I was just offering my suggestion. If you don't like my suggestion or don't think it applicable then you are free to politely refute my suggestions in a reasonable manner.
You're right though in that I didn't think about bootstrapping the system (I've never had trouble with the default bootstrapping kernels, so I didn't think about it).
But you'd be mistaken if you think me a n00b "who's never compiled a kernel, or done an install short of simply booting from the CDROM." As a stage-1 Gentoo user (running a manually configured 2.6.5-r1) I like to think I can claim some small degree of Linux knowledge.
But after thinking about your restated dilemma, I thought of three potential solutions (that you are free to shoot down): 1. Install to another harddrive. Does your root filesystem *really* need to be on the RAID array? Get a separate harddrive for the system files (which, since they can be restored from the install disk, don't need to be redundant, and probably won't need the performance boosts from the RAID array). 2. (Minimal?) Install on another harddrive, and copy over. Slow, painful, but effective. As you copy over, you can replace the standard kernel with your custom SATA RAID kernel. 3. Use your own kernel for the install, and install (with your kernel) to the RAID array. Either use a boot-floppy with your kernel in conjunction with the distro's install cd, or make your own variant of their install cd, and all should work normally. Adding your kernel to their install cd, and remastering shouldn't be that hard (and you can probably find detailed instructions via google, or by emailing your distro). If you do remaster the CD you could post it online (assuming you're using a free distro...) and then no one will be able to bitch about this issue with that distro again.
But of course I'm probably wasting my time replying as my brother thinks you're "one of those ogre-people" (trolls) he read about in his "Net Force" book.
Why don't you just download the source to and compile your own? Is it really that much harder to "check" the SATA RAID support option in the kernel, compile and install than bitch on slashdot about it?
SATA RAID doesn't seem (to me) like it would be very common in most environments (since the ID in RAID means "inexpensive disks", and last I checked SATA drives were still pretty pricey). Anyway, if you're in an environment that requires such specialized (high-performance) hardware, you might want to be tweaking your kernel anyway.
A legal entity, allowed by legislation, which permits a group of people, as shareholders (for-profit companies) or members (non-profit companies), to create an organization, which can then focus on pursuing set objectives, and empowered with legal rights which are usually only reserved for individuals, such as to sue and be sued, own property, hire employees or loan and borrow money. Also known as a "company." The primary advantage of for profit corporations is that it provides its shareholders with a right to participate in the profits (by dividends)
without any personal liability because the company absorbs the entire liability of the organization.
(emphasis mine)
The blessing and curse of corporations is that the owner's are not responsible for the actions of the corporation.
So who is responsible? No one. The lowly workers are responsible to their managers, the managers to the executives, and the executives to the stockholders, but the stockholders aren't responsible to anyone but themselves.
I can think of another class of people that aren't responsible to anyone but themselves. (but of course that doesn't mean they can't sometimes be benevolent)
I'm not saying corporations are evil, but just that you can't trust them as you would an individual or cooperative group.
Are we to just leap from our mother's womb fully formed and reasonable? Are we expected to extract the necessities of sense and reason from the world through instinct?
People are not innately capable of comprehending the present world and society. At some point they must be taught the basics of reason from which all other things flow.
They need to be taught the basics of reason, and rhetoric to enable them to converse with others to discover for themselves the necessity of critical thinking. For if a people can converse rationally, knowledge will spread, and ignorance will shrink, as each applies reason to the suppositions of others and accept what is reasonable, and reject fallacy.
I find it ironic the similarities in the current "education" present in schools with the "mis-education" of women rennounced by Wollstonecraft. With an enfeebling education that relies on blind acceptance of "facts," it is no wonder that our society is a herd of sheep. We live in a society where most can read and write, but few are literate!
</rant>
Anyway...Don't be so harsh on him. Education as exists today (with a few fortunate exceptions) is completely useless. Education should teach you *how* to think, not *what* to think. Since they're teaching you *what* to think, it's completely worthless.
Gone are the days (if they ever existed) where teacher and student are thought of as equals (save the teacher's superior knowledge and experience) and left to pound out the the truth from raw datum. Today the teacher is always right (and if the student thinks otherwise then we have a "behavior problem")...
I don't really control a mail server. I was merely maintaining so for rhetorical purposes. I was just taking the parent poster's suggestion of obfuscating their email address to avoid spam (by adding numbers to it) to the logical extreme. I was also comparing this obfuscation to the obfuscation of passwords (both of which are ironically used to prevent unauthorized people from gaining access to otherwise accessible resources).
I am aware that SMTP is supposed to ignore case (that factual error was missed during editting -- since origionally I claimed that they had to use their passwords for email addresses, but found that too absurd, and distracting from my point)
"Adding some numbers (*sigh*) helps guard against random address guessing."
Exactly! That's why I require all my users to use multi-case letters, symbols and numbers as their email address. I also require them to change the address every couple of weeks to a value different than any previous value (in case some spammer has managed to brute force it, or the user has leaked it). This has practically eliminated spam and reduced the mail server's storage usage by 99.9% (though the mail server still has to work really hard sending all those 550's).
Compaqs were crap before HP bought them. (See the other post I made this thread).
Actually I was kind of scared when HP merged with Compaq that HP would start to act more similar to Compaq. I have no idea if that actually happened, but I'd still be hesitant to buy an HP.
Personally I find the idea of Compaq being an "enthusiast's PC" quite far fetched. It is quite likely the reason those users tinkered with their hardware was because it didn't work right in the first place.
My Experience with Compaq PCs (a friend's PC bought during the Athlon/DDR day you mentioned)
PC Specs: The advertised: Presario [someModelOrOther] 2 GHz Athlon System with 256MiB DDR RAM, 40 GB harddrive and Geforce 2 video and sound.
