I used to own an Atari ST in the late 80's / early 90's (well, 3 actually, an ST, STE, and Mega). Those machines were sweet! The floppy is a standard 720K drive, but what we used to do is install a switch in the side of the case, which would allow us to switch sides on the disk, effectively using high-density disks as double 720k disks. I believe only the later models could read high-density disks, but it's worth a try. I'm sure you could find documentation on the 'net about this, it was a fairly standard practice back then (out of the 20 or so users in our Atari Users Group, 15 used this trick with no problems). In the worst case, you've just scrapped a standard floppy drive. Big deal.:)
I work for a company that develops recommendation systems. It's all fairly simple from a mathematical point of view, and we tend to get very good results (approx. 90% of all recommended items are well-liked by our users). We are currently in the process of developing a cross-platform, language-independent system capable of being used by just about any website or internet-enabled system. I'm not responsible for the math and statistical code running in the background, but I did pick up a thing or two about collaborative filtering (CF is the name Pattie Maes, founder of Firefly, gave to her style of recommendation techniques. It was eventually picked up by many others as well.).
In his article, Jamie says we all want to be cool. This may be true, however, the one thing recommendation systems show us plainly is that there is no magical 'One coolness' everybody adheres to. As a matter of fact, people in general have such radically different tastes that one person's 'cool' may be another's total opposite.
Yes, you could have a recommendation system handling 150 million users, but the chance that your definition of 'coolness' corresponds to those 150 million users' definition is slight at best, unless you're really part of 'mainstream culture', in which case the recommendation is unneeded because you're constantly being told what's cool through the media. Nobody needs to tell 13-year-old girls that the Backstreet Boys are cool. And when the next mega-boy-band comes out, they'll know, trust me.
Oh, and the one reason nobody has a free, open-source recommendation system is that the recommendation biz is pure gold. People are willing to pay huge amounts of cash to know what their users want / need. Just look at the data-mining business, which is enormous, and doesn't provide real-time results (which collaborative filtering / recommendation systems do). Developing an effective, fast recommendation system is time-consuming and extremely costly, due to the manpower you have to hire (Ph.D's in math, anyone)? Yes, it would be incredibly effective to have an open-source system anyone can tie into, but we're not talking about $100 operating systems here, we're talking about million-dollar statistical analysis programs.
Which is not to say that we couldn't tie, say, Slashdot into a recommendation system along with several other weblog-style sites to get a huge user base. One of the interesting things about our system is that it's web-based, so any number of sites can access the same system, keeping the same user database.
If you want to get a linux system booting up fast, just stick it on one of those IDE flash rom disks. My friend just bought 16 MB of Flash and he uses it to boot up an LRP box w/no harddrive. The data transfer rate of his 16MB drive is, well, 16MB/s. On his machine, which is a P-200MMX, I believe, the thing boots up in a few seconds (haven't timed it, but it's probably more than 3, less than 10). Pretty sweet if you can't afford to be tied down to a certain mobo / hardware config.
The LRP (Linux Router Project) is also a good solution if you want to run off a small Disk-on-Chip. 16MB should be fine; that's what a co-worker of mine was thinking of buying, and he's been playing around with the LRP for a while. With 16MB and a decent amount of RAM (the LRP is mostle ramdisk-based), you could get a whole mess of stuff in there, including routing/masquerading, firewalling, mail, web, dns, possibly even a copy of Perl.:)
Gee. You know the M$ lackeys are starting to wet their pants when they start inundating Transmeta stories with "W2K is good" posts. Especially when the posts only compare W2K with its almost useless predecessors.
Nice going, guys, keep it up. Waste your time flaming Linux on Slashdot while the rest of the world is busy actually writing real code and not flashy interfaces for a buggy platform. Idiots.
I think that was supposed to be funny. 'Reliability' and 'scalability'? 'Tarnish its image'? Compaq?? Ha! The whole thing reeks more of 'Funny' than 'Troll'.;)
I agree... the further you get away from the server end, the more Compaq machines generally suck. I think that a big part of their problem is that they treat all their machines (tech support wise) as if they WERE servers. It's great to have a riser board in a server, as well as little sliding drive bays, and rompaqs / softpaqs galore so you can fix all those little incompatibilities.
However, on the non-server side, these things drive me NUTS! When user X can't get application Y running on his bastardized, Compaq patched-to-hell version of Windows 98, things aren't quite as easy to debug. And of course, user X can't be damned to follow all the little steps he needs to in order to fix the problem. Ah, hell...
