I agree that before Linux the GNU system was not an operating system yet; however, most non-kernel parts were already written when Linux arrived. Of course, all the utilities and libraries only ran on already-existing (proprietary) Unix systems, so you can't really call this a system.
Glibc was not written for Linux; today it only supports Linux and the Hurd, but originally it supported many other systems. This was necessary in order to create as much as a free system as possible as long as there was no kernel for the GNU system.
The problem with creating a complete (Debian) GNU/Hurd distribution is not at all that it's so hard to port those packages to the Hurd (it isn't). It's simply the fact that the Hurd (due to its much more nonstandard design than Linux) hasn't reached the level of maturity of Linux yet.
In the GNU Coding Standards, there are a couple of paragraphs about the issue of using/referring to Unix code, as well as accepting code from other contributors whose sources (no pun intended) are unclear. The necessity of being extremely careful with these things is now becoming painfully clear...
Because of the computations required to analyze the enormous amount of data a particle collider outputs. The scattered particles go through all sorts of detectors which measure their energy and direction and send them to the cluster, which has to search for particles significantly smaller than a needle in a haystack of measurements.
I attended a lecture the other day by an expert on nanoscience. One interesting thing he noted is that while nanoscience is making rapid progress, real successes in the field we should call nanotechnology are still far away. We can `see' and `feel' atoms now, but it will take a while before mass-production of molecule-sized devices will be feasible.
As if free software/open source advocates wanted to fight for the rights of computers in the same way human rights campaigners fight for the rights of humans...
IMHO, this is just a lame attempt to ridicule RMS et al. --
Locally, the expansion of the universe can be countered by gravity. Just like the stars in our galaxy are held together by gravity, galaxies form clusters in which the velocities are not what you would expect from the expansion of the universe alone. Our Milky Way, for example, is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. The `collision' will happen in some hundreds of millions of years, IIRC. There will, however, be virtually no danger of colliding stars, although, judging from recent discoveries, we may experience severe amounts of supernovae...
If you're going to invade the Earth, guess at what moment you want to do that... Right!
No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twenty-first century came the great disillusionment.
No, you're not. IMHO, going to school makes it much easier to absorb the material than just reading the book. I find it extremely useful if somebody explains the ideas of something, gives examples, etc. I read the books to get the details, but going to school makes me grasp the necessary intuition much quicker. (I'm a math and astronomy student, and this is how it works best for me; I can imagine that for other sciences `just reading the book' works a lot better.)
Of course, going to school doesn't `make you special', but with schools we're surely a lot better off than without them. And for specialised subjects, who would be able to teach you better than people who do research in those subjects?
at least I think it was that. A few years ago, I wanted to write a program that wrote a disk image to a floppy disk in DOS. However, when I copied some code from the C library documentation, I forgot to change the device code from the hard disk to the floppy disk! Consequently, the FAT seemed to be FUBAR. Fortunately, I found Disk Doctor on the other hard disk, and it was able to repair most of the damage. I only lost a couple of Windows files, but since I almost never used Windows anyway, that wasn't such a big loss.
This reminds me of the `proof' of the Poincaré conjecture posted a few months ago on arXiv.org by Sergey Nikitin (see this page). Does anybody know if that has received any serious attention from other mathematicians? I read one reaction of a mathematician saying Nikitin had a wrong idea of one of the concepts he used, but he has made a couple of corrections since then.
unfortunately. We were taught it in one of our astronomy classes to analyze and plot data. It has a very arcane syntax and doesn't have a lot of capabilities (no matrices; there is a very crude way to represent square matrices as sets of vectors). I now use Octave or Matlab as much as possible for numerical work. For symbolic math, I mostly use Maple. I also have a little experience with Mathematica, but I like Maple better (although Mathematica looks nice). As far as I know Maxima, it can't do as much as Maple or Mathematica, but it should be good enough for most symbolic computations.
They're faster for computations that use large numbers (mostly scientific software; OS or office software probably won't benefit a lot from it). 64-bit processors are also able to address a lot more memory (2^64 bytes instead of 2^32 bytes = 4 GB).
There exist two versions of the PowerPC instruction set, one 32-bit and one 64-bit. The processors currently in use are all 32-bit, and the new 64-bit ones will be a superset of the 32-bit ones (and can execute 32-bit code natively).
I wonder how far in advance things like, say, the climate can be predicted, even by such a powerful computer. It's almost impossible to predict the weather for even a small area (I live in the Netherlands) for more than the coming few days to a week, because it's so sensitive to small errors. (That doesn't mean I'm not impressed by the thing, of course.)
