My point about using Google as a reference is that it will have a disproportionately HIGHER percentage of Linux users.
Dude, that's like saying that "since Geeks favor Albertson's, you can expect to see more geeks in Albertson's than you would see in other places, like HEB, Safeway, or Randall's." Google has over 70% of the search market share, and I'm not entirely convinced that when they reach monopoly status on search they'll be a benevolent monopoly. In any case, it doesn't matter how much geeks like google, google is used by over 70% of web searchers worldwide. In that group, geeks are a drop in the ocean and there's absolutely no reason Google's usage statistics should reflect that geeks like Google.
Take the GP poster's advice and learn something about logic. You'll also learn some critical thinking at the same time.
(yes, I do like to have 16 desktops and I do want to use my 3rd mouse button).
Here's some interesting anecdotal stuff.
Awhile back I showed a girl that I know how to use tabbed browsing in Mozilla. My buddy sitting in the room said "Tabbed browsing is useless. I never use it." He uses IE. Now she can't stop using it.
Awhile back I picked up an optical mouse for my house. My wife said "The other mouse worked fine for me." Now, she still maintains that a ball mouse works fine for her, but after letting her use the optical mouse for awhile, I switched it out again to a ball mouse. I noticed she spent a lot of time shaking the mouse and swearing. I wonder when she'll finally admit that the $10 optical mouse was a good thing?
Last week I showed my wife how to copyNpaste just by highlighting the text to copy and middle-clicking to paste. I haven't seen her right-click and select copy since then, but I have seen her copyNpaste a few times.
There are many, many things about non-Microsoft products that are just plain superior. (Yeah, I know, Microsoft invented the optical mouse, or they bought the company that invented it. Microsoft makes great meeses, and they always have.)
I use XP for my everyday apps, because it's a better tool for those.
My wife and I both use Linux for everything computer-related (with my Sony Clie being the exception) and I only use Windows for development when I have to. And we do it because Linux is a better tool for everyday desktop usage.
Linux has almost no penetration desktop, non-server applications. Evidence? Coming right up. Note Google's usage breakdown.
Your "evidence" only deals with Google's demographics specifically, although we can reasonably extrapolate it to say "the whole world", since Google does serve something like 70% of all searches. However, your statement was that linux didn't have "penetration desktop, non-server applications", which is plain false. Linux has plenty of it. Right now companies are getting the value proposition offered by Linux straightened out and are taking a look at it. That means, specifically, "no significant new penetration at this time". It's like when you tell your wife you're horny and she starts thinking about it. Doesn't mean you get any right away...
Tipover point? XP ranks first at 42%! Yes, Microsoft's latest O/S (which the article seems to think is a dismal failure) accounts for almost half of all web access!
Next time you get to see a pendulum, try to identify the two tipover points, and answer this question: When the pendulum reaches the tipover point, has it started downward motion? "Tipover point" doesn't mean "Microsoft will be filing Chapter 11 within a quarter". It means roughly the same thing as "turning point", i.e. Microsoft is now going to have to fight to keep its existing business. It doesn't mean they've started losing their business in droves, it just means that now Linux has the credibility and the critical mass of applications to be a serious contender against Microsoft, and people know that.
Simply compare the number of personal computers sold when MS was founded versus the number sold today. Or the number of wordprocessor/spreadsheet users in 1990 versus today. Etc. An enormous amount of that market developed only because Microsoft was significantly cheaper than the competition.
Or possibly because it was inevitable. Our society had grown large enough that organizing information was the next bottleneck to growth. Microsoft didn't get to be who they are because they did anything special, they just got to be in the right place at the right time in history and in a position to take advantage of it. That's all.
Just like Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, and even George Washington and company.
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2003 and provide the ability to edit posts?
Hm, let's see. I make a post and piss off a bunch of people. So I get a lot of very insightful and intelligent replies to my post. Now I can edit my original post and thus render all the intelligent replies to be idiotic and foolish?
Editing posts is a *bad* idea, I think. I think it would be abused more often than it would be used.
