Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Linus say that they didn't really need a 2.7 series yet? My feeling was that they didn't plan on anything revolutionary that would warrant branching, and Linus thought the way 2.6 was being handled was going well. Maybe he just doesn't want to hand over the reigns to Andrew Morton (the "official" 2.6 maintainer, and proprieter of the infamous mm patches).
I still don't know how I feel about having to have a kernel called 2.6.5-1.358.8kstacks (redhat with nvidia modifications, and yes I know they fixed that) instead of 2.7.1 or whatever. It just doesn't give me that nice and fuzzy stable feeling that the 2.4.20+ series had. I want to know my 2.6.x under redhat will perform the same at a 2.6.x under SuSE or slack or gentoo or ubunto or...
Linus can I please have my developement series back?
I too have had many problems with the 2.6 kernel series and 2.6 and 2.8 ssh versions, specifically pertaining to samba authentication, pam modules, and X forwarding, amoungst other inconsistencies. Not always problems with kernel or openssh per se, but it's the little stuff that gets you.
If you'd like some help head over to ##linux (yes, that's two pound signs) at freenode.net irc and ask me (same nick), or anybody. We tend to be very helpfull, and try to keep the "google that" and "RTFM" to a minimum (with some exceptions;)) unless it's stuff that we can't ourselves can't answer.
IRC is the best linux help out there as far as I'm concerned. E-mail lists and forum sites aren't very condusive for troubleshooting because of their non-realtime nature. Stop by.
And why would Linus ever sell for that measly amount of money? Ok, assume that you could get agreements from however many people make up 90% of the code.
Then you have to rip out who won't sell. What happens if you get one holdout from the 1.x days? You'd be removing a whole *lot* of code that was their work and derived. What about the people that are dead? (as so many others have pointed out). You can't change that license. It'd be hugely expensive to audit the millions of lines to take out who didn't agree. *Then* you'd have to redevelop it without any of the benefits of having the open testing community.
Even if you did take out 10% of the kernel, audited and redeveloped it, it's not linux anymore, it's not stable. Furthermore you've just spent millions of dollars just putting into BSD form, a untried product that has virtually no garuntee that it has any of the stability or any other attribute that has made linux famous.
Even if, for whatever reason, why not just change BSD to your liking (also suggested by many others). Problematic parts could still be tested by the community, there's no auditing or lawyers costs, no buys-out. I can't think of a reason why you would try to buy-out linux if you couldn't get everybody, (which is already impossible because of dead contributors).
In any event your looking at far more expenditure than $1.5M
The only thing wrong with modding trolls down automatically is that they'll just create a new account without that restriction. Then you'll drive trolls do just do one troll per account.
Like I said active counter measures don't do very well when the whole point of being a troll is getting attention. The whitelist thing is good, but many blog sites have a lot of one or few time posters. When you're running a blog you're not really trying to create a community (where the whitelist would work well) but rather trying and get people to respond to your thoughts. It might end up as a community but you have to tread very carefully before making first time posters less visiable.
One thing I *have* seen work well was to have first or few time posters not have any rich abilities, ie. you can't link or bold or have a small font or whatever. That way you'd have to work a little bit to become a really *visible* troll and that's often more work than most trolls want to do.
Also, I want anonymous posters. Often, the whole registration thing is too much work when I just want to make one comment (and probably never go there again.) Maybe sprinkle some Wiki ideas in whatever anti-trolls measurs you take.
How is this news for nerds, or stuff that matters?
Because many of us, as nerds, have blogs and therefore trolls. Any discussion about reducing the effects of trolls and trolling occurances is, I'm guessing, really interesting to a lot of people here. Is it a treatise of the effects and coutermeasures of trolling? Nope. Does is discuss a couple of the more popular ways to deal with trolls? Yes.
No one forces you to read slashdot. You are going to see articles that *you* think are stupid. But just move along to the next story, somebody might find value in this one. And for what it's worth I don't think you should be modded as troll. Just offtopic.
I believe I have written a little about trolls here but, blogs are the unfortunately the best place to troll. Places like slashdot get their fair share but the "many eyes" benefits quickly put them into obscurity. Though when one latches onto your site with only a handful of readers, it can be very hard to persuade them to move elsewhere.
Trolls are often very smart and if they see active counter measures like IP-banning and "disemvoweling" they are likely to find one of the many ways around those countermeasures because they know they're annoying someone.
