Yes - at an early age, I was schooled in the first most basic law of capitalism:
Build a better moustrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.
If that's all they taught you, someone didn't teach you very well. Let's look programming languages; there were dozens of Java-like languages before Java, but they were ignored and Java became a success, because of Sun. There were dozens of Java-like languages after Java, but they were ignored and C# is working on becoming a success, because of Microsoft. Even in the backyard of geeks, marketing mattered than quality.
They make a very big point about how everything is in rtf format. Pretty amazing. Sounds like they're trying to get the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, piracy thing going
I think it's more the fact that they aren't going to make you jump through hoops to read it. Here it is, you can read it anywhere, with no clunky proprietary reader to get in your way.
Put all the classics on the medium first. There is nothing worse than being on a plane or a trip with nothing to read, than having something bad to read.
They are. Every major book of English literature printed prior to 1923 is available from Project Gutenberg. If you aren't in a mood to download your own copy and burn it, there are cheap ripoff CD's available from Ebay or your local Hastings or the like. (Sadly, no one seems to sell an official PG CD any more.)
A nation must react to threats to the lives and interests of its citizens.
Iraquis never attacked the US, that was saudi arabians.
Where, pray tell, did you get your education? I said "threats to the lives and interests of its citizens."
Look no further then palestine for an example.
You seem to look at things in black and white. Israel is a nation surrounded by enemies who support Palestine. Palestinians have been sending a consistent barrage of terrorist attacks on Israelites, and has had trouble making peace treaties and keeping them. Israel is not perfect, but the Palestines are far from saints.
There have been about a dozen American Citizens that have been killed by Israel [...] When Bin Laden killed American citizens we bombed an entire country to bits.
Bin Laden set bombs in the World Trade Center. After that, he blew up _two_ US embassies, killing 224. I don't remember the US bombing an entire country after that. It wasn't until they killed 5,000 people that we released our full fury on him and his associates. Unlike Bin Laden, Israel has never targetted American citizens for extinction and has never stated an intent to attack us.
Instead of destroying books in the process of scanning them, why not use a high-end digital camera?
There are high end scanners. They are incredibly expensive (~$10,000) and, since the page isn't pressed flat, it can be hard to get a good scan. But even given only a flatbed scanner, it's a lot easier to get good scans without destroying the book than a lot of people seem to think.
If the US government had listened when many Americans were warning them not to arm bloodthirsty, criminallly-minded people like Hussein and Bin Laden while it was happening, we wouldn't be stuck in this predicament.
How can you know that? Hussein would probably have stuck his hand in the cookie jar earlier. Bin Laden's troops wouldn't have been as well trained, but there's no reason to think he wouldn't have done the same things. Of course, as Afganistan was in some ways the Soviet Union's Vietnam, it's possible we would still have the Soviet Union breathing down our neck while this was going on.
Experience suggests that the scans will be of mediocre quality (missing some pages, missing parts of other pages, frequently having insufficient contrast to be legible, and losing any colour or greyscale information present in the originals).
What type of experiance? The quality of the scans is of course dependent on how carefully they are done. Notice that the National Yiddish Book Center/Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library did just that to a lot of the books, and produced high enough quality scans to make new books from them.
Also, I sometimes scan public-domain books into the computer. I just sent scans of several books to someone with webspace and a preexisting site. If you look at those scans, you may get the impression that the contrast and grayscale was lost. What you probably don't realize, is that those are scaled for the web, at 90 KB for two pages. It's not feasible to put up the original 4 MB scans, and few really care about the difference. I would assume that other projects would be similar; you can get excellent scans if you talk to the person, but they aren't going to waste webspace and bandwidth offering huge high-detail scans to everyone who wanders by.
Iraq does not have the right to complain about being attacked because it _WAS_ a bully in the past.
Iraq _is_ a bully. You let Saddam Hussain free from the restrictions, and he'll do exactly what he did before.
But obviously American have become so selfcentered in their view of the worls, that you don't notice how many people are starting to hate your foreign policy.
But obviously, you have become so anti-American in your view of the world, that you don't realize that there is no nice solution. A nation must react to threats to the lives and interests of its citizens. Moreover, people and the nations composed of them naturally want to help those being unjustly oppressed or slaughtered. Superpowers, like the US, are frequently directly invoked for help, and will likely get blamed for the deaths if they do not help. On the other hand, nations object to actions taken by other nations on their soil, whether just or unjust, and people will complain if it didn't go perfectly. There is no obvious, perfect path; neither complete isolation nor world conquest are acceptable solutions, and which point between those two is the right answer is an open question.
What have the iraqis ever done to americans? The answer is nothing!
What has Iraq done to every country around it that looked vulnerable? Attacked it. When you're the bully on the block, sometimes you have to put up with the big bully coming around if you don't do what he wants, and you really have no moral standing to complain.
