..so now the problem becomes the laborious chore of mining finite resources out of the earth?
What is wrong with a solar-powered electric generator used to split water? Is that not efficient enough? At least you wouldn't be lugging around all these minerals to replenish the water splitter.
The obvious correct solution is to modularize the kernel into subsections with clearly defined areas of responsibility, with a "mini-Linus" (who Linus trusts) granted control over each module.
Not suprisingly, this is what Linus has suggested.
But unfortunately there aren't just 4-8 "maintainers" in the world. As Linus says himself in the thread, he can only trust a fixed number of people. That fixed number of people does NOT map nicely to the tens and hundreds, and even thousands of people who are contributing to Linux. There are way more than 4-8 conceptual modules that need maintainers, and through which the world at large can funnel changes and patches. The tree needs to be a bit less broad, but a bit deeper. It's all well and good that Linus says he'll just trust that handful of people he knows well...but what about *them*. They can only trust another 8 or so people, so that turns out to be a maximum of 64 in the world that the system can cope with, without a deeper level of nesting. That's pretty pathetic. Linus also apparently doesn't account for the fact that the job is not *only* accepting patches, but also doing tedious work of *reconciling* those patches and providing a "staging area" so those patches can be reconciled and tested for stupid obvious collisions and bugs before they are really applied to the golden-Linus-tree. One human can not possibly do this (even if he only is in contact with 8 other people through which the world funnels changes). Like Rob Landley says, this responsibility has been taken in the past by Alan Cox, and is currently taken up by Dave Jones. It just needs to be formalized. I see it as a DSP in front of Linus, throwing out (or returning gracefully with a little note!) any out of band signals. It's ridiculous for Linus to insist on a strict 1-level star topology and when he is overloaded simply throw his hands up and say "Hey world, be less noisy!". The noise can be filtered with a DSP called a "Patch Penguin" (or whatever the hell you want to call it), perhaps several levels if necessary (it probably isn't). I don't see the problem. Linus is right in that maintainers and contributors need to take more responsibility, modularize more, and make cleaner patches, but even *if* they do this perfectly there will still be the matter of the tedious work of assembling the various patches - and I'm sure we all know that many "perfect, beautiful" patches do not a "perfect, beautiful" patchset make. In the end, it doesn't even really matter if Linus is Right...the community has needs, and if Linus isn't attentive to them, the community will move on and go elsewhere (or start cracking and fragmenting like it currently is).
Do we adequately understand WHY this is though? Last time I saw Cosmos (ok, an admittedly ancient show as far as science progress), it still wasn't clear WHY were weren't seeing quantum manifestations like "gases going into boxes", or dropped glasses "unbreaking". Sure it sounds silly, but don't our models and formulas and predict this sort of stuff should be happening? Or is the macroscopic scale so astronomically large in comparison to these probabilities that it is just incredibly rare for anything like this to happen at the macroscopic scale?
Is contention negotiation (or whatever the correct term is) "built-in" to ethernet, or is it just a feature of a higher level protocol, like IP? What I'm talking about is the fact that ethernet is shared, and when multiple requests go out at the same time, each party "stands off" for some random amount of time before resending. I would think that this would absolutely KILL IO performance, as you don't want all your devices competing for the shared data channel. How is Firewire/USB/SCSI, etc in this respect?
"I think advancing the state of the art - where art and technology combine together - is what really moves him"
Advancing his own ego is what really moves him. Apple just takes the best known technology and sells it for a premium. Fireware and DVD burners aren't magic...it's just that the average Joe is not going to pay for that type of value, when a generic PC gives a much higher value (more for cheaper). Jobs would leave Apple the second it got "too" popular and started becoming mainstream, because it would no longer be a cult-of-Jobs any more.
"So the only thing the federal government is not allowed to tell us are matters of national security"
Which conveniently covers anything they want to pull out of their ass that day. "National security" is a crock. In a democracy the *people* are the national security.
