I intend to email them to tell them I'm switching to google as a result of this. Dunno if it'll do any good but ifya don't try... Anything better than webmaster@cmgi.com?
I'm SO SICK of the open source community rallying behind Netscape as if it were the second coming, just because they are anti-Microsoft. Netscape was HATED by the online community in the mid-90's.[...][Netscape] tried to screw up an existing standard bysecuring market share and then making their own extensions more popular than the standard.
Yesterday, Netscape tried to screw up standards, and it was a bad thing. Today, Microsoft's doing it, and it is still a bad thing. Meanwhile, Netscape has done an about turn and makes a standard-compliant, open-source web browser.
Public companies do whatever they think will be most profitable. They are legally obliged to do so. Sometimes, this means that what they do now contradicts what they did yesterday. It is pointless trying to assign karma to them. The situation *now* is that Netscape is promoting standards compliance and they will not (cannot) abort the Mozilla project. Meanwhile Microsoft has a dangerously high browser market share on top of an operating system monopoly.
I'm not anti-MS or pro-NS. Next time Microsoft is promoting standards compliance in a way from which they cannot easily withdraw, I will support that. Next time Netscape tries to screw standards, I will be against that.
As it stands, the rule is kind of like saying, "You should only need four or five gallons of gas to make a 100 mile trip."
I think something which Moore's law has in common with Newtons', but not with the above statement, is that it is an apparently unlikely statement with far-reaching consequences. Nobody would've guessed Moore's law in 1920, say. (Well, I presume not). And we all know the amazing effects that Moore's law enables - like computers that can beat Kasparov at chess *by brute force*. Wheras the fuel statement above is both obvious-sounding and devoid of amazing consequences.
Ah, I see what you mean - Boyle's law is more universal in some way. Although many (most?) physical laws which are considered to be "true" are only really approximations - take Newton's laws of motion (which are less accurate than General Relativity, but are still very good approximations and are widely used and acclaimed).
I think the usage of "boxen" for computers in English has nothing to do with the fact that the word is the correct plural in German (as this post so obscurely points out).
Well, as you say, I think it is just a joke plural, copying "ox -> oxen". I guess it is related to "Unixen", which was presumably coined by someone who couldn't / wouldn't choose between "unixes" and "unices".
Does anyone else object to the way the article speaks about Moores law in an overly matter-of-fact manner, implying that it is just as much a law of Physics as Boyle's Law?
I think that they were arguably right. Moore's law is the statement that "the number of transisters a chip can hold will double every 18 to 24 months". Moore speculated that his law would hold in the future. I.e. the law is a statement, and in formulating it Moore was speculating that it is true.
precisely. The things we do affect each other. Hence it's nonsense to say "I have an absolute right to do so-and-so with my private property". If you're harming the rest of us enough, our rights may outweigh yours.
I hope that you know how to think. I know that most of the greenhouse gasses that are spewing out into the atmosphere are from alot of the 3rd world countries that the "civilized" world allows to do so that they can play catch up with them.
You just made that up. The USA is responsible for 25% of the world's CO2 emmissions, with about 5% of the population. Your cars are hopelessly un-green (40mpg is about the average in Europe).
It's called private property. Perhaps you've heard of it? There are these nifty ideas called "property rights" too.
Remember, the whole point of government is to provide the public with services -- not to protect them from themselves. Even if it would improve my health if you steal my car -- pay me or not -- it still isn't Morally Right.
The point is, when you drive your car, you damage *my* air supply, *my* environment etc.. So you're infringing *my* property rights. I [should] have a right to stop you doing that, or at least a say.
You complain about California making your gas prices go up. However you are quite willing to spew out unlimited amounts of CO2 so that the rest of the planet has to cope with global warming caused by N America.
You're quite right. The problem in California is not that the government has realised the environment is an asset with value. The problem is that they won't let the laws of supply and demand kick in and raise the price of polluting for the consumer. If people aren't paying for the damage they do then market economics can't work its magic.
Basically, the testing distribution is "maintained" by an automatic script, which contains all packages which have been in the unstable (i.e. development) distribution for two weeks without a release critical bug being filed, subject to satisfying package dependencies. The idea is that testing might be buggy, but should be up-to-date and not completely broken. See here for more detail and precision.
Are there any truly free desktop environments? (I mean under the BSD license)
AFAIK they're all GPLed. That is, assuming you're asking for something bigger than a window manager. If you meant just a window manager, then twm is under the X license (being part of X).
Incidentally, would you count the LGPL as "truly free", whatever you mean by that phrase?
Assuming they would file a suit without having read the source and with no other basis they may be liable for a Rule 11 violation which prohibits filling such frivilous suits.
Interesting - anybody know if anything similar would apply in the EU (Maybe Germany in particular)?
Ah, obviously regional differences are cutting in. In Britain, "new" is pronounced "nyoo". Hence there is no such word as "noo"[*] and it sounds as silly as "boing".
[*] since the 1950's, "g-noo" has been the preferred pronounciation of "gnu" as in the animal, due in part to Flanders and Swann's "gnu song".
md5sum the whole floppy[*]. On booting, if the floppy image does not have the same checksum, abort. Then it's possible that the router might not boot one day, but it's impossible for the disk to corrupt without you noticing.
[*]ok, md5sum all of the floppy apart from a file containing the md5sums.