Seriously, if it's that freaking small, just EMAIL IT TO YOURSELF PEOPLE!
Care to spend the money to run ethernet around the house? The phone-ethernet doesn't support Linux, so I have to copy files to and from another computer when working with the Internet. Copying something to floppy is a lot quicker than wiping a CD-RW and burning it.
I get home, pop the CDR into my machine and it's blank... turns out she had her burning software set so only her computer could decipher the disk.
Right; there are several standards for CD-RWs. About all I've ever seen used for floppies (outside a Mac) was FAT compatible (includes VFAT) file systems. (Tom's root-boot disk is an exception, but it's not for file transfer.)
I'm convinced that it takes a small group of well-led, motivated people with an original idea and good planning to make truly structural leap -- think Be. I haven't seen an open source project do this *yet*
Intel's VLIW architecture is going to be a pain for compiler writers, greatly limiting the diversity of languages that's likely going to be available.
The major compiled languages are all attached to GCC, so if Linux/BSD get a decent C compiler for IA64, they will also get decent Pascal, Fortran, Ada, Java and Objective C compilers. Most implementations for other compiled languages are compilers to C. Most direct-to-assembly compilers only targeted IA32 anyway, arguably making it no great loss. JIT compilers will lose out, though.
Eric Raymond may not be an embedded programmer, but neither are most of the programmer's he's talking to. He clearly recognizes there are exceptions to the rule - "Nowadays, with every development shop and most users (apart from the few modeling nuclear explosions or doing 3D movie animation) awash in cheap machine cycles". In any case, embedded programming tends to worry about trading cycles for reliability, which has some of the same principles.
Did we discover some relevant piece of information about the posting ACs that made that a wise decision
You mean besides the fact that everyone reporting a problem is Anonymous Coward, except for Theo deRaadt (hint: look at the OpenBSD webpages - it's Theo de Raadt.) Considering a #5000 level user says there's no problem; well, I know who I believe.
it does show where it rates in the Linux priorities. (As a comparison, consider that Linux supported Itanium very early on [...]
That has nothing to do with priorities. It has to do with the fact that Intel and HP were throwing money at the problem and loaning out Itanium machines semi-permenantly to anyone who could really use one.
Re:apple.com/switch should become apple.com/wesue
on
Switch Different
·
· Score: 2
This website [lickmysweaty.com] was forced by Apple's lawyers to take down their parody of the switch campaign
If it's the one linked to slashdot that has linkmysweaty.com's name in it, it used an entire commerical of Apple's, instead of making their own. That's crossing a major line, legally.
Using people who are not hideously ugly might help. Btw, was that chick pregnant or just fat?
I agree. The first thing we should judge anyone who intends to leave their house on should be physical beauty. No one cares if what your personality is like, or how skilled you are. If you aren't extraordinarly attractive, just stay inside. </sarcasm>
There's absolutely no reason for this incompatibility.
The 3.1 (= IA64) C++ ABI was supposed to be the end-all and be-all of ABI's. Unfortunately, they made a few minor mistakes in implementation, and are trying to fix it before everyone starts using 3.1. I'm sure in your perfection, you wouldn't have made that mistake, but you haven't seen fit to grace GCC with your presence, so it has to struggle on without you.
Actually, no one should be shipping with this compiler. The distributers on the GCC list - FreeBSD, Redhat, Debian and Suse, and I thought Mandrake was in on this - agree that some emergency bugfixes would be made to the C++ ABI, so it will be compatible with the 3.3+ C++ ABI, and this would be release as 3.2 (as there's an ABI change.) Apple was the only exception I knew of - they're going ahead with a release based on 3.1.
if they link to a gpl'd library, must be gpld, can't dual license it.
If you link to a GPL library, the combination of the program and the library as a whole must be distributed under the GPL. There's nothing wrong with offering the code under a BSD (no-ad) license; it would only have an effect if someone rewrote it to not use Kylix or if someone had the proprietary version.
Is there really any advantage to it, compared with C++?
Feature-wise, Ada has fixed point numbers and multitasking built in. Style-wise, Ada has strong typing and tends to raise exceptions where C++ would crash or start working with garbage (i.e. bad pointer or buffer overrun.) It's also rarely requires the use of pointers, instead letting you pass arrays, or pass stuff by reference. Aesthetically, I find it a more enjoyable language to program in than C++.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes - at an early age, I was schooled in the first most basic law of capitalism:
Build a better moustrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.
If that's all they taught you, someone didn't teach you very well. Let's look programming languages; there were dozens of Java-like languages before Java, but they were ignored and Java became a success, because of Sun. There were dozens of Java-like languages after Java, but they were ignored and C# is working on becoming a success, because of Microsoft. Even in the backyard of geeks, marketing mattered than quality.