The best thing I can think of is to have a slashdot-like mechanism where you're the only mod and everybody starts at -1 (only the subject of their reply visible). You check in a couple times a day and "promote" comments so that the entire body is seen. But that rather draconian.
Hmm... like spam there's no clear way to stop trolls, only minimize the pleasure they get from trolling. If you have a clear and consistant plan before the trolls hit, I'm guessing you'll be better prepared. And yes, you've seen it here, the best advice is "Don't feed the trolls".
Their budget wasn't just the 10 mil purse, if fact it would have been quite stupid to bank on that money given the amount of competition. No, I believe they'll make much more money on their new partnership with Virgin and the tons of venture capital that they'll rake it.
I couldn't find any information on what they expected to spend, but I'm pretty much sure they didn't expect to do it with $10.
So are they cheaper than NASA? Like so many other have said, it's hard to say. Those NASA people are very smart and given free reign and relaxed regulations and maybe $30 million, I have no doubt they could have done it. However, they've *not* done anything like that (X15 was air force? and even then nothing in the past 30 years), and in fact their manned space program has been very slow since the inception of the space shuttle 25 years ago. What have they done? Some zero-g experiments? Space station? Was it worth it? , yeah, I'd say so. But with just NASA/ESA/RSA at the helm, it would be a long long time before regular people get into space.
Anyway, there's a lot more that they've won then just $10 mil.
Notice I said robust implementations(perhaps I should have emphasised that point). Yes there was a lot of work going on in SGML dialects, none of it was terribly popular or consistant, IIRC (and please correct me if I'm wrong). The XML standard took the concept of structured markup to describe and facilitate machine reading of data from it's infancy to ubiquity. Yes the XML keyword is thrown around too much, but the standard really helped it.
I don't totally disagree with you, but what I'm trying to say is that standards should be developed in parallel with early implementations and it seems like he's doing that.
He is pitching the idea just like a startup would, giving cool examples and everything. But in practice, all he is doing is proposing and overseeing standards.
He just doesn't write and talk about the semantic-web, he's trying to put alot of it in practice. However you can't really show an incomplete implemenation (though he did mention one at the end of the article). Also, notice there is no recomendation out, he's just working on it. In short I don't believe he's *just* using standards to promote the semantic-web, it's mearly a tool in his toolbox, and a useful one at that.
Perhaps Tim should get involved with companies in this field as an advisor/consultant.
Um... he invented www and started the W3C. I'd say he's had some experience with companies as a advisor. Take a look at some of the W3C recommendations and look for corporate involvment.
But in practice, all he is doing is proposing and overseeing standards.
That's kinda what the W3C *does*.
Standards should follow successful technology, not vice versa.
XHTML,XML,XSLT and a lot of other recommendations started as standards that *later* had robust implementations. Technology that starts without standards if often not fully thought out and awkward, and at worst, proprietary. Waiting for technology before standards will only inhibit interoperability and adoption of the standard.
The fact that Tim has been trying for 15 years to sell this idea with little success indicates that he approach is insufficient.
I suppose that it has nothing to with the fact that it's a tremendouly difficult and abitious project. You're right. Anything that take 15 years to develop should be scrapped.
There's a difference between describing stuff and finding relevant information. The semantic web (as I understand) can co-exist with statistical relevance information. If you lie about what you are describing, we can still use trust-relationship and google-like revance stuff to find what we want to find.
Once we *do* find something worthwhile, the semantic web will enable our machine to do much more with the information than just display it.
In conclusion the semantic web isn't a replacement for META tags or google-like search engines, it's about adding content and functionality so agent can provide a richer experience. Yes, that sounds like marketing talk, but that's what he has in mind, as far as I can tell.
ARP/ETHERNET
TCP/IP
DNS
HTTP
HTML
JavaScript
CSS
XML/XSL
even, ugh, RTF
Just examples of standards based technology that people said the same thing about. If the semantic-web stuff becomes sufficiently powerful and popular it will become widespread. It certainly has the potential to become a killer app.
There have been many instances of formats becoming ubiqutious, it's just that there have been many more instances of them not.
Baby steps, one page at a time and semantic web will grow. Even better, it doesn't need to be ubiqitous to become useful.
Just curious here, was I being particularly flippant?
Using 'she' in this context is not particularly onerous to the comprehensibility(is that a word?) of the sentence.