From the specs it sure sounds like a gamer's PC (2 GHz systems were top of the line back then, in 2001)
The recieved: 2 GHz Athlon Compaq proprietary motherboard with Compaq BIOS (no user settable options -- can't even configure the IDE devices!) 256MiB PC1600 DDR RAM 40 GB 5400 RPM no-name hardrive no-name Geforce 2 MX 440 Floppy drive that never worked Barely functional 48x CD drive an overworked 200W power supply Cheap platic case with no ventilation Windows ME Onboard audio, USB
The floppy drive never worked. My friend called up Compaq tech support and they told him to delete the floppy drive controller from Hardware Profiles (this should cause Windows to automatically reinstall the driver on boot). He tried that and it didn't work. He talked to tech support on and off for a few months but they wouldn't either send him a replacement floppy drive or let him send his system in. At this point he said forget it, and we canabalized the drive (which we noticed had obvious internal faults -- ie. a capacitor exploded).
A couple months after that his computer got messed up, so he needed to reinstall windows. NO WINDOWS CD. All he had was a system restore cd. That of course makes it a large pain because you can't get rid of the Compaq crud that comes with the PC, that was causing some of the problems in the first place.
Last I heard his motherboard was dieing (at least that's my guess -- He says he has to hit ALT-CTL-DEL a couple times when he starts his computer until the BIOS shows up [but the Video BIOS always comes up]).
Though its funny, since I built a computer at the same time as my friend bought his compaq. Mine was a 1.1 GHz Athlon, Windows98SE, with name-brand parts (except the power supply and case). Aside from my Video card dying after 2 years (about the same time my friend's did actually), I haven't had any hardware problems with my PC (which cost half as much as his...)
So at least at that time Compaq was an evil price-gouging corporation that felt no responsibility over its products to its customers. An amateur could spend a few hours online and design a better system for half the price.
So that's why I'll never buy a Compaq (HP, maybe --they're more business geared).
As for your theory that "Compaq might have counted on their customers being slightly more informed on the hardware side of things than otherwise," I think that actually Compaq was trying to trick people (like my friend) with a little knowledge of hardware but not any real in depth knowledge of computer systems (hence having a few selling point pieces of hardware in the system bundled with a load of crap).
The bill doesn't really appear to have anything to do with the DMCA. All it appears to do is require cds labeled as audio cds to actually be valid audio cds. This would just prohibit copy-protected cds from being advertised as audio cds.
How is this news? (And since when did Congress rule on the labling of individual products...A thought the government was designed that the Legislative branch set out the outline, and the Executive branch carried out the details.....And this seems like a detail...)
That's nice if what you're doing is chatting, but what if you just want a client to run *politely* in the background until someone you know gets on.
GAIM doesn't do this. If someone pops up and says "hello," it pops up right in front of what you're working on and steals the focus from whatever you were doing. If there is a minor internet disruption and it loses the connection it pops up an error message and steals the keyboard focus from whatever you were doing. If you have auto-reconnect enabled, it will then leave the error message and attempt to reconnect: This means that if I accidentally leave it on while I'm at work I have about 50 message boxes greeting me when I get home -- and since they aren't all located in the same spot (since they just let the window manager place them instead of acting like error messages traditionally do and appearing in the middle of the screen), I have to move the mouse around to find the 'OK' button on each one.
The UI may be fine if GAIM is all you're doing, but I do not spend most of my time chatting, so its pushiness bothers me: its pushiness brings back painful repressed memories of a long-forgotten era when I was forced to deal with poorly designed windows apps that always default to putting shortcuts on the desktop, the quicklaunch bar, start menu, and Sendto, set their own "quick agent" to launch on startup *and* snagging all the file types it can from whatever I had previously set them. In short it ignores the fact that users may want to do something else with their computer besides using your "wonderful" program.
What GAIM (and any well designed application) needs to do is *never* steal the user's keyboard focus, and *never* pop up on top of what the user is doing. It can pop up windows around or behind what I'm doing. It can make (configurable) noises, but *do not* interfere with what I'm doing.
I just don't have patience with whiny programs that for some reason require a user decision every time the internet hiccups, or m@dCh1X0R_23 sends you a message (do you wish to accept?). I have better things to do than babysit my applications.
IANAL, but I thought attorney-client priviledge was only valid in a court of law (as an extensions to the right against self-incrimination). All this means is that the prosecution can't put your lawyer on the stand, under oath and force him to either lie or betray his client.
Outside of the courtroom this means nothing. You get a POS lawyer who likes to talk to the pretty lady with the microphone and there's nothing the government can (or should IMHO) do about it -- though a lawyer that does that would probably lose his professional status (disbarred?) and not be able to be a lawyer in that state anymore.
The same thing already applies for the medical profession, and engineering.
The professionals who leak information now days face worse than a little jail time. They risk their livelyhoods, their prospects of *ever* holding a job in that field again.
I would much rather the government just delegate the responsibility to an organization (like a guild) of people with the same profession, and let them dictate what they think is right. You might be hesitant to let the very subjects of the regulation decide how they would be regulated (after all what do a few colonists know about taxation!), but such an organization could generally be expected to act in the best interest of the profession.
One problem is that some of these normal non-governmental regulatory organizations aren't functioning very efficiently. Also a lot of professions that should have professional organizations, don't. The already established organizations should be able to sort themselves out without government interference. The government should do little more than encourage the creation of professional organizations in the troubled professions.