Perhaps you want to live in a society where everybody has free reign to invade your life to verify that you are indeed not breaking any laws, but I'd sure as hell live in one where I was presumed *innocent* before proven guilty, not the other way around. The BSA should not be able to use scare tactics to single out and destroy arbitrary companies. Do you think this is a good thing? They should either bring lawsuits against ALL companies, and either lose the suits or engender so much bad will that nobody will every want to use their products, or not bring any at all. Any one company should not be allowed to scaremonger and arbitrarily cripple other companies by yelling "fire" in the free market.
Um, no it doesn't, because you can't PRODUCE anything with TVs. Duh. But still, I don't think this will mean much for Korean WRT India and China's software markets.
NASA has also revealed that it is researching ways to use magic as the next generation spacecraft propulsion. One scientist was quoted as saying: "With magic we could, for example, twitch our noses and *wish* the spacecraft to be at it's destination" "However," he cautioned, "magic is not known to exist. Nor may it ever". NASA has reportedly employed a young new scientist by the name of Harry Potter to aid in its newest research project.
Amen. The Digital Divide is a fabrication that politicians invented (was it all Gore?;) so they could pat themselves on the back when they "solved" all the problems due to poverty by simply throwing hardware at it. The "Digital Divide" is simply the symptom of a socioeconomic divide that nobody wants to talk about. There was a Telivision Divide in the 50s, a Video Recorder divide in the 80s. Who cares. It's insulting that we minimize the problems of poverty, etc., by treating some superficial and largely irrelevant symptom (oh no the homeless can't download warez, what *shall* we do?!). I also realize it is a false choice to present resolving the core problem and ameliorating the symptoms as mutually exclusive, they aren't of course, but could we please stop yammering about the "Digital Divide" already? Maybe in 1996 it meant something, but not now. It's just so self-indulgent. There *are* non-geeky ways to help people.
Despite the fact that Microsoft at large may be an evil goliath, there are still pockets within or affiliated with MS that do really good work. CLR (without all those other services MS wants to pile on top of it) is a *damn fine* architecture and a breath of fresh air (my day job is Java middleware development, so I know). Miguel de Icaza's Mono project thinks it's so good that they want this to be the basis of unix ("Let's Make Unix Not Suck"). Before you bash it, read the specs and technical articles. It's really nice. The trick is now how to keep Microsoft from perverting it to their own world domination ends. Having it be an official standard (ECMA I think) will help, and is something Sun hasn't done yet (though I can't bash Sun, they've been really great with Java and are slowing catching on to the OSS 'thang').
It's not a bunch of balony. It's simply polite. At least OBSCURE the address by textualizing it...otherwise spamming software will pick it right up. I'm sure this person will decide to have Linux installed after the 10s or so comments they read amongst the 100s of spam messages. Just plain rude.
Do government officials really have no other ideas except to dump waste on Native American holy sites? If these were Christian or Jewish or Muslim holy sites there would be no way in hell. But because they're Native American (and who really gives a damn about Native Americans, I mean, didn't they go extinct years ago?) we can just shit all over them.
http://130.94.214.68/main/pages/issues/natural_r es ources/documents/NCAIYuccaMtncomments.htm
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/nwpo991209. ht m
Hey, how about this idea: if you *really* want people to get a crash course in "computer literacy" why don't you ship the computers without operating systems? I'm not joking. If they really want to use that shiny new $1500 piece of equipment they'll have to put something on it. And perhaps they *won't* want to pay ~$200 out of pocket to put Windows on it. Let them choose whatever they want.
"That it takes more energy to make the hydrogen than you gain in using it."
Look, due to the laws of thermodynamics it will ALWAYS take more energy to obtain a resource than to use it. Same applies for oil - once we're out of it, it will be very damn expensive to "make" it. So a lot of these arguments against renewable energy sources are just rubbish. Sure, you don't get as big of an *immediate* payoff, but you get a much steadier, reliable payoff over time. The trick is amortizing the expense of using a certain fuel by using the byproducts in a very efficient way. We waste such vast amounts of energy both in direct use, and in unrecaptured efficiency, that I'm sure any number of energy sources will be totally viable (hydrogen, wind, solar, thermal, hydro, methane). But of course many of these will require social changes that nobody is willing to make. To paraphrase Denis Leary, everybody wants to get themselves a 1967 Cadillac El Dorado convertible, hot pink with whaleskin hub caps and all leather cow interior and big brown baby seal eyes for headlights, drive around in that baby at 115mph getting one mile per gallon, sucking down quarter pounder cheese burgers from McDonald's in the old-fashioned non-biodegradable styrofoam containers and when they're done sucking down those grease ball burgers, wipe their mouths with the American flag and toss the styrofoam container right out the side and there ain't a God damned thing anybody can do about it.
