I don't see any reference to that in Lewis & Short, but even if this were true, there would still be a valid plural form, even if it were not in use.
Anyway, the plural of 'virus' would be 'vira', not 'virii'. It's second declension neuter. Even if it were masculine (it looks masculine with -us, but it isn't), the plural would be 'viri'.
So what I'm saying is, you're ALL wrong. The plural is 'vira'.
I'm really suprised none of the linux zealots have mentioned this yet, but one of the best uses a school could have for an old PC is to rip out the hard drive, hook that sucker up to a network, and use it as an X terminal thin client with its display managed by a bigger backroom server.
This is much more reliable and effective than you might imagine. Over 10baseT, X is plenty fast. An old pentium is more than enough power for an X server (even a 486 works very nicely, with a decent vid card). Eight or 16 megs of ram is enough. For the server, to run basic office and net apps you need much less power than you think, because most of the time the processor is sitting idle (what you really need is ram). Plus, you get all the additional benefits of thin-clients in their easier administration and much lower TCO. No more running around to Windows (or even Linux) PCs all over the school--you can forget they exist.
This is already quite a popular way of doing things in cash-strapped schools, and it's growing.
They spent $68 million on "renovating" their facilities. The boss sits in a steel Capt'n Kirk chair!
This type of boy-toy spending was insane enough in the dot-com days, but now it's like begging for death. Even if they were doing well and raking in the bucks, they still would be ill-advised to spend this liberally.
Frankly, this type of spending practice tells me they are driven by flashy egos, and not buisness sense. Thus, they will fail, probably in a big buyout with the CEO getting a great payback while the rest of the employees are thrown out into the cold.
Nonetheless, I wish them well, because FM is crap nowdays.
Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe.
He says, somewhere there's a disk operating system, not "DOS". Is this false? Subsitute "disk operating system" for something like "kernel", and I think the jargon will be more clear to you. His intention is to counter the MS Market-speak that somehow those 'purty' windows you see is itself the operating system. Which is of course untrue, as you yourself say later...
The command processor has nothing to do with the operating system. Exactly. There's a disk operating system hiding under that command processor, be it a GUI or a command line.
Also take his statement in the context of the whole article, where it's clear that he understands this distinction. Why would he then act as if he didn't?
I think you misread "a disk operating system" to == "{MS,DR}DOS"....
Also, what's the one-line unix command (running MacOS X here).
There's dd, of course, but there's also shred, which is included in GNU's fileutils package that also includes stuff like chmod, so if you're running a system populated with GNU tools you probably already have it. (Don't know about OSX, since it's supposed to be BSD-based.)
From the man page: DESCRIPTION
Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder
for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.
From the info page:
This uses many overwrite passes, with the data patterns chosen to maximize the damage they do to the old data. While this will work on floppies, the patterns are designed for best effect on hard drives. For more details, see the source code and Peter Gutmann's paper `Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory', from the proceedings of the Sixth USENIX Security Symposium (San Jose, California, 22-25 July, 1996). The paper is also available online.
It seems that Apple's problem was more that there was more stripping that needed to be done with Gecko before they got down to the foundation and could start building their own browser. This seems to be a common concern, that Mozilla includes too much stuff to be very useful as a working base, and thus the popularity of things such as Phoenix, whose sole goal is to remove features from Mozilla.
If this is indeed the case, perhaps Gecko would benefit from being packaged and maintained separately from Mozilla, as a rendering engine but not a browser. In other words, something only useful for application developers. Even conceptually, rendering HTML != browser. Suppose you're rendering to postscript, for example? This might even benefit Mozilla, buy keeping the project more modular. (Although it's pretty modular already, but not down to the core.)
The above is spoken with next to no knowledge of the intricacies of the Mozilla codebase, so flame gently.
If MS wants to "win" this "war", all they have to do is port their apps to Linux. MS Office, Exchange, Outlook,.NET, etc.
If they do that, they win. People like their apps, or at the very least they're used to them. If they port, one of two things will happen:
1. Everyone will migrate to Linux, but run MS apps (unlikely, but MS just becomes an app farm instead of an OS farm. Big change, but MS gets to live on.)
2. People say, "Hey, I can run MS apps on Linux, and it's cheaper! But wait, they're probably more tightly integrated into their own OS. And they have better support. Hmm, it's probably worth it just to buy the whole package. Less work, too."
I mean, MS still will always have the Joe Schmowe desktop users as long as they control OEMs and maintain their humongous inertia. (Remember, inertia is what keeps alive the x86 monster.) So their worry is for big institutions defecting. If the institution has a very high priority on saving money (e.g., a government), they're going to go to Linux or similar anyway, so MS should just try to keep what slice of the pie it can by porting its popular apps, and actually making some use of its inertia. But if the institution wants a whole pre-packaged, integrated license deal, they're going to go MS all the way because no one else comes close to the app/OS integration they do. (This is similar to what Sun does, selling their hardware and Solaris all at once. And they don't have MS Office!) Heck, MS apps and OS are so integrated, even MS can't pick them apart! They don't know their dll/exe dependencies any better than we do!
Further, MS will get good publicity because they can no longer be so easily derided as anti-competitive. Who cares if the source isn't open? The media and Joe User can't pick up on subtleties like that, and when OSS zealots start crying foul, Joe User will just think they have a stick up their ass, ruining their public image. Joe User doesn't care about source. Joe User will never read a line of source or compile a single app in his life. Joe User gets his software in a BOX. At COMPUSA!
If MS ports its apps to Linux, MS wins, plain and simple. If they just get over this "Not Invented Here" stupidity, they are unstoppable. If they don't, they'll die the death of a thousand pinpricks.
(Hey, I just thought of something! Maybe MS should roll their own Linux distro, too!)
Odd thing for a third world country like us to have market penetration rates for cellular phones approaching that of the wealthiest European nations. Heck, I see street vendors here who have GSM mobiles!
