While you're not too far off, I'd like to point out one very common mistake Westerners make in trying to "fix" the Third World.
We've often looked askance at nomadic herders, and we keep trying to get them to settle down and farm like we have. What we *don't* take into account is that perhaps that lifestyle is better suited to the land. Europe has especially rich soil and good irrigation, whereas Africa just cannot be plowed so heavily. Their nomadic ways actually were good for not burdening the land excessively with themselves and their cattle.
Keep them down in one place, and you get soil pounded into dust by cattle herds, overworked for crops, and in the end, desertification.
That's what happens when a relative newcomer plays the arrogant know-it-all, regardless of technology.
It takes a fair amount of ignorance to say "screw you programmers, I want my quick and dirty feature slapped on with duct tape *now*".
I for one am glad that the KHTML developers are looking out for quality and the long-term health of the project over jumping for every disrespectful whiner with no respect for the process and volunteerism that gave them a choice to begin with.
Regarding the issues you bring up regarding "organic" labelling, I'm actually not very preturbed. I know people who run organic farms, and the big difficulty of certification is having all the paperwork to prove that your seed has an "organic" lineage. It's a burden of proof that is rather overwhelming for all but larger companies, and unless you've got some crazy GM thing going on, it's not nearly as significant as doing all the farming in a green manner. Your neighbor down the road can do all the right things and have no chance of getting an "organic" label.
Beware, here there be hype.
PS. Yes. I've done a little *real* farming, like, in broad daylight, and I post on Slashdot.;)
That makes me wonder, since I quite enjoy the solidity of my mostly 686-compiled Gentoo box. I save Athlon XP-specific flags for OpenGL libraries, and even then, I steer clear of the flags that haven't been tested out so carefully.
I love Gentoo, though it gives foolish people the chance to prove that just because you can doesn't mean that you should.
Completely subjective. I happen to like that very behavior. Mozilla's idiom versus consistency in Konqueror, Kopete, and Konsole is a win for the latter, and I can expect that thanks to KDE's consistency.
Not only can they not detect other Earths, they are heavily skewed towards very large gas giants in near, eccliptic orbits. They're measuring the star's wobble as the gas giant goes about its orbit. Just what do you expect to find first?
Stupid journalists.
Why fuss about current rails?
on
By Road and Rail?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It seems like a lot of the rebuttals are based upon the logistic or bureaucratic blocks to running this on current railways. I think that this, and new passenger-only railways along the interstate highways, is just what the USA needs. It has a lot more potential than just adding another regular lane.
I feel it necessary to say this: the way Commodore ran the Amiga into the ground made open source make a hell of a lot of sense. Amiga users, zealous as they were, were helpless to prevent the actual demise of their favorite platform.
Linux gained a convert in me for its immunity to just this kind of thing. At least the open source community cares about its products.
What?? Did they also bring back Irving "The Ghoul" Gould and Medhi Ali? Those guys were real trailblazers. Not every pointyhair gets to buy the most cutting edge technology and then botch marketing, gag R&D, and then blame their own user base when they bail out on their golden parachutes.
Anybody remember the "Omega RIPport", the satire newsletter on the death of Commodore wherein Ali gets lynched by members of a mysterious "Omega" group? Where Irving Gould swears to stamp out the Omega at any price, and Ali's alleged lover mourns him and their shortage of bananas? Hilarious stuff!
It's actually quite simple. T-Rex wasn't the only large predatory therapod, and its kin have noticeably stronger teeth and forelimbs.
I will contest that it couldn't pick itself back up, though. One of the books I had as a child showed how its musculature could allow it to rise from the ground using its hind legs. Evolution doesn't favor such big gaps in survivability.
Is the steady advance of Linux and other OSS projects the steady pressure that can make a better company of Microsoft?
Look at what IBM was in the 80's. They attempted to choke out the trend of open hardware specs and the clone industry with a proprietary platform. OS/2 and the PS/2 computers with their MCA bus architectures were going to displace the AT compatible. I remember John Dvorak and all the other experts predicting the end of the AT.
Regardless of the technical merit of MCA and OS/2, the backlash of EISA and then Windows put IBM in their place and they have since been a remarkably pragmatic company. Thanks to their R&D and participation in Linux, I think they're one of the coolest ones out there.
This is the way, my friends. Don't fume about court cases and market injustices. Compete!
You're very convincing IMHO until the very end, there. "Why not pipe XX to YY" conjured up visions of some of the most horribly broken and unmaintainable software I have ever witnessed.