"Hmmmm, the more I think about this, the more problems I see. Ignorance must be bliss, because knowing all this stuff only brings me headaches and frustration."
Hey, why bother with that "thinking" stuff? Just grab a beer and turn on the game, and live the "miller fnord! high life"!
"and even to revolt should things every get really out of hand"
AHAHAH. That was a laugh. Even with the "holy" 2nd amendment, there is no freakin' chance in hell we anyone is ever going to be able to overthrow the US government with measly firearms. What a joke. Do you really think the political system is going to back down and say "Hey, you know what? This is sort of like what our founding fathers did. Hey everbody, let's just let these revolutionaries overrun us and entirely change the political landscape that has so benefitted us due to our entrenchment".
And now with the coming soft-weapons to deter legitimate protest, one of the only viable avenues for change, is, sadly, voilent revolt. Welcome to Che's America.
Political issues really aren't as complicated as they are made out by politicians. And if we really ever acheive this broad-based "anarcho-democracy", we can always back out of anything we do - we don't have a giant political snowball controlled by elites.
I thought people were talking about some totally separate product (perhaps an SQL client or database?), until I eventually inferred that "sequel" meant SQL. "Sequel" just sounds too detached and vague (imagine: "Is SQL2 the sequel to SQL1?", "Company X is producing a sequel server since it's first server proved so successful"). I thought I was just clueless, I'm glad there's others that say S-Q-L.
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..so now the problem becomes the laborious chore of mining finite resources out of the earth?
What is wrong with a solar-powered electric generator used to split water? Is that not efficient enough? At least you wouldn't be lugging around all these minerals to replenish the water splitter.
But unfortunately there aren't just 4-8 "maintainers" in the world. As Linus says himself in the thread, he can only trust a fixed number of people. That fixed number of people does NOT map nicely to the tens and hundreds, and even thousands of people who are contributing to Linux. There are way more than 4-8 conceptual modules that need maintainers, and through which the world at large can funnel changes and patches. The tree needs to be a bit less broad, but a bit deeper. It's all well and good that Linus says he'll just trust that handful of people he knows well...but what about *them*. They can only trust another 8 or so people, so that turns out to be a maximum of 64 in the world that the system can cope with, without a deeper level of nesting. That's pretty pathetic. Linus also apparently doesn't account for the fact that the job is not *only* accepting patches, but also doing tedious work of *reconciling* those patches and providing a "staging area" so those patches can be reconciled and tested for stupid obvious collisions and bugs before they are really applied to the golden-Linus-tree. One human can not possibly do this (even if he only is in contact with 8 other people through which the world funnels changes). Like Rob Landley says, this responsibility has been taken in the past by Alan Cox, and is currently taken up by Dave Jones. It just needs to be formalized. I see it as a DSP in front of Linus, throwing out (or returning gracefully with a little note!) any out of band signals. It's ridiculous for Linus to insist on a strict 1-level star topology and when he is overloaded simply throw his hands up and say "Hey world, be less noisy!". The noise can be filtered with a DSP called a "Patch Penguin" (or whatever the hell you want to call it), perhaps several levels if necessary (it probably isn't). I don't see the problem. Linus is right in that maintainers and contributors need to take more responsibility, modularize more, and make cleaner patches, but even *if* they do this perfectly there will still be the matter of the tedious work of assembling the various patches - and I'm sure we all know that many "perfect, beautiful" patches do not a "perfect, beautiful" patchset make. In the end, it doesn't even really matter if Linus is Right...the community has needs, and if Linus isn't attentive to them, the community will move on and go elsewhere (or start cracking and fragmenting like it currently is).