I'll disgree with you there, IMHO, it's confusing. Using 'he' as the indefinite pronoun is much more widespread and using she implies a know person. You're right that I didn't *know* that the GP wasn't refering to a particlar person, but at the time it didn't read like it. However, I still think that the indefinite-she implies an overly political correct thought process that can be offensive to some people.
Ok, offtopic here, but why do some people insist on using 'she' where the sex of the anticedant is unspecified? I'm not sexist or anything but it's just bad grammar. Can we agree on a real word that fits the unspecified sex pronoun? He/she is horribly awkward. And then you're assigning preferance as to order. I'm not sure why people get all riled up when people use 'he'. Get over it, it's proper english.
While the feminist cause has done a great many things and still has a ways to go (ie the disproportionate pay problem) it often inspires reverse sexism and male-hating. As far as I'm concerned using 'she' in that fashion is just as bad as saying 'herstory' instead of history.
Basically when you are doing heavy math problem such as nuclear simulations or atmospheric or whatever, fortan is nice. The syntax is fairly succinct, there is less memory management than in C and it's built in math and especially matrix abilities are second to none.
It has lost it's usage as a general purpose language, as yes you're right in that, and most people will never need to pick it up. But for scientists Fortran is an attractive option especially if know how to interface it with C (and it's not that hard), you can use the best of both languages.
I find Fortran (especially old fortran like 77) is most easily worked when you do the setup and application logic in C/C++. Once you've got the type conversions down (ie, when passing Fortran strings, their lenth is appended as an argument, or that array subscripts are reverse and start from 1), it's quite easy to call C from Fortran and Fortran from C.
Since C is much more standard and cross platfrom, you can get that stuff out of the way and do the heavy lifting in Fortran. Data types, yes, those can be inconvenient cross-platfrom wise, (though I've never had to worry about them much on HPUX or Sun) but otherwise use the right tool for the job.
Then I challenge you do some complex multi-dimentional array calculation and manipulation. Most applications, yes, but why would scientists still use it if *everything* was better in c++? Not everything is maintaining applications from the 70's; there *is* new development.
There's a language for every problem domain and when that problem domain includes heavy lifting with math, it's often fortran. Besides you can quite easily compile C and Fortan together, Fortran for the math, C for the application data and GUI.
The point I was trying to make was the if you do challenge it, your *party* loses the next election. But I do agree with you that a 2nd term president has a lot more leeway than the 1st. I guess my main point is that as president your actions reflect on the party and will impact the next elect whether you are in it or not.
effectively overturn Roe v. Wade through executive order
And through the Republicans into political disorder? Though the religious right is one of Bush's constituancies, there are still more people who either belive that 1. it isn't the government place to say, right or wrong and 2. that women should have the choice. Please don't argue with me because I'm halfway between banning and number 1, but leaning towards the latter, and I really don't care what strangers think on this.
If you begin to seriously challenge RvW, you lose the next election. This one will be close and neither has decided to make abortion a big issue. Why? Because it's a lose-lose situation. Washingtonites don't like polarizing issues, that makes everything too clear. They talk about stuff that doesn't matter. Like stuff that happened in the military 25 years ago. Guess what. I don't if Kerry exagerated or Bush defected, this is here and now.
Despite popular misconception R's and D's are more alike than different. That's why I support the third party.
Don't talk to me about the president and anything that you've listed. The congress has more of a say on those anyway. I want real issues. Not psuedo-party beliefs that will never enter the realm of public lawmaking.
Dammit. I left rant lock on. It's so close to backspace. Sorry.
The windows tax is insignificant compared to the price of hardware and man-power. Also, though I can not discuss details, there are often contractual stipulations with resellers.
Furthermore, most of our clients like to keep the option of having windows on a box. Need another domain controller but the linux sql cluster is underused? Break out that windows license. Do you want on demand balancing? Install a dual-boot and reboot one of the DC's into linux for after hours web serving when the loads for DCs are less. Also many of our servers used to be outdated windows machines that we already bought.
And don't talk to me about using linux for whatever. MS still has it's place, and it's especially hard to replace it in the domain controller segment when you can't replace MS desktops. In conclusion, both because external forces and the need for internal flexibility, we will keep ordering machines with windows licenses. Not to mention that we do all configuration so that just about any preconfiguration is wiped out.
Excelent point. I know that all of my linux boxes are installed after the server is already rackmounted. That means that there was probably windows already on it, or that client need different functionality (you mean I can put my web and mail on one server and use the windows machine that were doing that to augment the SQL cluster? Cool!), or whatever.