Well, the Philippines isn't exactly a third-world country, but even so it is not unusual that cell-phone adoption rates and technology penetration would be higher in a less-developed country.
In developed countries, the land-line network has pretty much reached saturation, and to get people to adopt cell phones requires convincing them that they need the latest and greatest. Thing is, they aren't fooled, and know that a phone is a phone. Thus, even if they do have a cell phone, you have early-adoption syndrome: they have an old cell phone, and it's good enough. Why pay more a year or two from now for something a little better? There's no market for the technology, and if there's no market, there's no investment. Thus, old cell phone tech reigns in developed areas, because the infrastructure reached market saturation a long time ago, and there's no demand for upgrades.
But, look at an undeveloped area, with poor land lines, which is a latecomer to the cell phone scene, and they have better tech, simply because before there weren't any phones, so the market was there, and they invested in the infrastructure with the best stuff available at the time, which is current cell phone technology. Plus, cell phone infrastructure is much cheaper than land lines, if you don't already have land lines. You need more land line capacity, you have to run wire, which means digging miles of trench or putting up miles of posts, any section of which could be cut. Cell phones, you just put up another tower with a fence and a guard.
This is an inertia problem, and it's the same with any new technology. Unless the technology is clearly and significantly better, and that benefit is desirable (or else stupidly cheap), then no one has any incentive to leave what they currently have. Why do we use Windows rather than Linux? Why do we use PIIs instead of P4s? Because to Joe Consumer, it simply doesn't freaking matter.
In fact, why should I care whether my phone has downloadable ring tones or messaging or games? My phone is for making and receiving calls: all phones do that, and frankly, no one has any incentive to want anything more out of their phone than that it just be a phone, without ridiculous pretensions to being a web browser or gaming console!
Besides that, damnit, I freaking hate those stupid ring tones!
Fine, so it has two screens. So what? How about battery life?
Three major power draining devices on a laptop are screen, hard-drive, and cpu, I believe in that order. Most laptops have batteries that last about two hours, which is already a very short amount of time. Now, if you have two displays, that's significantly less battery time. Unless there is simply more battery, in which case it's probably heavier. But it's probably heavier anyway, since LCD screens are heavy.
So what advantage do I have? Even with a desktop, two screens are kinda nice, but not absolutely necessary. Why should they be in any way desirable on a laptop, where the priorities are very different?
Most people don't need much power for their laptop, but would sure appreciate having something lighter (fewer batteries) or being untethered by an ac-adapter (which most people still carry around with their laptops, because the batteries only last two damn hours!) Yet they continue to give us high-powered, 8+ pound monsters, or two-hour ultralights. Is Apple the only major company that can make a laptop that doesn't die after two hours? I wonder how a StrongARM based laptop would do, if someone should decide to make one.
Look, if ditching x86 is what I have to do to get decent battery life, I'll do it without any qualms (translation: my next laptop will most certainly be an Apple.) I mean, Linux runs on all sorts of stuff, and there's always NetBSD.
(Although, my Pentium 133 laptop, with 12.1" screen and lithium ion batteries, didn't run much longer than two hours, and it already had more than enough power, once it stopped running Windows. I think what it needed though, even here, was more ram, not more cpu.)
You see, my friend, Bose is not "high quality" to an audiophile because you cannot, while listening to sound reproduced on speakers manufactured by said company, tell the name of the guy who painted the wall behind the performer. Nor can you even tell whether he used a roller or a paintbrush. Or even what color the wall is.
Therefore, they are cheap-ass poseur speakers, and you, for praising them, are among the unwashed masses of drooling, indiscriminating mass-media consumers who still thinks that "advanced" lossy compression technology removes stuff you "couldn't hear anyway", when in fact it's merely because you have indiscriminating hearing and an audio rack that costs less than your house.
Don't believe the marketing hype. SATA isn't about faster speeds, or more advanced features, or any of that crap. S-ATA is about cables.
IDE is crippleware. At some point in the past there was probably a need for a simpler, less expensive counterpart to scsi for desktop systems, but frankly that need is gone. The price distinction between IDE and SCSI has long been totally artificial. Drive manufacturers make a drive, and then slap on whatever control board they need, IDE or SCSI. Makes no difference to them, except that they get to mark up the SCSI version. Pure marketing: they need to stratisfy their technology so the enterprise guys don't feel like they're sullying their hands with the same tech as those Walmart PC-consumer lusers.
Frankly I wish SCSI had those neat little connectors (and they soon will, with Serial attached SCSI), and I hate ribbon cables as much as the next guy, but I'm not going to be fooled into thinking this is any real improvement over IDE.
But even as little as this is, it's long overdue. Those ribbon cables are the enemy of all that is good and just and true in the world.
Remember folks, SATA is only one letter away from SATAN. Q.E.D. Evil.
It looks like a technology whose main purpose is to make things incompatible, and thus require people upgrade more stuff.
I was under the impression that it was possible to connect a P-ATA drive to a S-ATA controller using a physical adaptor--i.e., that it was fully backward-compatable. Is this no longer the case?
And of course, I go off rambling and I fail to connect it to the comment above.
What I'm doing is elaborating on the comment that having "no grand narrative" is indeed a bad thing, and that it is something computer science is supposed to provide to programmers.
Of course, it's easy to see, even in the first chapter, which side this article (and postmodernism) is on: its on the side of the programmer. The first chapter is a plea for computer science to become more like programming, but there is no counter-plea for programmers to become more like computer scientists.
I frankly am not sure what this article was trying to say about how modern programming is postmodern (or should be, or was, or whatever), having rejected the utter ontological and epistemological and even moral subjectivism that is postmodernism as complete trash (and who wouldn't except humanities navel-gazers who think pot-smoking is tantamount to good philosophy). Indeed, that the article has no point may even be the point--typical postmodernism.
