Yes. You have hit the nail on the head. Makes me want to build a time machine and go back to the stone age and "invent" a wheel. Oh, wait...doing that would "infringe" on someone's imaginary "property" probably.
The way things are going, the rate of progress is going to slow down instead of continuing to increase. The future is going to laugh at us in bewilderment--the past already is.
Masses of people living on basic income guarantee is a recipe for disaster. What do you expect people to do with their lives if they have no work to do? Watch TV? Surf the Web? Why do you think there are so many more obese people in first-world countries now? We're only beginning to see the consequences.
People were made to be active, to work. People need to earn their living--it's good for them. Without that, people will feel like their lives are meaningless--worse than many already do.
And no, there won't be an explosion of artistic, cultural creativity just because millions of people are "freed" from work. Those people on basic income guarantee aren't the ones who would be creative geniuses, they're the ones who'd be working in factories and flipping burgers. Besides, there's already an overload of "art" and entertainment available--more than anyone can consume.
There is such a thing as too much technology, and we are crossing into that territory now in some fields. It's not good for society as a whole, and it's not good for individual people either.
"Last Wednesday, Samsung was ordered..." or "Samsung was ordered last Wednesday"
NOT "Samsung last Wednesday was ordered..."! Yeesh! Wednesday was not ordered! Quit butchering grammar!
Re:Major power consumption: an overlooked issue
on
Linux 2.6.39 Released
·
· Score: 1
So if a bug only affected 49% of users, it couldn't be a showstopper? Baloney.
A major regression is a showstopper, period. I don't care if it only affects 5% of users, that's 5% too many. One of the primary benefits of FOSS is (supposed to be!) that once a problem is fixed, or once functionality is introduced, it stays functional--people can depend on it to work even in new versions.
Contrary to your opinion, 30% greater power drain is a major problem, and it should have been fixed before release. With all the kernel devs that there are, a distributed bisecting effort could track it down quickly.
Android apps run in a stinking VM. There's no reason whatsoever that the kernel and drivers have to be distributed with everything else as a monolithic package. The system apps and even the VM should just be packages like anything else and should be updated from Google. The kernel should present an API or ABI to which other packages can be compiled or run against. You know, like Linux. Oh, wait...
What was Google thinking? Android has so much potential but crap like this ruins it. They dug themselves a hole with no way out. The only hope is for thirdparty distros, but those void warranties. What a stupid mess that should have never been an issue.
So some entities who are paid to deliver lists of IP addresses and date-times do what they were paid to do. What does that prove? They could choose them at random from major ISP dynamic IP blocks and assign random date-times to all of them (a statistical study of their data might be very interesting). Even if the snoops are honest, it's so incredibly easy to make a typo or minor logic error when processing large data sets that their data could be completely wrong. It's also trivial to tamper with it at any step along the way, right up to the time it's presented in court (perhaps even afterwards, depending on who works behind the scenes at the court).
I wonder what the motivation of these snoops is. I wonder if they are paid more for providing larger lists.
Even if an IP address could be linked conclusively to one person, their data proves nothing more than "some guy said he saw this IP address in a list a year ago." If that stands up in court, that court has a pathetically low standard for evidence.
I mean this as a real, geeky question, not as a joke. rsync would go faster without tarring, because it could examine file mtimes and sizes rather than having to compare chunks of a tar file to see what chunks are new or changed. As your tar file grows, rsync slows.
You may want to check out rdiff-backup for local, unencrypted backups, and duplicity for local or remote encrypted ones. Duplicity even supports S3.
I think you are quite wrong. Modularity and terminals are not the reasons touted for average users to use Linux at all. And for the average user, Linux is often the best choice, though they may not realize it.
Some actual major reasons are: security, no need for anti-malware software, free as in money, ease-of-use, reliability, consistency, frequency of updates and bugfixes, quality of free community support, and performance. Notice that I never once mentioned using a terminal or a vague concept of modularity.
If I want story I'll read a book or watch a movie or TV show. Games are for playing, and playing with other people far outclasses AI. Replayability is king.
How is this any different than the choices a Windows developer faces? C or C++? Win32 or MFC or.Net? Java? Swing? Python? DirectX or OpenGL? Both? MSI or ZIP? Steam or DVD? DRM?
The fact that choices exist is not a problem. The problem is that people think it's a problem, and that they're blind to the same "problem" existing in their own platform of choice.
Freedom is a good thing. Freedom to choose is a good thing. Having choices from which to choose is a good thing. Take any of those away and THEN you have a problem.
I am sooooooo tired of hearing the claim that "choice is a good thing". It's not. In fact, a good way to frustrate people is to give them too many choices.
