For smaller server purposes, 64-bit x86 and Itanium may be a more economical choice.
But if you need a large memory bandwidth, I think probably still beats out Itanium, and definitely beats x86.
If you need a whole shitload of CPUs in one box, Sparc is also a better architecture - even if Itanium can scale up to hundreds of processors, there's no OS that runs on it which can properly handle that many.
When Alone in the Dark came out, it was hailed as a remarkable evolution in the adventure game genre. There are plenty of direct descendants of Alone in the Dark that fit the bill, too - the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series come to mind.
Granted, they now incorporate fighting monsters, and have given up on the interaction with NPC's, but that's not a very surprising change considering the genre as a whole seems to have shifted over to the console market.
Just a nitpick- Gentoo's portage system does not force you to compile everything. There is a switch to download binary versions of stuff, and you can also set it to download binaries by default.
Overall, I think portage has it right more than any other group. A GUI install would be nice, and I'd like to see some sort of gentoo take-off that is to Gentoo what Mandrake is to Red Hat.
You can't "just get Mac OS X". You have to get a Mac with it. Buying a whole new computer is a lot more expensive than changing distros.
Besides, a lot of us don't just use Linux because it's unix. Personally, I like to use Linux because I'm sick of getting dicked over by Microsoft. I've been watching Apple since OS X came out and thinking about the switch for a while, but the fact that Apple also likes to dick its customers over on a fairly regular basis makes me wary about going for it.
Fine. Just as long as I never have to look up another pair of major/minor numbers and manually create the entry in/dev when installing new hardware ever, ever again.
1: the stuff he says on the first page is basically a bunch of static linkx that can be done easily.
He said as much on the page (although he would use symlinks in a lot of the cases, which would be a better idea). The point is that even if it can be done easily, nobody buth Apple has done it yet.
2: You cannot have a Gentoo style community unless you are a distro that caters to people who are willing to go to great lengths to learn more about their OS and computer hardware.
You can have a Gentoo style community with people who are interested in computers. Anyone using linux already fits this criterion whether they're 1337 or not. Besides, who's to say that people who like to dig into the hardware wouldn't flock to a distro like this? I'm a gentoo junkie, too. The reason I went to Gentoo is because of portage - the install is a pain in the ass, but once I'm done I have the only linux distro I know of with a decent install/uninstall process. I like that. Just because I can deal with the system doesn't mean I want to every day. I'll gladly take some gloss that's implemented well (the way what little gloss Gentoo has is).
I'm not sure where this idea that hackers enjoy computers that are difficult to use came from, but I'm pretty sure it's either teenage boys or people who've come to linux because it's l33t.
3: the one desktop environment is stupid. Thats one of the reasons I switched from windows, that their desktop environment is idiotic, especially in the same paragraph as talking about how linux offers choice.
Fine. Then make your own distro that uses the dekstop environment you like. If you like no desktop environment, go for it. Nobody says there has to be just one linux distro.
4: installers are not necessary. try making a gui frontend to Gentoo's emerge/portage if you want a good install system. Not only does it download and update, but it also works. really well.
If I want to have some options about how a package is installed on my system, installers are necessary, even if having installers means making a system like portage a bit more interactive. Especially if we're talking about a distro that's designed for the desktop, having to fool with portage's USE variables is not a very good way to go about having customizing how things are installed. In a desktop distro, something like USE variables should be limited to setting system defaults.
not to echo Linus or anything, he sounds like his objective os to combat microsoft on the desktop. I think personally that it is far better to exceed or be superior to Microsoft for technical reasons more than market share reasons.
We're in the 21st century. I think it's fair to say that having a decent GUI can be considered a technical reason to use an OS. When most people get into arguments about desktop OSes, the arguments center around one of two things - GUI or application/hardware support. Why do most people complain about windows? Its sucky GUI comes up as often as anything else. How come it's sensible to complain about Windows's crappy gui but not to point out that Linux's gui is even crappier?
