That plus it's on the stack, and so will be killed by the next function you call.
I work for MS (temporarily, I'm an intern), and yes, Hungarian and Unicode are a PITA, but they have some nice tools which autodetect certain kinds of bugs (buffer overruns, possibly null pointer passed to function expecting non-null, etc). There won't be so many of those bugs next time around.
..instead of buying products, people will have sex. This is bad for the economy. Getting into Freudian philosophy and science, has it ever occured to you that perhaps large or covetted things like computers, cars, possessions like iPods or other things are just temporary mental replacements for the lack of sex drive or the lack of sex at all? Maybe that intimacy we experience with our toys is what replaces the intimacy between two people?
That's total bullshit. Married people, who one might assume get a lot of sex, if not as much as they want then nearly so, are generally still consumers.
The control of sex is the control of basic human emotion and instinct. If you control sex or the sex drive, the base of all instinct in mammals, you control the person is belongs to. Don't have sex! Buy these indulgences and be saved from Satan! Having sex is a sin and will breed disease! Come to church more and fork over your money!
Stable marital relationships are important in our society, and in almost every other society under the sun. Eastern societies do not have this Catholic prohibition, nor did the Greeks back in their day, but they too emphasize(d) stable marriages and fidelity. This is largely for genetic reasons: the man in the relationship can make sure the kids he feeds and raises are his, and the woman gets assurance of more protection and care for them.
Not all churches are like that, or even the ones who used to do that stuff actively *coughcatholiccough*. But the fact remains, the meaning of life for a human being, at the base, is to reproduce, be happy, and keep yourself occupied.
That is an opinion, not a fact. Biologically speaking, reproduction is rather important for human life to continue, but that doesn't mean it's the meaning or purpose. "The meaning of life" has been a classical unknown, nearly impossible question for thousands of years, don't pretend that it's obvious what it is, even "at the base".
Supression of instinct, especially sex, breeds a consumer - someone looking for something to fill the void.
Bullshit again. So how about those medieval peasants? Of course, the marriage age has gone up since then, so this isn't a perfect refutation, but still...
In a society where you can turn on the TV and see a child with all of his limbs amputated or a "precision" American bomber carpet bombing populated areas, I find it disgusting that this society bars SEX, SEX of all things, from television, but allows people to go on TV, preach about beating up prostitutes and being a "playa" or how various thousands of people are dying.
At least one point you make is good, and I totally agree with it. That violence is ok but sex is taboo is ridiculous.
Why does it matter? If any confidential document gets out of the NSA, the stuff intentionally printed on it probably matters a lot more than some stupid microdot.
Many New Russians obtained their wealth through perfectly honest means. For example, a friend of my wife's family made a killing by starting a door repair/replacement business. Not something you'd think would be a big money-maker, but apparently he became quite weathly from it.
<accent locale=Chicago> Wow, tough luck there, I see your door's busted up for the second time this week... luckily I gotta repair truck sittin' just across the street...
These repairs are gettin' kina expensive... maybe yous wanna buy a soivice plan, so if somebody busts up your door again, I'll repair it for free. </accent>
Research is one matter: I agree with you that there should be bands devoted to research, consistent with amateurs "advancing the art" of radio communication.
However, hams use radios because it's fun, and because they enjoy tinkering. It's quite difficult to tinker with digital voice processors: they are generally on a chip or daughterboard manufactured somewhere in Taiwan, and as such are hard to mess around with. Not so with the other technologies: they are quite simple enough to be easily tinkered with. And you could change the firmware in your voice encoder/decoder, but that's starting to sound like advancing the art of voice compression rather than radio technology.
If you're not tinkering or building anything yourself, there's little fun in hamming (at least in my experience); as you say, you might as well call Sao Paulo or get on the internet and chat. But the fact that you can have a conversation at 10,000 miles with no infrastructure and only a dozen watts drain (even less on a good day) is pretty cool, not to mention useful in emergencies. There should continue to be Morse bands for this; you simply can't do this with any other encoding.
Changing voice communications to digital is a different matter. It would alleviate congestion perhaps, but it would require other users to scan for voice conversations, carefully avoid even the edges of those bands, and so on. You wouldn't be able to sweep your dial and find interesting conversations to listen to. All existing hams would have to upgrade to this new-fangled digital radio thing. It just wouldn't work (tm). Switching over slowly might work, but I don't think many people would use it.