MS is big and powerful. I don't think anybody is saying that they are disappearing. Rather, the implication is that their dominance is waning. MS will be around for at least another 25 years. Will it be running 90% of machines then? Probably not, fortunately!
I don't personally think anybody's stupid enough to think that we can drive Microsoft out of business. If anybody's that stupid, I have four words for them: "IBM is still kicking". Microsoft has replaced IBM in all but name, but it didn't cause IBMs death. SUre, IBM had a few hard years, and now they're coming back with a vengeance. Expect to see IBM have more hard years in your lifetime.
Personally, I don't want to kill Microsoft. Microsoft is the best thing to ever happen to Free Software since Linux itself! Would we all be out there working all of our spare time to make Free Software kick ass like it does if there wasn't an Evil Monopoly to fell? If this wasn't David and Goliath, how much would we *really* care?
Answer: Not much. Look how hard GNU has had to work to gain credibility, and they've been fighting for it since 1984 (The Year of Orwell). Setting aside, for the moment, GNU's own internal problems. Point is, without Microsoft to be our Satan, would we all love God as much as we do?
There's a metaphor that makes me feel a little sick to my stomach...
But seriously.. what did 1000 people organizations use for global co-ordination, communication, and messaging before MS?
Just a few guesses here, but didn't they use Solaris, AIX, Unicos, and Netware?
MS won their monopoly because of a series of conditions that existed in the early '90s. They had already started penetrating desktops because the hardware was cheap, but they had already defeated IBM, to a degree. So they were "it" for the intel platform. The non-intel platforms were still fighting. Commodore drove Apple into a corner, and C&A together knocked Atari out of the game. Then Commodore went under itself, leaving Apple an already badly-beaten mess. Meanwhile, Microsoft continued to build their desktop market, and even started to build their server market. The cheap Intel platform undermined Sun's existing desktop market (I recall Sun being the big leader on the desktop in the '80s), and Microsoft basically stepped in to fill a hole.
The *only* reason Microsoft was able to get to the point they did by the mid-90s was blind luck.
There have been NO cases of American civilians flying jetliners into foreign buildings.
Maybe not that, specifically, but does the phrase "domestic terrorism" ring a bell? Remember Timothy McVeigh? Columbine? On September 11, 2001, the only question I had was "Who flew the planes? Was it 'domestic terrorists' or foreign?" What does it say about a country when the first question to be asked is "did our own people just commit mass murder?"
Of course, I'm a confirmed paranoid, since I'm still inclined to think that if they had followed the money trail all the way to its source, its source would have been American Gold.
This is the real threat, and considering MS's history I really do think they'll try it. OpenOffice can open Word files? No problem, DRM them and poof, no more (legal) OpenOffice.
You forgot a couple of other things, namely IBM, Sun, and Novel. MS might be considered a "monopoly", but they'll never be able to buy enough congressassholes from IBM to put a law through that would drown IBM. No way. *That* would hurt the economy far more than Microsoft going under. We're safe from DRM, for now.
Igor Sikorsky (inventor of the helicopter) personally flew on the first flight of all his new designs. And on many of those he took family members. Now that's confidence! NASA should require the same "skin in the game".
That's actually derived from naval tradition.:) It used to be that the ship's designer, or the guy that headed up the design team, had to go on the maiden voyage. You see this in Titanic. That guy was a real guy, and he was really on the ship, and he and the captain both were expected to be the last ones on the ship. Naturally, had there been enough lifeboats, they both would have gotten away (and been tossed in the sea by the angry passengers).
Anyway, I totally agree with this idea for space travel. Put the engineers' asses on the line. Just like software developers should have to use the software they develop.:)
O(1) Linux Scheduler : Linux 2.4::Hemi : Dodge's old standard issue V8.
The Hemi is a design that has all kinds of horsepower compared to a regular V8 and tends to meet emission standards and stuff. So you really do get more power with a Hemi. Therefore your comparison is quite valid.:) And your conclusion of "don't care" is still just as valid. You just missed the "act on conclusion part", which is to go away.
Right, and then you're surfing a linked list. Why not use a dynamic array? At least then you have a table of pointers (sorta) so you don't have to loop through the list.