Do we adequately understand WHY this is though? Last time I saw Cosmos (ok, an admittedly ancient show as far as science progress), it still wasn't clear WHY were weren't seeing quantum manifestations like "gases going into boxes", or dropped glasses "unbreaking". Sure it sounds silly, but don't our models and formulas and predict this sort of stuff should be happening? Or is the macroscopic scale so astronomically large in comparison to these probabilities that it is just incredibly rare for anything like this to happen at the macroscopic scale?
Is contention negotiation (or whatever the correct term is) "built-in" to ethernet, or is it just a feature of a higher level protocol, like IP? What I'm talking about is the fact that ethernet is shared, and when multiple requests go out at the same time, each party "stands off" for some random amount of time before resending. I would think that this would absolutely KILL IO performance, as you don't want all your devices competing for the shared data channel. How is Firewire/USB/SCSI, etc in this respect?
"Care to describe the method by which these signatures can be forged?"
*PUNCH* *SCUFFLE* I now have your card and can sign anything as if I were really you and it would be legally binding. Have a nice day.
Have the class assignment be to write a cheat detector which processes the very same class assignment. Try to cheat *that*!
really, how hard is it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=xml+compression
The very first thing that comes up is a project on SourceForge with in depth explanation of algorithm.
"Corporations still have much less rights than a person. We can start with voting rights...."
HAHAHA. Why would then need to *vote* when they can just buy legislation no matter who's in office?
"I think advancing the state of the art - where art and technology combine together - is what really moves him"
Advancing his own ego is what really moves him. Apple just takes the best known technology and sells it for a premium. Fireware and DVD burners aren't magic...it's just that the average Joe is not going to pay for that type of value, when a generic PC gives a much higher value (more for cheaper). Jobs would leave Apple the second it got "too" popular and started becoming mainstream, because it would no longer be a cult-of-Jobs any more.
"So the only thing the federal government is not allowed to tell us are matters of national security"
Which conveniently covers anything they want to pull out of their ass that day. "National security" is a crock. In a democracy the *people* are the national security.
Perhaps you want to live in a society where everybody has free reign to invade your life to verify that you are indeed not breaking any laws, but I'd sure as hell live in one where I was presumed *innocent* before proven guilty, not the other way around. The BSA should not be able to use scare tactics to single out and destroy arbitrary companies. Do you think this is a good thing? They should either bring lawsuits against ALL companies, and either lose the suits or engender so much bad will that nobody will every want to use their products, or not bring any at all. Any one company should not be allowed to scaremonger and arbitrarily cripple other companies by yelling "fire" in the free market.
Um, no it doesn't, because you can't PRODUCE anything with TVs. Duh. But still, I don't think this will mean much for Korean WRT India and China's software markets.
NASA has also revealed that it is researching ways to use magic as the next generation spacecraft propulsion. One scientist was quoted as saying: "With magic we could, for example, twitch our noses and *wish* the spacecraft to be at it's destination" "However," he cautioned, "magic is not known to exist. Nor may it ever". NASA has reportedly employed a young new scientist by the name of Harry Potter to aid in its newest research project.
Amen. The Digital Divide is a fabrication that politicians invented (was it all Gore? ;) so they could pat themselves on the back when they "solved" all the problems due to poverty by simply throwing hardware at it. The "Digital Divide" is simply the symptom of a socioeconomic divide that nobody wants to talk about. There was a Telivision Divide in the 50s, a Video Recorder divide in the 80s. Who cares. It's insulting that we minimize the problems of poverty, etc., by treating some superficial and largely irrelevant symptom (oh no the homeless can't download warez, what *shall* we do?!). I also realize it is a false choice to present resolving the core problem and ameliorating the symptoms as mutually exclusive, they aren't of course, but could we please stop yammering about the "Digital Divide" already? Maybe in 1996 it meant something, but not now. It's just so self-indulgent. There *are* non-geeky ways to help people.
Despite the fact that Microsoft at large may be an evil goliath, there are still pockets within or affiliated with MS that do really good work. CLR (without all those other services MS wants to pile on top of it) is a *damn fine* architecture and a breath of fresh air (my day job is Java middleware development, so I know). Miguel de Icaza's Mono project thinks it's so good that they want this to be the basis of unix ("Let's Make Unix Not Suck"). Before you bash it, read the specs and technical articles. It's really nice. The trick is now how to keep Microsoft from perverting it to their own world domination ends. Having it be an official standard (ECMA I think) will help, and is something Sun hasn't done yet (though I can't bash Sun, they've been really great with Java and are slowing catching on to the OSS 'thang').