I'd like to see the FCC drop the requirement for general, but require something faster than 5 wpm for Extra and for Morse bands. The reason is that high-speed (30-40wpm and above) and low-speed Morse are quite different. At low speeds, you hear each individual dot and dash, whereas at high speed, each letter is a different squawk. Learning low-speed Morse does not make learning high-speed Morse much easier; you just get blocked at 20wpm when you can no longer parse the sounds quickly enough.
To ramp up with high-speed Morse code, you need Farnsworth mode, i.e. each letter is transmitted as though it were 50wpm or so, but you leave space between them to reduce the overall speed to 5wpm or whatever you can parse.
Digital would be nice, but a transmitter or receiver for digital voice is essentially impossible to make without loads of high-level circuitry (the kind that typically gets sold in those little SSOP or QFP packages that are impossible to solder by hand). On the other hand, most hams can build an SSB or Morse transmitter from spare parts. Even packet radios can be built quite easily with cheap DIP processors.
This makes existing HAM analog technologies much better for amateurs than their digital counterparts.
As for getting rid of the "mostly dead" amateur bands, several of the bands are quite densely packed with traffic during much of the day, especially on weekends. And if the amateur bands were given away, on what bands would you conduct your research? If you have another band in mind, why not just use it?
As for your time and energy, memorizing "a bunch of frequency bands that are readily available in tabular form" may be a silly task, but you should be able to do it in a few hours. Learning code is harder, but 5wpm is not that fast... most of my friends with higher licenses didn't study either of these for all that long, and the ones that did get to chatter back and forth in 40wpm Morse code with people in Istanbul or Sao Paolo or wherever.
I'd say drop the morse requirement for general, but not for extra, but that's just my opinion.
I'm not a manager or anything here, but I'm guessing that they don't want to test beta updates on more than one platform, especially since SP2 was pretty major (which, I'm guessing, is why you didn't install it).
As to Firefox, I'm guessing that Linux and Windows conventions are different for where you put options, and that in this case the Linux one is dumb. Like, maybe they think you want to edit the options or something. (This is not meant as a troll; I use mostly Linux at home, Windows mostly for gaming, and I find certain design decisions of each platform to be dumb.)
If I'm helping to make their software more secure and better for users (regardless of its current state), why shouldn't my conscience be clean? Am I "selling out" by not going into academia?
1) Four years of one of the most time intensive majors in colleges
2) Going through Microsoft's dehumanizing interview process
3) Getting free soda in exchange for 80 hour work weeks at minimum wage
4) Getting fired at age 28 for being too old
Funny. I work at Microsoft as an intern, and I didn't find their interview process dehumanizing. It was mostly tests to see if I could solve problems, design as part of a team, and write clean, bug-free code. Sure it was a pain to fly to Redmond, but they paid for the tickets so I can't complain too much. And I work only 40 hours a week, for something substantially more than minimum wage. If my product were about to ship, I'd work longer hours for a few weeks, but that's not the case. I also haven't heard of them firing people... well, for just about anything, but particularly not for being "old."
It's also one of the nicest jobs in any industry: interesting work, no heavy lifting, flexible hours, air conditioning, great office machines, free soda, good view, mobility within the company, lots of benefits, good pay, minimal dress code (anything not revealing or offensive).
I'm not sure what more you could ask for other than a northern California location or free money. Or more women. But I have a girlfriend, so I don't care that much. (And yes, trolls, she's a female human, unrelated to me, about my age, and she dates me without any chemical, physical or monetary persuasion.)
Perhaps it's just a trap, and if I come to work here full-time, I'll see what it's really like.
Perhaps not. Current employees seem pretty happy with it. Maybe they put something in the free soda?
Point #1 stands on its own, but many interesting jobs require a lot of education to get.
I use a Kinesis keyboard. Here's why it was worth my ~$300:
A working keyboard is an exacting input device. The most and least expensive keyboards still print the exact same codes to the computer. As long as it works, who cares? Fancy keyboards are often programmable, i.e. they can remap or macro in firmware. This means that I can assign hotkeys to the KVM, remap to Dvorak + caps lock->control on every system, independent of whether it's Mac or PC.