I'm pretty sure that none of the linux boxes that I admin will get counted in any linux survey. Count support contracts from Redhat et al? Nope, I'm the support. I'd wager that any broad count of linux deployment is under by at least 50% and probably 75%.
to compile your own. The Washington spin artists make it hard to see through all the smoke and evalute canidates on what matters to you. No canidate will serious tell you their strengths *and* weaknesses, so you have to become your own source.
Go to the closest headquarters for each canidate. There will be at least one in all but the smallest communities. Ask them what they think their strengths and weakness are and be prepared to hear a lot of bull shit. Ask them why you should vote for them and not for the other guy. Then take that information to the other guy's headquarters and ask the same stuff. Take a good look at what they say about themselves and their opponent, and this will give you a nice base to start at.
Then read the major newspapers and watch the Sunday morning political lineup. Be careful to note the leanings of each, i.e. Nytimes == Liberal, Wall Street Journal == conservative. Radio political talk has a right leaning, and Tv political talk often is leftist.
After doing this for a couple weeks you'll have enough to start on if you want to do some serious reseach at the library. The most important things to remember are there is no unbaised source, gets information from as many sources as possible, and make you own descision (ie beware of groupthink). If you put some descent effort into you'll have more then enough to decide who to vote for.
I'd be more impressed with people who can prove they have the discipline to avoid obfuscations.
Have you ever read any of the code? Besides formatting, (you can run stuff through indent), this stuff is *very careful* obfuscation. It's not just nonsensical variable names and lack of comments. It's using constructs in novel ways, and comming up with non-trivial solutions to what are quite often complex problems.
If you can win this contest you know exactly what makes programs hard to read, and thereby in real situations, avoid them. Furthermore, some of the stuff is beautifully arranged and may be faster or more elegant than the easy to read version. It's not a mockery of the language, it's "art in c", and I would happily hire any of the winners as most probably they are masters of the nuances of c.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Linus say that they didn't really need a 2.7 series yet? My feeling was that they didn't plan on anything revolutionary that would warrant branching, and Linus thought the way 2.6 was being handled was going well. Maybe he just doesn't want to hand over the reigns to Andrew Morton (the "official" 2.6 maintainer, and proprieter of the infamous mm patches).
I still don't know how I feel about having to have a kernel called 2.6.5-1.358.8kstacks (redhat with nvidia modifications, and yes I know they fixed that) instead of 2.7.1 or whatever. It just doesn't give me that nice and fuzzy stable feeling that the 2.4.20+ series had. I want to know my 2.6.x under redhat will perform the same at a 2.6.x under SuSE or slack or gentoo or ubunto or...
Linus can I please have my developement series back?
I too have had many problems with the 2.6 kernel series and 2.6 and 2.8 ssh versions, specifically pertaining to samba authentication, pam modules, and X forwarding, amoungst other inconsistencies. Not always problems with kernel or openssh per se, but it's the little stuff that gets you.
;)) unless it's stuff that we can't ourselves can't answer.
If you'd like some help head over to ##linux (yes, that's two pound signs) at freenode.net irc and ask me (same nick), or anybody. We tend to be very helpfull, and try to keep the "google that" and "RTFM" to a minimum (with some exceptions
IRC is the best linux help out there as far as I'm concerned. E-mail lists and forum sites aren't very condusive for troubleshooting because of their non-realtime nature. Stop by.
And why would Linus ever sell for that measly amount of money? Ok, assume that you could get agreements from however many people make up 90% of the code.
Then you have to rip out who won't sell. What happens if you get one holdout from the 1.x days? You'd be removing a whole *lot* of code that was their work and derived. What about the people that are dead? (as so many others have pointed out). You can't change that license. It'd be hugely expensive to audit the millions of lines to take out who didn't agree. *Then* you'd have to redevelop it without any of the benefits of having the open testing community.
Even if you did take out 10% of the kernel, audited and redeveloped it, it's not linux anymore, it's not stable. Furthermore you've just spent millions of dollars just putting into BSD form, a untried product that has virtually no garuntee that it has any of the stability or any other attribute that has made linux famous.
Even if, for whatever reason, why not just change BSD to your liking (also suggested by many others). Problematic parts could still be tested by the community, there's no auditing or lawyers costs, no buys-out. I can't think of a reason why you would try to buy-out linux if you couldn't get everybody, (which is already impossible because of dead contributors).
