The major difference being the tube/valve industry was done in by the transistor - i.e. we had a viable replacement that was better. The problem with the transistor is that we don't (yet) have a viable replacement.
"better options already exists for servers where I am guessing CFS is used." Well, that depends on your workload (which is the thrust of the debate). With one of the HPC products I regularly work with, we have a best-practice of using the noop scheduler instead of cfs - this tiny tweak alone will see at least a 30% improvement in our I/O performance (which is nothing to be sneezed at when we're moving ~700MB/s).
Being able to have pluggable schedulers is great because Linux can be all things to all people and it does make sense to have options (lets not go crazy here - too much choice can also be a bad thing). People talk about the difference between Linux on netbooks and servers for example but even in the "server" space there is VAST difference between small business file & print, clustered Oracle or scientific data acquisition workloads.
I too hope that this debate doesn't go away and also hope that it doesn't become as heated and personal as in the past so that we can all benefit from a selection of good ideas.
Nope but I can pay them via my cellphone http://www.pago.co.nz/, or the over the web (or via the web, from my cellphone). Usually transfers to another bank happen with 24 hours, to an account within the same bank, sometimes within 12. That's back home, but here in the UK (where I reside), I can pay anybody in the UK or EU via their SWIFT code or IBAN. I can transfer funds to accounts overseas to unrelated banks within 24 hours via Internet banking.
I got my first debit card & PIN 22 years ago and haven't looked back. Don't even have a chequebook here in the UK, and the last one I wrote back home must have been like 10 years ago.
Yeah, I saw that and it made me smile. Especially after a certain space-station module could have been named "Colbert" and NASA wussed out on "Serenity" and went with "Tranquility" (the EIGHTH-placed vote!) instead.
I was a fiercely loyal Telewest customer - I always had great speeds and great service.
Ever since they got bought out everything's turned to crap. Tech-support on cheap VOIP lines from India that are so bad I can barely hear them - if the call doesn't drop in under a minute.
Link speeds a fraction of what I'm paying for - without downloading anything! Forget about watching iPlayer or YouTube. Downloads of any type (http, ftp, torrent all suck equally - I now download my Linux iso's in the office.
I am seriously thinking of ditching cable and going back to dial-up because the current performance of Virgin in our street is about the same.
It's not the conformity, it's the lack of a defined unit - this is a site for nerds/geeks/whatever and anybody in science knows that showing the unit of measurement is important. Degrees of temperature (F, C & K), latitude, arc, etc.? IIRC degrees K is the definitive standard for temperature anyway (because it measures from absolute zero as opposed to an arbitrary zero).
Not to mention there is significant benefit to standardisation - as evidenced by a certain Mars probe incident and mass-production techniques which would be impossible without standards.
In terms of language use - well you are posting on Slashdot in its "standard" language! How useful would this (or any other) site be if every article and forum post was in a different language? Not very! There is also significant evidence that native languages are becoming extinct all over the world at an accelerating pace.
This really strikes me as an adjunct of the way the Gnome project thinks, "We are the one true way. Our way is the right way, the only way, no matter what you, the user thinks."
I gave up on Rhapsody (for example), when I discovered you can't even adjust the network buffer for streaming audio - god forbid you don't have fat broadband like the developers or poor wifi connectivity or high latency. The response usually to such complaints is "Stop complaining, write the code and submit a patch." - when I checked the mailing-list I discovered someone had submitted a patch TWO YEARS ago that had never been accepted. They aren't interested in any ideas that aren't their own.
A coder friend of mine refers to Gnome and related projects as "The Software Taleban" due to their "holy vision" and stubborn refusal of any criticism.
Still, the advantage of Freed Software is we are free to choose - dropped Pidgin months ago. There is better available that doesn't treat you like a mentally-retarded shaved monkey.
I do hope this is just a section (idle.slashdot) change and not intended to be a site-wide change. Looks not good and way too many active widgets in the page.
From what I can tell of from extracts from their paper the donor was the same blood type (O) with a different rhesus group.