***End Discussion***
Organizational thinking and personal self-interest. You might ask why I can say that a professional organization would act in the best interest of the profession: 1. Human Nature: People like to believe they are moral caring individuals. If they see someone similar to them doing something they consider wrong, they like to point them out, and make an example of them, and show how "I'm not like that". This makes them feel better and represses their own insecurities about their own indiscretions. 2. Self-Interest: It is in their own best interests to trim the unfit from their ranks. This decreases the available work pool (raising $alaries), and prevents their profession from being subject to suspicion. For example, doctors are becoming even more subject to suspicion, which has caused demand for malpractice insurance, which caused costs to go up. 3. #include <subpost_pos>
Why would they not act in the best interest of the profession: 1. Good Ol Boy System: Members "helps" their friends when their friends do something wrong. everyone else out. This essentially allows everyone (for well-connected everyone) the freedom to do as they please. This is another symptom of the short-term thinking in our society. In the longterm these actions damage the profession and hurt every person in this profession. 2. #include <subpost_neg>
For real! All you have to do is: 1. Find, compile, and load the kernel module for your system. 2. Adjust the volume (which defaults to 0) with alsamixer. 3. Find, download, compile and run amixer to unmute the channels which default to muted since alsamixer doesn't unmute channels properly. 4. Configure the esound daemon to allow the esd-dependent applications to get sound. 5. Configure the arts daemon so kde apps can get sound.
See, in only 5 easy steps you can get sound on linux. Or at least that's how it works on my gentoo system.
Needless to say, the first time was troublesome (read: took 3 days on and off), but now I can get it done in 5 minutes.
Getting sound working in Linux is not complicated, but it ain't easy. If you don't know what you're doing, odds are you won't intuitively figure out the proper way to do things. but all teh stoopid NEwbs should just RTFM right?
"The burden of proof clearly lies with the theists to prove the existence of god or gods".
You say the burden of proof lies with the theists. Why is that? (I haven't studied philosophy, and had to look "sophistry" up in the dictionary, but I'm curious how you can conclude that.)
To me it seems that both views would be equally valid until it can be proven one way or another. Until they are proven the truth is indeterminate.
In statistics they usually pick one hypothesis as the default or "Null" hypothesis and the other as the hypothesis to test, and then if they are unable to disprove the Null hypothesis, they accept it as true (because the burden of proof is not on the test hypothesis, not the Null hypothesis).
In statistics this selection works well because the selection of the Null hypothesis is non-arbitrary -- it's usually the given data you're trying to disprove/verify (like if a manufacturer claims that a certain part can withstand 8mA of current before breaking).
I don't see how this style of hypothesis verification can work in discussions where two parties hold completely different assumptions. If person A were to hold that god exists and then run a test with his assumption as the Null hypothesis, after being unable to disprove the Null hypothesis, he would conclude that god exists. If persion B were to hold that god does not exist and then run a test with his assumption as the Null hypothesis, he would conclude that god doesn't exist.
I may be missing something, but it seems to me the selection of the burden of proof for this argument is entirely arbitrary. In the absence of proof, I would assume the actual state is indeterminate (both true and false simultaneously).
You did a good job dealing with the troll, but I just wanted to comment on something.
The first point (1) is not completely incorrect.
It is true that since Linux is distributed as C source code the compiler does the majority of the optimizing, but in some of the more high performance routines they optimize the C code so that gcc produces better assembly code (at least a saw a couple with comments saying something like that). The compiler is not all-knowing, so sometimes changing the way something is implemented (without even changing what it does) can lead to significant speed advantages on certain architectures and penalties on others.
There is no doubt that the programmers and other supporting personnel do need to make money from their talents. For this to happen, people have to buy their software. But when people share software collections on P2P services, the artistes are, without doubt, robbed of their fruits of labour.
However, at the same time, it must be noted that more c90% of proceedings from program sales go to the management. P2P sharing hits more the big software companies than the actual programmers.
A P2P system where the programmers get paid per program would be an ideal solution.
#---End of Output
hmm..that doesn't look entirely correct to me.
Time for a naive rant:
Maybe artists could give away their music for free and make a living supporting them. *j/k*
Or maybe artits could be set up like charities. If you want to support the artist then send them a check, or food, or something. If you have time or equipment you could donate it. Or not. The fact is that one person may get more enjoyment out of listening to a song than another person -- so how fair is it to charge them the same amount. If you let the customers pick the price, then you find the true value of what you're selling -- unless they're evil uncaring/unthinking bastards (business majors). If the music isn't important enough to you that you want to hear more then you won't support it. Likewise if you want to hear more, then you will probably do what you can to insure that they continue making music (as a sort of modern plebian-Patron D'Artes).
Ok slashbots tell me how wrong my naive and completely unthought out rant was
I thought that the reason Nissan, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda and Hyundai have factories here is because the duties (import taxes) on automobiles were insanely high (most likely due to "what's good for GM is good for the country").
If it weren't for those taxes, they would probably have factories elsewhere in the world (where unskilled labor is cheaper).
IMHO, though, I think such duties (and also limits on individuals traveling) should be removed and the world moved to a true global economy (not the "global for us but not for you" economy that seems to be popular with politicians these days). Admittedly, this probably would cause economic problems for a few decades as things sorted themselves into their proper order (Ain't capitalism grand), but in the end the most efficient order would be created.
but sitting in your room/basement writing custom operating systems and watching anime doesn't put you in much of a position to meet, much less court women.
So its not that women don't want geeks, its just that if the two never meet nothing happens, so the geeks just say that no women want them because that way it's not their fault.
What the geeks need to do is go where the girls are. The question of course is where are the girls. On that, I have no idea.
Oh well... Maybe when RFID's become ubundant in all <femine product>s we could use them to setup a grid-based tracking network and answer this question once and for all...
"And besides, most people's connection limits are dowload limits not uploads"
Most *posted* limits. The problem is that most consumers have asymetrical bandwidth, so they just don't have that much upstream to share.
I could use all 12 kbps upstream that the Comcast gods see fit to bless me with to upload files using P2P. But then, of course, I couldn't even surf the internet: Almost all my DNS queries fail, and the websites that don't, just timeout --probably because my [smart] router decides to preserve active connections instead of allowing more udp (DNS) or tcp (http) connections.
That's a perfectly valid reason *not* to share -- because it costs you something.