Besides...last time I checked the average non-poweruser on windows is just as lost as they would be in KDE, for example, if not more. And were said powerusers not almost all gamers, they'd likely find KDE superior if they gave it a chance (to compare similar DE's). You haven't been spending much time helping non-powerusers work with KDE, have you? It's one of my job expectations. I can tell you with complete certainty that most people find KDE much, much harder to use than Windows. Yeah, sure, you can read all those nice anecdotes about someone who set up a linux box for mom and dad and how they find it easier to use. For every one of those anecdotes I've heard, I deal with several people per day who can't even figure out how to eject a CD using KDE. (Of course, the eject button on the drive won't work because the CD is mounted.)
He covers a lot of overlooked stuff. A lot of the people working on having a desktop-ready linux seem to think that you can just throw on some clone of LinuxConf or YaST that you made yourself and call it a day.
Not true.
The math and CS departments at my school have started maintaining machines running Red Hat in any computer lab they can exercise any control over. Naturally, students who aren't familiar with linux try them out. Seeing as how I work the helpdesk and I'm the one everybody seems to come to for help with installing linux anyway, I end up helping them out a lot, and I've noticed a few things.
The author's comments on the filesystem are dead-on, but don't go far enough. I've helped users who are trying to save files on the desktop, and they expect the desktop to be an option in file pickers. I would like it to be there, too - having to go to "/home/uname/Desktop" is not intuitive, and it's a pain in the ass. This should be something that is global to all file handling dialogs. KDE does it in a half-assed way (I don't know about Gnome 2), and it doesn't really help much anyway since all applications seem to want to write their own dialogs from scratch, anyway.
KDE and Gnome need to come to an agreement on some common dialogs, work on a design for these dialogs and how they will work, and then implement them using a shared library that both will access. I don't care how it is implemented - the dialogs can be written in straight X11 so it looks the same on both, or the library can check for what environment is being used and pop up a dialog that is written using GTK+ or QT. As long as they look and work the same, I'm happy.
Another one is networking. We've tried finding a good way to help students who aren't good with Linux to access our campus network resources. LinNeighborhood is the best we've come up with so far, and that doesn't even get to the configuration issues that pop up for people trying to get their own linux boxen connected to the network. Come on, people. Most everyone using Samba is connecting to Windows networks. Windows networks usually have pretty much the same configuration. Why the heck can't we have distros that set up Samba by default, have Samba's default configuration be for a standard Windows network, and give users a decent system? On top of it, there is no good network browser. Apple gives me splat-K and pops shares up on my desktop. Windows gives me Network Neighborhood and acts as if all shares on a network are already in my filesystem. LinNeighborhood makes me mount everything, then forces me to go into the filesystem again and find where I mounted the share, and it asks me for my username and password every step of the way. In this case, I like the Apple model best. Give me a "connect to server" option in my start menu, and when I connect to a server, pop up an icon on my desktop.
While we're on the subject of things just popping up without any hassle, if your distro isn't using DevFS yet, get it switched the heck over. If the driver you're writing isn't DevFS compatible, get it working that way.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but the point is, there are a whole lot of details involved in a good desktop OS. Linux is a great desktop OS for me, but I am comfortable enough with Linux to handle the hassle, and I've made it over the 2-year learning curve. Anyone who thinks that drag'n'drop and a somewhat working office suite makes a complete desktop OS for the general public needs to get a clue.
Is why so many people seem to want to oversimplify the situation.
As with any set of data, it's not all signal and it's not all noise. Much of the research in global warming may be due to political motive. (Though personally, I'm not inclined to agree that environmentalism is a purely political issue. I have a lot of reasons to be concerned by the idea that Florida might start shrinking in the next century, and none of them have to do with politics.) However, the focus of all the stuff I've heard about lately is on trying to figure out just how much of the change in global climate over the past century is due to natural fluctuation and how much is due to pollution.
Besides, even if it turns out to be entirely due to nautural fluctuation, it seems that it would be in our best interests to still modify the actions of humanity as a whole to promote a global climate that is best suited to humans. People don't think irrigation is a stupid idea because Mother Nature didn't put a body of water in the middle of every cornfield. The issue at hand should be what action is ultimately the most beneficial to the world.