Keyboards get old and wear out or break. I would rather replace a used Dell keyboard I got for free than a $100 buckling spring keyboard. Most high-end keyboards are extremely durable, and can be cleaned relatively easily. Cheap keyboards wear out more rapidly.
When you are used to cheap keyboards, using them is no big deal. When you are used to expensive keyboards, anything less seems like a chore. Not true for me; ymmv. I don't like certain types of keyboards (I hate Mac keyboards, for example), but my views haven't changed since I got a fancy one. Of coures, I prefer it as it's more comfortable, but I can tolerate using a cheap one.
Expensive keyboards usually justify their cost by offering features that aren't really that useful or innovative. Sometimes they just look pretty. Lots of buttons controlled by the thumb, especially modifiers (more work for thumb than pinky, nicer chords). Contoured surface (less movement for wrists). Lots of key travel (good for joints). Macros and remapping built-in. How aren't these useful or innovative?
Your keyboard shouldn't be 10-30% the cost of the entire system. It's not (I use it from system to system). But anyway, why shouldn't it be? The monitor is 20-50% of the cost of the system, and those two components (plus the mouse, but you want to minimize that one if you have any sort of wrist problem, and the speakers, but not so much for coding) are the parts I interact with directly.
An expensive keyboard doesn't typically provide the same value as "the hottest CPU or latest video card". Bullshit. My CPU doesn't affect my tendonitis, whereas my keyboard definitely does. I often work on an old FreeBSD machine with a VIA C3 CPU and integrated graphics. As long as I'm just coding, the only difference between that and a dual Xeon is the compile time, and since I usually don't compile big things interactively, that's not so bad.
Now, when I'm gaming, the hottest CPU or latest video card is a big deal, at least for the latest fps. And I don't use a fancy keyboard, since the split makes things harder. I'm much more concerned about the mouse and monitor in that case.
Hm, that's funny. I installed Ubuntu 5.04 on my Centrino laptop, and it got the wireless, screen and ports, but not the power management (other than cpufreq) or special Toshiba Buttons (fnfxd gets about half of these, but didn't work in default install). It didn't configure my mouse right (I use an optical 3+scroll mouse when my laptop is on the desk, and it doesn't recognise the middle button or scroll wheel without configuration editing). It didn't get the display resolution right either (easy to fix in emacs), and I still can't get DRI to work.
I also can't use my 5-button wireless intellimouse+fingerprint scanner (mm, tasty 2-factor auth). Surprise surprise MS didn't write drivers for it, and no open-source ones exist. To get on the local wireless network requires WPA, which took quite a bit of hacking to get to work automatically, and adds so much to the boot time that I had to parallelize it out.
rc.d is now a Makefile which makes -j 5, kde is out because it's so slow and piggish, the boot process is pretty well stripped down, and the laptop still boots (defined as button to browser, or GAIM, or other useful gui app) noticeably slower than Windows (but after a few hours of hacking it's only 30% longer, rather than 250% longer). And you may rant about how your uptime renders reboots unneccessary, but on a laptop with no power management things are different.
Windows recognized all the hardware without any help from me (but probably lots of help from Toshiba), plus I can play 3d games on it (not so many of these for Linux, and you can't even run Chromium, AA or UT2K4 without graphics card support).
Several of my friends have had similar experiences, both with Ubuntu and with other distros. One couldn't install Ubuntu without some magic kernel option to avoid snowscreen, and even now has a long "todo: get x working" list.
Now, Ubuntu is much better than previous distros in this regard -- it recognized my wireless card, chipset and even graphics card (but DRI somehow still doesn't work), and I expect it to be better in the future. But it's still nowhere near Windows in terms of (mainstream x86/x64 PC) hardware support.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft as a dev intern. At school I used MacOS X, FreeBSD and Linux, but sold my eMac because it was ancient and heavy and slow, and my FreeBSD server was destroyed in shipping, so am now typing this from the above-mentioned Linux/Windows dual-boot laptop, from Firefox on Ubuntu 5.04. I prefer Linux to Windows because of the abundance of free and well-designed programming tools, along with the greater power of the Linux command line, although honestly Windows programming is not so bad at work -- you can RTFS:-) This post is not intionally slanted in either direction, it's just a statement of the truth.
Look. Killing certain human cells while not killing all the rest of the cells is hard. It's a lot harder than killing a foreign pathogen without killing the human, which is already a lot harder than, say, rebooting a server or modifying a Perl script.