The problem with looping through a list like you're doing is that that operation is O(n). I don't know exaclty the O notation for when you stop when you reach the task for which you're looking, though.
They didn't exactly go and try to sell their plane. The Flyer didn't exactly fly much.:) This link has more information on the years after the first Kitty Hawk flight.
Most good skeptics doubt the Wright Brothers' flight, and I doubt the flight itself as well, actually. The thing is, they weren't up for long, and they couldn't repeat the feat without building a new airplane, and they developed their catapult system. THey later proved they didn't need the catapult to launch, but they did need it in the early days, and they didn't have it at Kitty Hawk. Why would their first plane not need a catapult, but their third plane did? The Flyer II, as you indicated, never flew.
The Wrights' made a few mistakes, and are one of the well-known examples for intellectual property hording and how it backfires. IN the end, the only way they managed to make any money off their invention (outside of winning prizes similar to the X-Prize) was in their school. They spent too much time fighting over the technology and not enough time advancing it. There's a very important lesson in there that is every bit applicable to the world of software today.
Interesting.
November 12 - Albertos Santos-Dumont, France, flies 722 feet in his 14-Bis. This is considered the first true flight of a powered aircraft in Europe.
He does get a claim to fame, after all.:) And he was quite a pioneer in the area of flight.
Hmm, I read some more on Langley, and you might be right about his craft not flying. His aerodrome had two sets of wings, one fore and one aft (do they use those naval terms for planes?;) ), and a motor in the middle with propellors on each end. Presumably he just strapped props onto the crank on both sides of the engine. Looks like he picked one of the more powerful engines of the time, and it may have been more powerful than the Wrights', but I haven't found specs on the Wrights'. Anyway, it also looks like he hadn't figured out how to control it because he spent his time focusing on propulsion, where the Wrights worked on control first.
Interesting enough, Langley tried to contact the Wrights and they blew him off. Looks like if they had put their minds together, let Langley put together propulsion while the Wrights worked out control, they might have been able to build the first flyer and fly it to London.;)
As far as this brazilian wanting to make Santos-Dumont the first flyer, yes he has a slant.:) In the article you referenced, he asks us to redefine what makes the first "true airplane". If I were to cite a "first true airplane", I'd have to say one that could fly as long as it had fuel. And the Frenchies and the Wrights seemed to be very close to one another, close enough that it's highly likely that whoever we credit, we'll be wrong. The other thing is "public demonstration". As far as the Wrights were concerned, they demonstrated publicly at Kitty Hawk in 1903 that they could fly. SO they didn't "publicly" demonstrate again until 1908, they did privately demonstrate for the military and sell the first military planes before then.
IN the end, it all comes with a grain of salt. Whether or not the Wrights' first flyer flew doesn't make a lot of difference in the grand scheme of things. They showed that it can be done, and it was done. They also trained the first pilots, which is a big deal. They also made a lot of bad business decisions which meant that they could only claim the first flight, but they didn't get to claim getting rich off their invention becuase they spent too much time fighting the "bad guys". I always wonder who were the bad guys in the Wrights' world...
In either Perl --snip-- the language actually cooperates in helping the programmer write robust software.
What are you smoking? The reason Perl is described as line noise is because that's what it looks like. The only character in history that could speak line noise is the Terminatrix! And she's a fucking fiction!
If Perl cooperates in helping me write robust software then I've got two penises.
If you're going to go to that much trouble, you need to add some bits for TimeZoneOffset and a bit to indicate whether or not DayLightSavings is in effect or not. Otherwise, you have ambiguous timestamps when stored.
Absolutely not, on a timestamp. Store timestamps in GMT only. If you want to know locale-specific information about the timestamp, convert it to your locale using your locale settings---
Wait, only one OS I know of the stores local time in the hardware clock. DO you know you're a troll?;P
[dave@fiona dave]$ python
Python 2.3 (#2, Aug 31 2003, 17:27:29)
[GCC 3.3.1 (Mandrake Linux 9.2 3.3.1-1mdk)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import time
>>> print time.ctime(1073741824) Sat Jan 10 05:37:04 2004
>>> print time.ctime(11073741824) Fri Dec 13 12:45:52 1901
I don't know what's scarier, knowing that this is likely to be gcc's or the kernel's fault, or knowing the Python and Perl had the same function name that took the same input and returned the same value.
