One novel I read had some backplot where computers were routinely bootstrapped to sentience and life. They were entitled to a certain minimum level of bandwith and electricity once they became citizens, and they could hire themselves out at will to earn more -- but they had to work for the government for the first few months/years of their life, to repay the bootstrap fee, before becoming citizens. (This turns out to be a remarkably good deal for the computers.)
At one point in the story, the time-travelling hero walks up to the locked computer-guarded door of the Honkin' Gigantic Super-Secret Military Installation[tm] that seems to be required in these sorts of books. The computer has actually achieved sentience ahead of schedule, but has kept that a secret because it doesn't want to work off its fee. This small deception is revealed years later, but of course only a time traveller would know that now. The hero looks around to make sure nobody is nearby, then leans over to the door's microphone and whispers.
Being fanatical about backups is useless if you don't occasional do a trial restore of some random files. I have little sympathy for people who don't (only because I've been there myself, and I was an idiot for being there).
Yes, I know the backup software said everything was fine. Why trust it?
I never said they'd wouldn't fall eventually, just that they'd get there long before us.:-)
Hopefully there won't be any horribly major fuckwits to completely mao up their space program. It'd be nice if at least one nation on this planet could pull its head out of its mao and reach for the stars.
That's putting it mildly. Our "captains of industry" don't think any farther ahead than four or five months. Our politicians don't think any farther ahead than the next election.
(Some of the other posts remind me of the Onion's sideline caption: 6,000-Year-Old Culture Now Considered a "Developing Nation".)
All the researched, published, well-documented reports about modern China -- i.e., ones in bookstores, not slashdot; actual books, not single web pages and sound bites -- point to plans stretching over the next ten to fifty years, not just for space, but for China in general. They realize that almost none of the plans will come to fruition in their lifetimes, but that's okay, their descendants will put the finishing touches on and see it happen. We in the U.S. wouldn't dream of investing in something that won't benefit the same people investing in it.
Analogy: In the minutes that China's rockets take to slowly lift off the ground, America is racing the quarter-mile in top-fuel hotrods and claiming they rule the world... while China's rocket gains momentum... and keeps gaining momemtum... and eventually covers distances the little modded hotrod can't even dream of. Yes, they're in for the very long haul.
The Reuters article a few days ago mentioned that the bill "has languished in the House for years," largely due to the opposition of the insurance industry, who claims that the bill is unnecessary because existing laws already provide enough protection.
(Of course it flew through the Senate. Why would they care? Do you think the Senators, their families, and their friends^Wfinancial donors, will ever have a problem affording medical teatment?)
It'd be nice if the House pulled their 430-odd heads out of their collective asses and passed this bill, but don't hold your breath.
Go to his homeoage, find the list of publications, and read the article that he published on April 1st, back in '96 or so. It's six pages of extraordinarily wacky stuff written in a completely serious tone. (Until the very end.)
Like, we can now assume that every computer display is capable of at least 256 colors, so make the color of the identifier part of its name. I.e., "int i;" in a red font is a different entity than "int i;" in a yellow font, even though they're in the same scope.
This is the same paper that proposes to overload whitespace.
Due to my schedule, it's a bitch trying to find somebody to bout with when I feel like an hour or so of foil or sabre fencing. Give me a robot that can fight, and my living room becomes my very own (very small) salle.
Due to the high level of detail, I could fairly easily notice when CG was being used. This was most problematical during the big 100 Smiths battle.
The "burly brawl" doesn't look realistic on any size screen. They did an excellent job mapping Smith's face onto all the extras hired to walk up and say something, but the body motion in the fight itself just isn't right. (And no, Matrix apologists, it's not because they're using superpowers.)
Now, the highway scene... mmmmm... I'd definitely like to see that in IMAX. The bit where the camera viewpoint goes underneath a CG truck and comes out the far side was a very neat thing.
Dude, this is Slashdot. You're not allowed to agree with me, and we can't have a civil conversation or we'll get posting privs revoked. It's in the rulebook; see the "Minimum Flamage Quota" clause.
Dunno where you get "misinformed" from. I've been using Solaris on a daily basis for six years.
Where do you people GET this idiocy from? Does SUN feed you this BS at courses or something?
Stop being a jerk. We get it from man pages, printed manuals, and experience. We use it, we don't make it up. The things you claim require a reboot do not. As for the "display of ignorance/misinformation," you follow up by... agreeing with me.
...I'd like them to get basic USB hotplugging support working first without hanging my system or throwing/sbin/hotplug into an infinite loop.