Wow. Even with Perl 6 on the horizon, it doesn't look like the development community is ready to face the challenge of modifying a Perl script... is there any hope?
The NSA is not allowed to break US laws. Of course, they spy on other countries, so they're probably allowed to break other countries' laws.
As for the other nasty stuff, it sounds an awful lot like your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
Also, if you want to hack a computer, you probably care more about the services running on it than the guts of the kernel, at least up to the point where you install a rootkit. They probably care more because they want to use MacOS X in a highly secure environment. SEDarwin anyone?
Remember the list of features modern UNIXen have that BSD doesn't? Did you notice how many of them Linux does support? All of them.
Well, here are some features Linux doesn't have yet. BSD has some of them, but not all. 1) Dtrace, a la Solaris. 2) Soft updates (and useful filesystem snapshots, and background fsck). 3) Jails. 4) Pooled storage, a la Solaris. 5) Project Evil (Windows network card ABI emulation). 6) Working systrace.... just about anything new in Solaris 10.
You're thinking of the kernel. The operating system is the whole software part of the platform. If there's a lot of optional stuff, as in Linux, you can quibble as to whether X is part of the OS, but in Windows, the whole graphical shell is certainly part of the OS.
I've got a Kinesis keyboard. The dvorak version. It's really nice, and quite comfortable, and it doesn't aggravate my tendonitis at all. But there are a few problems...
-- The symbol keys are annoying, particularly ~.
-- The function keys suck.
-- And the kicker: modifier keys get stuck down in firmware. It is unbelievably irritating for a $300 keyboard, whose features have been stable over several years, to have such a big firmware bug.
Still, it is an amazing keyboard for typing English text, and a pretty good one for coding, too.
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That plus it's on the stack, and so will be killed by the next function you call.
I work for MS (temporarily, I'm an intern), and yes, Hungarian and Unicode are a PITA, but they have some nice tools which autodetect certain kinds of bugs (buffer overruns, possibly null pointer passed to function expecting non-null, etc). There won't be so many of those bugs next time around.
..instead of buying products, people will have sex. This is bad for the economy.
Getting into Freudian philosophy and science, has it ever occured to you that perhaps large or covetted things like computers, cars, possessions like iPods or other things are just temporary mental replacements for the lack of sex drive or the lack of sex at all? Maybe that intimacy we experience with our toys is what replaces the intimacy between two people?
That's total bullshit. Married people, who one might assume get a lot of sex, if not as much as they want then nearly so, are generally still consumers.
The control of sex is the control of basic human emotion and instinct. If you control sex or the sex drive, the base of all instinct in mammals, you control the person is belongs to. Don't have sex! Buy these indulgences and be saved from Satan! Having sex is a sin and will breed disease! Come to church more and fork over your money!
Stable marital relationships are important in our society, and in almost every other society under the sun. Eastern societies do not have this Catholic prohibition, nor did the Greeks back in their day, but they too emphasize(d) stable marriages and fidelity. This is largely for genetic reasons: the man in the relationship can make sure the kids he feeds and raises are his, and the woman gets assurance of more protection and care for them.
Not all churches are like that, or even the ones who used to do that stuff actively *coughcatholiccough*. But the fact remains, the meaning of life for a human being, at the base, is to reproduce, be happy, and keep yourself occupied.
That is an opinion, not a fact. Biologically speaking, reproduction is rather important for human life to continue, but that doesn't mean it's the meaning or purpose. "The meaning of life" has been a classical unknown, nearly impossible question for thousands of years, don't pretend that it's obvious what it is, even "at the base".
Supression of instinct, especially sex, breeds a consumer - someone looking for something to fill the void.
Bullshit again. So how about those medieval peasants? Of course, the marriage age has gone up since then, so this isn't a perfect refutation, but still...
In a society where you can turn on the TV and see a child with all of his limbs amputated or a "precision" American bomber carpet bombing populated areas, I find it disgusting that this society bars SEX, SEX of all things, from television, but allows people to go on TV, preach about beating up prostitutes and being a "playa" or how various thousands of people are dying.
At least one point you make is good, and I totally agree with it. That violence is ok but sex is taboo is ridiculous.
Or the GODS only know how much Foghorn will cost... errr... I mean longhorn.