We're talking cobbled-together abominations of compiled C, bash scripts, and Perl, with no coherent division of responsibility. The requirements for the underlying system become so fixed and detailed that transporting it to a new system was difficult at best (we had to leave it on a Redhat 5.1 server). There were all kinds of undocumented points of configuration, even embedded in the source code.
If I ever find the author of that package, I should like to superglue their fingers together!
It's better to know one language well, and to know what it's good for, than to use a little bit of everything in a way that just barely works! I for my part truly prefer Python and C++ for their respective goodies, and perhaps Perl for some quick and dirty regular expression work. Whatever your preference, there's no excuse for any software of importance not being designed for easy maintainability.
Me, I think that with the porting of the KDE application framework to the Mac and the KHTML code that underlies' Apples browser Safari, that having them give back is very welcome. I've been using KDE 3.x for six months now on my laptop quite happily, and Konqueror is better for the code that Apple gave back.
You know, when a rating system becomes so self-referential, it's time to hide it or ditch it. I see nothing wrong with the parent, and all the noise people make about points on a website is really tiresome.
Let's refine this: Jupiter puts out more energy than it receives, but it's due to gravitational compression, not fusion. The same is true for those planets we've detected with twenty times Jupiter's mass, I understand.
Let's make the criteria for the high threshhold work on the low end. If an object can cause a state change of its own matter due to its gravitational compression, you get a core, a mantle, and perhaps a crust in some proportion. Bingo, a moon or planet.
Distilled, I'm arguing for energy output because of gravity as the primary feature of a planet.
http://www.extrasolar.net/planet.asp?PlanetID=14 Don't let the mass 1.5 times that of Jupiter's fool you, that's no planet!
Our detection methods bias the findings, but it certainly seems that the calm circular order of most of our solar system isn't a necessary feature of planets. It's just favorable to creating lifeforms capable of arguing about them.;)
Magnetic fields would guarantee it, I think, because it would suggest an iron core. Having enough gravity to have seismic activity and eruptions should guarantee it, I think!
Plane and eccentricity of the orbit doesn't seem right because a passing star can change that. We've also seen many planets with orbits far more eccentric than Plutos, yet several times the mass of Jupiter - they count, right?
What I'm saying is that when you have a core, a mantle, and a crust, the conclusion can be made.
So what do we settle upon for criteria? Size is actually rather an arbitrary and vague boundary at both ends.
The fact that it orbits the Sun, specifically? The Sun's nothing special, we've found plenty of other stars that have planets. And if the Sun snuffed it tomorrow, would the Earth cease to be a planet? Would Ganymede be a planet if it were let loose for a stroll on its own away from Jupiter?
What about moons? Venus and Mercury don't have them, and those two rocks around Mars don't count.
It can't be geological activity, because Mercury is dormant and Io, a moon, beats everything we've yet seen for volcanic eruptions.
I think that having a discernable stata and a core of different composition than the crust sounds like a good rule of thumb, because then you're not just talking about a lump of rock that happens to be round, like Ceres. Now we just need to see what Pluto, Quaoar, Sedna have got in that department.
Ark's philosophy is very good to see. I think it has its place on the installation side of things.
What I think is undersold is that fact that Gentoo can be used perfectly well based on binary packages. The reference platform contains a chunk of packages that can get you up to using KDE without a single compile.
See, what all that ports business is about is upgradability. It used to be a pain for me to manage upgrades to my RedHat 7.x boxes, with RPM dependency hell. Now I have a laptop, a dual Xeon server, and an Athlon desktop and when I need to, I can grab things from source and compile *once* to upgrade all three systems, and upgrades are easy. The only thing I have to sacrifice to do that is a few CPU-specific optimizations which may as well be saved for where it really counts anyway, though I can tweak where I really need to.
It wouldn't be hard to make a Gentoo package that installs every bit as easily and quickly as the others, for those who just want portage as an upgrade contingency. The moment the advantages of Gentoo and something like Ark or Knoppix wind up in one distro, you'll have it. Gentoo's closer to that than you might think.
That said, Ark's got something for the rest to learn from, and I hope that they'll be a part at whatever rises from the ashes of the SCO-infested United Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
While you're not too far off, I'd like to point out one very common mistake Westerners make in trying to "fix" the Third World.
We've often looked askance at nomadic herders, and we keep trying to get them to settle down and farm like we have. What we *don't* take into account is that perhaps that lifestyle is better suited to the land. Europe has especially rich soil and good irrigation, whereas Africa just cannot be plowed so heavily. Their nomadic ways actually were good for not burdening the land excessively with themselves and their cattle.