A person with group O can receive blood only from another group O person (but can donate to almost everyone else). RhD negative people who don't have anti-RhD antibodies can receive one transfusion of RhD positive blood then become sensitised to the RhD antigen.
On the flipside, RhD positive people don't react to RhD negative blood.
It's important to realise that the ABO and RhD+/- systems are only the most important parts of the system - there are 29 blood group systems and over 600 known antigens relating to blood type.
With all due respect I think you miss Stallman's point of "Free as in speech..." and what the GPL license (I assume) you are working under allows you to do.
There is no "Linux Corp.", there is the Linux Community (of which you are part). YOU (and the rest of the community) are the unit test and quality control procedure.
How does using a Mac or any other closed code GUARANTEE that they have done those things too? Because they say so? Excuse my bitter (20 year veteran) cynicism at not taking large IT companies at their word (I work for one of the biggest).
If, for example, Apple had a similar "obvious fault" in a library/driver/whatever, that you were using (under license) in your project and they didn't think it was necessary to fix - even if you contributed the code back to them (probably losing your rights to it in the process), then you're stuck at their mercy.
Yes those cost your company money to perform - but how much would it have cost if Freed Software didn't exist in the first place? Was it cheaper to find and fix that bug instead of writing the entire code-base from scratch?
Thanks to you and your team for performing the tests and procedures while taking advantage of the GPL and your community spirit in returning your fixes back - that's what it's all about!
That is quite the case, however there is a growing question from UK License Fee (TV tax) payers as to just what the hell copyrights to content that was paid for by the public through a state-enforced tax is ending up in private hands.
Generally (although this too is changing) publicly-funded works (in medicine for example) are placed in the public domain. If the production companies that produce works for the UK taxpayers want the rights to those programs they should have to buy them outright otherwise the works default to the public use. That is only fair.
We should not be expected to pay again for what we have already paid to produce - that is just outright robber-baron behaviour. Certainly I have no issue with paying a fair price for boxed DVD's for my convenient access to meet the physical costs to be covered. Should the BBC archive be available on-line then the public should have open & non-proprietary access to their properties on-line.
You are assuming of course that the European's rabid fetish for spirit-crushing bureaucracy and regulation doesn't choke the whole EU project to death before it has a chance to complete.
Either that or the rapidly changing demographics of extirpating caucasians in Europe being replaced by new ethnicities with totally different value systems and priorities.
However the tone of your post seems to indicate that what the Beeb says is gospel truth as opposed to the Times?
I love the Beeb, I think it's an amazing institution and I believe that Murdoch is a baby-feasting spawn of Satan and a genuine threat to Democracy, BUT part of our open society is being able to provide a counterpoint which the Times is doing - just because they are owned by the aforementioned hellspawn please don't accuse them of lying. Don't accept everything the BBC says as perfect truth either.
The BBC does do a very good job - probably the best in the World (IMHO) of balanced reporting, certainly when compared to bile like Fox news (gak, "news" is certainly a misnomer there...) but there is also an obvious liberal bias. This may reflect that Britain is a reasonably liberal society.
Remember - "Question everything including what I am telling you now."
Yup. I've often wondered where the Linux desktop went oh-so-wrong when KDE1 on my (ancient even then) 486DX2-66 was (just, barely, "but it's prettier than TWM") usable. It might have been that (or my first DX4-100 system) I first played MP3's on and got work done in telnet/shell - anything else and the audio would kark it. PFY's and pro coders in general (IMHO) are spoiled for CPU cycles these days. (Four Yorkshireman sketch anyone?;-)
I refer to it at work as the Microsoft Programming Mentality: "Who cares if the code sucks? CPU, RAM and disk are cheap!" Now maybe that's not fair to MS coders (or coders in general) but Moore's law certainly seems to have enabled and encouraged code-bloat and less-than-efficient coding practices.