Me, I still share (I just limit bittorrent to 5kbps upstream so I can still have some bandwidth). Although, my roommate (uses windows) "doesn't know how" to limit his bandwidth ("I just click the download button and it downloads. It doesn't give me an option for that!")....so every thursday when the new enterprise episodes come out...
anyway...I'm pretty sure I had a point so...yeah...
You probably mean protected instead of "enhanced" and real instead of "protected". The 386 added "protected mode". x86 CPUs all start out in "real mode" where they act like they're an 8086 (for compatability reasons). In order to switch into protected mode you have to set a flag (bit 0) in the cr0 register (It's a little more complicated than that because you have to prepare the system for protected mode first by setting up some tables for the MMU, and after setting cr0 you still have to do a long jump to flush the instruction pipeline).
Though I'm not sure that the a20 line is strictly necessary for protected mode. Rather I think that either windows gave you a pretty error message and halted, or it didn't notice that it wasn't working and decided to use memory that it couldn't access and ended up trashing it's own data (this could potentially cause a triple fault in protected mode and thats....kind of bad...). But as far as I know the the machine would be able to enter protected mode perfectly fine -- but most bootloaders wouldn't get that far as they like to use memory for things like operating systems and such, and protected mode takes lots of memory for tables so they might want more than 1 MB so they can load the OS in higher memory (I think the Linux Kernel loads itself at 2 MB but I'd have to check).
FYI: If the a20 line is disabled memory is aliased in megabyte-sized pairs, so if you try to use them you end up reading and writing to the previous megabyte of memory instead -- a very robust operating system would detect this and just not use the odd megabytes (I don't think Linux does this though...) or maybe just panic and display an error message (Linux and Windows probably do this). Of course when I write a bootloader, I always just assume that it worked =D..
But not providing the capability to make those "irrelevant, useless choices" is also "an abdication of responsibility on behalf of the programmer."
A good programmer will figure out the best settings and instead of HARD CODING them in to the program, [s]he'll make them be DEFAULTS. That way the application works sensibly, and the user will not be bothered by extraneous choices unless they explicitly look for them.
A well designed interface should have the common options in obvious, easily accessible places, but also still have obscure options hidden, available through some intuitive method (like an "Advanced" tab).
I don't particularly want to recompile $APPLICATION because some idiot hard coded the cdrom drive to/dev/cdrom or hard coded the text black, (which doesn't match my background...--well actually it doesn't look that bad, but it's hardly functional with my black background) either of which would take maybe 30 minutes of programming, testing, and debugging time to fix (2 hours if they are a slashdot reader).
That reasoning will hold true for time-invariant random events, but the fact is that the asteroids up there move. Hence it can be more probable now than it was then (but I'd still like to see some evidence...maybe I'll RTFA...).
A good example would be if we observed an asteroid on course to hit earth. If the asteroid is a year away, it would be foolish to say that it is equally probable that earth would be hit by an asteroid this month as it would the month 12 months from now.
Even if we observed the asteroid on course to hit earth, it is still only a finite probability that it would hit earth because we cannot know the true course the asteroid would take exactly. So you would include a margin of error in your projections. We can use this margin of error to determine the probability. You find the range of the projection that would include earth getting hit and integrate the probabilities to find the current probability. That's at least the basics of it. In a real example you wouldn't have the probabilities of every possible deviation so you would have to assume a probability density for it (probably gaussian) and integrate that (or look it up in a table) to get the actual probability.
Of course if we don't know of any asteroids that are coming close to earth, the best we can probably do is the prior probability. But given the limited sampling time it's really a shot in the dark.
Note: by limited sampling time I was talking about how long we have been measuring meteor strikes...which hasn't been but infinitesimal part of the earth's lifetime. We may have evidence from rocks and remnants of craters, but there's no way we can know how many meteors fell without leaving evidence that we can examine today (meteors that land in the ocean leave smaller craters, and the earth is mostly ocean).
No one's suggesting we go back to the commandlines of the 60's. Even less suggest that we all program in machine-code assembly or edit text source files in a hex editor (I thought you were programming in machine-code..?).
For most simple or complex tasks (at least that I perform) the command line is faster and less frustrating than a GUI. Copying a directory: In the time it takes you to open Explorer, navigate to the correct directory highlight a directory, right click, select copy, navigate to the destination directory and click edit->paste, I have already executed the command (even though I may not have remembered the exact name of the directory--that's what tab completion's for) and even added the '-v' so it tells when each file has been copied. This is not a case of "obscureProgram.sh -XFGXRmnq -i filename1 -o filename2 -c..." this was just a simple "cp -vrf/usr/src/linux mykernelmod/". After doing simple things like this so easily *I* find it frustrating to have to go back to the GUI world where everything takes 50 sub-operations to accomplish some small task. *My time* is too valueable to be spent doing that tedious crap.
GUI is useful sometimes, for tasks of moderate complexity. If you need to do something really complicated you'll be relegated to the command line anyway (because that's where the real power is--You know all those windows apps--they have command line options too [though it's a little harder to enter the arguments for some reason and they're completely undocumented]).
Time spent learning new skills (not 1337 skillz) is not a waste. Every year corporations spend how many billion$ educating their employees. The time you spent learning how to configure CUPS from the command line will help you use UNIXy systems later on. The first task you attempt will take 4 hours, the second task 2 hours, the third even less. Pointing and clicking on printer icons probably will not help make you a better windows user or make your clicking and pointing any more efficient.
it's a one time performance penalty returning huge benefits
How so? Isn't the performance bad every time you run it?
A one time penalty would be checking bounds at compile time, or actually writing it correctly the first time. Neither ".Net" nor Java are "one time penalties".
The future of small custom programs is runtime. For apps that require realtime characteristics (like games, media players, device drivers, operating systems) the overhead of a runtime language like.Net or Java is excessive.