You show two possibilities: no choice or too many choices. This is a false dichotomy. For example, the average user will not discover alternative, independent window managers--he'll either use GNOME and its wm, or KDE and KWin. But if he does find them, it's no different than finding the thousands of shareware and freeware apps available on Windows software megasites. I don't see you complaining about that.
Moreover, the wide choice of windows managers is an example of Linux market failure.
This is begging the question: Is Linux--either as a vague term, or a specific reference to the kernel--aiming to fulfill the needs of a specific market? I assert that:
1) without defining "Linux" for the purposes of your argument, your argument is moot; 2) neither the kernel nor the "ecosystem" are aiming to fulfill one particular market; 3) the kernel actually meets the needs of a wide variety of markets--therefore it's a success; 4) the rest of the projects in the "ecosystem" each have their own goals and target "markets"--to claim "Linux market failure" demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how Linux and FOSS works. You should instead look at individual projects, and individual companies that contribute to FOSS and Linux to ensure that each project meets its own needs (e.g. Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Google, etc.). You will find that "Linux" meets the needs of these "markets" very well.
People don't use computers to run various windows managers, they use computers to run applications that perform tasks.
This is a strawman.
The fragmentation of low-level libraries for sound, graphics, UI, packaging, etc., means that developers don't have a clear target for Linux apps.
This is another false dilemma. The truth is that developers either aim at an application-specific target (embedded, or vendor-supported), or at a general Linux/FOSS target. The embedded/vendor-supported Linux target has clear requirements--not an issue. The general target has more choices, but is not such a problem as you claim. A developer targeting teneral Linux platforms can choose Gtk or Qt for UI; GStreamer and/or PulseAudio for sound, or OpenAL; OpenGL is the only 3D standard (and works on Windows too), and Deb or RPM packaging (which are well-established and widely-supported--many, many projects easily support both--or he could support the "TGZ package", which is no different than Windows software being distributed in ZIP files). Having these choices is no different than choosing between Win32 or.Net, Windows Installer or InstallShield/NSIS/etc, OpenGL or Direct3D, or between any of the other many toolkits available for the Windows platform. If your point is that there are actually many other insignificant alternatives to the choices I gave on Linux, that is another false dilemma, because the existence of those minor alternatives does not present a problem in any way. There are also thousands of libraries available for Windows development, but developers use what makes the most sense--they don't pick something just because it exists.
For open source efforts, this means wasted efforts on ports, plugins, and duplicate projects.
Ports are not wasted effort--they often help fortify code against bugs that might not otherwise be found. Supporting multiple platforms is not wasted effort. I submit that the true wasted effort is on the creation of proprietary platforms such as Windows and Mac. All the effort put into those incompatible systems could be put into Linux and FOSS platforms that could solve software problems once-and-for-all (basically).
Plugins? Huh? Another undefined strawman.
Duplicate projects? Another strawman. There are plenty of "d
The biggest problem with Java was a culture of over-engineering that grew up around it.... That's why the Java world needs something like OSGI, which is essentially a Service Oriented Architecture framework for stuff running on a single virtual machine.
Doing two things at the same time doesn't (or shouldn't) make a patent. It's plainly obvious that it's desirable for electronic devices--computers, which nearly every electronic device technically is nowadays--to do things simultaneously in a useful way.
I believe that patents are now simply evil and should be abolished. "I thought of it first!" is what it boils down to, and it is just as much whining now as it was in kindergarten. Let inventors negotiate for confidentiality, let companies keep trade secrets, and let other companies be rewarded for their hard work at reverse engineering. Then look who gets rewarded: those who actually do work, not those who sit around doing nothing but telling others that they can't use their imaginary property.
Sheesh, the very idea of imaginary property is so absurd, it's only because people don't think for themselves that they accept the idea of it. Without the free exchange of ideas, we'd still be living in caves going "Ug!" It's shameful.
Stop trolling. The functionality is the same. Their patent is merely an electronic version of a viewfinder. It's extremely obvious, and it's trivial. Kodak should be ashamed of patenting it, and extremely ashamed of suing anyone over it. When a company becomes evil like this, it ought to fail.
Of course, by this definition of evil, almost every major tech company ought to fail.:( What a sad age.
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Yes. You have hit the nail on the head. Makes me want to build a time machine and go back to the stone age and "invent" a wheel. Oh, wait...doing that would "infringe" on someone's imaginary "property" probably.
The way things are going, the rate of progress is going to slow down instead of continuing to increase. The future is going to laugh at us in bewilderment--the past already is.
"I thought of it first! Mommy! Make him stop!"
Pathetic and hypocritical.
...oh, there it is.