Slashdot Mirror
then why is Micro$oft still around?
Bell Labs have another server with the same contents here.
Yes, it is.
Glibc was not written for Linux; today it only supports Linux and the Hurd, but originally it supported many other systems. This was necessary in order to create as much as a free system as possible as long as there was no kernel for the GNU system.
The problem with creating a complete (Debian) GNU/Hurd distribution is not at all that it's so hard to port those packages to the Hurd (it isn't). It's simply the fact that the Hurd (due to its much more nonstandard design than Linux) hasn't reached the level of maturity of Linux yet.
In the GNU Coding Standards, there are a couple of paragraphs about the issue of using/referring to Unix code, as well as accepting code from other contributors whose sources (no pun intended) are unclear. The necessity of being extremely careful with these things is now becoming painfully clear...
--
(Disclaimer: IANAPP (Particle Physicist))
I attended a lecture the other day by an expert on nanoscience. One interesting thing he noted is that while nanoscience is making rapid progress, real successes in the field we should call nanotechnology are still far away. We can `see' and `feel' atoms now, but it will take a while before mass-production of molecule-sized devices will be feasible.
IMHO, this is just a lame attempt to ridicule RMS et al.
--
Locally, the expansion of the universe can be countered by gravity. Just like the stars in our galaxy are held together by gravity, galaxies form clusters in which the velocities are not what you would expect from the expansion of the universe alone. Our Milky Way, for example, is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. The `collision' will happen in some hundreds of millions of years, IIRC. There will, however, be virtually no danger of colliding stars, although, judging from recent discoveries, we may experience severe amounts of supernovae...
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering. -- Arthur C. Clarke
No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twenty-first century came the great disillusionment.
(See also the online version of the book.)
No, you're not. IMHO, going to school makes it much easier to absorb the material than just reading the book. I find it extremely useful if somebody explains the ideas of something, gives examples, etc. I read the books to get the details, but going to school makes me grasp the necessary intuition much quicker. (I'm a math and astronomy student, and this is how it works best for me; I can imagine that for other sciences `just reading the book' works a lot better.)
Of course, going to school doesn't `make you special', but with schools we're surely a lot better off than without them. And for specialised subjects, who would be able to teach you better than people who do research in those subjects?
at least I think it was that. A few years ago, I wanted to write a program that wrote a disk image to a floppy disk in DOS. However, when I copied some code from the C library documentation, I forgot to change the device code from the hard disk to the floppy disk! Consequently, the FAT seemed to be FUBAR. Fortunately, I found Disk Doctor on the other hard disk, and it was able to repair most of the damage. I only lost a couple of Windows files, but since I almost never used Windows anyway, that wasn't such a big loss.
This reminds me of the `proof' of the Poincaré conjecture posted a few months ago on arXiv.org by Sergey Nikitin (see this page). Does anybody know if that has received any serious attention from other mathematicians? I read one reaction of a mathematician saying Nikitin had a wrong idea of one of the concepts he used, but he has made a couple of corrections since then.
unfortunately. We were taught it in one of our astronomy classes to analyze and plot data. It has a very arcane syntax and doesn't have a lot of capabilities (no matrices; there is a very crude way to represent square matrices as sets of vectors). I now use Octave or Matlab as much as possible for numerical work. For symbolic math, I mostly use Maple. I also have a little experience with Mathematica, but I like Maple better (although Mathematica looks nice). As far as I know Maxima, it can't do as much as Maple or Mathematica, but it should be good enough for most symbolic computations.
They're faster for computations that use large numbers (mostly scientific software; OS or office software probably won't benefit a lot from it). 64-bit processors are also able to address a lot more memory (2^64 bytes instead of 2^32 bytes = 4 GB).
There exist two versions of the PowerPC instruction set, one 32-bit and one 64-bit. The processors currently in use are all 32-bit, and the new 64-bit ones will be a superset of the 32-bit ones (and can execute 32-bit code natively).
Europe is written as Europa!
Actually, I haven't seen a single cloud in five days! (which indeed surprises me, too)
I wonder how far in advance things like, say, the climate can be predicted, even by such a powerful computer. It's almost impossible to predict the weather for even a small area (I live in the Netherlands) for more than the coming few days to a week, because it's so sensitive to small errors. (That doesn't mean I'm not impressed by the thing, of course.)
Of course, why didn't someone think of that before?