This is the reason that Slashdotters who support Linux shouldn't be fixing every Windows PC around and giving others pirated software. So many people think they're sticking it to the man by using pirated proprietary software, but it only increases the user base of it.
Microsoft is happy to let the Chinese pirate everything, because it locks them in and increases their user base. Without it, alternatives like Red Flag Linux might actually have a few users.
You aren't stuck with NTFS on them. You can always reformat a flash drive as a large FAT32 volume (or any other FS) from Linux. Windows can use a large FAT32 FS, but it can't create one, so Linux can be used as a workaround. Example command:
An old, slow, quiet PC does make an extremely reliable router. I did this with a 25MHz 486, with 12MB of memory and 4 NIC's. It had no hard drive, and loaded the whole system into RAM from a floppy disk at boot time. It performed like a champ without a single hiccup.
Re:easy way to fill a book
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Yet, for any programmer new to object orientation...
How many can there be left these days?!? It's too easy to accumulate enough material for a good-sized book by starting from scratch and assuming the reader only knows how to read. Anyone could write a beginner's book on a computer language, without knowing the language too in depth, by just padding it with lots of remedial review material, that 99% of the readers don't need and don't want (to wade thru or pay for).
From what I have seen, there are many programmers who do not use OO languages. But what is disturbing is the number of programmers who do use OOP to some extent, but don't use it without even understanding its basic concepts.
Dijkstra used to say that BASIC mutilated programmers' minds. But today, I think that C++ and VB have taken that role.
Isn't it the Republican Party's job to acquiesce to big business? You must be new here. The system is such that the parties only benefit when they gain power, not when they do good. When will people wake up and realize that the world cannot be run with money? That the almighty dollar is not the best leader? That we should endeavor to maximize human happiness, freedom, and education, and not just the cash in our wallets? America has been running on greed and fear for too long.
And FWIW, Noam Chomsky has been writing since the 1950's that they are just two factions of the business party.
Where did you get this fact from -- "most of us dual-boot"? I've never heard that before. And who do you mean by "us"? Home desktop PC users who use Linux, I assume?
Cars, televisions, players, music, computers... are there really any electronics intended to last 30 years any more? Electric guitars and some guitar vacuum tube amps are the only electronics I know of that are still made to last decades and be serviced easily. A $2000 Marshall amp, for example, needs to be able to be serviced if a capacitor goes bad, or if the transformer blows out.
Many vintage amps from the 1950's just need a few capacitors replaced, and they will work perfectly, 50-year old vacuum tubes and all.
If your definition of "desktop-ready" is "works exactly like Windows", then no non-Windows OS will ever be there. There will always be Windows apps that will not work for Linux. This isn't a "shortcoming" of Linux, and it is not the job of developers to make Linux completely compatible with Windows applications.
The issue that he raises is a flaw in capitalism, not specific to this case. Capitalism assumes that consumers have accurate information about their purchases. Making this information readily available is not encouraging capitalism, but rather trying to deny that the flaw exists.
If anything, this has the trappings of libertarian or democratic socialism. The idea of democracy taking a role in putting moral standards on powerful economic institutions, is not traditionally capitalist.
Absolutely. If you want to understand why someone would commit suicide, then research suicide. The answers are typically the same -- a profound feeling of hopelessness, coupled with isolation or loneliness.
If more people took the time to understand why others commit suicide, I think that it could be prevented in many cases. Simply making sure that people aren't completely isolated in social situations, or have a few friends, could make all the difference.
Java is an object-oriented language. In any real object-oriented language, you need to learn about objects right away. C++ is a hybrid language that is arguably one of the worst languages for beginners to learn, since it takes the ugly details of C, and adds on half-baked OO ideas that are simply optional.
A language such as Scheme will teach better program design, and teach high school students good program design from the start. The problem with teaching programming in high school, and even at the university level, is that students are often taught convoluted language semantics (every detail in C++) rather than program design and logical reasoning. Scheme is simple to the point that it can be picked up in a day or two, and then the rest of the class could focus on real problem-solving. This is the MIT approach, with their intro course (6.001).
Desktop Linux distros like Ubuntu have worked well for a long time now. They aren't something always on the horizon. You're not going to wake up one morning and realize that this year is the year of Linux on the desktop, and see mass conversions.
And FWIW, the best Quadro performance isn't going to make a difference unless you're doing high-performance rendering or some similar task (and you actually have a Quadro card).