Anyway, I do however think I can draw two insights from this article: that there is an increasing divide between programmers and computer scientists, which should be closed; and two, that the fruit of this divide is sloppy and short-sighted programming.
It's no secret that more and more programmers are emerging with less and less of a computer science background. They are studying less and less theory and are concentrating more and more on just getting things done. They are becoming code monkeys, either because of lack of time, or because they are revolted by "dry, unsexy theory", or they think it's all just trash anyway. Thus there emerges a certain sloppy eclecticism (which I suppose may be called postmodern) in practices and methodologies. Now, such people are not always bad programmers, but if they are not, its probably because they have a natural intuition on how things should be done, or else they have learned through trial and error what are good and bad coding and design practices.
We may divide all human activity into two categories: practical (those whose aim is the production of something or performance of some activity for the sake of something else, e.g., being entertained), and speculative (those whose aim is the knowledge of something, for its own sake). I don't think this is too big a claim.
Now, most things we call "sciences" are speculative. However, programming is clearly a practical art: its aim is to produce a program that serves some useful purpose. When OSS guys speak of "scratching an itch" as the genesis of any program's development, they are in effect saying that programming is a means (hence practical) to some external end.
Now, computer science is called a science, but is it really speculative? It's certainly more speculative than just programming, but I think that strictly speaking it is a practical science, not a speculative one. Computer science isn't studied just for the sake of knowing--its done for the sake of making better programs, and for creating better programming methodologies. It is "meta-programming", but programming nonetheless. If one were to claim that the end of computer science is just knowledge for its own sake, I would suggest to that person that what he's really talking about is not computer science, but a specific branch of mathematics.
Anyway, if we accept that computer science is "meta-programming", it's easy to see why it's good for, on the one hand, computer science types to get their friggen heads out of the clouds and pay more attention to how their work relates to the production of actual, useful programs, and on the other hand for programmers to stop playing in the mud and start thinking about what is really the best way to go about the buisness of programming, rather than just throwing stuff together or trying things 'til it works.
If I may make an analogy: a carpenter builds a piece of furniture. He must, on the one hand, concern himself with the nitty-gritty of cutting and nailing pieces of wood together. However, if he wants to make a good, pleasant, and sturdy table (and not just a piece of plywood and three two-by-fours), he will have to think about the type of wood he uses, the kinds of joints he will use; the inter-changability of its various parts (if he has to design many similar pieces of furniture, for example), what features it has, and how it looks (what ornamentation, stain, etc). He will probably (gasp!) have to draw a blueprint. He will probably have to draw several. Now, if he's recieved formal training on these diverse issues--even if this training does not reveal all there is to know, or is even misguided--he will be in a much better position to go about building a good table than the guy who only learned about how to use a saw and a hammer and then just started building tables.
The goal of programmers is to make better programs. The goal of computer science is to help programmers make better programs, and in so doing make better programmers.
What any of this has to do with postmodernism I have no idea, but if the little example of the postmodern programming methodology presented in the article is any indication, postmodern programming is going to be trash.
And that is why I am so damned scared of postmodern programming. Someone one day is going to be programming nuclear missle guidance systems like that, and then we'll be sorry....
There are a lot of people whining about X (myself included). Most people say X is (take your pick) bloated, slow, obsolete, inefficient, or hopeless. Now some of these individual claims may have some truth to them, but the fact is that X despite its knarliness, works, and it works today. There isn't any real alternative, and it can continue to be extended for a long time.
But people who say such things about X are missing the point. X is ugly, in the same way that x86 is ugly. I think the analogy is a very apt one. Both are rather old designs, both are the most prevalent, both have had to be extended numerous times (and successfully), and both work, and work quite well. But neither one will get any design awards: the only thing we're doing at this point with either of these is leveraging the existing code base (i.e., the millions of x86 binaries on the one hand and X applications on the other) and avoiding duplication of past work by building something from scratch. And frankly, I think both are beginning to reach the end of the line: the further we go, the more effort we need to expend for an increasingly marginal return.
For the x86 example, Intel perceives this, and wants to jump ship now, even though its replacement is not as robust, fast, or powerful as its last top of the line. Once again, people who point this fact out are missing the point: Intel is laying down a roadmap, to service a broader goal of an architecture it can grow with for the next decade or more.
Why can't we do the same with X? It's going to get harder and harder to grow with X, so lets lay some groundwork now for a window system we can grow with for the next decade or more.
I am shocked and amazed that more comments are not mentioning Berlin, that is, Fresco. Do people not know about this? This is the only project I've found that has half a chance of being a suitable replacement for X. There's a framework there, a coherent vision, and even a basic running system. This isn't vapor, folks, or are these people a bunch of anti-X whiners with no code to back up their pointless bitching. They're not FUD-mongers; at least listen to their well-balanced (I think) justification as to why they're working on this project. It's quite easy to see that they're not at all motivated by hatred of X, but by a desire to design an elegant and network-transparent window system.
Why don't we have more of that nowadays? Half the OSS movement seems to be driven by hatred of Microsoft (or simply closed-source software), rather than love of elegant, useful, robust code born of honest work. At some point someone is going to have to worry about more than simply getting things done as quickly as possible, be-damned-how-it-works, and think more about design and the way things should be. The former type of attitude breeds stuff like MS Windows. Is that really what you want your windowing system to become? If something isn't done before long, X is going to be just like Windows: pasted and taped together and building on a merely serviceable codebase. This, I think, would be a great injustice to X. Let it die a peaceful and honorable death now, rather than a violent and hate-filled one later when it becomes so horrible, so monstrous, that the issue of replacing it is forced upon us and we throw its head on the guillotine.
Remember that at its inception X itself was merely a design framework by people who wanted to do a windowing system the right way. That X has served so well for so long is a testament to that foresight. But please, let us have the foresight to know when to design something new on that same basis, learning from what we have done. A rejection of the code does not mean a rejection of the vision or of the talent that bore that code.