Runtime languages will take over for small custom apps because they allow the development to proceed more rapidly, but for everything else there's no replacement for languages that interface directly with the machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the flame?
I was just offering my suggestion. If you don't like my suggestion or don't think it applicable then you are free to politely refute my suggestions in a reasonable manner.
You're right though in that I didn't think about bootstrapping the system (I've never had trouble with the default bootstrapping kernels, so I didn't think about it).
But you'd be mistaken if you think me a n00b "who's never compiled a kernel, or done an install short of simply booting from the CDROM." As a stage-1 Gentoo user (running a manually configured 2.6.5-r1) I like to think I can claim some small degree of Linux knowledge.
But after thinking about your restated dilemma, I thought of three potential solutions (that you are free to shoot down):
1. Install to another harddrive.
Does your root filesystem *really* need to be on the RAID array? Get a separate harddrive for the system files (which, since they can be restored from the install disk, don't need to be redundant, and probably won't need the performance boosts from the RAID array).
2. (Minimal?) Install on another harddrive, and copy over.
Slow, painful, but effective. As you copy over, you can replace the standard kernel with your custom SATA RAID kernel.
3. Use your own kernel for the install, and install (with your kernel) to the RAID array.
Either use a boot-floppy with your kernel in conjunction with the distro's install cd, or make your own variant of their install cd, and all should work normally. Adding your kernel to their install cd, and remastering shouldn't be that hard (and you can probably find detailed instructions via google, or by emailing your distro). If you do remaster the CD you could post it online (assuming you're using a free distro...) and then no one will be able to bitch about this issue with that distro again.
But of course I'm probably wasting my time replying as my brother thinks you're "one of those ogre-people" (trolls) he read about in his "Net Force" book.
Why don't you just download the source to and compile your own? Is it really that much harder to "check" the SATA RAID support option in the kernel, compile and install than bitch on slashdot about it?
SATA RAID doesn't seem (to me) like it would be very common in most environments (since the ID in RAID means "inexpensive disks", and last I checked SATA drives were still pretty pricey). Anyway, if you're in an environment that requires such specialized (high-performance) hardware, you might want to be tweaking your kernel anyway.
Actually that's cooperation.
Google says: (emphasis mine)
The blessing and curse of corporations is that the owner's are not responsible for the actions of the corporation.
So who is responsible? No one. The lowly workers are responsible to their managers, the managers to the executives, and the executives to the stockholders, but the stockholders aren't responsible to anyone but themselves.
I can think of another class of people that aren't responsible to anyone but themselves. (but of course that doesn't mean they can't sometimes be benevolent)
I'm not saying corporations are evil, but just that you can't trust them as you would an individual or cooperative group.
Are we to just leap from our mother's womb fully formed and reasonable? Are we expected to extract the necessities of sense and reason from the world through instinct?
People are not innately capable of comprehending the present world and society. At some point they must be taught the basics of reason from which all other things flow.
They need to be taught the basics of reason, and rhetoric to enable them to converse with others to discover for themselves the necessity of critical thinking. For if a people can converse rationally, knowledge will spread, and ignorance will shrink, as each applies reason to the suppositions of others and accept what is reasonable, and reject fallacy.
I find it ironic the similarities in the current "education" present in schools with the "mis-education" of women rennounced by Wollstonecraft. With an enfeebling education that relies on blind acceptance of "facts," it is no wonder that our society is a herd of sheep. We live in a society where most can read and write, but few are literate!
</rant>
Anyway...Don't be so harsh on him. Education as exists today (with a few fortunate exceptions) is completely useless. Education should teach you *how* to think, not *what* to think. Since they're teaching you *what* to think, it's completely worthless.
Gone are the days (if they ever existed) where teacher and student are thought of as equals (save the teacher's superior knowledge and experience) and left to pound out the the truth from raw datum. Today the teacher is always right (and if the student thinks otherwise then we have a "behavior problem")...
Leave the Visual Basic Programmer alone....
sheesh...he's pathetic enough already...
It was hyperbole and extended metaphor.
I don't really control a mail server. I was merely maintaining so for rhetorical purposes. I was just taking the parent poster's suggestion of obfuscating their email address to avoid spam (by adding numbers to it) to the logical extreme. I was also comparing this obfuscation to the obfuscation of passwords (both of which are ironically used to prevent unauthorized people from gaining access to otherwise accessible resources).
I am aware that SMTP is supposed to ignore case (that factual error was missed during editting -- since origionally I claimed that they had to use their passwords for email addresses, but found that too absurd, and distracting from my point)
"Adding some numbers (*sigh*) helps guard against random address guessing."
Exactly! That's why I require all my users to use multi-case letters, symbols and numbers as their email address. I also require them to change the address every couple of weeks to a value different than any previous value (in case some spammer has managed to brute force it, or the user has leaked it). This has practically eliminated spam and reduced the mail server's storage usage by 99.9% (though the mail server still has to work really hard sending all those 550's).
Compaqs were crap before HP bought them. (See the other post I made this thread).
Actually I was kind of scared when HP merged with Compaq that HP would start to act more similar to Compaq. I have no idea if that actually happened, but I'd still be hesitant to buy an HP.
Personally I find the idea of Compaq being an "enthusiast's PC" quite far fetched. It is quite likely the reason those users tinkered with their hardware was because it didn't work right in the first place.
My Experience with Compaq PCs (a friend's PC bought during the Athlon/DDR day you mentioned)
PC Specs:
The advertised:
Presario [someModelOrOther]
2 GHz Athlon System with 256MiB DDR RAM, 40 GB harddrive and Geforce 2 video and sound.
From the specs it sure sounds like a gamer's PC (2 GHz systems were top of the line back then, in 2001)
The recieved:
2 GHz Athlon
Compaq proprietary motherboard with Compaq BIOS (no user settable options -- can't even configure the IDE devices!)