There's an old PII under my stairs that was a great desktop PC in its day (now a server) but today's most spartan of Linux desktops (excepting stuff like TWM) would suck mightily on it - even with all the eye-candy turned off. Am I the only one who remembers adopting and promoting Linux because it was better (faster and less-resource hungry) and allowed for re-use of older kit and was much more efficient on the latest gear? Admittedly eye-candy like Beryl/Compiz is a tad less resource-hungry than Aero but not by a huge margin. Why isn't Linux far, FAR more efficient than it has become?
Maybe it should be law that programmers should have to work on the slowest kit available;-)
Damn right. As usual there seems to be hordes of PFY's on/. that believes the world begins and ends at their gee-whizz, eye-candy laden desktop installed on some garish box all lit up like a titty bar.
As a server OS Debian is where you want to be, in fact if they just sorted out their goddamn bickering they could own the server space. Slow, sure STABLE and SECURE development is what sysadmins want, not freakin Aero or Beryl or anything else that doesn't warrant being in a production server farm. In fatc this is one of the reasons RH split off their desktop development and slowed down their rate of release for the server variant. Enterprise customers want PREDICTABILITY not eye-candy. (You whack the eye-candy on the management's desktop's to get them to sign the cheques.) Admittedly Debian is predicatably late, but hey, its release cycle is still light-years ahead of Duke Nukem.:D
Debian and Ubuntu work excellently together as a server/desktop OS pairing. Ubuntu is the dogs bollocks for the Linux desktop (IMHO). It was the first ever distro where everything worked "out of the box" on my laptop (YMMV) and that impressed me. It is a polished desktop OS that deserves its place in the sun. Debian is the sure workhorse on the server.
Debian needs to get it's act together poltically speaking but technically it's a damn fine OS and Ubuntu, Knoppix, Mepis and a pile of tohers would be nothing without it.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, Godwin's Law this soon? Wow.
The major difference being the tube/valve industry was done in by the transistor - i.e. we had a viable replacement that was better. The problem with the transistor is that we don't (yet) have a viable replacement.
A good quality umbrella - but you're from Washington State - you already know all about rain :-D
"better options already exists for servers where I am guessing CFS is used." Well, that depends on your workload (which is the thrust of the debate). With one of the HPC products I regularly work with, we have a best-practice of using the noop scheduler instead of cfs - this tiny tweak alone will see at least a 30% improvement in our I/O performance (which is nothing to be sneezed at when we're moving ~700MB/s). Being able to have pluggable schedulers is great because Linux can be all things to all people and it does make sense to have options (lets not go crazy here - too much choice can also be a bad thing). People talk about the difference between Linux on netbooks and servers for example but even in the "server" space there is VAST difference between small business file & print, clustered Oracle or scientific data acquisition workloads. I too hope that this debate doesn't go away and also hope that it doesn't become as heated and personal as in the past so that we can all benefit from a selection of good ideas.
Nope but I can pay them via my cellphone http://www.pago.co.nz/, or the over the web (or via the web, from my cellphone). Usually transfers to another bank happen with 24 hours, to an account within the same bank, sometimes within 12. That's back home, but here in the UK (where I reside), I can pay anybody in the UK or EU via their SWIFT code or IBAN. I can transfer funds to accounts overseas to unrelated banks within 24 hours via Internet banking. I got my first debit card & PIN 22 years ago and haven't looked back. Don't even have a chequebook here in the UK, and the last one I wrote back home must have been like 10 years ago.
Yeah, I saw that and it made me smile. Especially after a certain space-station module could have been named "Colbert" and NASA wussed out on "Serenity" and went with "Tranquility" (the EIGHTH-placed vote!) instead.
Quite so! Hear hear!
I was a fiercely loyal Telewest customer - I always had great speeds and great service.
Ever since they got bought out everything's turned to crap. Tech-support on cheap VOIP lines from India that are so bad I can barely hear them - if the call doesn't drop in under a minute.
Link speeds a fraction of what I'm paying for - without downloading anything! Forget about watching iPlayer or YouTube. Downloads of any type (http, ftp, torrent all suck equally - I now download my Linux iso's in the office.