What do you do when you need to represent a date before the epoch?
Damn, mod this stuff up. Mostly because I was looking for the ideal post to post this same reply to when I found this.:)
Anyway, anyone know how we currently represent historical dates before the epoch? Seriously! I suspect they're being stored as strings, therefore requiring some data conversions to use with modern dates, and something strikes me as being completely wrong with that...
They now include a GUI to tweak the settings for an NVIdia card under Linux similar to the one under MS Windows. The GUI is written in GTK+2.x and NVidia did not have to pay QT just to be able to write a GUI for some OS.
And the new GUI for configuring the kernel is Qt-based. What exactly is your point with this? Is there *any* reason NVidia had to use GTK for their configure app? None that I can think of. For them it was probably a pretty arbitrary choice. "Hey, you who have been writing our LInux driver, make us a GUI for it." "No problem boss, I'll have it ready tomorrow." DO you really think there was a huge board meeting, or big-time IT department meeting or even a large developer meeting for that?
I just think that for Linux to be more accepted in the Corporate World(tm), a corporate Linux distro needs to REALLY limit the choices of packages, pick what the distro builders feel are the best and focus on making those packages work well together.
I disagree completely. I may have been responding to you when I said this already, but here goes again.
Microsoft gets a lot of flak because they have made a number of decisions in their OS that negatively affect businesses. The decisions themselves differ from business to business, but the bottom line is that most businesses are not completely happy with their Windows OS. Give them Linux, where they can now make all of the decisions they want or they can let the vendor make some/all of them. Do you really think that a company is going to install Linux on all their desktops and then tell their employees "You can use Gnome, KDE, IceWM, WindowMaker, Enlightenment...". FUCK NO. A business is going to look carefully at the desktops available and the apps available, pick ONE, and then install that on their machines. If they're big enough and the contract is big enough, they can probably get the vendor to give them a custom installer that ultimately leaves them with a system that they can use the vendor's update service with. And for that they need the vendor to support the desktop they pick, and if UserLinux isn't going to support KDE, they're going to miss out on a lot of their market. They'll lose it to the likes of Mandrake that fully supports Gnome and KDE.
ANd no. Debian's volunteer-maintained repository is not a good selling point in this market. RedHat and Mandrake both provide repositories with some QA (probably RedHat's QA is better than Mandrake's, although I prefer Mandrake;) ), and they each have a significant commercial stake in the quality of their repositories. Debian doesn't, and never will. They're a volunteer organization. That's great and all, but a company wants to know that updating their desktops isn't going to cause all of their users to sit on their asses for 2 days because some volunteer didn't double-check his package.
Choice is good and needs to be preserved for businesses. The #1 selling point of Linux over Windows is choice. Microsoft has a record for reducing/eliminating choice and Linux and KDE both have a record for creating/adding choice.
Look at MS Windows and Mac OS X. You don't have to pay extra to develop commercial, closed source applications on those platforms, it would be silly to require that under Linux.
Quite the contrary, if you intend to develop for Windows and Mac OS X with GTK you're fucked. Sorry, no go. Doesn't work at all. GTK uses Xlib (or rather, GTK now uses GDK which uses Xlib) and Mac OS X doesn't ship with X. THe windows port of GTK is the suck of all suck. It crashes more often than a drunk driver. It's less reliable than a 3-time loser serving his life sentence. It makes as much sense to use GTK for windows development as installing a periscope on a baby stroller.
If cross-platform is to be brought in to this "discussion", Qt will beat the living shit out of anything Gnome tries to offer (with the possible exception of wxWindows, but last I heard Gnome and wxWindows weren't getting along).
Slashdot Mirror
My point about using Google as a reference is that it will have a disproportionately HIGHER percentage of Linux users.