In short, I think this applies to Compaq more than it does to any other computer manufacturer selling home systems: Keep It Simple, STUPID!!
I did a little poking around on Google too. They seem to be ex-Corel WINE programmers who've been working on getting DirectX7 working for a few months now. Judging by the name, I'd guess what they want to do is get most, or all, Windows games working on Linux.
Now, I don't know how they plan to generate revenue from this, as they can't possibly sell it... maybe they're planning to make a quick porting/fixing tool that will let game developers run their games under WINE more easily.
Ove Kaaven seems to be the guy working on the Direct3D and DirectSound, so I'd say he's one of their lead coders. He seems like a pretty bright guy, from what I saw in the WINE devel lists.
"Sun's commercial motivations helped make Unix a much more stable OS--for example, it created the Network Filing System (NFS)--and Unix's growing popularity meant more apps could be easily moved to Sun platforms."
Sadly, this author has the balls to ask the question "Is Unix an OS?", but he obviously lacks the brains to answer it. I don't think he quite understands the difference between a file cabinet and a computer.
Um... We Canadians drink hour after hour, day after day... what's your point? You shouldn't have to drink piss-weak beer just because you can't handle the good stuff.
Re:Talk about a waste of processor time.
on
Can Computers Pray?
·
· Score: 1
What a bunch of religious drivel...
How can you possibly proclaim "If I have ever been certain of anything, this is it." when your arguments are based on YOUR religious convictions? I happen to be an atheist, and if I were to use your terms, "I am completely certain there is no god, no afterlife, and that our souls are merely a biological perception".
Of course, I don't go around proclaiming that this stuff is the truth, it is merely my perception, and my opinion of the world I live on. Forcing your beliefs on anyone is never a good thing. Remember, you are a single individual, and no matter how clear your vision may seem, it is marred by your own perceptions. No one can really say they know the truth until they eliminate the barriers of their own perception (math is very good for that).
Perl is not 'a bit more easier' (sic) than C++ in terms of string manipulation. It's a language based on string manipulation, like awk or sed. The advantage that Perl gives you are very interesting: typeless (or almost) variables, functions for parsing, rearranging, splicing, and concatenation, as well as a plethora of interesting tools that make web development incredibly easy and efficient. Also, keep in mind that Perl is a very expandable language. Modules exist to do just about everything you'd like with Perl.
Don't they do all that stuff already? Any community, independent or otherwise, has a way to import, or produce, all the goods needed to sustain that community.
I'm not saying they wouldn't have ties with their neighbors; most countries do already. There wouldn't be a 'big oil crisis' if Silicon Valley didn't produce its own oil... many nations depend on imported oil, or did you think every little country has massive oil fields?
Silicon Valley could clearly make enough money as a nation to sustain itself. Just think of all the cash there already is in SV. Now subtract a bunch of taxes and add heavier import fees. I think the equation works itself out pretty much, don't you?
This article struck me as being quite clueless about the internet, the IT community, and the world in general.
"The place is full of bright immigrants willing to sacrifice their ancestral ties for a seat at the table;"
WTF is that? Just because people move to Silicon valley doesn't mean they're "sacrificing their ancestral ties"... Come on!
"Technologists tend not to be philosophers."
We're not philosophers? What the hell are we then? We're a bunch of monkeys playing with a new world, endlessly finding new ways to do and think about things, and we're not philosophers? Hrm. Guess I need to review my definition of a philosopher.
The writer shows a sad lack of understanding... It seems he's blissfully ignorant of much of what goes on in the wired world.
I some times do wonder, why is it that we spend so much time, cash and equipments on search for ET when our own good old earth is still a vast mystery to us ! Here's how he establised his theory on the Earth: he looked at the universe and wondered what didn't click.
A tree does die from old age. If it didn't, there'd be a lot more 'immortal' trees out there... I believe the oldest are California Redwoods or something like that, and they're only a few hundred (maybe thousand?) years old.
There are a bunch of micro-organisms that have shown a remarkable amount (and I mean -remarkable-) of resistance to such things as heat and pressure. The only thing stopping us from finding similar, even more resistant ones is probably the fact that our equipment isn't as tough as they are (as well as the fact that they're several miles in the Earth's sublayers). We'd probably find more, if we could build the tools to look.