You mean Vista.
Do NSA printers exhibit the same behaviour?
Why does it matter? If any confidential document gets out of the NSA, the stuff intentionally printed on it probably matters a lot more than some stupid microdot.
Many New Russians obtained their wealth through perfectly honest means. For example, a friend of my wife's family made a killing by starting a door repair/replacement business. Not something you'd think would be a big money-maker, but apparently he became quite weathly from it.
<accent locale=Chicago>
Wow, tough luck there, I see your door's busted up for the second time this week... luckily I gotta repair truck sittin' just across the street...
These repairs are gettin' kina expensive... maybe yous wanna buy a soivice plan, so if somebody busts up your door again, I'll repair it for free.
</accent>
Research is one matter: I agree with you that there should be bands devoted to research, consistent with amateurs "advancing the art" of radio communication.
However, hams use radios because it's fun, and because they enjoy tinkering. It's quite difficult to tinker with digital voice processors: they are generally on a chip or daughterboard manufactured somewhere in Taiwan, and as such are hard to mess around with. Not so with the other technologies: they are quite simple enough to be easily tinkered with. And you could change the firmware in your voice encoder/decoder, but that's starting to sound like advancing the art of voice compression rather than radio technology.
If you're not tinkering or building anything yourself, there's little fun in hamming (at least in my experience); as you say, you might as well call Sao Paulo or get on the internet and chat. But the fact that you can have a conversation at 10,000 miles with no infrastructure and only a dozen watts drain (even less on a good day) is pretty cool, not to mention useful in emergencies. There should continue to be Morse bands for this; you simply can't do this with any other encoding.
Changing voice communications to digital is a different matter. It would alleviate congestion perhaps, but it would require other users to scan for voice conversations, carefully avoid even the edges of those bands, and so on. You wouldn't be able to sweep your dial and find interesting conversations to listen to. All existing hams would have to upgrade to this new-fangled digital radio thing. It just wouldn't work (tm). Switching over slowly might work, but I don't think many people would use it.
I'd like to see the FCC drop the requirement for general, but require something faster than 5 wpm for Extra and for Morse bands. The reason is that high-speed (30-40wpm and above) and low-speed Morse are quite different. At low speeds, you hear each individual dot and dash, whereas at high speed, each letter is a different squawk. Learning low-speed Morse does not make learning high-speed Morse much easier; you just get blocked at 20wpm when you can no longer parse the sounds quickly enough.
To ramp up with high-speed Morse code, you need Farnsworth mode, i.e. each letter is transmitted as though it were 50wpm or so, but you leave space between them to reduce the overall speed to 5wpm or whatever you can parse.
Digital would be nice, but a transmitter or receiver for digital voice is essentially impossible to make without loads of high-level circuitry (the kind that typically gets sold in those little SSOP or QFP packages that are impossible to solder by hand). On the other hand, most hams can build an SSB or Morse transmitter from spare parts. Even packet radios can be built quite easily with cheap DIP processors.
This makes existing HAM analog technologies much better for amateurs than their digital counterparts.
As for getting rid of the "mostly dead" amateur bands, several of the bands are quite densely packed with traffic during much of the day, especially on weekends. And if the amateur bands were given away, on what bands would you conduct your research? If you have another band in mind, why not just use it?
As for your time and energy, memorizing "a bunch of frequency bands that are readily available in tabular form" may be a silly task, but you should be able to do it in a few hours. Learning code is harder, but 5wpm is not that fast... most of my friends with higher licenses didn't study either of these for all that long, and the ones that did get to chatter back and forth in 40wpm Morse code with people in Istanbul or Sao Paolo or wherever.
I'd say drop the morse requirement for general, but not for extra, but that's just my opinion.
I'm not a manager or anything here, but I'm guessing that they don't want to test beta updates on more than one platform, especially since SP2 was pretty major (which, I'm guessing, is why you didn't install it).
As to Firefox, I'm guessing that Linux and Windows conventions are different for where you put options, and that in this case the Linux one is dumb. Like, maybe they think you want to edit the options or something. (This is not meant as a troll; I use mostly Linux at home, Windows mostly for gaming, and I find certain design decisions of each platform to be dumb.)
If I'm helping to make their software more secure and better for users (regardless of its current state), why shouldn't my conscience be clean? Am I "selling out" by not going into academia?