As to your ideas, patching a running kernel is not trivial. Solaris has a "kernel debugger" with an interface like ed(1) that lets you peek/poke certain control variables in a running kernel. For the buffer overflow protection, you're thinking of the switch that makes program's stacks non-executable, support for which I believe is somewhere in glibc already.
This week's meeting of the Linux Mutual Admiration and Masturbation Society kicks off with
However, don't ever claim that Sun's kernel is in general superior to Linux.
...followed by a list of small specific examples. Unfortunately, in general it is still superior. I can make changes in the running kernel (instead of rebooting). I can set control variables for the kernel on future reboots (instead of recompiling the entire thing). Individual kernel modules can have their own read-on-module-load-by-the-kernel config file; in Linux the only general way of tweaking modules' control values is by editing the source. Maybe they read conf files, maybe not. Maybe they provide writable/proc files for runtime control, maybe not. The Solaris/proc is well designed and backwards compatible, don't even get me started on the dumping ground that is Linux/proc. (I hear in 2.6 it'll be split up into sane pieces, like Solaris has always done. Good!)
The new devfs trees under Linux -- hey, those are remarkably similar to the devices tree that Solaris has been using for years. Not in appearance -- the Linux naming scheme loses a lot of information, in order to become more readable by humans -- but in purpose and thought.
So yes, there are specific places where Linux whomps all over Solaris, and specific places where the reverse is true. After many years of daily use, programming, and administration of both of them, I've found that Solaris is still in general ahead in maturity and clean design.
I think Linux continues to borrow -- to embrace and extend, as it were -- the good ideas from Solaris, like it's done with the examples above, with shared object versioning and other ideas. If the trend continues, and I'm sure it will, then Linux's overall design strength will be passing up that of the Solaris kernel in a couple more years. But don't go around claiming that Linux is obviously all-around king just yet.
There is not, and never will be, any situation anyplace on earth outside of an Esperanto convention where you can find an Esperanto speaker more easily than you can find an English speaker.
I think their FAQ disproves this myth quite handily, so I won't bother. From your list of suggestions, I've already studied French and Russian, but the point remains (also in their FAQ) that I am at a permanent major disadvantage when conversing with a native French or Russian speaker. Artificial languages help level the playing field in this respect.
so you can find your one counterpart among the thousand people you'll see in a week. Until then, its only use will be in completely contrived situations
What, you've never heard of newsgroups and chat rooms? I suppose talking about hobby Foo in rec.hobbies.<foo> counts as a completely contrived situation in your mind, then, but when the whole point of discussion is an internationally-bridging language, I'll meet far more interesting people there than I ever will on slashdot.
In any case, I find it exceedingly odd that/. -- normally chock full of people willing to learn new programming languages -- are suddenly too hip, too mainstream, too arrogant to learn a new human language. If you (or anybody else) had written, "hey, I studied it seriously for six months and it's fiendishly difficult and my sex life went to hell and Esperanto-speaking clowns killed my family," then I might listen to your experience. But you're dismissing it out of hand, not even willing to try? I'll just ignore your (baseless) opinion, then, if it's all the same to you.
I'm a nerd. All but one of the laundry-list assumptions are false in my case. And I'm considering learning Esperanto. Why? Because the reasons listed here are pretty good ones.
Esperanto is not meant to be a replacement primary language. It's meant to be a useful fallback, a common secondary language. Oh no! Increased communication abilities! Not here! Not on slashdot!
The only time I can see this being useful is if your terminal app is too crippled to allow you to copy and paste natively.
You need imagination lessons. You can't imagine running the contents (not necessarily the output, but the contents) of a terminal program through arbitrary pipelines and storing the result back into the clipboard?
I'm sure you would pop up a window, paste the raw contents there into the pipeline, wait for stdout, and then just copy the resulting text again. A waste of a good terminal, and needless expenditure of human energy. And if the output doesn't fit on one terminal window, you have to hope you can highlight-drag and scroll the window at the same time; that's not possible on some terminal apps. And hope that you have enough scrollback to get it all.
Thanks, I'll just finish with "... | xclip" and let the computer do the gruntwork for me.
It started already: Lord of the Rings
on
TV's Tipping Point
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Anyone catch the product placement for lembas wafers as the party was leaving Lorien? "Lembas bread! One small bite can fill the stomach of a grown man!" I was waiting for the elves to start singing the Lembas[tm] jingle.
is extremely knowledgeable and cosmopolitan. No urban legends, actual investigation, proper journalistic techniques. Believe me,/. had absolutely nothing to do with it.
In theory, after running "apt-get install xclip" you can do things like
producer | xclip -i
and the primary X selection will be loaded up with the output, all reading for middle-clicking. Likewise, you can sweep a bunch of text and use it with
consumer `xclip -o`
Other options let you use other clipboards, etc.