What are you talking about? There's a world of difference between Microsoft's strategy (embrace and expand) and the way Linux absorbs new technologies.
The biggest difference is, before Microsoft puts something new into Windows, they make absolutely sure that they can twist standards around to grab more market share than their competitors, and once it's in there, there's no going back (it's there to stay).
Linux developers, on the other hand, are constantly releasing new code for Linux. Does this mean the code will make it into a distro? Not necesarily. It depends on the community's will, and the project's acceptance within the community.
I know this has been repeated time and time again, but obviously, some people still don't get it. Microsoft makes its OSes evolve like machines. Linux evolves like a living being. The difference is that when the time comes to implement something new under Linux, it's never forced on anybody.
And as for your comment about innovation in the history of Linux, I think you should look at what's going on before you make such blantantly ignorant statements. Take a look on Freshmeat, I'm sure you'll find at least a little innovation there.
Oh, and not to be a bitch, but learn to spell hypocrisy before you run around everywhere complaining about it.
I don't believe the free software community is an aristocracy... Aristocracy denotes a certain level of control and superiority over the 'masses'. The people who write the software we use everyday have no control over the common man, as he is free to choose whatever he likes. In that sense, the free software community is a democracy.
Here in Quebec I see a lot of French(Canadian) keyboards, and they all have an 'Alt Gr' key on them. I believe the 'Alt Gr' stands for 'Alternate Group', or in French, 'Alterner Groupe'. I think it's used for certain key combos, such as certain types of accents that are rarely used. I remember under Windoze I had to use them quite a bit.
That's the problem with democracy... people tend to whine. And people tend to whine about the people who whine. I don't see how you can make generalized comments about this "community", as you put it, based on a percentage of whiny people.
The thing that you have to remember is that the Linux community is a democratic community based on free speech. Free speech has its advantages and disadvantages, and as such, we must accept both the compliments and the criticisms of other people.
I'd rather that people whine about the things they don't like than have them blindly accept everything that comes their way.
Slashdot Mirror
A few lines of Perl would do it. Very easy, but as stated previously, the implications are worth thinking about.
I used to own an Atari ST in the late 80's / early 90's (well, 3 actually, an ST, STE, and Mega). Those machines were sweet! The floppy is a standard 720K drive, but what we used to do is install a switch in the side of the case, which would allow us to switch sides on the disk, effectively using high-density disks as double 720k disks. I believe only the later models could read high-density disks, but it's worth a try. I'm sure you could find documentation on the 'net about this, it was a fairly standard practice back then (out of the 20 or so users in our Atari Users Group, 15 used this trick with no problems). In the worst case, you've just scrapped a standard floppy drive. Big deal. :)
I work for a company that develops recommendation systems. It's all fairly simple from a mathematical point of view, and we tend to get very good results (approx. 90% of all recommended items are well-liked by our users). We are currently in the process of developing a cross-platform, language-independent system capable of being used by just about any website or internet-enabled system. I'm not responsible for the math and statistical code running in the background, but I did pick up a thing or two about collaborative filtering (CF is the name Pattie Maes, founder of Firefly, gave to her style of recommendation techniques. It was eventually picked up by many others as well.).
In his article, Jamie says we all want to be cool. This may be true, however, the one thing recommendation systems show us plainly is that there is no magical 'One coolness' everybody adheres to. As a matter of fact, people in general have such radically different tastes that one person's 'cool' may be another's total opposite.
Yes, you could have a recommendation system handling 150 million users, but the chance that your definition of 'coolness' corresponds to those 150 million users' definition is slight at best, unless you're really part of 'mainstream culture', in which case the recommendation is unneeded because you're constantly being told what's cool through the media. Nobody needs to tell 13-year-old girls that the Backstreet Boys are cool. And when the next mega-boy-band comes out, they'll know, trust me.
Oh, and the one reason nobody has a free, open-source recommendation system is that the recommendation biz is pure gold. People are willing to pay huge amounts of cash to know what their users want / need. Just look at the data-mining business, which is enormous, and doesn't provide real-time results (which collaborative filtering / recommendation systems do). Developing an effective, fast recommendation system is time-consuming and extremely costly, due to the manpower you have to hire (Ph.D's in math, anyone)? Yes, it would be incredibly effective to have an open-source system anyone can tie into, but we're not talking about $100 operating systems here, we're talking about million-dollar statistical analysis programs.