Try the hundreds of heavy metal bands in Sweden, many of which also come to the states to tour. Sweden most likely exports the greatest amount of metal, of any European country. Opeth, for example, is now certainly one of the most highly acclaimed metal bands in the world.
Just about every serious guitarist still uses tube amps. They're not esoteric or ancient at all for this purpose, because they're the best tool for the job. Although digital models of tube amps have improved, nothing sounds quite like the real thing.
If your biggest complaint about Ubuntu is that it mounts CD's for you, then you should really be complaining about every GUI-oriented distribution in the last 10+ years. Slackware is great for learning Linux (6-7 years on my desktop), but Ubuntu is unique in that it gets out of the way of the user. No Slackware/etc files to edit, and no SuSE big clunky icons and huge taskbars to get in your way. And if you think that people wanting a simple, eloquent operating system should go with Windows, then you're pretty out of touch with reality.
Your typical socialists would have everything nationalised, under the control of politicians.
Where are these people? As a socialist, I see much more of the libertarian and democratic forms of socialism than anything else. So-called "communism" as practiced in the USSR and China has very little support from socialists around the world, and most will not regard them as forms of true socialism. It's mostly uninformed Americans, who think that true socialism equates to Leninism, who actually believe otherwise. I think that you would do well to learn a bit about the history of anarchism and democratic socialism before you spew your James Bond Cold War FUD.
My experiences of loading Emacs 21 on an HP Vectra 100MHz 486 must have been very different from whatever you were running. I upgraded my RAM to deal specifically with this problem, but Emacs was still slower to start up than Vim was (although it loaded reasonably well). Vim was no speed demon either, which was why I ended up using Elvis for most things. Now that I'm in the future and running on an Athlon, I can use Vim or Emacs without even noticing a startup delay. I still like both editors for different reasons, but those are my experiences, and they're not bullshit.
When I was still reading/. through lynx a few years ago on my 486 (no joke) running Slackware, the difference between the performance of Emacs and Vim was very significant. Vim wasn't nearly as responsive as elvis, but it was still much faster than Emacs. In fact, I scrounged up a 16MB SIMM to upgrade my RAM to a total of 24MB, and that was the only way to get Emacs to run better. But at the end of the day I had learned too many convenient Vim shortcuts.
Personally, the company that I work for doesn't care whether I'm a techie or not. I'm a developer to them, and they aren't willing to shell out hundreds of dollars so I can run a special, unsupported setup when they have hundreds of PC's to maintain in a controlled environment. Which company do you work at that allows you to install whatever OS you want on your development system, using an unsupported virtualization method like Xen?
I reiterate: In the real world, virtualization is rarely used outside the server room.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the reason that Slashdotters who support Linux shouldn't be fixing every Windows PC around and giving others pirated software. So many people think they're sticking it to the man by using pirated proprietary software, but it only increases the user base of it.
Microsoft is happy to let the Chinese pirate everything, because it locks them in and increases their user base. Without it, alternatives like Red Flag Linux might actually have a few users.
You aren't stuck with NTFS on them. You can always reformat a flash drive as a large FAT32 volume (or any other FS) from Linux. Windows can use a large FAT32 FS, but it can't create one, so Linux can be used as a workaround. Example command:
/dev/sda1
$ mkfs.vfat -F 32
An old, slow, quiet PC does make an extremely reliable router. I did this with a 25MHz 486, with 12MB of memory and 4 NIC's. It had no hard drive, and loaded the whole system into RAM from a floppy disk at boot time. It performed like a champ without a single hiccup.
We should be learning about longevity from people like this.
Yet, for any programmer new to object orientation...
How many can there be left these days?!? It's too easy to accumulate enough material for a good-sized book by starting from scratch and assuming the reader only knows how to read. Anyone could write a beginner's book on a computer language, without knowing the language too in depth, by just padding it with lots of remedial review material, that 99% of the readers don't need and don't want (to wade thru or pay for).
From what I have seen, there are many programmers who do not use OO languages. But what is disturbing is the number of programmers who do use OOP to some extent, but don't use it without even understanding its basic concepts.
Dijkstra used to say that BASIC mutilated programmers' minds. But today, I think that C++ and VB have taken that role.
And FWIW, Noam Chomsky has been writing since the 1950's that they are just two factions of the business party.