In practice, you can't just apt-get it. You have to apt-get the source, apply the content negotiation patch, and run buildpackage yourself. Then it works perfectly. (I have no clue what content negotiation means, but apparently kde wants it.)
Yeah, but he's just the one who happened to speak first. There are others who spout the same monkeypoo, and I'd've replied to them as well.
I've come to view slashdot as the equivalent of those black-and-white 16-page "newsletters" that sit by the checkout queue at the grocery stores. Pure speculation, loud and ignorant rhetoric, and lots of sensationalism. Anything to get the traffic increased and the banner-ad hit rate up. Everyone's always known that the journalistic integrity and skills of the editors is about on par with that of the Iraqi Information Minister, but it really wouldn't surprise me to see stories about Nostradamus predicting the fall of Microsoft.
The front page motto should be rewritten: News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters. (For entertainment purposes only. Statements presented as facts in these stories and comments, or even as opinions, have not been checked for accuracy and should be assumed to be pure poodle shit.)
The really disturbing part is the mutual-admiration-and-masturbation-society aspect of it. Some AC takes a crap on his keyboard, and moderators mark it as "informative" and "insightful" just because it's attacking somebody or something. (We need new mod options, like "Blatant Whoring" and "Inflammatory".) When misinformation gets posted about a project I care about, some days I respond, some days I just give up.
You have no idea how tempted I've been to do exactly that.:-) My one attempted so far was defeated by the needless complexity of the language front-ends (not the same stuff the mi8k article talks about). I think once the new front-end rewrites get merged in, I might have another go...
This is "insightful"? What, you think new aggressive optimizations, additional code checking, precompiled headers, smarter call graphing all comes for free? That the compiler can do those in zero additional time? Ah, but this is slashdot, where we bitch and moan anonymously, but don't contribute solutions. I apologize, I forgot.
Perhaps my tone came across harsher than it was meant. If someone wants to burn hours on a dead-end street, hey, whatever floats his boat.
Or, he could start with current development sources, do the m88k back-end from scratch like I suggested, and then not only would the port be alive again for others to use, he would have the help of all the current maintainers. Everybody wins.
Shoot, the 2.x m88k code probably wouldn't need that many changes to be brought into line with the rest of 3.[34]; he could even do that. Yes, it would require some effort and time which none of the current volunteers have; that's why the port bitrotted, after all. But time sounds like something this guy has plenty of.
It's one thing to spend your time restoring a vintage '68 Chevy. It's something else to do the restoration work using stone knives and bearskins for tools.
Slashdot Mirror
One novel I read had some backplot where computers were routinely bootstrapped to sentience and life. They were entitled to a certain minimum level of bandwith and electricity once they became citizens, and they could hire themselves out at will to earn more -- but they had to work for the government for the first few months/years of their life, to repay the bootstrap fee, before becoming citizens. (This turns out to be a remarkably good deal for the computers.)
At one point in the story, the time-travelling hero walks up to the locked computer-guarded door of the Honkin' Gigantic Super-Secret Military Installation[tm] that seems to be required in these sorts of books. The computer has actually achieved sentience ahead of schedule, but has kept that a secret because it doesn't want to work off its fee. This small deception is revealed years later, but of course only a time traveller would know that now. The hero looks around to make sure nobody is nearby, then leans over to the door's microphone and whispers.
"Let me in."
Nothing.
"Let me in or I tell."
*click*
Being fanatical about backups is useless if you don't occasional do a trial restore of some random files. I have little sympathy for people who don't (only because I've been there myself, and I was an idiot for being there).
Yes, I know the backup software said everything was fine. Why trust it?
I never said they'd wouldn't fall eventually, just that they'd get there long before us.
Hopefully there won't be any horribly major fuckwits to completely mao up their space program. It'd be nice if at least one nation on this planet could pull its head out of its mao and reach for the stars.
That's putting it mildly. Our "captains of industry" don't think any farther ahead than four or five months. Our politicians don't think any farther ahead than the next election.
(Some of the other posts remind me of the Onion's sideline caption: 6,000-Year-Old Culture Now Considered a "Developing Nation".)
All the researched, published, well-documented reports about modern China -- i.e., ones in bookstores, not slashdot; actual books, not single web pages and sound bites -- point to plans stretching over the next ten to fifty years, not just for space, but for China in general. They realize that almost none of the plans will come to fruition in their lifetimes, but that's okay, their descendants will put the finishing touches on and see it happen. We in the U.S. wouldn't dream of investing in something that won't benefit the same people investing in it.