I am seriously thinking of ditching cable and going back to dial-up because the current performance of Virgin in our street is about the same.
Unless she is from Omicron Persei 8, then it should read: "I wuv U".
Oh very droll... ;-)
It's not the conformity, it's the lack of a defined unit - this is a site for nerds/geeks/whatever and anybody in science knows that showing the unit of measurement is important. Degrees of temperature (F, C & K), latitude, arc, etc.? IIRC degrees K is the definitive standard for temperature anyway (because it measures from absolute zero as opposed to an arbitrary zero).
Not to mention there is significant benefit to standardisation - as evidenced by a certain Mars probe incident and mass-production techniques which would be impossible without standards.
In terms of language use - well you are posting on Slashdot in its "standard" language! How useful would this (or any other) site be if every article and forum post was in a different language? Not very! There is also significant evidence that native languages are becoming extinct all over the world at an accelerating pace.
This really strikes me as an adjunct of the way the Gnome project thinks, "We are the one true way. Our way is the right way, the only way, no matter what you, the user thinks." I gave up on Rhapsody (for example), when I discovered you can't even adjust the network buffer for streaming audio - god forbid you don't have fat broadband like the developers or poor wifi connectivity or high latency. The response usually to such complaints is "Stop complaining, write the code and submit a patch." - when I checked the mailing-list I discovered someone had submitted a patch TWO YEARS ago that had never been accepted. They aren't interested in any ideas that aren't their own. A coder friend of mine refers to Gnome and related projects as "The Software Taleban" due to their "holy vision" and stubborn refusal of any criticism. Still, the advantage of Freed Software is we are free to choose - dropped Pidgin months ago. There is better available that doesn't treat you like a mentally-retarded shaved monkey.
Damn right. Time for an angry mob I say, if I could just find a pitchfork...
I do hope this is just a section (idle.slashdot) change and not intended to be a site-wide change. Looks not good and way too many active widgets in the page.
From what I can tell of from extracts from their paper the donor was the same blood type (O) with a different rhesus group.
A person with group O can receive blood only from another group O person (but can donate to almost everyone else). RhD negative people who don't have anti-RhD antibodies can receive one transfusion of RhD positive blood then become sensitised to the RhD antigen.
On the flipside, RhD positive people don't react to RhD negative blood.
It's important to realise that the ABO and RhD+/- systems are only the most important parts of the system - there are 29 blood group systems and over 600 known antigens relating to blood type.
With all due respect I think you miss Stallman's point of "Free as in speech..." and what the GPL license (I assume) you are working under allows you to do.
There is no "Linux Corp.", there is the Linux Community (of which you are part). YOU (and the rest of the community) are the unit test and quality control procedure.
How does using a Mac or any other closed code GUARANTEE that they have done those things too? Because they say so? Excuse my bitter (20 year veteran) cynicism at not taking large IT companies at their word (I work for one of the biggest).
If, for example, Apple had a similar "obvious fault" in a library/driver/whatever, that you were using (under license) in your project and they didn't think it was necessary to fix - even if you contributed the code back to them (probably losing your rights to it in the process), then you're stuck at their mercy.
Yes those cost your company money to perform - but how much would it have cost if Freed Software didn't exist in the first place? Was it cheaper to find and fix that bug instead of writing the entire code-base from scratch?
Thanks to you and your team for performing the tests and procedures while taking advantage of the GPL and your community spirit in returning your fixes back - that's what it's all about!
Funny... That sounds like our friends in Scientology...
That is quite the case, however there is a growing question from UK License Fee (TV tax) payers as to just what the hell copyrights to content that was paid for by the public through a state-enforced tax is ending up in private hands.
Generally (although this too is changing) publicly-funded works (in medicine for example) are placed in the public domain. If the production companies that produce works for the UK taxpayers want the rights to those programs they should have to buy them outright otherwise the works default to the public use. That is only fair.