In any event your looking at far more expenditure than $1.5M
The only thing wrong with modding trolls down automatically is that they'll just create a new account without that restriction. Then you'll drive trolls do just do one troll per account.
Like I said active counter measures don't do very well when the whole point of being a troll is getting attention. The whitelist thing is good, but many blog sites have a lot of one or few time posters. When you're running a blog you're not really trying to create a community (where the whitelist would work well) but rather trying and get people to respond to your thoughts. It might end up as a community but you have to tread very carefully before making first time posters less visiable.
One thing I *have* seen work well was to have first or few time posters not have any rich abilities, ie. you can't link or bold or have a small font or whatever. That way you'd have to work a little bit to become a really *visible* troll and that's often more work than most trolls want to do.
Also, I want anonymous posters. Often, the whole registration thing is too much work when I just want to make one comment (and probably never go there again.) Maybe sprinkle some Wiki ideas in whatever anti-trolls measurs you take.
How is this news for nerds, or stuff that matters?
Because many of us, as nerds, have blogs and therefore trolls. Any discussion about reducing the effects of trolls and trolling occurances is, I'm guessing, really interesting to a lot of people here. Is it a treatise of the effects and coutermeasures of trolling? Nope. Does is discuss a couple of the more popular ways to deal with trolls? Yes.
No one forces you to read slashdot. You are going to see articles that *you* think are stupid. But just move along to the next story, somebody might find value in this one. And for what it's worth I don't think you should be modded as troll. Just offtopic.
I believe I have written a little about trolls here but, blogs are the unfortunately the best place to troll. Places like slashdot get their fair share but the "many eyes" benefits quickly put them into obscurity. Though when one latches onto your site with only a handful of readers, it can be very hard to persuade them to move elsewhere.
Trolls are often very smart and if they see active counter measures like IP-banning and "disemvoweling" they are likely to find one of the many ways around those countermeasures because they know they're annoying someone.
The best thing I can think of is to have a slashdot-like mechanism where you're the only mod and everybody starts at -1 (only the subject of their reply visible). You check in a couple times a day and "promote" comments so that the entire body is seen. But that rather draconian.
Hmm... like spam there's no clear way to stop trolls, only minimize the pleasure they get from trolling. If you have a clear and consistant plan before the trolls hit, I'm guessing you'll be better prepared. And yes, you've seen it here, the best advice is "Don't feed the trolls".
Their budget wasn't just the 10 mil purse, if fact it would have been quite stupid to bank on that money given the amount of competition. No, I believe they'll make much more money on their new partnership with Virgin and the tons of venture capital that they'll rake it.
I couldn't find any information on what they expected to spend, but I'm pretty much sure they didn't expect to do it with $10.
So are they cheaper than NASA? Like so many other have said, it's hard to say. Those NASA people are very smart and given free reign and relaxed regulations and maybe $30 million, I have no doubt they could have done it. However, they've *not* done anything like that (X15 was air force? and even then nothing in the past 30 years), and in fact their manned space program has been very slow since the inception of the space shuttle 25 years ago. What have they done? Some zero-g experiments? Space station? Was it worth it? , yeah, I'd say so. But with just NASA/ESA/RSA at the helm, it would be a long long time before regular people get into space.
Anyway, there's a lot more that they've won then just $10 mil.
Notice I said robust implementations(perhaps I should have emphasised that point). Yes there was a lot of work going on in SGML dialects, none of it was terribly popular or consistant, IIRC (and please correct me if I'm wrong). The XML standard took the concept of structured markup to describe and facilitate machine reading of data from it's infancy to ubiquity. Yes the XML keyword is thrown around too much, but the standard really helped it.
I don't totally disagree with you, but what I'm trying to say is that standards should be developed in parallel with early implementations and it seems like he's doing that.
He is pitching the idea just like a startup would, giving cool examples and everything. But in practice, all he is doing is proposing and overseeing standards.
He just doesn't write and talk about the semantic-web, he's trying to put alot of it in practice. However you can't really show an incomplete implemenation (though he did mention one at the end of the article). Also, notice there is no recomendation out, he's just working on it. In short I don't believe he's *just* using standards to promote the semantic-web, it's mearly a tool in his toolbox, and a useful one at that.
Perhaps Tim should get involved with companies in this field as an advisor/consultant.