256MiB PC1600 DDR RAM
40 GB 5400 RPM no-name hardrive
no-name Geforce 2 MX 440
Floppy drive that never worked
Barely functional 48x CD drive
an overworked 200W power supply
Cheap platic case with no ventilation
Windows ME
Onboard audio, USB
The floppy drive never worked. My friend called up Compaq tech support and they told him to delete the floppy drive controller from Hardware Profiles (this should cause Windows to automatically reinstall the driver on boot). He tried that and it didn't work. He talked to tech support on and off for a few months but they wouldn't either send him a replacement floppy drive or let him send his system in. At this point he said forget it, and we canabalized the drive (which we noticed had obvious internal faults -- ie. a capacitor exploded).
A couple months after that his computer got messed up, so he needed to reinstall windows. NO WINDOWS CD. All he had was a system restore cd. That of course makes it a large pain because you can't get rid of the Compaq crud that comes with the PC, that was causing some of the problems in the first place.
Last I heard his motherboard was dieing (at least that's my guess -- He says he has to hit ALT-CTL-DEL a couple times when he starts his computer until the BIOS shows up [but the Video BIOS always comes up]).
Though its funny, since I built a computer at the same time as my friend bought his compaq. Mine was a 1.1 GHz Athlon, Windows98SE, with name-brand parts (except the power supply and case). Aside from my Video card dying after 2 years (about the same time my friend's did actually), I haven't had any hardware problems with my PC (which cost half as much as his...)
So at least at that time Compaq was an evil price-gouging corporation that felt no responsibility over its products to its customers. An amateur could spend a few hours online and design a better system for half the price.
So that's why I'll never buy a Compaq (HP, maybe --they're more business geared).
As for your theory that "Compaq might have counted on their customers being slightly more informed on the hardware side of things than otherwise," I think that actually Compaq was trying to trick people (like my friend) with a little knowledge of hardware but not any real in depth knowledge of computer systems (hence having a few selling point pieces of hardware in the system bundled with a load of crap).
The bill doesn't really appear to have anything to do with the DMCA. All it appears to do is require cds labeled as audio cds to actually be valid audio cds. This would just prohibit copy-protected cds from being advertised as audio cds.
How is this news? (And since when did Congress rule on the labling of individual products...A thought the government was designed that the Legislative branch set out the outline, and the Executive branch carried out the details.....And this seems like a detail...)
That's nice if what you're doing is chatting, but what if you just want a client to run *politely* in the background until someone you know gets on.
GAIM doesn't do this. If someone pops up and says "hello," it pops up right in front of what you're working on and steals the focus from whatever you were doing. If there is a minor internet disruption and it loses the connection it pops up an error message and steals the keyboard focus from whatever you were doing. If you have auto-reconnect enabled, it will then leave the error message and attempt to reconnect: This means that if I accidentally leave it on while I'm at work I have about 50 message boxes greeting me when I get home -- and since they aren't all located in the same spot (since they just let the window manager place them instead of acting like error messages traditionally do and appearing in the middle of the screen), I have to move the mouse around to find the 'OK' button on each one.
The UI may be fine if GAIM is all you're doing, but I do not spend most of my time chatting, so its pushiness bothers me: its pushiness brings back painful repressed memories of a long-forgotten era when I was forced to deal with poorly designed windows apps that always default to putting shortcuts on the desktop, the quicklaunch bar, start menu, and Sendto, set their own "quick agent" to launch on startup *and* snagging all the file types it can from whatever I had previously set them. In short it ignores the fact that users may want to do something else with their computer besides using your "wonderful" program.
What GAIM (and any well designed application) needs to do is *never* steal the user's keyboard focus, and *never* pop up on top of what the user is doing. It can pop up windows around or behind what I'm doing. It can make (configurable) noises, but *do not* interfere with what I'm doing.
I just don't have patience with whiny programs that for some reason require a user decision every time the internet hiccups, or m@dCh1X0R_23 sends you a message (do you wish to accept?). I have better things to do than babysit my applications.
IANAL, but I thought attorney-client priviledge was only valid in a court of law (as an extensions to the right against self-incrimination). All this means is that the prosecution can't put your lawyer on the stand, under oath and force him to either lie or betray his client.
Outside of the courtroom this means nothing. You get a POS lawyer who likes to talk to the pretty lady with the microphone and there's nothing the government can (or should IMHO) do about it -- though a lawyer that does that would probably lose his professional status (disbarred?) and not be able to be a lawyer in that state anymore.
The same thing already applies for the medical profession, and engineering.
The professionals who leak information now days face worse than a little jail time. They risk their livelyhoods, their prospects of *ever* holding a job in that field again.
I would much rather the government just delegate the responsibility to an organization (like a guild) of people with the same profession, and let them dictate what they think is right. You might be hesitant to let the very subjects of the regulation decide how they would be regulated (after all what do a few colonists know about taxation!), but such an organization could generally be expected to act in the best interest of the profession.
One problem is that some of these normal non-governmental regulatory organizations aren't functioning very efficiently. Also a lot of professions that should have professional organizations, don't. The already established organizations should be able to sort themselves out without government interference. The government should do little more than encourage the creation of professional organizations in the troubled professions.
***End Discussion***
Organizational thinking and personal self-interest.
You might ask why I can say that a professional organization would act in the best interest of the profession:
1. Human Nature: People like to believe they are moral caring individuals. If they see someone similar to them doing something they consider wrong, they like to point them out, and make an example of them, and show how "I'm not like that". This makes them feel better and represses their own insecurities about their own indiscretions.
2. Self-Interest: It is in their own best interests to trim the unfit from their ranks. This decreases the available work pool (raising $alaries), and prevents their profession from being subject to suspicion. For example, doctors are becoming even more subject to suspicion, which has caused demand for malpractice insurance, which caused costs to go up.