Dude, that's like saying that "since Geeks favor Albertson's, you can expect to see more geeks in Albertson's than you would see in other places, like HEB, Safeway, or Randall's." Google has over 70% of the search market share, and I'm not entirely convinced that when they reach monopoly status on search they'll be a benevolent monopoly. In any case, it doesn't matter how much geeks like google, google is used by over 70% of web searchers worldwide. In that group, geeks are a drop in the ocean and there's absolutely no reason Google's usage statistics should reflect that geeks like Google.
Take the GP poster's advice and learn something about logic. You'll also learn some critical thinking at the same time.
(yes, I do like to have 16 desktops and I do want to use my 3rd mouse button).
Here's some interesting anecdotal stuff.
Awhile back I showed a girl that I know how to use tabbed browsing in Mozilla. My buddy sitting in the room said "Tabbed browsing is useless. I never use it." He uses IE. Now she can't stop using it.
Awhile back I picked up an optical mouse for my house. My wife said "The other mouse worked fine for me." Now, she still maintains that a ball mouse works fine for her, but after letting her use the optical mouse for awhile, I switched it out again to a ball mouse. I noticed she spent a lot of time shaking the mouse and swearing. I wonder when she'll finally admit that the $10 optical mouse was a good thing?
Last week I showed my wife how to copyNpaste just by highlighting the text to copy and middle-clicking to paste. I haven't seen her right-click and select copy since then, but I have seen her copyNpaste a few times.
There are many, many things about non-Microsoft products that are just plain superior. (Yeah, I know, Microsoft invented the optical mouse, or they bought the company that invented it. Microsoft makes great meeses, and they always have.)
Ok, I'll tear down your straw men. :)
I use XP for my everyday apps, because it's a better tool for those.
My wife and I both use Linux for everything computer-related (with my Sony Clie being the exception) and I only use Windows for development when I have to. And we do it because Linux is a better tool for everyday desktop usage.
Linux has almost no penetration desktop, non-server applications. Evidence? Coming right up. Note Google's usage breakdown.
Your "evidence" only deals with Google's demographics specifically, although we can reasonably extrapolate it to say "the whole world", since Google does serve something like 70% of all searches. However, your statement was that linux didn't have "penetration desktop, non-server applications", which is plain false. Linux has plenty of it. Right now companies are getting the value proposition offered by Linux straightened out and are taking a look at it. That means, specifically, "no significant new penetration at this time". It's like when you tell your wife you're horny and she starts thinking about it. Doesn't mean you get any right away...
Tipover point? XP ranks first at 42%! Yes, Microsoft's latest O/S (which the article seems to think is a dismal failure) accounts for almost half of all web access!
Next time you get to see a pendulum, try to identify the two tipover points, and answer this question: When the pendulum reaches the tipover point, has it started downward motion? "Tipover point" doesn't mean "Microsoft will be filing Chapter 11 within a quarter". It means roughly the same thing as "turning point", i.e. Microsoft is now going to have to fight to keep its existing business. It doesn't mean they've started losing their business in droves, it just means that now Linux has the credibility and the critical mass of applications to be a serious contender against Microsoft, and people know that.
That's all.
Simply compare the number of personal computers sold when MS was founded versus the number sold today. Or the number of wordprocessor/spreadsheet users in 1990 versus today. Etc. An enormous amount of that market developed only because Microsoft was significantly cheaper than the competition.
Or possibly because it was inevitable. Our society had grown large enough that organizing information was the next bottleneck to growth. Microsoft didn't get to be who they are because they did anything special, they just got to be in the right place at the right time in history and in a position to take advantage of it. That's all.
Just like Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, and even George Washington and company.
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2003 and provide the ability to edit posts?
Hm, let's see. I make a post and piss off a bunch of people. So I get a lot of very insightful and intelligent replies to my post. Now I can edit my original post and thus render all the intelligent replies to be idiotic and foolish?
Editing posts is a *bad* idea, I think. I think it would be abused more often than it would be used.
MS is big and powerful. I don't think anybody is saying that they are disappearing. Rather, the implication is that their dominance is waning. MS will be around for at least another 25 years. Will it be running 90% of machines then? Probably not, fortunately!