...but X, for all its extensibility, is getting long in the tooth. X is the x86 of the software world: we've squeezed it much, much farther than the original design intended, and it still functions servicably--but who really admires it in the abstract? Both are ugly.
In the meantime, I do longingly await Fresco/Berlin. Now that's nice. Now only if it were usable...
Let us now all observe a brief moment of reverent and mournful silence to mourn the NeWS that might have been....
The reason for this common confusion is quite simple: English (as usual) is absolutely brain-dead. Case in point: inconsistent pronunciation.
Cf.: choose and loose; chose and lose.
The O in lose is of the same length as the O in loose, yet only one receives a double O. However, this is inconsistent with the pattern in choose and chose, where an O terminated by a Z-sound receives the double O--with loose and lose the matter is the exact opposite. And the pronunciation of O in chose is inconsistent with the pronunciation of O in lose. (Admit it: how many of you at first sight said "chOHz and lOHz"?
Face it folks: there hasn't been a decent language in the western world since the fall of the Roman empire, when the barbarians corrupted all elevated discourse. It's all been downhill since then. Even modern greek is disgusting compared to its glorious ancestors.
And that is why people should learn classical languages: to escape the mire of the vulgarity that is every modern tongue. None can achieve even half the precision and elegance of the full case system (for example) or radical inflection (for another) that are found in (for example) Greek and Latin.
And while I'm on it: I'll split my infinitives any time I damn well please. That's a totally artificial rule introduced by the humanists who systematized English while high on Latin grammar (and rightly so), yet ignored its germanic origins. Just because in Latin an infinitive is a single unit, doesn't mean it is in English! Besides, the Latins thought nothing of inserting adverbs in the middle of their periphrastic verbal constructions, so why should we in our own? Besides, splitting infinitives introduces a nuance and precision that is otherwise lacking in English.
menus customize themselves to the way I work. Nooo! Not the hidey menu thingy! That thing drove me insane! And here it's listed as a plus? I'm sorry, what?
I must admit, I really did like that feature. I don't like clutter in my menus, yet if there's a rarely used feature that I want I don't want to have to go digging to find it.
One of the things that bothers me about OSS is this tendancy to just put every single feature out there on a bloated menu (especially right-click menus!). I freaking hate clutter.
The solution is, of course, let me customize menus. Happily, OSS software lets me do that. But Word 2000 did it for me! I didn't have to waste time thinking about what features I used and didn't use. I didn't have to worry about digging deep to get back the use of some rarely-used feature--the menu items were always there, just not immediately visible.
And if I someone doesn't like it, he can turn it off: Tools->customize->options (IIRC).
Thus I got some of the benefits of customization without nearly half the hassle, and I can focus on customizing other things, like writing templates and changing toolbars and keyboard shortcuts. I left Word because of proprietary formats, the lousy OS it runs on, the impotent large-document features, and the moronic handling of styles. But I certainly didn't leave because of the auto-menu hiding or the organized presentation. I miss that.
I suppose it's just part of our geekdom: we don't want a software tool, we want a relationship! Something we can tweak and caress to perfect harmony with us for the rest of our lives. Something we know the ins-and-outs of. Something intensely personal. How many sane people are ready for such a commitment? I mean, no wonder the FSF goes off the deep end all the time: they think software is people! I don't develop personal relationships with circular saws, so why should I do so with software?
I'm sorry man, but software is my slave. It should do what I want without my even asking nicely, and preferably without my having to ask. And like it.
I'm sick of PCs. I look at a PC and what do I see? Decades of short-sighted design, kludges, needless complexity, and backward compatability.
Why? Because it's cheap? Because it's what we've always done? Is that all?
I say throw off the x86 architecture--we've long sinced reached its esthetic limitations. It's ugly; it's hot; it's loud; it has bus after redundant bus; it has a cpu architecture that's wheezing; it has connectors up the wazoo; and don't even get me started on the abomination that is the PC bios!
I want something simple, elegant, and quiet; something that doesn't have to answer to the kuckelheaded profit motives of twenty years of design revisions. Something that doesn't give kernel hackers cold sweats when they think of all the chaotic evil hiding in that arch just waiting to be unleashed!
I want the BeOS of hardware!
Designing a PC today like remodeling an abandoned house. Who cares then if you've replaced the tile in the kitchen if the pipes are wrapped in duct tape? (Oh. And the house is haunted, too.)
Note, however, that I still prefer cheap hardware to good hardware. Which, um, I suppose is the problem....
That said, however, surely someone can design an architecture using existing technologies that doesn't have to answer to ISA madness (or equivalent) yet is still an open standard? I mean, can't someone take a bunch of standard buses (PCI, IDE, USB, etc) and design something sensible to connect them to? Am I really so stupid about what's involved? (Entirely possible)
I just find it very hard to believe that the PC is really the best one can do. -- Francis Avila
On a more serious note, the word processors and office-productivity software of the OSS world need exposure to the unwashed masses. It's here that there is the greatest dependence on Microsoft among average users. If you go by the theory that joe user wants a computer for applications and not operating systems (my personal theory, and I think MS's as well, which I think is why they are always trying to conflate the OS and its applications), then what one should do is get them hooked onto the applications they use. It's just a tiny leap from there to running the same application over a different OS.
Seriously, sometimes I doubt why OS's matter at all if one simply wants to use a computer for ordinary work. It seems totally irrelevant what OS is being run, as long as it meets some basic criterion for stability and performance. Only serious applications need careful choice of OS.
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Virus has no plural in latin.
I don't see any reference to that in Lewis & Short, but even if this were true, there would still be a valid plural form, even if it were not in use.
Anyway, the plural of 'virus' would be 'vira', not 'virii'. It's second declension neuter. Even if it were masculine (it looks masculine with -us, but it isn't), the plural would be 'viri'.
So what I'm saying is, you're ALL wrong. The plural is 'vira'.
So ha!