3. #include <subpost_pos>
Why would they not act in the best interest of the profession:
1. Good Ol Boy System: Members "helps" their friends when their friends do something wrong. everyone else out. This essentially allows everyone (for well-connected everyone) the freedom to do as they please. This is another symptom of the short-term thinking in our society. In the longterm these actions damage the profession and hurt every person in this profession.
2. #include <subpost_neg>
I think Fark would disagree.
FYI: Fark is yet another news site, with powers that possibly rival even the slashdot effect.
For real!
All you have to do is:
1. Find, compile, and load the kernel module for your system.
2. Adjust the volume (which defaults to 0) with alsamixer.
3. Find, download, compile and run amixer to unmute the channels which default to muted since alsamixer doesn't unmute channels properly.
4. Configure the esound daemon to allow the esd-dependent applications to get sound.
5. Configure the arts daemon so kde apps can get sound.
See, in only 5 easy steps you can get sound on linux. Or at least that's how it works on my gentoo system.
Needless to say, the first time was troublesome (read: took 3 days on and off), but now I can get it done in 5 minutes.
Getting sound working in Linux is not complicated, but it ain't easy. If you don't know what you're doing, odds are you won't intuitively figure out the proper way to do things. but all teh stoopid NEwbs should just RTFM right?
"The burden of proof clearly lies with the theists to prove the existence of god or gods".
You say the burden of proof lies with the theists. Why is that? (I haven't studied philosophy, and had to look "sophistry" up in the dictionary, but I'm curious how you can conclude that.)
To me it seems that both views would be equally valid until it can be proven one way or another. Until they are proven the truth is indeterminate.
In statistics they usually pick one hypothesis as the default or "Null" hypothesis and the other as the hypothesis to test, and then if they are unable to disprove the Null hypothesis, they accept it as true (because the burden of proof is not on the test hypothesis, not the Null hypothesis).
In statistics this selection works well because the selection of the Null hypothesis is non-arbitrary -- it's usually the given data you're trying to disprove/verify (like if a manufacturer claims that a certain part can withstand 8mA of current before breaking).
I don't see how this style of hypothesis verification can work in discussions where two parties hold completely different assumptions.
If person A were to hold that god exists and then run a test with his assumption as the Null hypothesis, after being unable to disprove the Null hypothesis, he would conclude that god exists.
If persion B were to hold that god does not exist and then run a test with his assumption as the Null hypothesis, he would conclude that god doesn't exist.
I may be missing something, but it seems to me the selection of the burden of proof for this argument is entirely arbitrary. In the absence of proof, I would assume the actual state is indeterminate (both true and false simultaneously).
You did a good job dealing with the troll, but I just wanted to comment on something.
The first point (1) is not completely incorrect.
It is true that since Linux is distributed as C source code the compiler does the majority of the optimizing, but in some of the more high performance routines they optimize the C code so that gcc produces better assembly code (at least a saw a couple with comments saying something like that). The compiler is not all-knowing, so sometimes changing the way something is implemented (without even changing what it does) can lead to significant speed advantages on certain architectures and penalties on others.
To share or not to share, that is the question.
There is no doubt that the programmers and other supporting personnel do need to make money from their talents. For this to happen, people have to buy their software. But when people share software collections on P2P services, the artistes are, without doubt, robbed of their fruits of labour.
However, at the same time, it must be noted that more c90% of proceedings from program sales go to the management. P2P sharing hits more the big software companies than the actual programmers.
A P2P system where the programmers get paid per program would be an ideal solution.
#---End of Output
hmm..that doesn't look entirely correct to me.
Time for a naive rant:
Maybe artists could give away their music for free and make a living supporting them. *j/k*
Or maybe artits could be set up like charities. If you want to support the artist then send them a check, or food, or something. If you have time or equipment you could donate it. Or not.
The fact is that one person may get more enjoyment out of listening to a song than another person -- so how fair is it to charge them the same amount. If you let the customers pick the price, then you find the true value of what you're selling -- unless they're evil uncaring/unthinking bastards (business majors). If the music isn't important enough to you that you want to hear more then you won't support it. Likewise if you want to hear more, then you will probably do what you can to insure that they continue making music (as a sort of modern plebian-Patron D'Artes).
Ok slashbots tell me how wrong my naive and completely unthought out rant was
I thought that the reason Nissan, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda and Hyundai have factories here is because the duties (import taxes) on automobiles were insanely high (most likely due to "what's good for GM is good for the country").
If it weren't for those taxes, they would probably have factories elsewhere in the world (where unskilled labor is cheaper).
IMHO, though, I think such duties (and also limits on individuals traveling) should be removed and the world moved to a true global economy (not the "global for us but not for you" economy that seems to be popular with politicians these days). Admittedly, this probably would cause economic problems for a few decades as things sorted themselves into their proper order (Ain't capitalism grand), but in the end the most efficient order would be created.
That's true...
but sitting in your room/basement writing custom operating systems and watching anime doesn't put you in much of a position to meet, much less court women.
So its not that women don't want geeks, its just that if the two never meet nothing happens, so the geeks just say that no women want them because that way it's not their fault.
What the geeks need to do is go where the girls are. The question of course is where are the girls. On that, I have no idea.
Oh well...
Maybe when RFID's become ubundant in all <femine product>s we could use them to setup a grid-based tracking network and answer this question once and for all...
"And besides, most people's connection limits are dowload limits not uploads"
Most *posted* limits. The problem is that most consumers have asymetrical bandwidth, so they just don't have that much upstream to share.
I could use all 12 kbps upstream that the Comcast gods see fit to bless me with to upload files using P2P. But then, of course, I couldn't even surf the internet: Almost all my DNS queries fail, and the websites that don't, just timeout --probably because my [smart] router decides to preserve active connections instead of allowing more udp (DNS) or tcp (http) connections.
That's a perfectly valid reason *not* to share -- because it costs you something.