It's not a bunch of balony. It's simply polite. At least OBSCURE the address by textualizing it...otherwise spamming software will pick it right up. I'm sure this person will decide to have Linux installed after the 10s or so comments they read amongst the 100s of spam messages. Just plain rude.
Do government officials really have no other ideas except to dump waste on Native American holy sites? If these were Christian or Jewish or Muslim holy sites there would be no way in hell. But because they're Native American (and who really gives a damn about Native Americans, I mean, didn't they go extinct years ago?) we can just shit all over them.
r es ources/documents/NCAIYuccaMtncomments.htm
. ht m
c .h tm
http://130.94.214.68/main/pages/issues/natural_
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/nwpo991209
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/nwpo991202
http://www.shundahai.org/yucca_mt.html
Hey, how about this idea: if you *really* want people to get a crash course in "computer literacy" why don't you ship the computers without operating systems? I'm not joking. If they really want to use that shiny new $1500 piece of equipment they'll have to put something on it. And perhaps they *won't* want to pay ~$200 out of pocket to put Windows on it. Let them choose whatever they want.
"That it takes more energy to make the hydrogen than you gain in using it."
Look, due to the laws of thermodynamics it will ALWAYS take more energy to obtain a resource than to use it. Same applies for oil - once we're out of it, it will be very damn expensive to "make" it. So a lot of these arguments against renewable energy sources are just rubbish. Sure, you don't get as big of an *immediate* payoff, but you get a much steadier, reliable payoff over time. The trick is amortizing the expense of using a certain fuel by using the byproducts in a very efficient way. We waste such vast amounts of energy both in direct use, and in unrecaptured efficiency, that I'm sure any number of energy sources will be totally viable (hydrogen, wind, solar, thermal, hydro, methane). But of course many of these will require social changes that nobody is willing to make. To paraphrase Denis Leary, everybody wants to get themselves a 1967 Cadillac El Dorado convertible, hot pink with whaleskin hub caps and all leather cow interior and big brown baby seal eyes for headlights, drive around in that baby at 115mph getting one mile per gallon, sucking down quarter pounder cheese burgers from McDonald's in the old-fashioned non-biodegradable styrofoam containers and when they're done sucking down those grease ball burgers, wipe their mouths with the American flag and toss the styrofoam container right out the side and there ain't a God damned thing anybody can do about it.
"Hmmmm, the more I think about this, the more problems I see. Ignorance must be bliss, because knowing all this stuff only brings me headaches and frustration."
Hey, why bother with that "thinking" stuff? Just grab a beer and turn on the game, and live the "miller fnord! high life"!
"and even to revolt should things every get really out of hand"
AHAHAH. That was a laugh. Even with the "holy" 2nd amendment, there is no freakin' chance in hell we anyone is ever going to be able to overthrow the US government with measly firearms. What a joke. Do you really think the political system is going to back down and say "Hey, you know what? This is sort of like what our founding fathers did. Hey everbody, let's just let these revolutionaries overrun us and entirely change the political landscape that has so benefitted us due to our entrenchment".
And now with the coming soft-weapons to deter legitimate protest, one of the only viable avenues for change, is, sadly, voilent revolt. Welcome to Che's America.
Political issues really aren't as complicated as they are made out by politicians. And if we really ever acheive this broad-based "anarcho-democracy", we can always back out of anything we do - we don't have a giant political snowball controlled by elites.
Was this article useful to you
1/9/2002:
Very 40%
Somewhat 50%
No 10%
2/9/2002:
Very -20%
Somewhat -10%
No 100%
Hey stop picking on Microsoft and buy lots of their products 130%
I thought people were talking about some totally separate product (perhaps an SQL client or database?), until I eventually inferred that "sequel" meant SQL. "Sequel" just sounds too detached and vague (imagine: "Is SQL2 the sequel to SQL1?", "Company X is producing a sequel server since it's first server proved so successful"). I thought I was just clueless, I'm glad there's others that say S-Q-L.
The translation is right here.