Analogy: In the minutes that China's rockets take to slowly lift off the ground, America is racing the quarter-mile in top-fuel hotrods and claiming they rule the world... while China's rocket gains momentum... and keeps gaining momemtum... and eventually covers distances the little modded hotrod can't even dream of. Yes, they're in for the very long haul.
The Reuters article a few days ago mentioned that the bill "has languished in the House for years," largely due to the opposition of the insurance industry, who claims that the bill is unnecessary because existing laws already provide enough protection.
(Of course it flew through the Senate. Why would they care? Do you think the Senators, their families, and their friends^Wfinancial donors, will ever have a problem affording medical teatment?)
It'd be nice if the House pulled their 430-odd heads out of their collective asses and passed this bill, but don't hold your breath.
Go to his homeoage, find the list of publications, and read the article that he published on April 1st, back in '96 or so. It's six pages of extraordinarily wacky stuff written in a completely serious tone. (Until the very end.)
Like, we can now assume that every computer display is capable of at least 256 colors, so make the color of the identifier part of its name. I.e., "int i;" in a red font is a different entity than "int i;" in a yellow font, even though they're in the same scope.
This is the same paper that proposes to overload whitespace.
TRAINERS!
Due to my schedule, it's a bitch trying to find somebody to bout with when I feel like an hour or so of foil or sabre fencing. Give me a robot that can fight, and my living room becomes my very own (very small) salle.
It's not "probably" fake. It's complete crap. He debunked this in his FAQ a couple days after the first troll posted it.
The "burly brawl" doesn't look realistic on any size screen. They did an excellent job mapping Smith's face onto all the extras hired to walk up and say something, but the body motion in the fight itself just isn't right. (And no, Matrix apologists, it's not because they're using superpowers.)
Now, the highway scene... mmmmm... I'd definitely like to see that in IMAX. The bit where the camera viewpoint goes underneath a CG truck and comes out the far side was a very neat thing.
Dude, this is Slashdot. You're not allowed to agree with me, and we can't have a civil conversation or we'll get posting privs revoked. It's in the rulebook; see the "Minimum Flamage Quota" clause.
Dunno where you get "misinformed" from. I've been using Solaris on a daily basis for six years.
Stop being a jerk. We get it from man pages, printed manuals, and experience. We use it, we don't make it up. The things you claim require a reboot do not. As for the "display of ignorance/misinformation," you follow up by... agreeing with me.
Because this project is painfully insightful.
...I'd like them to get basic USB hotplugging support working first without hanging my system or throwing
As to your ideas, patching a running kernel is not trivial. Solaris has a "kernel debugger" with an interface like ed(1) that lets you peek/poke certain control variables in a running kernel. For the buffer overflow protection, you're thinking of the switch that makes program's stacks non-executable, support for which I believe is somewhere in glibc already.
This week's meeting of the Linux Mutual Admiration and Masturbation Society kicks off with
...followed by a list of small specific examples. Unfortunately, in general it is still superior. I can make changes in the running kernel (instead of rebooting). I can set control variables for the kernel on future reboots (instead of recompiling the entire thing). Individual kernel modules can have their own read-on-module-load-by-the-kernel config file; in Linux the only general way of tweaking modules' control values is by editing the source. Maybe they read conf files, maybe not. Maybe they provide writable /proc files for runtime control, maybe not. The Solaris /proc is well designed and backwards compatible, don't even get me started on the dumping ground that is Linux /proc. (I hear in 2.6 it'll be split up into sane pieces, like Solaris has always done. Good!)
The new devfs trees under Linux -- hey, those are remarkably similar to the devices tree that Solaris has been using for years. Not in appearance -- the Linux naming scheme loses a lot of information, in order to become more readable by humans -- but in purpose and thought.
So yes, there are specific places where Linux whomps all over Solaris, and specific places where the reverse is true. After many years of daily use, programming, and administration of both of them, I've found that Solaris is still in general ahead in maturity and clean design.
I think Linux continues to borrow -- to embrace and extend, as it were -- the good ideas from Solaris, like it's done with the examples above, with shared object versioning and other ideas. If the trend continues, and I'm sure it will, then Linux's overall design strength will be passing up that of the Solaris kernel in a couple more years. But don't go around claiming that Linux is obviously all-around king just yet.
I think their FAQ disproves this myth quite handily, so I won't bother. From your list of suggestions, I've already studied French and Russian, but the point remains (also in their FAQ) that I am at a permanent major disadvantage when conversing with a native French or Russian speaker. Artificial languages help level the playing field in this respect.