If it's Longhorn, you won't have to worry about it shipping for quite a while.
There are these things called betas...
Such as blogging?
Good point, I'd forgotten about that.
Let's see here:
1) Four years of one of the most time intensive majors in colleges
2) Going through Microsoft's dehumanizing interview process
3) Getting free soda in exchange for 80 hour work weeks at minimum wage
4) Getting fired at age 28 for being too old
Funny. I work at Microsoft as an intern, and I didn't find their interview process dehumanizing. It was mostly tests to see if I could solve problems, design as part of a team, and write clean, bug-free code. Sure it was a pain to fly to Redmond, but they paid for the tickets so I can't complain too much. And I work only 40 hours a week, for something substantially more than minimum wage. If my product were about to ship, I'd work longer hours for a few weeks, but that's not the case. I also haven't heard of them firing people... well, for just about anything, but particularly not for being "old."
It's also one of the nicest jobs in any industry: interesting work, no heavy lifting, flexible hours, air conditioning, great office machines, free soda, good view, mobility within the company, lots of benefits, good pay, minimal dress code (anything not revealing or offensive).
I'm not sure what more you could ask for other than a northern California location or free money. Or more women. But I have a girlfriend, so I don't care that much. (And yes, trolls, she's a female human, unrelated to me, about my age, and she dates me without any chemical, physical or monetary persuasion.)
Perhaps it's just a trap, and if I come to work here full-time, I'll see what it's really like.
Perhaps not. Current employees seem pretty happy with it. Maybe they put something in the free soda?
Point #1 stands on its own, but many interesting jobs require a lot of education to get.
I use a Kinesis keyboard. Here's why it was worth my ~$300:
A working keyboard is an exacting input device. The most and least expensive keyboards still print the exact same codes to the computer. As long as it works, who cares?
Fancy keyboards are often programmable, i.e. they can remap or macro in firmware. This means that I can assign hotkeys to the KVM, remap to Dvorak + caps lock->control on every system, independent of whether it's Mac or PC.
Keyboards get old and wear out or break. I would rather replace a used Dell keyboard I got for free than a $100 buckling spring keyboard.
Most high-end keyboards are extremely durable, and can be cleaned relatively easily. Cheap keyboards wear out more rapidly.
When you are used to cheap keyboards, using them is no big deal. When you are used to expensive keyboards, anything less seems like a chore.
Not true for me; ymmv. I don't like certain types of keyboards (I hate Mac keyboards, for example), but my views haven't changed since I got a fancy one. Of coures, I prefer it as it's more comfortable, but I can tolerate using a cheap one.
Expensive keyboards usually justify their cost by offering features that aren't really that useful or innovative. Sometimes they just look pretty.
Lots of buttons controlled by the thumb, especially modifiers (more work for thumb than pinky, nicer chords). Contoured surface (less movement for wrists). Lots of key travel (good for joints). Macros and remapping built-in. How aren't these useful or innovative?
Your keyboard shouldn't be 10-30% the cost of the entire system.
It's not (I use it from system to system). But anyway, why shouldn't it be? The monitor is 20-50% of the cost of the system, and those two components (plus the mouse, but you want to minimize that one if you have any sort of wrist problem, and the speakers, but not so much for coding) are the parts I interact with directly.
An expensive keyboard doesn't typically provide the same value as "the hottest CPU or latest video card".
Bullshit. My CPU doesn't affect my tendonitis, whereas my keyboard definitely does. I often work on an old FreeBSD machine with a VIA C3 CPU and integrated graphics. As long as I'm just coding, the only difference between that and a dual Xeon is the compile time, and since I usually don't compile big things interactively, that's not so bad.
Now, when I'm gaming, the hottest CPU or latest video card is a big deal, at least for the latest fps. And I don't use a fancy keyboard, since the split makes things harder. I'm much more concerned about the mouse and monitor in that case.
Hm, that's funny. I installed Ubuntu 5.04 on my Centrino laptop, and it got the wireless, screen and ports, but not the power management (other than cpufreq) or special Toshiba Buttons (fnfxd gets about half of these, but didn't work in default install). It didn't configure my mouse right (I use an optical 3+scroll mouse when my laptop is on the desk, and it doesn't recognise the middle button or scroll wheel without configuration editing). It didn't get the display resolution right either (easy to fix in emacs), and I still can't get DRI to work.