We should not be expected to pay again for what we have already paid to produce - that is just outright robber-baron behaviour. Certainly I have no issue with paying a fair price for boxed DVD's for my convenient access to meet the physical costs to be covered. Should the BBC archive be available on-line then the public should have open & non-proprietary access to their properties on-line.
We do use their numerals though, as a consequence of using the algebra they developed.
You are assuming of course that the European's rabid fetish for spirit-crushing bureaucracy and regulation doesn't choke the whole EU project to death before it has a chance to complete.
Either that or the rapidly changing demographics of extirpating caucasians in Europe being replaced by new ethnicities with totally different value systems and priorities.
There is nowhere left to run.
However the tone of your post seems to indicate that what the Beeb says is gospel truth as opposed to the Times?
I love the Beeb, I think it's an amazing institution and I believe that Murdoch is a baby-feasting spawn of Satan and a genuine threat to Democracy, BUT part of our open society is being able to provide a counterpoint which the Times is doing - just because they are owned by the aforementioned hellspawn please don't accuse them of lying. Don't accept everything the BBC says as perfect truth either.
The BBC does do a very good job - probably the best in the World (IMHO) of balanced reporting, certainly when compared to bile like Fox news (gak, "news" is certainly a misnomer there...) but there is also an obvious liberal bias. This may reflect that Britain is a reasonably liberal society.
Remember - "Question everything including what I am telling you now."
Yup. I've often wondered where the Linux desktop went oh-so-wrong when KDE1 on my (ancient even then) 486DX2-66 was (just, barely, "but it's prettier than TWM") usable. It might have been that (or my first DX4-100 system) I first played MP3's on and got work done in telnet/shell - anything else and the audio would kark it. PFY's and pro coders in general (IMHO) are spoiled for CPU cycles these days. (Four Yorkshireman sketch anyone? ;-)
;-)
I refer to it at work as the Microsoft Programming Mentality: "Who cares if the code sucks? CPU, RAM and disk are cheap!" Now maybe that's not fair to MS coders (or coders in general) but Moore's law certainly seems to have enabled and encouraged code-bloat and less-than-efficient coding practices.
There's an old PII under my stairs that was a great desktop PC in its day (now a server) but today's most spartan of Linux desktops (excepting stuff like TWM) would suck mightily on it - even with all the eye-candy turned off. Am I the only one who remembers adopting and promoting Linux because it was better (faster and less-resource hungry) and allowed for re-use of older kit and was much more efficient on the latest gear? Admittedly eye-candy like Beryl/Compiz is a tad less resource-hungry than Aero but not by a huge margin. Why isn't Linux far, FAR more efficient than it has become?
Maybe it should be law that programmers should have to work on the slowest kit available
Have you tried a spoon?
Agreed, as I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, Debian/Ubuntu would make an ideal server/desktop pairing.
Probably too many personalities involved to make it happen though.
Sigh...
Damn right. As usual there seems to be hordes of PFY's on /. that believes the world begins and ends at their gee-whizz, eye-candy laden desktop installed on some garish box all lit up like a titty bar.
:D
As a server OS Debian is where you want to be, in fact if they just sorted out their goddamn bickering they could own the server space. Slow, sure STABLE and SECURE development is what sysadmins want, not freakin Aero or Beryl or anything else that doesn't warrant being in a production server farm. In fatc this is one of the reasons RH split off their desktop development and slowed down their rate of release for the server variant. Enterprise customers want PREDICTABILITY not eye-candy. (You whack the eye-candy on the management's desktop's to get them to sign the cheques.) Admittedly Debian is predicatably late, but hey, its release cycle is still light-years ahead of Duke Nukem.
Debian and Ubuntu work excellently together as a server/desktop OS pairing. Ubuntu is the dogs bollocks for the Linux desktop (IMHO). It was the first ever distro where everything worked "out of the box" on my laptop (YMMV) and that impressed me. It is a polished desktop OS that deserves its place in the sun. Debian is the sure workhorse on the server.
Debian needs to get it's act together poltically speaking but technically it's a damn fine OS and Ubuntu, Knoppix, Mepis and a pile of tohers would be nothing without it.