Which is not to say that we couldn't tie, say, Slashdot into a recommendation system along with several other weblog-style sites to get a huge user base. One of the interesting things about our system is that it's web-based, so any number of sites can access the same system, keeping the same user database.
If you want to get a linux system booting up fast, just stick it on one of those IDE flash rom disks. My friend just bought 16 MB of Flash and he uses it to boot up an LRP box w/no harddrive. The data transfer rate of his 16MB drive is, well, 16MB/s. On his machine, which is a P-200MMX, I believe, the thing boots up in a few seconds (haven't timed it, but it's probably more than 3, less than 10). Pretty sweet if you can't afford to be tied down to a certain mobo / hardware config.
The LRP (Linux Router Project) is also a good solution if you want to run off a small Disk-on-Chip. 16MB should be fine; that's what a co-worker of mine was thinking of buying, and he's been playing around with the LRP for a while. With 16MB and a decent amount of RAM (the LRP is mostle ramdisk-based), you could get a whole mess of stuff in there, including routing/masquerading, firewalling, mail, web, dns, possibly even a copy of Perl. :)
Gee. You know the M$ lackeys are starting to wet their pants when they start inundating Transmeta stories with "W2K is good" posts. Especially when the posts only compare W2K with its almost useless predecessors.
Nice going, guys, keep it up. Waste your time flaming Linux on Slashdot while the rest of the world is busy actually writing real code and not flashy interfaces for a buggy platform. Idiots.
I think that was supposed to be funny. 'Reliability' and 'scalability'? 'Tarnish its image'? Compaq?? Ha! The whole thing reeks more of 'Funny' than 'Troll'. ;)
I agree... the further you get away from the server end, the more Compaq machines generally suck. I think that a big part of their problem is that they treat all their machines (tech support wise) as if they WERE servers. It's great to have a riser board in a server, as well as little sliding drive bays, and rompaqs / softpaqs galore so you can fix all those little incompatibilities.
However, on the non-server side, these things drive me NUTS! When user X can't get application Y running on his bastardized, Compaq patched-to-hell version of Windows 98, things aren't quite as easy to debug. And of course, user X can't be damned to follow all the little steps he needs to in order to fix the problem. Ah, hell...
In short, I think this applies to Compaq more than it does to any other computer manufacturer selling home systems: Keep It Simple, STUPID!!
I did a little poking around on Google too. They seem to be ex-Corel WINE programmers who've been working on getting DirectX7 working for a few months now. Judging by the name, I'd guess what they want to do is get most, or all, Windows games working on Linux.
Now, I don't know how they plan to generate revenue from this, as they can't possibly sell it... maybe they're planning to make a quick porting/fixing tool that will let game developers run their games under WINE more easily.
Ove Kaaven seems to be the guy working on the Direct3D and DirectSound, so I'd say he's one of their lead coders. He seems like a pretty bright guy, from what I saw in the WINE devel lists.
Just my 2 cents.
Wow. You seem to be the only one who actually understands the article. If I had moderator points, you'd be up to (5, Informative) by now.
"Sun's commercial motivations helped make Unix a much more stable OS--for example, it created the Network Filing System (NFS)--and Unix's growing popularity meant more apps could be easily moved to Sun platforms."
Sadly, this author has the balls to ask the question "Is Unix an OS?", but he obviously lacks the brains to answer it. I don't think he quite understands the difference between a file cabinet and a computer.
Um... We Canadians drink hour after hour, day after day... what's your point? You shouldn't have to drink piss-weak beer just because you can't handle the good stuff.
What a bunch of religious drivel...
How can you possibly proclaim "If I have ever been certain of anything, this is it." when your arguments are based on YOUR religious convictions? I happen to be an atheist, and if I were to use your terms, "I am completely certain there is no god, no afterlife, and that our souls are merely a biological perception".
Of course, I don't go around proclaiming that this stuff is the truth, it is merely my perception, and my opinion of the world I live on. Forcing your beliefs on anyone is never a good thing. Remember, you are a single individual, and no matter how clear your vision may seem, it is marred by your own perceptions. No one can really say they know the truth until they eliminate the barriers of their own perception (math is very good for that).
What the hell are you talking about? "None of them had actually been exploited by anyone"? Only an idiot would believe that.