Anyone familar with computer science sees how this disadvantages women in the field.
Any anybody familiar with actual breathing human beings who are studying to be computer scientists these days would say you're a full of shit crypto-misogynist.
For one, I've met a whole lot more CS students who are also majoring in something in the fine arts than I have physics, bio, etc. majors.
For two, anybody who has seen kids being raised can tell that boys are taught to be less emotional than girls. If a boy gets a constructive toy, it'll be an erector set. If a girl gets a constructive toy, it'll be finger paints.
And going back to your IQ point, it's been fairly well accepted by everybody but the kinds of idiots who think The Bell Curve was real science that you can't use the IQ test to compare different social divisions of people (such as the races or the sexes).
(Sorry about saying crypto-misogynist, but you gotta admit the word is kinda cute.)
Excuse me, but the U.N. and the WTO are two entirely different bodies with very little (if any) overlap in terms of powers and responsibilities. It's relationship with the U.S. government is also entirely different.
The same for the League of Nations - one is meant for political stability. The other is meant for maximizing free trade (thereby maximizing economic efficiency (usually at the expense of reduced equity)). The Powers that Be have much more to gain directly from agreeing to do whatever the WTO tells them to do. Yeah, they may have to kowtow to the WTO (in ways that don't really affect the people making these decisions) every so often, but it also means that whenever another country wants to put trade restrictions on U.S. goods, the U.S. can also go cry to the WTO.
So yeah, you're right that the U.S. could use the mass of its economy to destabilize the WTO, but I think it's ludicrous to think that it will.
That doesn't matter. If the WTO takes an aggressive stance against U.S. policy, the U.S. gov't will just ignore them, or attempt to sideline them, as is their usual strategy when dealing with unresponsive world bodies.
I don't buy it. Your suggestion does not line up at all with the activities of the US government in the past.
If we quit listening to the WTO telling us how we can and can not restrict trade, we'd no longer be able to go to the WTO to force other companies to import stuff of ours that they don't want, like fuel additives that cause cancer (Canada), or BGH-laced cow products that fuck up peoples' hormonal systems (European Union).
That is the unintended consequence of connecting everyone everywhere. Now employers can hire anyone from anywhere.
No, this is a totally intended consequence of integrating the world's markets. Do you really thing stuff like NAFTA was dreamt up as anything but a way for companies to get cheap labor? It certainly hasn't provided any benefits to the citizens of North America w/r/t increasted availability of goods, more stable markets, better market competition, or what have you.
Cute thing is, if the US tried to enact legislation to protect its workforce (yeah right, not until Americans realize that billionaire oil tycoons are not, and will never be 'just regular Joes like you and me'), the WTO would probably slap it on the wrist for obstructing free trade.
Try Elite. It's super old, but you can also try to find its sequel, Frontier. Both are at the Home of the Underdogs.
Good Newtonian spaceflight for the time. I don't think that stars and planets produce gravity that affects starships, but otherwise spaceship flight is quite realistically implemented.
I don't think whoever wrote the blurb for the story RTFA on it being debunked last time.
What was debunked is the idea that if you burn lots of money, break a few laws of physics, engineer electronic devices that can modulate information transmissions at rates orders of magnitude faster than the best we've got right now (but will cost under $60 apiece), and break a few more laws of physics, you can transmit data over the power grid in the exobit range. (That's thousands of gigabits.)
Other companies that aren't scams have had much more modest success. The idea works, the problem is finding a way to make it financially workable, too.
Yeah, what useless crap. It only applies directly to everything we know in the universe.
No really, it isn't all that useful. If it were somehow applicalbe to partial differential equations, for example, it might offer a simple way of handling many engineering problems.
Granted, being able to describe shapes with a function can be terribly useful, as it might then become possible to use linear algebra or calculus to directly solve various problems relating to that shape's geometry rather than approximating a solution.
But still, that's just shapes. There's a lot more to the universe than shapes. And no, I'm not willing to consider something like a function of two variables a shape just because it can be plotted in three dimensions.