(Score: -1, Flamebait)
I'm really suprised none of the linux zealots have mentioned this yet, but one of the best uses a school could have for an old PC is to rip out the hard drive, hook that sucker up to a network, and use it as an X terminal thin client with its display managed by a bigger backroom server.
This is much more reliable and effective than you might imagine. Over 10baseT, X is plenty fast. An old pentium is more than enough power for an X server (even a 486 works very nicely, with a decent vid card). Eight or 16 megs of ram is enough. For the server, to run basic office and net apps you need much less power than you think, because most of the time the processor is sitting idle (what you really need is ram). Plus, you get all the additional benefits of thin-clients in their easier administration and much lower TCO. No more running around to Windows (or even Linux) PCs all over the school--you can forget they exist.
This is already quite a popular way of doing things in cash-strapped schools, and it's growing.
Be evangelized.
The biggest deployment of this kind I know of is in Largo, Florida, with 400 terminals. See also here, and here, aw heck just Google.
LTSP is a very popular package for serving mini X server distros to storage-less PSs over a network.
They spent $68 million on "renovating" their facilities. The boss sits in a steel Capt'n Kirk chair!
This type of boy-toy spending was insane enough in the dot-com days, but now it's like begging for death. Even if they were doing well and raking in the bucks, they still would be ill-advised to spend this liberally.
Frankly, this type of spending practice tells me they are driven by flashy egos, and not buisness sense. Thus, they will fail, probably in a big buyout with the CEO getting a great payback while the rest of the employees are thrown out into the cold.
Nonetheless, I wish them well, because FM is crap nowdays.
Um, lets look at that quote a bit more closely...
Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe.
He says, somewhere there's a disk operating system, not "DOS". Is this false? Subsitute "disk operating system" for something like "kernel", and I think the jargon will be more clear to you.
His intention is to counter the MS Market-speak that somehow those 'purty' windows you see is itself the operating system. Which is of course untrue, as you yourself say later...
The command processor has nothing to do with the operating system.
Exactly. There's a disk operating system hiding under that command processor, be it a GUI or a command line.
Also take his statement in the context of the whole article, where it's clear that he understands this distinction. Why would he then act as if he didn't?
I think you misread "a disk operating system" to == "{MS,DR}DOS"....
A medium we can write to faster than we can read!
Excellent for backups! Well, maybe. How fast do tape drives write nowdays?
Also, what's the one-line unix command (running MacOS X here).
There's dd, of course, but there's also shred, which is included in GNU's fileutils package that also includes stuff like chmod, so if you're running a system populated with GNU tools you probably already have it. (Don't know about OSX, since it's supposed to be BSD-based.)
From the man page:
DESCRIPTION
Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder
for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.
From the info page:
This uses many overwrite passes, with the data patterns chosen to
maximize the damage they do to the old data. While this will work on
floppies, the patterns are designed for best effect on hard drives.
For more details, see the source code and Peter Gutmann's paper `Secure
Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory', from the
proceedings of the Sixth USENIX Security Symposium (San Jose,
California, 22-25 July, 1996). The paper is also available online.
Yes. While I admire his technical acumen, I fail to find the resulting noise very compelling...
No one has come to the defense of Pringles yet!
Pardon me, but why? They are really disgusting, and do make you (read: me) very sick if you (I) eat more than the suggested serving size.
Plus, what the heck are they made of? They look like reconsituted finely-ground potates!
It seems that Apple's problem was more that there was more stripping that needed to be done with Gecko before they got down to the foundation and could start building their own browser. This seems to be a common concern, that Mozilla includes too much stuff to be very useful as a working base, and thus the popularity of things such as Phoenix, whose sole goal is to remove features from Mozilla.
If this is indeed the case, perhaps Gecko would benefit from being packaged and maintained separately from Mozilla, as a rendering engine but not a browser. In other words, something only useful for application developers. Even conceptually, rendering HTML != browser. Suppose you're rendering to postscript, for example? This might even benefit Mozilla, buy keeping the project more modular. (Although it's pretty modular already, but not down to the core.)
The above is spoken with next to no knowledge of the intricacies of the Mozilla codebase, so flame gently.
If MS wants to "win" this "war", all they have to do is port their apps to Linux. MS Office, Exchange, Outlook, .NET, etc.
If they do that, they win. People like their apps, or at the very least they're used to them. If they port, one of two things will happen:
1. Everyone will migrate to Linux, but run MS apps (unlikely, but MS just becomes an app farm instead of an OS farm. Big change, but MS gets to live on.)
2. People say, "Hey, I can run MS apps on Linux, and it's cheaper! But wait, they're probably more tightly integrated into their own OS. And they have better support. Hmm, it's probably worth it just to buy the whole package. Less work, too."
I mean, MS still will always have the Joe Schmowe desktop users as long as they control OEMs and maintain their humongous inertia. (Remember, inertia is what keeps alive the x86 monster.) So their worry is for big institutions defecting. If the institution has a very high priority on saving money (e.g., a government), they're going to go to Linux or similar anyway, so MS should just try to keep what slice of the pie it can by porting its popular apps, and actually making some use of its inertia. But if the institution wants a whole pre-packaged, integrated license deal, they're going to go MS all the way because no one else comes close to the app/OS integration they do. (This is similar to what Sun does, selling their hardware and Solaris all at once. And they don't have MS Office!) Heck, MS apps and OS are so integrated, even MS can't pick them apart! They don't know their dll/exe dependencies any better than we do!
Further, MS will get good publicity because they can no longer be so easily derided as anti-competitive. Who cares if the source isn't open? The media and Joe User can't pick up on subtleties like that, and when OSS zealots start crying foul, Joe User will just think they have a stick up their ass, ruining their public image. Joe User doesn't care about source. Joe User will never read a line of source or compile a single app in his life. Joe User gets his software in a BOX. At COMPUSA!
If MS ports its apps to Linux, MS wins, plain and simple. If they just get over this "Not Invented Here" stupidity, they are unstoppable. If they don't, they'll die the death of a thousand pinpricks.