Perl is not 'a bit more easier' (sic) than C++ in terms of string manipulation. It's a language based on string manipulation, like awk or sed. The advantage that Perl gives you are very interesting: typeless (or almost) variables, functions for parsing, rearranging, splicing, and concatenation, as well as a plethora of interesting tools that make web development incredibly easy and efficient. Also, keep in mind that Perl is a very expandable language. Modules exist to do just about everything you'd like with Perl.
Don't they do all that stuff already? Any community, independent or otherwise, has a way to import, or produce, all the goods needed to sustain that community.
I'm not saying they wouldn't have ties with their neighbors; most countries do already. There wouldn't be a 'big oil crisis' if Silicon Valley didn't produce its own oil... many nations depend on imported oil, or did you think every little country has massive oil fields?
Silicon Valley could clearly make enough money as a nation to sustain itself. Just think of all the cash there already is in SV. Now subtract a bunch of taxes and add heavier import fees. I think the equation works itself out pretty much, don't you?
This article struck me as being quite clueless about the internet, the IT community, and the world in general.
"The place is full of bright immigrants willing to sacrifice their ancestral ties for a seat at the table;"
WTF is that? Just because people move to Silicon valley doesn't mean they're "sacrificing their ancestral ties"... Come on!
"Technologists tend not to be philosophers."
We're not philosophers? What the hell are we then? We're a bunch of monkeys playing with a new world, endlessly finding new ways to do and think about things, and we're not philosophers? Hrm. Guess I need to review my definition of a philosopher.
The writer shows a sad lack of understanding... It seems he's blissfully ignorant of much of what goes on in the wired world.
I some times do wonder, why is it that we spend so much time, cash and equipments on search for ET when our own good old earth is still a vast mystery to us ! Here's how he establised his theory on the Earth: he looked at the universe and wondered what didn't click.
A tree does die from old age. If it didn't, there'd be a lot more 'immortal' trees out there... I believe the oldest are California Redwoods or something like that, and they're only a few hundred (maybe thousand?) years old.
There are a bunch of micro-organisms that have shown a remarkable amount (and I mean -remarkable-) of resistance to such things as heat and pressure. The only thing stopping us from finding similar, even more resistant ones is probably the fact that our equipment isn't as tough as they are (as well as the fact that they're several miles in the Earth's sublayers). We'd probably find more, if we could build the tools to look.
What are you talking about? There's a world of difference between Microsoft's strategy (embrace and expand) and the way Linux absorbs new technologies.
The biggest difference is, before Microsoft puts something new into Windows, they make absolutely sure that they can twist standards around to grab more market share than their competitors, and once it's in there, there's no going back (it's there to stay).
Linux developers, on the other hand, are constantly releasing new code for Linux. Does this mean the code will make it into a distro? Not necesarily. It depends on the community's will, and the project's acceptance within the community.
I know this has been repeated time and time again, but obviously, some people still don't get it. Microsoft makes its OSes evolve like machines. Linux evolves like a living being. The difference is that when the time comes to implement something new under Linux, it's never forced on anybody.
And as for your comment about innovation in the history of Linux, I think you should look at what's going on before you make such blantantly ignorant statements. Take a look on Freshmeat, I'm sure you'll find at least a little innovation there.
Oh, and not to be a bitch, but learn to spell hypocrisy before you run around everywhere complaining about it.
It hasn't been distributed yet, AFAIK... Only the Beta License, and what's more, it hasn't even been 24 hours since they distributed it.
As soon as they realize what they did (i.e: tomorrow) they'll promptly apologize and replace the license with something in accordance with the GPL.
I don't believe the free software community is an aristocracy... Aristocracy denotes a certain level of control and superiority over the 'masses'. The people who write the software we use everyday have no control over the common man, as he is free to choose whatever he likes. In that sense, the free software community is a democracy.
Here in Quebec I see a lot of French(Canadian) keyboards, and they all have an 'Alt Gr' key on them. I believe the 'Alt Gr' stands for 'Alternate Group', or in French, 'Alterner Groupe'. I think it's used for certain key combos, such as certain types of accents that are rarely used. I remember under Windoze I had to use them quite a bit.
That's the problem with democracy... people tend to whine. And people tend to whine about the people who whine. I don't see how you can make generalized comments about this "community", as you put it, based on a percentage of whiny people.
The thing that you have to remember is that the Linux community is a democratic community based on free speech. Free speech has its advantages and disadvantages, and as such, we must accept both the compliments and the criticisms of other people.
I'd rather that people whine about the things they don't like than have them blindly accept everything that comes their way.