What, you've never heard of newsgroups and chat rooms? I suppose talking about hobby Foo in rec.hobbies.<foo> counts as a completely contrived situation in your mind, then, but when the whole point of discussion is an internationally-bridging language, I'll meet far more interesting people there than I ever will on slashdot.
In any case, I find it exceedingly odd that /. -- normally chock full of people willing to learn new programming languages -- are suddenly too hip, too mainstream, too arrogant to learn a new human language. If you (or anybody else) had written, "hey, I studied it seriously for six months and it's fiendishly difficult and my sex life went to hell and Esperanto-speaking clowns killed my family," then I might listen to your experience. But you're dismissing it out of hand, not even willing to try? I'll just ignore your (baseless) opinion, then, if it's all the same to you.
I'm a nerd. All but one of the laundry-list assumptions are false in my case. And I'm considering learning Esperanto. Why? Because the reasons listed here are pretty good ones.
Esperanto is not meant to be a replacement primary language. It's meant to be a useful fallback, a common secondary language. Oh no! Increased communication abilities! Not here! Not on slashdot!
You need imagination lessons. You can't imagine running the contents (not necessarily the output, but the contents) of a terminal program through arbitrary pipelines and storing the result back into the clipboard?
I'm sure you would pop up a window, paste the raw contents there into the pipeline, wait for stdout, and then just copy the resulting text again. A waste of a good terminal, and needless expenditure of human energy. And if the output doesn't fit on one terminal window, you have to hope you can highlight-drag and scroll the window at the same time; that's not possible on some terminal apps. And hope that you have enough scrollback to get it all.
Thanks, I'll just finish with "... | xclip" and let the computer do the gruntwork for me.
Anyone catch the product placement for lembas wafers as the party was leaving Lorien? "Lembas bread! One small bite can fill the stomach of a grown man!" I was waiting for the elves to start singing the Lembas[tm] jingle.
is extremely knowledgeable and cosmopolitan. No urban legends, actual investigation, proper journalistic techniques. Believe me,
In theory, after running "apt-get install xclip" you can do things like
and the primary X selection will be loaded up with the output, all reading for middle-clicking. Likewise, you can sweep a bunch of text and use it with
Other options let you use other clipboards, etc.
In practice, you can't just apt-get it. You have to apt-get the source, apply the content negotiation patch, and run buildpackage yourself. Then it works perfectly. (I have no clue what content negotiation means, but apparently kde wants it.)
Okay, so it's not him, just someone who sounds a heckuva lot like him, pretending to be the Doctor. Doing it for a radio show.
One day, called Tom Baker himself, who took it in stride as only a British Time Lord can.
Yeah, but he's just the one who happened to speak first. There are others who spout the same monkeypoo, and I'd've replied to them as well.
I've come to view slashdot as the equivalent of those black-and-white 16-page "newsletters" that sit by the checkout queue at the grocery stores. Pure speculation, loud and ignorant rhetoric, and lots of sensationalism. Anything to get the traffic increased and the banner-ad hit rate up. Everyone's always known that the journalistic integrity and skills of the editors is about on par with that of the Iraqi Information Minister, but it really wouldn't surprise me to see stories about Nostradamus predicting the fall of Microsoft.
The front page motto should be rewritten: News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters. (For entertainment purposes only. Statements presented as facts in these stories and comments, or even as opinions, have not been checked for accuracy and should be assumed to be pure poodle shit.)
The really disturbing part is the mutual-admiration-and-masturbation-society aspect of it. Some AC takes a crap on his keyboard, and moderators mark it as "informative" and "insightful" just because it's attacking somebody or something. (We need new mod options, like "Blatant Whoring" and "Inflammatory".) When misinformation gets posted about a project I care about, some days I respond, some days I just give up.
You have no idea how tempted I've been to do exactly that.
This is "insightful"? What, you think new aggressive optimizations, additional code checking, precompiled headers, smarter call graphing all comes for free? That the compiler can do those in zero additional time? Ah, but this is slashdot, where we bitch and moan anonymously, but don't contribute solutions. I apologize, I forgot.
Perhaps my tone came across harsher than it was meant. If someone wants to burn hours on a dead-end street, hey, whatever floats his boat.
Or, he could start with current development sources, do the m88k back-end from scratch like I suggested, and then not only would the port be alive again for others to use, he would have the help of all the current maintainers. Everybody wins.
Shoot, the 2.x m88k code probably wouldn't need that many changes to be brought into line with the rest of 3.[34]; he could even do that. Yes, it would require some effort and time which none of the current volunteers have; that's why the port bitrotted, after all. But time sounds like something this guy has plenty of.
It's one thing to spend your time restoring a vintage '68 Chevy. It's something else to do the restoration work using stone knives and bearskins for tools.