They make a very big point about how everything is in rtf format. Pretty amazing. Sounds like they're trying to get the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, piracy thing going
I think it's more the fact that they aren't going to make you jump through hoops to read it. Here it is, you can read it anywhere, with no clunky proprietary reader to get in your way.
Put all the classics on the medium first. There is nothing worse than being on a plane or a trip with nothing to read, than having something bad to read.
They are. Every major book of English literature printed prior to 1923 is available from Project Gutenberg. If you aren't in a mood to download your own copy and burn it, there are cheap ripoff CD's available from Ebay or your local Hastings or the like. (Sadly, no one seems to sell an official PG CD any more.)
What interests? Oh I see you mean cheap oil.
That's certainly one interest.
[A bunch of half-truths deleted]
So you hate the American president and everything that America has done and does, but you aren't anti-American. Right...
Iraq has attacked two counties iran and kuwait.
Right; the vulnerable looking countries around him.
Both at the urging of the US.
Are you honestly claiming that the US urged Iraq to invade Kuwait, and then attacked Iraq for doing the same?
Yes, the US urged Iraq to attack Iran. Saddam could have turned the US down, but didn't because Iran was too tempting for conquest.
A nation must react to threats to the lives and interests of its citizens.
Iraquis never attacked the US, that was saudi arabians.
Where, pray tell, did you get your education? I said "threats to the lives and interests of its citizens."
Look no further then palestine for an example.
You seem to look at things in black and white. Israel is a nation surrounded by enemies who support Palestine. Palestinians have been sending a consistent barrage of terrorist attacks on Israelites, and has had trouble making peace treaties and keeping them. Israel is not perfect, but the Palestines are far from saints.
There have been about a dozen American Citizens that have been killed by Israel [...] When Bin Laden killed American citizens we bombed an entire country to bits.
Bin Laden set bombs in the World Trade Center. After that, he blew up _two_ US embassies, killing 224. I don't remember the US bombing an entire country after that. It wasn't until they killed 5,000 people that we released our full fury on him and his associates. Unlike Bin Laden, Israel has never targetted American citizens for extinction and has never stated an intent to attack us.
Instead of destroying books in the process of scanning them, why not use a high-end digital camera?
There are high end scanners. They are incredibly expensive (~$10,000) and, since the page isn't pressed flat, it can be hard to get a good scan. But even given only a flatbed scanner, it's a lot easier to get good scans without destroying the book than a lot of people seem to think.
If the US government had listened when many Americans were warning them not to arm bloodthirsty, criminallly-minded people like Hussein and Bin Laden while it was happening, we wouldn't be stuck in this predicament.
How can you know that? Hussein would probably have stuck his hand in the cookie jar earlier. Bin Laden's troops wouldn't have been as well trained, but there's no reason to think he wouldn't have done the same things. Of course, as Afganistan was in some ways the Soviet Union's Vietnam, it's possible we would still have the Soviet Union breathing down our neck while this was going on.
Experience suggests that the scans will be of mediocre quality (missing some pages, missing parts of other pages, frequently having insufficient contrast to be legible, and losing any colour or greyscale information present in the originals).
What type of experiance? The quality of the scans is of course dependent on how carefully they are done. Notice that the National Yiddish Book Center/Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library did just that to a lot of the books, and produced high enough quality scans to make new books from them.
Also, I sometimes scan public-domain books into the computer. I just sent scans of several books to someone with webspace and a preexisting site. If you look at those scans, you may get the impression that the contrast and grayscale was lost. What you probably don't realize, is that those are scaled for the web, at 90 KB for two pages. It's not feasible to put up the original 4 MB scans, and few really care about the difference. I would assume that other projects would be similar; you can get excellent scans if you talk to the person, but they aren't going to waste webspace and bandwidth offering huge high-detail scans to everyone who wanders by.
Iraq does not have the right to complain about being attacked because it _WAS_ a bully in the past.
Iraq _is_ a bully. You let Saddam Hussain free from the restrictions, and he'll do exactly what he did before.
But obviously American have become so selfcentered in their view of the worls, that you don't notice how many people are starting to hate your foreign policy.
But obviously, you have become so anti-American in your view of the world, that you don't realize that there is no nice solution. A nation must react to threats to the lives and interests of its citizens. Moreover, people and the nations composed of them naturally want to help those being unjustly oppressed or slaughtered. Superpowers, like the US, are frequently directly invoked for help, and will likely get blamed for the deaths if they do not help. On the other hand, nations object to actions taken by other nations on their soil, whether just or unjust, and people will complain if it didn't go perfectly. There is no obvious, perfect path; neither complete isolation nor world conquest are acceptable solutions, and which point between those two is the right answer is an open question.