Where did you get this fact from -- "most of us dual-boot"? I've never heard that before. And who do you mean by "us"? Home desktop PC users who use Linux, I assume?
Many vintage amps from the 1950's just need a few capacitors replaced, and they will work perfectly, 50-year old vacuum tubes and all.
If your definition of "desktop-ready" is "works exactly like Windows", then no non-Windows OS will ever be there. There will always be Windows apps that will not work for Linux. This isn't a "shortcoming" of Linux, and it is not the job of developers to make Linux completely compatible with Windows applications.
The issue that he raises is a flaw in capitalism, not specific to this case. Capitalism assumes that consumers have accurate information about their purchases. Making this information readily available is not encouraging capitalism, but rather trying to deny that the flaw exists.
If anything, this has the trappings of libertarian or democratic socialism. The idea of democracy taking a role in putting moral standards on powerful economic institutions, is not traditionally capitalist.
Absolutely. If you want to understand why someone would commit suicide, then research suicide. The answers are typically the same -- a profound feeling of hopelessness, coupled with isolation or loneliness.
If more people took the time to understand why others commit suicide, I think that it could be prevented in many cases. Simply making sure that people aren't completely isolated in social situations, or have a few friends, could make all the difference.
Java is an object-oriented language. In any real object-oriented language, you need to learn about objects right away. C++ is a hybrid language that is arguably one of the worst languages for beginners to learn, since it takes the ugly details of C, and adds on half-baked OO ideas that are simply optional.
A language such as Scheme will teach better program design, and teach high school students good program design from the start. The problem with teaching programming in high school, and even at the university level, is that students are often taught convoluted language semantics (every detail in C++) rather than program design and logical reasoning. Scheme is simple to the point that it can be picked up in a day or two, and then the rest of the class could focus on real problem-solving. This is the MIT approach, with their intro course (6.001).
Desktop Linux distros like Ubuntu have worked well for a long time now. They aren't something always on the horizon. You're not going to wake up one morning and realize that this year is the year of Linux on the desktop, and see mass conversions.
And FWIW, the best Quadro performance isn't going to make a difference unless you're doing high-performance rendering or some similar task (and you actually have a Quadro card).
Wikipedia: Human Development Index
#2: Norway
#6: Sweden
#12: United States
Democratic socialist Scandinavian countries -- where people live in abject squalor and poverty due to the evil scurge of socialism...
Try the hundreds of heavy metal bands in Sweden, many of which also come to the states to tour. Sweden most likely exports the greatest amount of metal, of any European country. Opeth, for example, is now certainly one of the most highly acclaimed metal bands in the world.
Just about every serious guitarist still uses tube amps. They're not esoteric or ancient at all for this purpose, because they're the best tool for the job. Although digital models of tube amps have improved, nothing sounds quite like the real thing.
There was no suggestion of anyone blaming YouTube in the summary or in the article. WTF?
If your biggest complaint about Ubuntu is that it mounts CD's for you, then you should really be complaining about every GUI-oriented distribution in the last 10+ years. Slackware is great for learning Linux (6-7 years on my desktop), but Ubuntu is unique in that it gets out of the way of the user. No Slackware /etc files to edit, and no SuSE big clunky icons and huge taskbars to get in your way. And if you think that people wanting a simple, eloquent operating system should go with Windows, then you're pretty out of touch with reality.
Jeebus, I need to move to Sweden.
My experiences of loading Emacs 21 on an HP Vectra 100MHz 486 must have been very different from whatever you were running. I upgraded my RAM to deal specifically with this problem, but Emacs was still slower to start up than Vim was (although it loaded reasonably well). Vim was no speed demon either, which was why I ended up using Elvis for most things. Now that I'm in the future and running on an Athlon, I can use Vim or Emacs without even noticing a startup delay. I still like both editors for different reasons, but those are my experiences, and they're not bullshit.
When I was still reading /. through lynx a few years ago on my 486 (no joke) running Slackware, the difference between the performance of Emacs and Vim was very significant. Vim wasn't nearly as responsive as elvis, but it was still much faster than Emacs. In fact, I scrounged up a 16MB SIMM to upgrade my RAM to a total of 24MB, and that was the only way to get Emacs to run better. But at the end of the day I had learned too many convenient Vim shortcuts.
I reiterate: In the real world, virtualization is rarely used outside the server room.