Wireless is sexy and sci-fi. But it's also getting pushed hard right now, when it can't deliver the quality of wireless networking that people in the general public have in their heads. You guys better get caught up fast, or there's going to be some dissilusionment and a wireless bust and a few companies are going to have to die.
I would get a few other Exchange servers together and go to Redmond (killing a few people on the way). Then we would go to Bill Gates's house and request that he turn us into something other than Exchange servers. When he says he can't, we crush his head, and kill a few more people. Then we would leave his house and try and kill a couple more people in the few scant hours before we crash.
No, it's that I haven't sat down and read GTK+ 2.0's documentation because the only project I'm working in right now are GTK+ 1.2 && isn't going to be ported to 2.0 until the next release.
I know a couple people who have had complications.
One got an infection, the other basically destroyed a few of her molars by biting on the tongue ring.
As far as the infection goes, apparently tongue piercings are the most likely to get infected. They are particularly troublesome because they can be fatal (due to the proximity of your tongue to your brain).
I'm not too surprised about the teeth chipping, either.
Slashdot Mirror
While we're at it, why doesn't the open source write an ext2 defragmenter?
For smaller server purposes, 64-bit x86 and Itanium may be a more economical choice.
But if you need a large memory bandwidth, I think probably still beats out Itanium, and definitely beats x86.
If you need a whole shitload of CPUs in one box, Sparc is also a better architecture - even if Itanium can scale up to hundreds of processors, there's no OS that runs on it which can properly handle that many.
I do a lot of work on a Sun450. The OS is solaris, but almost all the tools we use, with the exception of the C library, are GNU.
Yes, GNU needs _A_ kernel, but not necessarily the Linux kernel.
Maybe it's just me, but when I realized that Batman and Robin were lovers, I didn't lose a myth so much as gain some role models.
I was wondering the same thing.
When Alone in the Dark came out, it was hailed as a remarkable evolution in the adventure game genre. There are plenty of direct descendants of Alone in the Dark that fit the bill, too - the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series come to mind.
Granted, they now incorporate fighting monsters, and have given up on the interaction with NPC's, but that's not a very surprising change considering the genre as a whole seems to have shifted over to the console market.
Just a nitpick- Gentoo's portage system does not force you to compile everything. There is a switch to download binary versions of stuff, and you can also set it to download binaries by default.
Overall, I think portage has it right more than any other group. A GUI install would be nice, and I'd like to see some sort of gentoo take-off that is to Gentoo what Mandrake is to Red Hat.
maybe because we own PC's, perchance?
You can't "just get Mac OS X". You have to get a Mac with it. Buying a whole new computer is a lot more expensive than changing distros.
Besides, a lot of us don't just use Linux because it's unix. Personally, I like to use Linux because I'm sick of getting dicked over by Microsoft. I've been watching Apple since OS X came out and thinking about the switch for a while, but the fact that Apple also likes to dick its customers over on a fairly regular basis makes me wary about going for it.
Fine. Just as long as I never have to look up another pair of major/minor numbers and manually create the entry in /dev when installing new hardware ever, ever again.
1: the stuff he says on the first page is basically a bunch of static linkx that can be done easily.
He said as much on the page (although he would use symlinks in a lot of the cases, which would be a better idea). The point is that even if it can be done easily, nobody buth Apple has done it yet.
2: You cannot have a Gentoo style community unless you are a distro that caters to people who are willing to go to great lengths to learn more about their OS and computer hardware.
You can have a Gentoo style community with people who are interested in computers. Anyone using linux already fits this criterion whether they're 1337 or not. Besides, who's to say that people who like to dig into the hardware wouldn't flock to a distro like this? I'm a gentoo junkie, too. The reason I went to Gentoo is because of portage - the install is a pain in the ass, but once I'm done I have the only linux distro I know of with a decent install/uninstall process. I like that. Just because I can deal with the system doesn't mean I want to every day. I'll gladly take some gloss that's implemented well (the way what little gloss Gentoo has is).
I'm not sure where this idea that hackers enjoy computers that are difficult to use came from, but I'm pretty sure it's either teenage boys or people who've come to linux because it's l33t.