What have the iraqis ever done to americans? The answer is nothing!
What has Iraq done to every country around it that looked vulnerable? Attacked it. When you're the bully on the block, sometimes you have to put up with the big bully coming around if you don't do what he wants, and you really have no moral standing to complain.
Seriously, if it's that freaking small, just EMAIL IT TO YOURSELF PEOPLE!
Care to spend the money to run ethernet around the house? The phone-ethernet doesn't support Linux, so I have to copy files to and from another computer when working with the Internet. Copying something to floppy is a lot quicker than wiping a CD-RW and burning it.
I get home, pop the CDR into my machine and it's blank... turns out she had her burning software set so only her computer could decipher the disk.
Right; there are several standards for CD-RWs. About all I've ever seen used for floppies (outside a Mac) was FAT compatible (includes VFAT) file systems. (Tom's root-boot disk is an exception, but it's not for file transfer.)
I'm convinced that it takes a small group of well-led, motivated people with an original idea and good planning to make truly structural leap -- think Be. I haven't seen an open source project do this *yet*
What about TeX?
Intel's VLIW architecture is going to be a pain for compiler writers, greatly limiting the diversity of languages that's likely going to be available.
The major compiled languages are all attached to GCC, so if Linux/BSD get a decent C compiler for IA64, they will also get decent Pascal, Fortran, Ada, Java and Objective C compilers. Most implementations for other compiled languages are compilers to C. Most direct-to-assembly compilers only targeted IA32 anyway, arguably making it no great loss. JIT compilers will lose out, though.
Eric Raymond may not be an embedded programmer, but neither are most of the programmer's he's talking to. He clearly recognizes there are exceptions to the rule - "Nowadays, with every development shop and most users (apart from the few modeling nuclear explosions or doing 3D movie animation) awash in cheap machine cycles". In any case, embedded programming tends to worry about trading cycles for reliability, which has some of the same principles.
Did we discover some relevant piece of information about the posting ACs that made that a wise decision
You mean besides the fact that everyone reporting a problem is Anonymous Coward, except for Theo deRaadt (hint: look at the OpenBSD webpages - it's Theo de Raadt.) Considering a #5000 level user says there's no problem; well, I know who I believe.
No, it has to do with priorities.
You think Redhat paused for a second to consider priorities when Intel shoved a big pile of cash at them to get Linux working on Itanium?
it does show where it rates in the Linux priorities. (As a comparison, consider that Linux supported Itanium very early on [...]
That has nothing to do with priorities. It has to do with the fact that Intel and HP were throwing money at the problem and loaning out Itanium machines semi-permenantly to anyone who could really use one.
This website [lickmysweaty.com] was forced by Apple's lawyers to take down their parody of the switch campaign
If it's the one linked to slashdot that has linkmysweaty.com's name in it, it used an entire commerical of Apple's, instead of making their own. That's crossing a major line, legally.
Using people who are not hideously ugly might help. Btw, was that chick pregnant or just fat?
I agree. The first thing we should judge anyone who intends to leave their house on should be physical beauty. No one cares if what your personality is like, or how skilled you are. If you aren't extraordinarly attractive, just stay inside.
</sarcasm>
There's absolutely no reason for this incompatibility.
The 3.1 (= IA64) C++ ABI was supposed to be the end-all and be-all of ABI's. Unfortunately, they made a few minor mistakes in implementation, and are trying to fix it before everyone starts using 3.1. I'm sure in your perfection, you wouldn't have made that mistake, but you haven't seen fit to grace GCC with your presence, so it has to struggle on without you.
Actually, no one should be shipping with this compiler. The distributers on the GCC list - FreeBSD, Redhat, Debian and Suse, and I thought Mandrake was in on this - agree that some emergency bugfixes would be made to the C++ ABI, so it will be compatible with the 3.3+ C++ ABI, and this would be release as 3.2 (as there's an ABI change.) Apple was the only exception I knew of - they're going ahead with a release based on 3.1.
if they link to a gpl'd library, must be gpld, can't dual license it.
If you link to a GPL library, the combination of the program and the library as a whole must be distributed under the GPL. There's nothing wrong with offering the code under a BSD (no-ad) license; it would only have an effect if someone rewrote it to not use Kylix or if someone had the proprietary version.
Is there really any advantage to it, compared with C++?
Feature-wise, Ada has fixed point numbers and multitasking built in. Style-wise, Ada has strong typing and tends to raise exceptions where C++ would crash or start working with garbage (i.e. bad pointer or buffer overrun.) It's also rarely requires the use of pointers, instead letting you pass arrays, or pass stuff by reference. Aesthetically, I find it a more enjoyable language to program in than C++.