WIndows apps run on x86 before it starts thinking about other platforms. As it stands now, Wine's support for applications is so spotty that it falls far short of allowing it to be a Windows replacement, and this really must be the goal of wine.