I don't personally think anybody's stupid enough to think that we can drive Microsoft out of business. If anybody's that stupid, I have four words for them: "IBM is still kicking". Microsoft has replaced IBM in all but name, but it didn't cause IBMs death. SUre, IBM had a few hard years, and now they're coming back with a vengeance. Expect to see IBM have more hard years in your lifetime.
Personally, I don't want to kill Microsoft. Microsoft is the best thing to ever happen to Free Software since Linux itself! Would we all be out there working all of our spare time to make Free Software kick ass like it does if there wasn't an Evil Monopoly to fell? If this wasn't David and Goliath, how much would we *really* care?
Answer: Not much. Look how hard GNU has had to work to gain credibility, and they've been fighting for it since 1984 (The Year of Orwell). Setting aside, for the moment, GNU's own internal problems. Point is, without Microsoft to be our Satan, would we all love God as much as we do?
There's a metaphor that makes me feel a little sick to my stomach...
But seriously.. what did 1000 people organizations use for global co-ordination, communication, and messaging before MS?
Just a few guesses here, but didn't they use Solaris, AIX, Unicos, and Netware?
MS won their monopoly because of a series of conditions that existed in the early '90s. They had already started penetrating desktops because the hardware was cheap, but they had already defeated IBM, to a degree. So they were "it" for the intel platform. The non-intel platforms were still fighting. Commodore drove Apple into a corner, and C&A together knocked Atari out of the game. Then Commodore went under itself, leaving Apple an already badly-beaten mess. Meanwhile, Microsoft continued to build their desktop market, and even started to build their server market. The cheap Intel platform undermined Sun's existing desktop market (I recall Sun being the big leader on the desktop in the '80s), and Microsoft basically stepped in to fill a hole.
The *only* reason Microsoft was able to get to the point they did by the mid-90s was blind luck.
Do you want to suggest to Linus that DRM would be a great addition for Linux 2.7?
Isn't DRM already available in the 2.4 series?
Summary of parent:
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, computer uses YOU!
There have been NO cases of American civilians flying jetliners into foreign buildings.
Maybe not that, specifically, but does the phrase "domestic terrorism" ring a bell? Remember Timothy McVeigh? Columbine? On September 11, 2001, the only question I had was "Who flew the planes? Was it 'domestic terrorists' or foreign?" What does it say about a country when the first question to be asked is "did our own people just commit mass murder?"
Of course, I'm a confirmed paranoid, since I'm still inclined to think that if they had followed the money trail all the way to its source, its source would have been American Gold.
This is the real threat, and considering MS's history I really do think they'll try it. OpenOffice can open Word files? No problem, DRM them and poof, no more (legal) OpenOffice.
You forgot a couple of other things, namely IBM, Sun, and Novel. MS might be considered a "monopoly", but they'll never be able to buy enough congressassholes from IBM to put a law through that would drown IBM. No way. *That* would hurt the economy far more than Microsoft going under. We're safe from DRM, for now.
Igor Sikorsky (inventor of the helicopter) personally flew on the first flight of all his new designs. And on many of those he took family members. Now that's confidence! NASA should require the same "skin in the game".
That's actually derived from naval tradition. :) It used to be that the ship's designer, or the guy that headed up the design team, had to go on the maiden voyage. You see this in Titanic. That guy was a real guy, and he was really on the ship, and he and the captain both were expected to be the last ones on the ship. Naturally, had there been enough lifeboats, they both would have gotten away (and been tossed in the sea by the angry passengers).
Anyway, I totally agree with this idea for space travel. Put the engineers' asses on the line. Just like software developers should have to use the software they develop. :)
No, the official NASA drink is "7 up"
Are you sure it's not Burst?
Hmm, it's like this:
O(1) Linux Scheduler : Linux 2.4::Hemi : Dodge's old standard issue V8.
The Hemi is a design that has all kinds of horsepower compared to a regular V8 and tends to meet emission standards and stuff. So you really do get more power with a Hemi. Therefore your comparison is quite valid. :) And your conclusion of "don't care" is still just as valid. You just missed the "act on conclusion part", which is to go away.