3: the one desktop environment is stupid. Thats one of the reasons I switched from windows, that their desktop environment is idiotic, especially in the same paragraph as talking about how linux offers choice.
Fine. Then make your own distro that uses the dekstop environment you like. If you like no desktop environment, go for it. Nobody says there has to be just one linux distro.
4: installers are not necessary. try making a gui frontend to Gentoo's emerge/portage if you want a good install system. Not only does it download and update, but it also works. really well.
If I want to have some options about how a package is installed on my system, installers are necessary, even if having installers means making a system like portage a bit more interactive. Especially if we're talking about a distro that's designed for the desktop, having to fool with portage's USE variables is not a very good way to go about having customizing how things are installed. In a desktop distro, something like USE variables should be limited to setting system defaults.
not to echo Linus or anything, he sounds like his objective os to combat microsoft on the desktop. I think personally that it is far better to exceed or be superior to Microsoft for technical reasons more than market share reasons.
We're in the 21st century. I think it's fair to say that having a decent GUI can be considered a technical reason to use an OS. When most people get into arguments about desktop OSes, the arguments center around one of two things - GUI or application/hardware support. Why do most people complain about windows? Its sucky GUI comes up as often as anything else. How come it's sensible to complain about Windows's crappy gui but not to point out that Linux's gui is even crappier?
Besides...last time I checked the average non-poweruser on windows is just as lost as they would be in KDE, for example, if not more. And were said powerusers not almost all gamers, they'd likely find KDE superior if they gave it a chance (to compare similar DE's).
You haven't been spending much time helping non-powerusers work with KDE, have you? It's one of my job expectations. I can tell you with complete certainty that most people find KDE much, much harder to use than Windows. Yeah, sure, you can read all those nice anecdotes about someone who set up a linux box for mom and dad and how they find it easier to use. For every one of those anecdotes I've heard, I deal with several people per day who can't even figure out how to eject a CD using KDE. (Of course, the eject button on the drive won't work because the CD is mounted.)
He covers a lot of overlooked stuff. A lot of the people working on having a desktop-ready linux seem to think that you can just throw on some clone of LinuxConf or YaST that you made yourself and call it a day.
Not true.
The math and CS departments at my school have started maintaining machines running Red Hat in any computer lab they can exercise any control over. Naturally, students who aren't familiar with linux try them out. Seeing as how I work the helpdesk and I'm the one everybody seems to come to for help with installing linux anyway, I end up helping them out a lot, and I've noticed a few things.
The author's comments on the filesystem are dead-on, but don't go far enough. I've helped users who are trying to save files on the desktop, and they expect the desktop to be an option in file pickers. I would like it to be there, too - having to go to "/home/uname/Desktop" is not intuitive, and it's a pain in the ass. This should be something that is global to all file handling dialogs. KDE does it in a half-assed way (I don't know about Gnome 2), and it doesn't really help much anyway since all applications seem to want to write their own dialogs from scratch, anyway.
KDE and Gnome need to come to an agreement on some common dialogs, work on a design for these dialogs and how they will work, and then implement them using a shared library that both will access. I don't care how it is implemented - the dialogs can be written in straight X11 so it looks the same on both, or the library can check for what environment is being used and pop up a dialog that is written using GTK+ or QT. As long as they look and work the same, I'm happy.
Another one is networking. We've tried finding a good way to help students who aren't good with Linux to access our campus network resources. LinNeighborhood is the best we've come up with so far, and that doesn't even get to the configuration issues that pop up for people trying to get their own linux boxen connected to the network. Come on, people. Most everyone using Samba is connecting to Windows networks. Windows networks usually have pretty much the same configuration. Why the heck can't we have distros that set up Samba by default, have Samba's default configuration be for a standard Windows network, and give users a decent system? On top of it, there is no good network browser. Apple gives me splat-K and pops shares up on my desktop. Windows gives me Network Neighborhood and acts as if all shares on a network are already in my filesystem. LinNeighborhood makes me mount everything, then forces me to go into the filesystem again and find where I mounted the share, and it asks me for my username and password every step of the way. In this case, I like the Apple model best. Give me a "connect to server" option in my start menu, and when I connect to a server, pop up an icon on my desktop.