Um... he invented www and started the W3C. I'd say he's had some experience with companies as a advisor. Take a look at some of the W3C recommendations and look for corporate involvment.
But in practice, all he is doing is proposing and overseeing standards.
That's kinda what the W3C *does*.
Standards should follow successful technology, not vice versa.
XHTML,XML,XSLT and a lot of other recommendations started as standards that *later* had robust implementations. Technology that starts without standards if often not fully thought out and awkward, and at worst, proprietary. Waiting for technology before standards will only inhibit interoperability and adoption of the standard.
The fact that Tim has been trying for 15 years to sell this idea with little success indicates that he approach is insufficient.
I suppose that it has nothing to with the fact that it's a tremendouly difficult and abitious project. You're right. Anything that take 15 years to develop should be scrapped.
There's a difference between describing stuff and finding relevant information. The semantic web (as I understand) can co-exist with statistical relevance information. If you lie about what you are describing, we can still use trust-relationship and google-like revance stuff to find what we want to find.
Once we *do* find something worthwhile, the semantic web will enable our machine to do much more with the information than just display it.
In conclusion the semantic web isn't a replacement for META tags or google-like search engines, it's about adding content and functionality so agent can provide a richer experience. Yes, that sounds like marketing talk, but that's what he has in mind, as far as I can tell.
ARP/ETHERNET
TCP/IP
DNS
HTTP
HTML
JavaScript
CSS
XML/XSL
even, ugh, RTF
Just examples of standards based technology that people said the same thing about. If the semantic-web stuff becomes sufficiently powerful and popular it will become widespread. It certainly has the potential to become a killer app.
There have been many instances of formats becoming ubiqutious, it's just that there have been many more instances of them not.
Baby steps, one page at a time and semantic web will grow. Even better, it doesn't need to be ubiqitous to become useful.
You need to cut back on the caffeine
Just curious here, was I being particularly flippant?
Using 'she' in this context is not particularly onerous to the comprehensibility(is that a word?) of the sentence.
I'll disgree with you there, IMHO, it's confusing. Using 'he' as the indefinite pronoun is much more widespread and using she implies a know person. You're right that I didn't *know* that the GP wasn't refering to a particlar person, but at the time it didn't read like it. However, I still think that the indefinite-she implies an overly political correct thought process that can be offensive to some people.
a Linux feature that she developed
Ok, offtopic here, but why do some people insist on using 'she' where the sex of the anticedant is unspecified? I'm not sexist or anything but it's just bad grammar. Can we agree on a real word that fits the unspecified sex pronoun? He/she is horribly awkward. And then you're assigning preferance as to order. I'm not sure why people get all riled up when people use 'he'. Get over it, it's proper english.
While the feminist cause has done a great many things and still has a ways to go (ie the disproportionate pay problem) it often inspires reverse sexism and male-hating. As far as I'm concerned using 'she' in that fashion is just as bad as saying 'herstory' instead of history.
Basically when you are doing heavy math problem such as nuclear simulations or atmospheric or whatever, fortan is nice. The syntax is fairly succinct, there is less memory management than in C and it's built in math and especially matrix abilities are second to none.
It has lost it's usage as a general purpose language, as yes you're right in that, and most people will never need to pick it up. But for scientists Fortran is an attractive option especially if know how to interface it with C (and it's not that hard), you can use the best of both languages.
I find Fortran (especially old fortran like 77) is most easily worked when you do the setup and application logic in C/C++. Once you've got the type conversions down (ie, when passing Fortran strings, their lenth is appended as an argument, or that array subscripts are reverse and start from 1), it's quite easy to call C from Fortran and Fortran from C.
Since C is much more standard and cross platfrom, you can get that stuff out of the way and do the heavy lifting in Fortran. Data types, yes, those can be inconvenient cross-platfrom wise, (though I've never had to worry about them much on HPUX or Sun) but otherwise use the right tool for the job.
Then I challenge you do some complex multi-dimentional array calculation and manipulation. Most applications, yes, but why would scientists still use it if *everything* was better in c++? Not everything is maintaining applications from the 70's; there *is* new development.
There's a language for every problem domain and when that problem domain includes heavy lifting with math, it's often fortran. Besides you can quite easily compile C and Fortan together, Fortran for the math, C for the application data and GUI.
...or the physicist would use the right term for 1K in a based 2 environment, kibibyte
;)
Kinda like Mibibyte. Yes obscure blah blah, but physicist like those things.