Right, and then you're surfing a linked list. Why not use a dynamic array? At least then you have a table of pointers (sorta) so you don't have to loop through the list.
The problem with looping through a list like you're doing is that that operation is O(n). I don't know exaclty the O notation for when you stop when you reach the task for which you're looking, though.
They didn't exactly go and try to sell their plane. The Flyer didn't exactly fly much. :) This link has more information on the years after the first Kitty Hawk flight.
Most good skeptics doubt the Wright Brothers' flight, and I doubt the flight itself as well, actually. The thing is, they weren't up for long, and they couldn't repeat the feat without building a new airplane, and they developed their catapult system. THey later proved they didn't need the catapult to launch, but they did need it in the early days, and they didn't have it at Kitty Hawk. Why would their first plane not need a catapult, but their third plane did? The Flyer II, as you indicated, never flew.
The Wrights' made a few mistakes, and are one of the well-known examples for intellectual property hording and how it backfires. IN the end, the only way they managed to make any money off their invention (outside of winning prizes similar to the X-Prize) was in their school. They spent too much time fighting over the technology and not enough time advancing it. There's a very important lesson in there that is every bit applicable to the world of software today.
Interesting.
He does get a claim to fame, after all. :) And he was quite a pioneer in the area of flight.
Hmm, I read some more on Langley, and you might be right about his craft not flying. His aerodrome had two sets of wings, one fore and one aft (do they use those naval terms for planes? ;) ), and a motor in the middle with propellors on each end. Presumably he just strapped props onto the crank on both sides of the engine. Looks like he picked one of the more powerful engines of the time, and it may have been more powerful than the Wrights', but I haven't found specs on the Wrights'. Anyway, it also looks like he hadn't figured out how to control it because he spent his time focusing on propulsion, where the Wrights worked on control first.
Interesting enough, Langley tried to contact the Wrights and they blew him off. Looks like if they had put their minds together, let Langley put together propulsion while the Wrights worked out control, they might have been able to build the first flyer and fly it to London. ;)
As far as this brazilian wanting to make Santos-Dumont the first flyer, yes he has a slant. :) In the article you referenced, he asks us to redefine what makes the first "true airplane". If I were to cite a "first true airplane", I'd have to say one that could fly as long as it had fuel. And the Frenchies and the Wrights seemed to be very close to one another, close enough that it's highly likely that whoever we credit, we'll be wrong. The other thing is "public demonstration". As far as the Wrights were concerned, they demonstrated publicly at Kitty Hawk in 1903 that they could fly. SO they didn't "publicly" demonstrate again until 1908, they did privately demonstrate for the military and sell the first military planes before then.
IN the end, it all comes with a grain of salt. Whether or not the Wrights' first flyer flew doesn't make a lot of difference in the grand scheme of things. They showed that it can be done, and it was done. They also trained the first pilots, which is a big deal. They also made a lot of bad business decisions which meant that they could only claim the first flight, but they didn't get to claim getting rich off their invention becuase they spent too much time fighting the "bad guys". I always wonder who were the bad guys in the Wrights' world...
In either Perl --snip-- the language actually cooperates in helping the programmer write robust software.
What are you smoking? The reason Perl is described as line noise is because that's what it looks like. The only character in history that could speak line noise is the Terminatrix! And she's a fucking fiction!
If Perl cooperates in helping me write robust software then I've got two penises.
Why, exactly, should I have to handhold VB chimps?
If you're going to go to that much trouble, you need to add some bits for TimeZoneOffset and a bit to indicate whether or not DayLightSavings is in effect or not. Otherwise, you have ambiguous timestamps when stored.
Absolutely not, on a timestamp. Store timestamps in GMT only. If you want to know locale-specific information about the timestamp, convert it to your locale using your locale settings---
Wait, only one OS I know of the stores local time in the hardware clock. DO you know you're a troll? ;P
Ack! Worse yet!