Masses of people living on basic income guarantee is a recipe for disaster. What do you expect people to do with their lives if they have no work to do? Watch TV? Surf the Web? Why do you think there are so many more obese people in first-world countries now? We're only beginning to see the consequences.
People were made to be active, to work. People need to earn their living--it's good for them. Without that, people will feel like their lives are meaningless--worse than many already do.
And no, there won't be an explosion of artistic, cultural creativity just because millions of people are "freed" from work. Those people on basic income guarantee aren't the ones who would be creative geniuses, they're the ones who'd be working in factories and flipping burgers. Besides, there's already an overload of "art" and entertainment available--more than anyone can consume.
There is such a thing as too much technology, and we are crossing into that territory now in some fields. It's not good for society as a whole, and it's not good for individual people either.
"Last Wednesday, Samsung was ordered..."
or
"Samsung was ordered last Wednesday"
NOT "Samsung last Wednesday was ordered..."! Yeesh! Wednesday was not ordered! Quit butchering grammar!
So if a bug only affected 49% of users, it couldn't be a showstopper? Baloney.
A major regression is a showstopper, period. I don't care if it only affects 5% of users, that's 5% too many. One of the primary benefits of FOSS is (supposed to be!) that once a problem is fixed, or once functionality is introduced, it stays functional--people can depend on it to work even in new versions.
Contrary to your opinion, 30% greater power drain is a major problem, and it should have been fixed before release. With all the kernel devs that there are, a distributed bisecting effort could track it down quickly.
Regressions suck. And they should be stomped out.
Android apps run in a stinking VM. There's no reason whatsoever that the kernel and drivers have to be distributed with everything else as a monolithic package. The system apps and even the VM should just be packages like anything else and should be updated from Google. The kernel should present an API or ABI to which other packages can be compiled or run against. You know, like Linux. Oh, wait...
What was Google thinking? Android has so much potential but crap like this ruins it. They dug themselves a hole with no way out. The only hope is for thirdparty distros, but those void warranties. What a stupid mess that should have never been an issue.
They were funnier back in the day. If they actually made them sound like department names it would help.
So some entities who are paid to deliver lists of IP addresses and date-times do what they were paid to do. What does that prove? They could choose them at random from major ISP dynamic IP blocks and assign random date-times to all of them (a statistical study of their data might be very interesting). Even if the snoops are honest, it's so incredibly easy to make a typo or minor logic error when processing large data sets that their data could be completely wrong. It's also trivial to tamper with it at any step along the way, right up to the time it's presented in court (perhaps even afterwards, depending on who works behind the scenes at the court).
I wonder what the motivation of these snoops is. I wonder if they are paid more for providing larger lists.
Even if an IP address could be linked conclusively to one person, their data proves nothing more than "some guy said he saw this IP address in a list a year ago." If that stands up in court, that court has a pathetically low standard for evidence.
Oops, thought I was logged in. news.slashdot.org won't let me log in on the mobile version, and it's not getting slashdot.org cookies.
In most, if not all, states, you are required to register your children with the state as home-schooled--i.e. same thing. So what's your point?
I mean this as a real, geeky question, not as a joke. rsync would go faster without tarring, because it could examine file mtimes and sizes rather than having to compare chunks of a tar file to see what chunks are new or changed. As your tar file grows, rsync slows.
You may want to check out rdiff-backup for local, unencrypted backups, and duplicity for local or remote encrypted ones. Duplicity even supports S3.
I think you are quite wrong. Modularity and terminals are not the reasons touted for average users to use Linux at all. And for the average user, Linux is often the best choice, though they may not realize it.
Some actual major reasons are: security, no need for anti-malware software, free as in money, ease-of-use, reliability, consistency, frequency of updates and bugfixes, quality of free community support, and performance. Notice that I never once mentioned using a terminal or a vague concept of modularity.
That's a matter of opinion. I think Linux as a desktop OS is compelling in and of itself. It has significant advantages over Windows and Mac.
What is "artificial motivation" anyway? Did you mean extrinsic motivation, i.e. a third party influencing your decision?
If I want story I'll read a book or watch a movie or TV show. Games are for playing, and playing with other people far outclasses AI. Replayability is king.
Just my opinion, of course.
So...besides the kernel, you wrote all the software you use? How do you work? Enlighten us, O great one. :p
How is this any different than the choices a Windows developer faces? C or C++? Win32 or MFC or .Net? Java? Swing? Python? DirectX or OpenGL? Both? MSI or ZIP? Steam or DVD? DRM?
The fact that choices exist is not a problem. The problem is that people think it's a problem, and that they're blind to the same "problem" existing in their own platform of choice.