Me, I still share (I just limit bittorrent to 5kbps upstream so I can still have some bandwidth).
Although, my roommate (uses windows) "doesn't know how" to limit his bandwidth ("I just click the download button and it downloads. It doesn't give me an option for that!")....so every thursday when the new enterprise episodes come out...
anyway...I'm pretty sure I had a point so...yeah...
You probably mean protected instead of "enhanced" and real instead of "protected".
The 386 added "protected mode". x86 CPUs all start out in "real mode" where they act like they're an 8086 (for compatability reasons). In order to switch into protected mode you have to set a flag (bit 0) in the cr0 register (It's a little more complicated than that because you have to prepare the system for protected mode first by setting up some tables for the MMU, and after setting cr0 you still have to do a long jump to flush the instruction pipeline).
Though I'm not sure that the a20 line is strictly necessary for protected mode. Rather I think that either windows gave you a pretty error message and halted, or it didn't notice that it wasn't working and decided to use memory that it couldn't access and ended up trashing it's own data (this could potentially cause a triple fault in protected mode and thats....kind of bad...). But as far as I know the the machine would be able to enter protected mode perfectly fine -- but most bootloaders wouldn't get that far as they like to use memory for things like operating systems and such, and protected mode takes lots of memory for tables so they might want more than 1 MB so they can load the OS in higher memory (I think the Linux Kernel loads itself at 2 MB but I'd have to check).
FYI: If the a20 line is disabled memory is aliased in megabyte-sized pairs, so if you try to use them you end up reading and writing to the previous megabyte of memory instead -- a very robust operating system would detect this and just not use the odd megabytes (I don't think Linux does this though...) or maybe just panic and display an error message (Linux and Windows probably do this). Of course when I write a bootloader, I always just assume that it worked =D..
But not providing the capability to make those "irrelevant, useless choices" is also "an abdication of responsibility on behalf of the programmer."
/dev/cdrom or hard coded the text black, (which doesn't match my background...--well actually it doesn't look that bad, but it's hardly functional with my black background) either of which would take maybe 30 minutes of programming, testing, and debugging time to fix (2 hours if they are a slashdot reader).
A good programmer will figure out the best settings and instead of HARD CODING them in to the program, [s]he'll make them be DEFAULTS. That way the application works sensibly, and the user will not be bothered by extraneous choices unless they explicitly look for them.
A well designed interface should have the common options in obvious, easily accessible places, but also still have obscure options hidden, available through some intuitive method (like an "Advanced" tab).
I don't particularly want to recompile $APPLICATION because some idiot hard coded the cdrom drive to
That reasoning will hold true for time-invariant random events, but the fact is that the asteroids up there move. Hence it can be more probable now than it was then (but I'd still like to see some evidence...maybe I'll RTFA...).
A good example would be if we observed an asteroid on course to hit earth. If the asteroid is a year away, it would be foolish to say that it is equally probable that earth would be hit by an asteroid this month as it would the month 12 months from now.
Even if we observed the asteroid on course to hit earth, it is still only a finite probability that it would hit earth because we cannot know the true course the asteroid would take exactly. So you would include a margin of error in your projections. We can use this margin of error to determine the probability. You find the range of the projection that would include earth getting hit and integrate the probabilities to find the current probability. That's at least the basics of it. In a real example you wouldn't have the probabilities of every possible deviation so you would have to assume a probability density for it (probably gaussian) and integrate that (or look it up in a table) to get the actual probability.
Of course if we don't know of any asteroids that are coming close to earth, the best we can probably do is the prior probability. But given the limited sampling time it's really a shot in the dark.
Note: by limited sampling time I was talking about how long we have been measuring meteor strikes...which hasn't been but infinitesimal part of the earth's lifetime. We may have evidence from rocks and remnants of craters, but there's no way we can know how many meteors fell without leaving evidence that we can examine today (meteors that land in the ocean leave smaller craters, and the earth is mostly ocean).
No one's suggesting we go back to the commandlines of the 60's. Even less suggest that we all program in machine-code assembly or edit text source files in a hex editor (I thought you were programming in machine-code..?).
/usr/src/linux mykernelmod/". After doing simple things like this so easily *I* find it frustrating to have to go back to the GUI world where everything takes 50 sub-operations to accomplish some small task. *My time* is too valueable to be spent doing that tedious crap.
For most simple or complex tasks (at least that I perform) the command line is faster and less frustrating than a GUI.
Copying a directory:
In the time it takes you to open Explorer, navigate to the correct directory highlight a directory, right click, select copy, navigate to the destination directory and click edit->paste, I have already executed the command (even though I may not have remembered the exact name of the directory--that's what tab completion's for) and even added the '-v' so it tells when each file has been copied.
This is not a case of "obscureProgram.sh -XFGXRmnq -i filename1 -o filename2 -c..." this was just a simple "cp -vrf
GUI is useful sometimes, for tasks of moderate complexity. If you need to do something really complicated you'll be relegated to the command line anyway (because that's where the real power is--You know all those windows apps--they have command line options too [though it's a little harder to enter the arguments for some reason and they're completely undocumented]).
Time spent learning new skills (not 1337 skillz) is not a waste. Every year corporations spend how many billion$ educating their employees. The time you spent learning how to configure CUPS from the command line will help you use UNIXy systems later on. The first task you attempt will take 4 hours, the second task 2 hours, the third even less. Pointing and clicking on printer icons probably will not help make you a better windows user or make your clicking and pointing any more efficient.
A one time penalty would be checking bounds at compile time, or actually writing it correctly the first time. Neither ".Net" nor Java are "one time penalties".
The future of small custom programs is runtime. For apps that require realtime characteristics (like games, media players, device drivers, operating systems) the overhead of a runtime language like
Runtime languages will take over for small custom apps because they allow the development to proceed more rapidly, but for everything else there's no replacement for languages that interface directly with the machine.