[dave@fiona dave]$ python
Python 2.3 (#2, Aug 31 2003, 17:27:29)
[GCC 3.3.1 (Mandrake Linux 9.2 3.3.1-1mdk)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import time
>>> print time.ctime(1073741824)
Sat Jan 10 05:37:04 2004
>>> print time.ctime(11073741824)
Fri Dec 13 12:45:52 1901
I don't know what's scarier, knowing that this is likely to be gcc's or the kernel's fault, or knowing the Python and Perl had the same function name that took the same input and returned the same value.
What do you do when you need to represent a date before the epoch?
Damn, mod this stuff up. Mostly because I was looking for the ideal post to post this same reply to when I found this. :)
Anyway, anyone know how we currently represent historical dates before the epoch? Seriously! I suspect they're being stored as strings, therefore requiring some data conversions to use with modern dates, and something strikes me as being completely wrong with that...
I was born just before 1970. I'm a billion seconds old.
Worse yet, you're in your 30s. Sorry, dude.
It was flame bait and I just wanted to post an educated rebuttal.
Translation:
They now include a GUI to tweak the settings for an NVIdia card under Linux similar to the one under MS Windows. The GUI is written in GTK+2.x and NVidia did not have to pay QT just to be able to write a GUI for some OS.
And the new GUI for configuring the kernel is Qt-based. What exactly is your point with this? Is there *any* reason NVidia had to use GTK for their configure app? None that I can think of. For them it was probably a pretty arbitrary choice. "Hey, you who have been writing our LInux driver, make us a GUI for it." "No problem boss, I'll have it ready tomorrow." DO you really think there was a huge board meeting, or big-time IT department meeting or even a large developer meeting for that?
I just think that for Linux to be more accepted in the Corporate World(tm), a corporate Linux distro needs to REALLY limit the choices of packages, pick what the distro builders feel are the best and focus on making those packages work well together.
I disagree completely. I may have been responding to you when I said this already, but here goes again.
Microsoft gets a lot of flak because they have made a number of decisions in their OS that negatively affect businesses. The decisions themselves differ from business to business, but the bottom line is that most businesses are not completely happy with their Windows OS. Give them Linux, where they can now make all of the decisions they want or they can let the vendor make some/all of them. Do you really think that a company is going to install Linux on all their desktops and then tell their employees "You can use Gnome, KDE, IceWM, WindowMaker, Enlightenment...". FUCK NO. A business is going to look carefully at the desktops available and the apps available, pick ONE, and then install that on their machines. If they're big enough and the contract is big enough, they can probably get the vendor to give them a custom installer that ultimately leaves them with a system that they can use the vendor's update service with. And for that they need the vendor to support the desktop they pick, and if UserLinux isn't going to support KDE, they're going to miss out on a lot of their market. They'll lose it to the likes of Mandrake that fully supports Gnome and KDE.
ANd no. Debian's volunteer-maintained repository is not a good selling point in this market. RedHat and Mandrake both provide repositories with some QA (probably RedHat's QA is better than Mandrake's, although I prefer Mandrake ;) ), and they each have a significant commercial stake in the quality of their repositories. Debian doesn't, and never will. They're a volunteer organization. That's great and all, but a company wants to know that updating their desktops isn't going to cause all of their users to sit on their asses for 2 days because some volunteer didn't double-check his package.
Choice is good and needs to be preserved for businesses. The #1 selling point of Linux over Windows is choice. Microsoft has a record for reducing/eliminating choice and Linux and KDE both have a record for creating/adding choice.
Look at MS Windows and Mac OS X. You don't have to pay extra to develop commercial, closed source applications on those platforms, it would be silly to require that under Linux.
Quite the contrary, if you intend to develop for Windows and Mac OS X with GTK you're fucked. Sorry, no go. Doesn't work at all. GTK uses Xlib (or rather, GTK now uses GDK which uses Xlib) and Mac OS X doesn't ship with X. THe windows port of GTK is the suck of all suck. It crashes more often than a drunk driver. It's less reliable than a 3-time loser serving his life sentence. It makes as much sense to use GTK for windows development as installing a periscope on a baby stroller.
If cross-platform is to be brought in to this "discussion", Qt will beat the living shit out of anything Gnome tries to offer (with the possible exception of wxWindows, but last I heard Gnome and wxWindows weren't getting along).