Strike a blow against RMS idiocy: pronounce GNU and Gnome without the hard G.
I'm glad to find that I'm not the only one who is irritated to death by this nonsense.
You're nuts, the pair of you. If you believe that people should use the de-facto names for things, then why are you trying to rename a well-known operating system to "Noo"?
"people with too much free time on there hands" are only too willing to overload the kernel with unnessasary crap.
You seem not to have gathered that the topic of this article, ORBit, won't be in the official kernel any time soon (if ever). It is just a patch which you could install if you wanted to work all the weird and wonderful wizardry which it enables.
Slashdot Mirror
I intend to email them to tell them I'm switching to google as a result of this. Dunno if it'll do any good but ifya don't try ... Anything better than webmaster@cmgi.com?
"Microsoft (only) technologies (take data binding and xsl for example)". He's a troll all right.
Yesterday, Netscape tried to screw up standards, and it was a bad thing. Today, Microsoft's doing it, and it is still a bad thing. Meanwhile, Netscape has done an about turn and makes a standard-compliant, open-source web browser.
Public companies do whatever they think will be most profitable. They are legally obliged to do so. Sometimes, this means that what they do now contradicts what they did yesterday. It is pointless trying to assign karma to them. The situation *now* is that Netscape is promoting standards compliance and they will not (cannot) abort the Mozilla project. Meanwhile Microsoft has a dangerously high browser market share on top of an operating system monopoly.
I'm not anti-MS or pro-NS. Next time Microsoft is promoting standards compliance in a way from which they cannot easily withdraw, I will support that. Next time Netscape tries to screw standards, I will be against that.
I think something which Moore's law has in common with Newtons', but not with the above statement, is that it is an apparently unlikely statement with far-reaching consequences. Nobody would've guessed Moore's law in 1920, say. (Well, I presume not). And we all know the amazing effects that Moore's law enables - like computers that can beat Kasparov at chess *by brute force*. Wheras the fuel statement above is both obvious-sounding and devoid of amazing consequences.
Ah, I see what you mean - Boyle's law is more universal in some way. Although many (most?) physical laws which are considered to be "true" are only really approximations - take Newton's laws of motion (which are less accurate than General Relativity, but are still very good approximations and are widely used and acclaimed).
Hmmm The jargon file has an entry on the word.
Well, as you say, I think it is just a joke plural, copying "ox -> oxen". I guess it is related to "Unixen", which was presumably coined by someone who couldn't / wouldn't choose between "unixes" and "unices".
I think that they were arguably right. Moore's law is the statement that "the number of transisters a chip can hold will double every 18 to 24 months". Moore speculated that his law would hold in the future. I.e. the law is a statement, and in formulating it Moore was speculating that it is true.
Aber warum?
precisely. The things we do affect each other. Hence it's nonsense to say "I have an absolute right to do so-and-so with my private property". If you're harming the rest of us enough, our rights may outweigh yours.
You just made that up. The USA is responsible for 25% of the world's CO2 emmissions, with about 5% of the population. Your cars are hopelessly un-green (40mpg is about the average in Europe).
The point is, when you drive your car, you damage *my* air supply, *my* environment etc.. So you're infringing *my* property rights. I [should] have a right to stop you doing that, or at least a say.
You complain about California making your gas prices go up. However you are quite willing to spew out unlimited amounts of CO2 so that the rest of the planet has to cope with global warming caused by N America.
You're quite right. The problem in California is not that the government has realised the environment is an asset with value. The problem is that they won't let the laws of supply and demand kick in and raise the price of polluting for the consumer. If people aren't paying for the damage they do then market economics can't work its magic.
Yes, the scripts which generate testing deal with it. Dunno what algorithm they use, though.
Basically, the testing distribution is "maintained" by an automatic script, which contains all packages which have been in the unstable (i.e. development) distribution for two weeks without a release critical bug being filed, subject to satisfying package dependencies. The idea is that testing might be buggy, but should be up-to-date and not completely broken. See here for more detail and precision.
Hmmm
AFAIK they're all GPLed. That is, assuming you're asking for something bigger than a window manager. If you meant just a window manager, then twm is under the X license (being part of X).
Incidentally, would you count the LGPL as "truly free", whatever you mean by that phrase?
True, but one common name for the bonobo is the "pygmy chimp".
Interesting - anybody know if anything similar would apply in the EU (Maybe Germany in particular)?
Ah, obviously regional differences are cutting in. In Britain, "new" is pronounced "nyoo". Hence there is no such word as "noo"[*] and it sounds as silly as "boing".
[*] since the 1950's, "g-noo" has been the preferred pronounciation of "gnu" as in the animal, due in part to Flanders and Swann's "gnu song".
What exactly does this mean? That packets from openbsd.org to netbsd.org are just swallowed without trace?
md5sum the whole floppy[*]. On booting, if the floppy image does not have the same checksum, abort. Then it's possible that the router might not boot one day, but it's impossible for the disk to corrupt without you noticing.
[*]ok, md5sum all of the floppy apart from a file containing the md5sums.
You're nuts, the pair of you. If you believe that people should use the de-facto names for things, then why are you trying to rename a well-known operating system to "Noo"?
You seem not to have gathered that the topic of this article, ORBit, won't be in the official kernel any time soon (if ever). It is just a patch which you could install if you wanted to work all the weird and wonderful wizardry which it enables.