(Hey, I just thought of something! Maybe MS should roll their own Linux distro, too!)
Well, the Philippines isn't exactly a third-world country, but even so it is not unusual that cell-phone adoption rates and technology penetration would be higher in a less-developed country.
In developed countries, the land-line network has pretty much reached saturation, and to get people to adopt cell phones requires convincing them that they need the latest and greatest. Thing is, they aren't fooled, and know that a phone is a phone. Thus, even if they do have a cell phone, you have early-adoption syndrome: they have an old cell phone, and it's good enough. Why pay more a year or two from now for something a little better? There's no market for the technology, and if there's no market, there's no investment. Thus, old cell phone tech reigns in developed areas, because the infrastructure reached market saturation a long time ago, and there's no demand for upgrades.
But, look at an undeveloped area, with poor land lines, which is a latecomer to the cell phone scene, and they have better tech, simply because before there weren't any phones, so the market was there, and they invested in the infrastructure with the best stuff available at the time, which is current cell phone technology. Plus, cell phone infrastructure is much cheaper than land lines, if you don't already have land lines. You need more land line capacity, you have to run wire, which means digging miles of trench or putting up miles of posts, any section of which could be cut. Cell phones, you just put up another tower with a fence and a guard.
This is an inertia problem, and it's the same with any new technology. Unless the technology is clearly and significantly better, and that benefit is desirable (or else stupidly cheap), then no one has any incentive to leave what they currently have. Why do we use Windows rather than Linux? Why do we use PIIs instead of P4s? Because to Joe Consumer, it simply doesn't freaking matter.
In fact, why should I care whether my phone has downloadable ring tones or messaging or games? My phone is for making and receiving calls: all phones do that, and frankly, no one has any incentive to want anything more out of their phone than that it just be a phone, without ridiculous pretensions to being a web browser or gaming console!
Besides that, damnit, I freaking hate those stupid ring tones!
Fine, so it has two screens. So what? How about battery life?
Three major power draining devices on a laptop are screen, hard-drive, and cpu, I believe in that order. Most laptops have batteries that last about two hours, which is already a very short amount of time. Now, if you have two displays, that's significantly less battery time. Unless there is simply more battery, in which case it's probably heavier. But it's probably heavier anyway, since LCD screens are heavy.
So what advantage do I have? Even with a desktop, two screens are kinda nice, but not absolutely necessary. Why should they be in any way desirable on a laptop, where the priorities are very different?
Most people don't need much power for their laptop, but would sure appreciate having something lighter (fewer batteries) or being untethered by an ac-adapter (which most people still carry around with their laptops, because the batteries only last two damn hours!) Yet they continue to give us high-powered, 8+ pound monsters, or two-hour ultralights. Is Apple the only major company that can make a laptop that doesn't die after two hours? I wonder how a StrongARM based laptop would do, if someone should decide to make one.
Look, if ditching x86 is what I have to do to get decent battery life, I'll do it without any qualms (translation: my next laptop will most certainly be an Apple.) I mean, Linux runs on all sorts of stuff, and there's always NetBSD.
(Although, my Pentium 133 laptop, with 12.1" screen and lithium ion batteries, didn't run much longer than two hours, and it already had more than enough power, once it stopped running Windows. I think what it needed though, even here, was more ram, not more cpu.)
You see, my friend, Bose is not "high quality" to an audiophile because you cannot, while listening to sound reproduced on speakers manufactured by said company, tell the name of the guy who painted the wall behind the performer. Nor can you even tell whether he used a roller or a paintbrush. Or even what color the wall is.
Therefore, they are cheap-ass poseur speakers, and you, for praising them, are among the unwashed masses of drooling, indiscriminating mass-media consumers who still thinks that "advanced" lossy compression technology removes stuff you "couldn't hear anyway", when in fact it's merely because you have indiscriminating hearing and an audio rack that costs less than your house.
Nope, I can still hear the CRT buzzing.
Besides, are Apples really PC's? I thought I PC had to be based on ISA (shudder) to be a PC.
...and one reason only:
To get rid of those damn ribbon cables.
Don't believe the marketing hype. SATA isn't about faster speeds, or more advanced features, or any of that crap. S-ATA is about cables.
IDE is crippleware. At some point in the past there was probably a need for a simpler, less expensive counterpart to scsi for desktop systems, but frankly that need is gone. The price distinction between IDE and SCSI has long been totally artificial. Drive manufacturers make a drive, and then slap on whatever control board they need, IDE or SCSI. Makes no difference to them, except that they get to mark up the SCSI version. Pure marketing: they need to stratisfy their technology so the enterprise guys don't feel like they're sullying their hands with the same tech as those Walmart PC-consumer lusers.
Frankly I wish SCSI had those neat little connectors (and they soon will, with Serial attached SCSI), and I hate ribbon cables as much as the next guy, but I'm not going to be fooled into thinking this is any real improvement over IDE.
But even as little as this is, it's long overdue. Those ribbon cables are the enemy of all that is good and just and true in the world.
Remember folks, SATA is only one letter away from SATAN. Q.E.D. Evil.
It looks like a technology whose main purpose is to make things incompatible, and thus require people upgrade more stuff.
I was under the impression that it was possible to connect a P-ATA drive to a S-ATA controller using a physical adaptor--i.e., that it was fully backward-compatable. Is this no longer the case?
And of course, I go off rambling and I fail to connect it to the comment above.
What I'm doing is elaborating on the comment that having "no grand narrative" is indeed a bad thing, and that it is something computer science is supposed to provide to programmers.
Of course, it's easy to see, even in the first chapter, which side this article (and postmodernism) is on: its on the side of the programmer. The first chapter is a plea for computer science to become more like programming, but there is no counter-plea for programmers to become more like computer scientists.