Keep them down in one place, and you get soil pounded into dust by cattle herds, overworked for crops, and in the end, desertification.
That's what happens when a relative newcomer plays the arrogant know-it-all, regardless of technology.
It takes a fair amount of ignorance to say "screw you programmers, I want my quick and dirty feature slapped on with duct tape *now*".
I for one am glad that the KHTML developers are looking out for quality and the long-term health of the project over jumping for every disrespectful whiner with no respect for the process and volunteerism that gave them a choice to begin with.
Regarding the issues you bring up regarding "organic" labelling, I'm actually not very preturbed. I know people who run organic farms, and the big difficulty of certification is having all the paperwork to prove that your seed has an "organic" lineage. It's a burden of proof that is rather overwhelming for all but larger companies, and unless you've got some crazy GM thing going on, it's not nearly as significant as doing all the farming in a green manner. Your neighbor down the road can do all the right things and have no chance of getting an "organic" label.
;)
Beware, here there be hype.
PS. Yes. I've done a little *real* farming, like, in broad daylight, and I post on Slashdot.
That makes me wonder, since I quite enjoy the solidity of my mostly 686-compiled Gentoo box. I save Athlon XP-specific flags for OpenGL libraries, and even then, I steer clear of the flags that haven't been tested out so carefully.
I love Gentoo, though it gives foolish people the chance to prove that just because you can doesn't mean that you should.
Completely subjective. I happen to like that very behavior. Mozilla's idiom versus consistency in Konqueror, Kopete, and Konsole is a win for the latter, and I can expect that thanks to KDE's consistency.
Not only can they not detect other Earths, they are heavily skewed towards very large gas giants in near, eccliptic orbits. They're measuring the star's wobble as the gas giant goes about its orbit. Just what do you expect to find first?
Stupid journalists.
It seems like a lot of the rebuttals are based upon the logistic or bureaucratic blocks to running this on current railways. I think that this, and new passenger-only railways along the interstate highways, is just what the USA needs. It has a lot more potential than just adding another regular lane.
I feel it necessary to say this: the way Commodore ran the Amiga into the ground made open source make a hell of a lot of sense. Amiga users, zealous as they were, were helpless to prevent the actual demise of their favorite platform.
Linux gained a convert in me for its immunity to just this kind of thing. At least the open source community cares about its products.
What?? Did they also bring back Irving "The Ghoul" Gould and Medhi Ali? Those guys were real trailblazers. Not every pointyhair gets to buy the most cutting edge technology and then botch marketing, gag R&D, and then blame their own user base when they bail out on their golden parachutes.
Anybody remember the "Omega RIPport", the satire newsletter on the death of Commodore wherein Ali gets lynched by members of a mysterious "Omega" group? Where Irving Gould swears to stamp out the Omega at any price, and Ali's alleged lover mourns him and their shortage of bananas? Hilarious stuff!
Okay, I've dated myself rather badly already.
It's actually quite simple. T-Rex wasn't the only large predatory therapod, and its kin have noticeably stronger teeth and forelimbs.
I will contest that it couldn't pick itself back up, though. One of the books I had as a child showed how its musculature could allow it to rise from the ground using its hind legs. Evolution doesn't favor such big gaps in survivability.
What if, instead of billing automatically and sending, the mail was held until payment was received?
With a hybrid of whitelists of free senders and pay-to-email, that might actually work.
Is the steady advance of Linux and other OSS projects the steady pressure that can make a better company of Microsoft?
Look at what IBM was in the 80's. They attempted to choke out the trend of open hardware specs and the clone industry with a proprietary platform. OS/2 and the PS/2 computers with their MCA bus architectures were going to displace the AT compatible. I remember John Dvorak and all the other experts predicting the end of the AT.
Regardless of the technical merit of MCA and OS/2, the backlash of EISA and then Windows put IBM in their place and they have since been a remarkably pragmatic company. Thanks to their R&D and participation in Linux, I think they're one of the coolest ones out there.
This is the way, my friends. Don't fume about court cases and market injustices. Compete!
You're very convincing IMHO until the very end, there. "Why not pipe XX to YY" conjured up visions of some of the most horribly broken and unmaintainable software I have ever witnessed.
We're talking cobbled-together abominations of compiled C, bash scripts, and Perl, with no coherent division of responsibility. The requirements for the underlying system become so fixed and detailed that transporting it to a new system was difficult at best (we had to leave it on a Redhat 5.1 server). There were all kinds of undocumented points of configuration, even embedded in the source code.