To the music of the Imperial March?
Hemos: "They will feel the power of the slashdot!"
timothy: "The slashdot effect is insignificant compared to the ire raised when I dupe."
The point I was trying to make was the if you do challenge it, your *party* loses the next election. But I do agree with you that a 2nd term president has a lot more leeway than the 1st. I guess my main point is that as president your actions reflect on the party and will impact the next elect whether you are in it or not.
effectively overturn Roe v. Wade through executive order
And through the Republicans into political disorder? Though the religious right is one of Bush's constituancies, there are still more people who either belive that 1. it isn't the government place to say, right or wrong and 2. that women should have the choice. Please don't argue with me because I'm halfway between banning and number 1, but leaning towards the latter, and I really don't care what strangers think on this.
If you begin to seriously challenge RvW, you lose the next election. This one will be close and neither has decided to make abortion a big issue. Why? Because it's a lose-lose situation. Washingtonites don't like polarizing issues, that makes everything too clear. They talk about stuff that doesn't matter. Like stuff that happened in the military 25 years ago. Guess what. I don't if Kerry exagerated or Bush defected, this is here and now.
Despite popular misconception R's and D's are more alike than different. That's why I support the third party.
Don't talk to me about the president and anything that you've listed. The congress has more of a say on those anyway. I want real issues. Not psuedo-party beliefs that will never enter the realm of public lawmaking.
Dammit. I left rant lock on. It's so close to backspace. Sorry.
The windows tax is insignificant compared to the price of hardware and man-power. Also, though I can not discuss details, there are often contractual stipulations with resellers.
Furthermore, most of our clients like to keep the option of having windows on a box. Need another domain controller but the linux sql cluster is underused? Break out that windows license. Do you want on demand balancing? Install a dual-boot and reboot one of the DC's into linux for after hours web serving when the loads for DCs are less. Also many of our servers used to be outdated windows machines that we already bought.
And don't talk to me about using linux for whatever. MS still has it's place, and it's especially hard to replace it in the domain controller segment when you can't replace MS desktops. In conclusion, both because external forces and the need for internal flexibility, we will keep ordering machines with windows licenses. Not to mention that we do all configuration so that just about any preconfiguration is wiped out.
Excelent point. I know that all of my linux boxes are installed after the server is already rackmounted. That means that there was probably windows already on it, or that client need different functionality (you mean I can put my web and mail on one server and use the windows machine that were doing that to augment the SQL cluster? Cool!), or whatever.
I'm pretty sure that none of the linux boxes that I admin will get counted in any linux survey. Count support contracts from Redhat et al? Nope, I'm the support. I'd wager that any broad count of linux deployment is under by at least 50% and probably 75%.
to compile your own. The Washington spin artists make it hard to see through all the smoke and evalute canidates on what matters to you. No canidate will serious tell you their strengths *and* weaknesses, so you have to become your own source.
Go to the closest headquarters for each canidate. There will be at least one in all but the smallest communities. Ask them what they think their strengths and weakness are and be prepared to hear a lot of bull shit. Ask them why you should vote for them and not for the other guy. Then take that information to the other guy's headquarters and ask the same stuff. Take a good look at what they say about themselves and their opponent, and this will give you a nice base to start at.
Then read the major newspapers and watch the Sunday morning political lineup. Be careful to note the leanings of each, i.e. Nytimes == Liberal, Wall Street Journal == conservative. Radio political talk has a right leaning, and Tv political talk often is leftist.
After doing this for a couple weeks you'll have enough to start on if you want to do some serious reseach at the library. The most important things to remember are there is no unbaised source, gets information from as many sources as possible, and make you own descision (ie beware of groupthink). If you put some descent effort into you'll have more then enough to decide who to vote for.
I'd be more impressed with people who can prove they have the discipline to avoid obfuscations.
Have you ever read any of the code? Besides formatting, (you can run stuff through indent), this stuff is *very careful* obfuscation. It's not just nonsensical variable names and lack of comments. It's using constructs in novel ways, and comming up with non-trivial solutions to what are quite often complex problems.
If you can win this contest you know exactly what makes programs hard to read, and thereby in real situations, avoid them. Furthermore, some of the stuff is beautifully arranged and may be faster or more elegant than the easy to read version. It's not a mockery of the language, it's "art in c", and I would happily hire any of the winners as most probably they are masters of the nuances of c.