:-) This post is not intionally slanted in either direction, it's just a statement of the truth.
I also can't use my 5-button wireless intellimouse+fingerprint scanner (mm, tasty 2-factor auth). Surprise surprise MS didn't write drivers for it, and no open-source ones exist. To get on the local wireless network requires WPA, which took quite a bit of hacking to get to work automatically, and adds so much to the boot time that I had to parallelize it out.
rc.d is now a Makefile which makes -j 5, kde is out because it's so slow and piggish, the boot process is pretty well stripped down, and the laptop still boots (defined as button to browser, or GAIM, or other useful gui app) noticeably slower than Windows (but after a few hours of hacking it's only 30% longer, rather than 250% longer). And you may rant about how your uptime renders reboots unneccessary, but on a laptop with no power management things are different.
Windows recognized all the hardware without any help from me (but probably lots of help from Toshiba), plus I can play 3d games on it (not so many of these for Linux, and you can't even run Chromium, AA or UT2K4 without graphics card support).
Several of my friends have had similar experiences, both with Ubuntu and with other distros. One couldn't install Ubuntu without some magic kernel option to avoid snowscreen, and even now has a long "todo: get x working" list.
Now, Ubuntu is much better than previous distros in this regard -- it recognized my wireless card, chipset and even graphics card (but DRI somehow still doesn't work), and I expect it to be better in the future. But it's still nowhere near Windows in terms of (mainstream x86/x64 PC) hardware support.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft as a dev intern. At school I used MacOS X, FreeBSD and Linux, but sold my eMac because it was ancient and heavy and slow, and my FreeBSD server was destroyed in shipping, so am now typing this from the above-mentioned Linux/Windows dual-boot laptop, from Firefox on Ubuntu 5.04. I prefer Linux to Windows because of the abundance of free and well-designed programming tools, along with the greater power of the Linux command line, although honestly Windows programming is not so bad at work -- you can RTFS
Look. Killing certain human cells while not killing all the rest of the cells is hard. It's a lot harder than killing a foreign pathogen without killing the human, which is already a lot harder than, say, rebooting a server or modifying a Perl script.
Wow. Even with Perl 6 on the horizon, it doesn't look like the development community is ready to face the challenge of modifying a Perl script... is there any hope?
The NSA is not allowed to break US laws. Of course, they spy on other countries, so they're probably allowed to break other countries' laws.
As for the other nasty stuff, it sounds an awful lot like your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
Also, if you want to hack a computer, you probably care more about the services running on it than the guts of the kernel, at least up to the point where you install a rootkit. They probably care more because they want to use MacOS X in a highly secure environment. SEDarwin anyone?
I believe that would be (1/2)+bi.
If it existed, we wouldn't be trying so hard to replace it.
Remember the list of features modern UNIXen have that BSD doesn't? Did you notice how many of them Linux does support? All of them.
... just about anything new in Solaris 10.
Well, here are some features Linux doesn't have yet. BSD has some of them, but not all.
1) Dtrace, a la Solaris.
2) Soft updates (and useful filesystem snapshots, and background fsck).
3) Jails.
4) Pooled storage, a la Solaris.
5) Project Evil (Windows network card ABI emulation).
6) Working systrace.
Um. It's not a beta. And the CRC error is your computer's problem, a good downloader should be able to deal with that.
You're thinking of the kernel. The operating system is the whole software part of the platform. If there's a lot of optional stuff, as in Linux, you can quibble as to whether X is part of the OS, but in Windows, the whole graphical shell is certainly part of the OS.
Price?
I have good hopes for the beta of Earth, but for the final release I, and many users like me would like a bigger planet.
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I've got a Kinesis keyboard. The dvorak version. It's really nice, and quite comfortable, and it doesn't aggravate my tendonitis at all. But there are a few problems...
-- The symbol keys are annoying, particularly ~.
-- The function keys suck.
-- And the kicker: modifier keys get stuck down in firmware. It is unbelievably irritating for a $300 keyboard, whose features have been stable over several years, to have such a big firmware bug.
Still, it is an amazing keyboard for typing English text, and a pretty good one for coding, too.
The server sends the salt.
The point of SRP is largely that it can be used from different computers without either creating security holes or confusing users. So, no.