If I ever find the author of that package, I should like to superglue their fingers together!
It's better to know one language well, and to know what it's good for, than to use a little bit of everything in a way that just barely works! I for my part truly prefer Python and C++ for their respective goodies, and perhaps Perl for some quick and dirty regular expression work. Whatever your preference, there's no excuse for any software of importance not being designed for easy maintainability.
You haven't commented on Limewire, and I think the reason is that it's actually a catchy name.
Me, I think that with the porting of the KDE application framework to the Mac and the KHTML code that underlies' Apples browser Safari, that having them give back is very welcome. I've been using KDE 3.x for six months now on my laptop quite happily, and Konqueror is better for the code that Apple gave back.
I think we should welcome their partnership.
You know, when a rating system becomes so self-referential, it's time to hide it or ditch it. I see nothing wrong with the parent, and all the noise people make about points on a website is really tiresome.
Satisfying, yes, and also yet another throwback to the older AT&T versus BSD case.
Yes, but around that time our galaxy will be colliding with M81, so that will hardly be the hippest show in town.
Let's refine this: Jupiter puts out more energy than it receives, but it's due to gravitational compression, not fusion. The same is true for those planets we've detected with twenty times Jupiter's mass, I understand.
Let's make the criteria for the high threshhold work on the low end. If an object can cause a state change of its own matter due to its gravitational compression, you get a core, a mantle, and perhaps a crust in some proportion. Bingo, a moon or planet.
Distilled, I'm arguing for energy output because of gravity as the primary feature of a planet.
http://www.extrasolar.net/planet.asp?PlanetID=14
;)
Don't let the mass 1.5 times that of Jupiter's fool you, that's no planet!
Our detection methods bias the findings, but it certainly seems that the calm circular order of most of our solar system isn't a necessary feature of planets. It's just favorable to creating lifeforms capable of arguing about them.
Magnetic fields would guarantee it, I think, because it would suggest an iron core. Having enough gravity to have seismic activity and eruptions should guarantee it, I think!
Plane and eccentricity of the orbit doesn't seem right because a passing star can change that. We've also seen many planets with orbits far more eccentric than Plutos, yet several times the mass of Jupiter - they count, right?
What I'm saying is that when you have a core, a mantle, and a crust, the conclusion can be made.
So what do we settle upon for criteria? Size is actually rather an arbitrary and vague boundary at both ends.
The fact that it orbits the Sun, specifically? The Sun's nothing special, we've found plenty of other stars that have planets. And if the Sun snuffed it tomorrow, would the Earth cease to be a planet? Would Ganymede be a planet if it were let loose for a stroll on its own away from Jupiter?
What about moons? Venus and Mercury don't have them, and those two rocks around Mars don't count.
It can't be geological activity, because Mercury is dormant and Io, a moon, beats everything we've yet seen for volcanic eruptions.
I think that having a discernable stata and a core of different composition than the crust sounds like a good rule of thumb, because then you're not just talking about a lump of rock that happens to be round, like Ceres. Now we just need to see what Pluto, Quaoar, Sedna have got in that department.
Ark's philosophy is very good to see. I think it has its place on the installation side of things.
What I think is undersold is that fact that Gentoo can be used perfectly well based on binary packages. The reference platform contains a chunk of packages that can get you up to using KDE without a single compile.
See, what all that ports business is about is upgradability. It used to be a pain for me to manage upgrades to my RedHat 7.x boxes, with RPM dependency hell. Now I have a laptop, a dual Xeon server, and an Athlon desktop and when I need to, I can grab things from source and compile *once* to upgrade all three systems, and upgrades are easy. The only thing I have to sacrifice to do that is a few CPU-specific optimizations which may as well be saved for where it really counts anyway, though I can tweak where I really need to.
It wouldn't be hard to make a Gentoo package that installs every bit as easily and quickly as the others, for those who just want portage as an upgrade contingency. The moment the advantages of Gentoo and something like Ark or Knoppix wind up in one distro, you'll have it. Gentoo's closer to that than you might think.
That said, Ark's got something for the rest to learn from, and I hope that they'll be a part at whatever rises from the ashes of the SCO-infested United Linux.
Great! As if little chicken bits from cosmonaut snacks hitting our shuttles in orbit wasn't enough! Now we'll have to clean lo mein off, too. ;P
;)
Welcome aboard China.
How many here remember "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run"?