Freedom is a good thing. Freedom to choose is a good thing. Having choices from which to choose is a good thing. Take any of those away and THEN you have a problem.
I am sooooooo tired of hearing the claim that "choice is a good thing". It's not. In fact, a good way to frustrate people is to give them too many choices.
You show two possibilities: no choice or too many choices. This is a false dichotomy. For example, the average user will not discover alternative, independent window managers--he'll either use GNOME and its wm, or KDE and KWin. But if he does find them, it's no different than finding the thousands of shareware and freeware apps available on Windows software megasites. I don't see you complaining about that.
Moreover, the wide choice of windows managers is an example of Linux market failure.
This is begging the question: Is Linux--either as a vague term, or a specific reference to the kernel--aiming to fulfill the needs of a specific market? I assert that:
1) without defining "Linux" for the purposes of your argument, your argument is moot;
2) neither the kernel nor the "ecosystem" are aiming to fulfill one particular market;
3) the kernel actually meets the needs of a wide variety of markets--therefore it's a success;
4) the rest of the projects in the "ecosystem" each have their own goals and target "markets"--to claim "Linux market failure" demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how Linux and FOSS works. You should instead look at individual projects, and individual companies that contribute to FOSS and Linux to ensure that each project meets its own needs (e.g. Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Google, etc.). You will find that "Linux" meets the needs of these "markets" very well.
People don't use computers to run various windows managers, they use computers to run applications that perform tasks.
This is a strawman.
The fragmentation of low-level libraries for sound, graphics, UI, packaging, etc., means that developers don't have a clear target for Linux apps.
This is another false dilemma. The truth is that developers either aim at an application-specific target (embedded, or vendor-supported), or at a general Linux/FOSS target. The embedded/vendor-supported Linux target has clear requirements--not an issue. The general target has more choices, but is not such a problem as you claim. A developer targeting teneral Linux platforms can choose Gtk or Qt for UI; GStreamer and/or PulseAudio for sound, or OpenAL; OpenGL is the only 3D standard (and works on Windows too), and Deb or RPM packaging (which are well-established and widely-supported--many, many projects easily support both--or he could support the "TGZ package", which is no different than Windows software being distributed in ZIP files). Having these choices is no different than choosing between Win32 or .Net, Windows Installer or InstallShield/NSIS/etc, OpenGL or Direct3D, or between any of the other many toolkits available for the Windows platform. If your point is that there are actually many other insignificant alternatives to the choices I gave on Linux, that is another false dilemma, because the existence of those minor alternatives does not present a problem in any way. There are also thousands of libraries available for Windows development, but developers use what makes the most sense--they don't pick something just because it exists.
For open source efforts, this means wasted efforts on ports, plugins, and duplicate projects.
Ports are not wasted effort--they often help fortify code against bugs that might not otherwise be found. Supporting multiple platforms is not wasted effort. I submit that the true wasted effort is on the creation of proprietary platforms such as Windows and Mac. All the effort put into those incompatible systems could be put into Linux and FOSS platforms that could solve software problems once-and-for-all (basically).
Plugins? Huh? Another undefined strawman.
Duplicate projects? Another strawman. There are plenty of "d
The biggest problem with Java was a culture of over-engineering that grew up around it. ... That's why the Java world needs something like OSGI, which is essentially a Service Oriented Architecture framework for stuff running on a single virtual machine.
...?
Doing two things at the same time doesn't (or shouldn't) make a patent. It's plainly obvious that it's desirable for electronic devices--computers, which nearly every electronic device technically is nowadays--to do things simultaneously in a useful way.
I believe that patents are now simply evil and should be abolished. "I thought of it first!" is what it boils down to, and it is just as much whining now as it was in kindergarten. Let inventors negotiate for confidentiality, let companies keep trade secrets, and let other companies be rewarded for their hard work at reverse engineering. Then look who gets rewarded: those who actually do work, not those who sit around doing nothing but telling others that they can't use their imaginary property.
Sheesh, the very idea of imaginary property is so absurd, it's only because people don't think for themselves that they accept the idea of it. Without the free exchange of ideas, we'd still be living in caves going "Ug!" It's shameful.
Stop trolling. The functionality is the same. Their patent is merely an electronic version of a viewfinder. It's extremely obvious, and it's trivial. Kodak should be ashamed of patenting it, and extremely ashamed of suing anyone over it. When a company becomes evil like this, it ought to fail.
Of course, by this definition of evil, almost every major tech company ought to fail. :( What a sad age.
Are there trespassing laws in Belgium? =)
Point a rocket up. "Thrust" becomes "lift."
or rdiff-backup
Sounds like you want a FreedomBox (Google it :).