I frankly am not sure what this article was trying to say about how modern programming is postmodern (or should be, or was, or whatever), having rejected the utter ontological and epistemological and even moral subjectivism that is postmodernism as complete trash (and who wouldn't except humanities navel-gazers who think pot-smoking is tantamount to good philosophy). Indeed, that the article has no point may even be the point--typical postmodernism.
Anyway, I do however think I can draw two insights from this article: that there is an increasing divide between programmers and computer scientists, which should be closed; and two, that the fruit of this divide is sloppy and short-sighted programming.
It's no secret that more and more programmers are emerging with less and less of a computer science background. They are studying less and less theory and are concentrating more and more on just getting things done. They are becoming code monkeys, either because of lack of time, or because they are revolted by "dry, unsexy theory", or they think it's all just trash anyway. Thus there emerges a certain sloppy eclecticism (which I suppose may be called postmodern) in practices and methodologies. Now, such people are not always bad programmers, but if they are not, its probably because they have a natural intuition on how things should be done, or else they have learned through trial and error what are good and bad coding and design practices.
We may divide all human activity into two categories: practical (those whose aim is the production of something or performance of some activity for the sake of something else, e.g., being entertained), and speculative (those whose aim is the knowledge of something, for its own sake). I don't think this is too big a claim.
Now, most things we call "sciences" are speculative. However, programming is clearly a practical art: its aim is to produce a program that serves some useful purpose. When OSS guys speak of "scratching an itch" as the genesis of any program's development, they are in effect saying that programming is a means (hence practical) to some external end.
Now, computer science is called a science, but is it really speculative? It's certainly more speculative than just programming, but I think that strictly speaking it is a practical science, not a speculative one. Computer science isn't studied just for the sake of knowing--its done for the sake of making better programs, and for creating better programming methodologies. It is "meta-programming", but programming nonetheless. If one were to claim that the end of computer science is just knowledge for its own sake, I would suggest to that person that what he's really talking about is not computer science, but a specific branch of mathematics.
Anyway, if we accept that computer science is "meta-programming", it's easy to see why it's good for, on the one hand, computer science types to get their friggen heads out of the clouds and pay more attention to how their work relates to the production of actual, useful programs, and on the other hand for programmers to stop playing in the mud and start thinking about what is really the best way to go about the buisness of programming, rather than just throwing stuff together or trying things 'til it works.
If I may make an analogy: a carpenter builds a piece of furniture. He must, on the one hand, concern himself with the nitty-gritty of cutting and nailing pieces of wood together. However, if he wants to make a good, pleasant, and sturdy table (and not just a piece of plywood and three two-by-fours), he will have to think about the type of wood he uses, the kinds of joints he will use; the inter-changability of its various parts (if he has to design many similar pieces of furniture, for example), what features it has, and how it looks (what ornamentation, stain, etc). He will probably (gasp!) have to draw a blueprint. He will probably have to draw several. Now, if he's recieved formal training on these diverse issues--even if this training does not reveal all there is to know, or is even misguided--he will be in a much better position to go about building a good table than the guy who only learned about how to use a saw and a hammer and then just started building tables.
The goal of programmers is to make better programs. The goal of computer science is to help programmers make better programs, and in so doing make better programmers.
What any of this has to do with postmodernism I have no idea, but if the little example of the postmodern programming methodology presented in the article is any indication, postmodern programming is going to be trash.
And that is why I am so damned scared of postmodern programming. Someone one day is going to be programming nuclear missle guidance systems like that, and then we'll be sorry....
There are a lot of people whining about X (myself included). Most people say X is (take your pick) bloated, slow, obsolete, inefficient, or hopeless. Now some of these individual claims may have some truth to them, but the fact is that X despite its knarliness, works, and it works today. There isn't any real alternative, and it can continue to be extended for a long time.
But people who say such things about X are missing the point. X is ugly, in the same way that x86 is ugly. I think the analogy is a very apt one. Both are rather old designs, both are the most prevalent, both have had to be extended numerous times (and successfully), and both work, and work quite well. But neither one will get any design awards: the only thing we're doing at this point with either of these is leveraging the existing code base (i.e., the millions of x86 binaries on the one hand and X applications on the other) and avoiding duplication of past work by building something from scratch. And frankly, I think both are beginning to reach the end of the line: the further we go, the more effort we need to expend for an increasingly marginal return.
For the x86 example, Intel perceives this, and wants to jump ship now, even though its replacement is not as robust, fast, or powerful as its last top of the line. Once again, people who point this fact out are missing the point: Intel is laying down a roadmap, to service a broader goal of an architecture it can grow with for the next decade or more.
Why can't we do the same with X? It's going to get harder and harder to grow with X, so lets lay some groundwork now for a window system we can grow with for the next decade or more.
I am shocked and amazed that more comments are not mentioning Berlin, that is, Fresco. Do people not know about this? This is the only project I've found that has half a chance of being a suitable replacement for X. There's a framework there, a coherent vision, and even a basic running system. This isn't vapor, folks, or are these people a bunch of anti-X whiners with no code to back up their pointless bitching. They're not FUD-mongers; at least listen to their well-balanced (I think) justification as to why they're working on this project. It's quite easy to see that they're not at all motivated by hatred of X, but by a desire to design an elegant and network-transparent window system.
Why don't we have more of that nowadays? Half the OSS movement seems to be driven by hatred of Microsoft (or simply closed-source software), rather than love of elegant, useful, robust code born of honest work. At some point someone is going to have to worry about more than simply getting things done as quickly as possible, be-damned-how-it-works, and think more about design and the way things should be. The former type of attitude breeds stuff like MS Windows. Is that really what you want your windowing system to become? If something isn't done before long, X is going to be just like Windows: pasted and taped together and building on a merely serviceable codebase. This, I think, would be a great injustice to X. Let it die a peaceful and honorable death now, rather than a violent and hate-filled one later when it becomes so horrible, so monstrous, that the issue of replacing it is forced upon us and we throw its head on the guillotine.
Remember that at its inception X itself was merely a design framework by people who wanted to do a windowing system the right way. That X has served so well for so long is a testament to that foresight. But please, let us have the foresight to know when to design something new on that same basis, learning from what we have done. A rejection of the code does not mean a rejection of the vision or of the talent that bore that code.
...but X, for all its extensibility, is getting long in the tooth. X is the x86 of the software world: we've squeezed it much, much farther than the original design intended, and it still functions servicably--but who really admires it in the abstract? Both are ugly.
In the meantime, I do longingly await Fresco/Berlin. Now that's nice. Now only if it were usable...
Let us now all observe a brief moment of reverent and mournful silence to mourn the NeWS that might have been....
The reason for this common confusion is quite simple: English (as usual) is absolutely brain-dead. Case in point: inconsistent pronunciation.
Cf.: choose and loose; chose and lose.
The O in lose is of the same length as the O in loose, yet only one receives a double O. However, this is inconsistent with the pattern in choose and chose, where an O terminated by a Z-sound receives the double O--with loose and lose the matter is the exact opposite. And the pronunciation of O in chose is inconsistent with the pronunciation of O in lose. (Admit it: how many of you at first sight said "chOHz and lOHz"?
Face it folks: there hasn't been a decent language in the western world since the fall of the Roman empire, when the barbarians corrupted all elevated discourse. It's all been downhill since then. Even modern greek is disgusting compared to its glorious ancestors.
And that is why people should learn classical languages: to escape the mire of the vulgarity that is every modern tongue. None can achieve even half the precision and elegance of the full case system (for example) or radical inflection (for another) that are found in (for example) Greek and Latin.
And while I'm on it: I'll split my infinitives any time I damn well please. That's a totally artificial rule introduced by the humanists who systematized English while high on Latin grammar (and rightly so), yet ignored its germanic origins. Just because in Latin an infinitive is a single unit, doesn't mean it is in English! Besides, the Latins thought nothing of inserting adverbs in the middle of their periphrastic verbal constructions, so why should we in our own? Besides, splitting infinitives introduces a nuance and precision that is otherwise lacking in English.
[Whew, I feel much better.]
menus customize themselves to the way I work. Nooo! Not the hidey menu thingy! That thing drove me insane! And here it's listed as a plus? I'm sorry, what?
I must admit, I really did like that feature. I don't like clutter in my menus, yet if there's a rarely used feature that I want I don't want to have to go digging to find it.
One of the things that bothers me about OSS is this tendancy to just put every single feature out there on a bloated menu (especially right-click menus!). I freaking hate clutter.
The solution is, of course, let me customize menus. Happily, OSS software lets me do that. But Word 2000 did it for me! I didn't have to waste time thinking about what features I used and didn't use. I didn't have to worry about digging deep to get back the use of some rarely-used feature--the menu items were always there, just not immediately visible.
And if I someone doesn't like it, he can turn it off: Tools->customize->options (IIRC).
Thus I got some of the benefits of customization without nearly half the hassle, and I can focus on customizing other things, like writing templates and changing toolbars and keyboard shortcuts. I left Word because of proprietary formats, the lousy OS it runs on, the impotent large-document features, and the moronic handling of styles. But I certainly didn't leave because of the auto-menu hiding or the organized presentation. I miss that.
I suppose it's just part of our geekdom: we don't want a software tool, we want a relationship! Something we can tweak and caress to perfect harmony with us for the rest of our lives. Something we know the ins-and-outs of. Something intensely personal. How many sane people are ready for such a commitment? I mean, no wonder the FSF goes off the deep end all the time: they think software is people! I don't develop personal relationships with circular saws, so why should I do so with software?
I'm sorry man, but software is my slave. It should do what I want without my even asking nicely, and preferably without my having to ask. And like it.
I'm sick of PCs.
I look at a PC and what do I see? Decades of short-sighted design, kludges, needless complexity, and backward compatability.
Why? Because it's cheap? Because it's what we've always done? Is that all?
I say throw off the x86 architecture--we've long sinced reached its esthetic limitations. It's ugly; it's hot; it's loud; it has bus after redundant bus; it has a cpu architecture that's wheezing; it has connectors up the wazoo; and don't even get me started on the abomination that is the PC bios!
I want something simple, elegant, and quiet; something that doesn't have to answer to the kuckelheaded profit motives of twenty years of design revisions. Something that doesn't give kernel hackers cold sweats when they think of all the chaotic evil hiding in that arch just waiting to be unleashed!
I want the BeOS of hardware!
Designing a PC today like remodeling an abandoned house. Who cares then if you've replaced the tile in the kitchen if the pipes are wrapped in duct tape? (Oh. And the house is haunted, too.)
Note, however, that I still prefer cheap hardware to good hardware. Which, um, I suppose is the problem....
That said, however, surely someone can design an architecture using existing technologies that doesn't have to answer to ISA madness (or equivalent) yet is still an open standard? I mean, can't someone take a bunch of standard buses (PCI, IDE, USB, etc) and design something sensible to connect them to? Am I really so stupid about what's involved? (Entirely possible)
I just find it very hard to believe that the PC is really the best one can do.
--
Francis Avila
...is WINE.
Too bad there's no port of WINE to Windows.
On a more serious note, the word processors and office-productivity software of the OSS world need exposure to the unwashed masses. It's here that there is the greatest dependence on Microsoft among average users. If you go by the theory that joe user wants a computer for applications and not operating systems (my personal theory, and I think MS's as well, which I think is why they are always trying to conflate the OS and its applications), then what one should do is get them hooked onto the applications they use. It's just a tiny leap from there to running the same application over a different OS.
Seriously, sometimes I doubt why OS's matter at all if one simply wants to use a computer for ordinary work. It seems totally irrelevant what OS is being run, as long as it meets some basic criterion for stability and performance. Only serious applications need careful choice of OS.