While we're on the subject of things just popping up without any hassle, if your distro isn't using DevFS yet, get it switched the heck over. If the driver you're writing isn't DevFS compatible, get it working that way.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but the point is, there are a whole lot of details involved in a good desktop OS. Linux is a great desktop OS for me, but I am comfortable enough with Linux to handle the hassle, and I've made it over the 2-year learning curve. Anyone who thinks that drag'n'drop and a somewhat working office suite makes a complete desktop OS for the general public needs to get a clue.
It's been proven that the dog farting can clear a room. Therefore, Joe's farts can't clear a room.
There's no reason to believe that there can't be two or more contributing factors.
Is why so many people seem to want to oversimplify the situation.
As with any set of data, it's not all signal and it's not all noise. Much of the research in global warming may be due to political motive. (Though personally, I'm not inclined to agree that environmentalism is a purely political issue. I have a lot of reasons to be concerned by the idea that Florida might start shrinking in the next century, and none of them have to do with politics.) However, the focus of all the stuff I've heard about lately is on trying to figure out just how much of the change in global climate over the past century is due to natural fluctuation and how much is due to pollution.
Besides, even if it turns out to be entirely due to nautural fluctuation, it seems that it would be in our best interests to still modify the actions of humanity as a whole to promote a global climate that is best suited to humans. People don't think irrigation is a stupid idea because Mother Nature didn't put a body of water in the middle of every cornfield. The issue at hand should be what action is ultimately the most beneficial to the world.
Anyone familar with computer science sees how this disadvantages women in the field.
Any anybody familiar with actual breathing human beings who are studying to be computer scientists these days would say you're a full of shit crypto-misogynist.
For one, I've met a whole lot more CS students who are also majoring in something in the fine arts than I have physics, bio, etc. majors.
For two, anybody who has seen kids being raised can tell that boys are taught to be less emotional than girls. If a boy gets a constructive toy, it'll be an erector set. If a girl gets a constructive toy, it'll be finger paints.
And going back to your IQ point, it's been fairly well accepted by everybody but the kinds of idiots who think The Bell Curve was real science that you can't use the IQ test to compare different social divisions of people (such as the races or the sexes).
(Sorry about saying crypto-misogynist, but you gotta admit the word is kinda cute.)
Excuse me, but the U.N. and the WTO are two entirely different bodies with very little (if any) overlap in terms of powers and responsibilities. It's relationship with the U.S. government is also entirely different.
The same for the League of Nations - one is meant for political stability. The other is meant for maximizing free trade (thereby maximizing economic efficiency (usually at the expense of reduced equity)). The Powers that Be have much more to gain directly from agreeing to do whatever the WTO tells them to do. Yeah, they may have to kowtow to the WTO (in ways that don't really affect the people making these decisions) every so often, but it also means that whenever another country wants to put trade restrictions on U.S. goods, the U.S. can also go cry to the WTO.
So yeah, you're right that the U.S. could use the mass of its economy to destabilize the WTO, but I think it's ludicrous to think that it will.
That doesn't matter. If the WTO takes an aggressive stance against U.S. policy, the U.S. gov't will just ignore them, or attempt to sideline them, as is their usual strategy when dealing with unresponsive world bodies.
I don't buy it. Your suggestion does not line up at all with the activities of the US government in the past.
If we quit listening to the WTO telling us how we can and can not restrict trade, we'd no longer be able to go to the WTO to force other companies to import stuff of ours that they don't want, like fuel additives that cause cancer (Canada), or BGH-laced cow products that fuck up peoples' hormonal systems (European Union).
duh.
That is the unintended consequence of connecting everyone everywhere. Now employers can hire anyone from anywhere.
No, this is a totally intended consequence of integrating the world's markets. Do you really thing stuff like NAFTA was dreamt up as anything but a way for companies to get cheap labor? It certainly hasn't provided any benefits to the citizens of North America w/r/t increasted availability of goods, more stable markets, better market competition, or what have you.
Cute thing is, if the US tried to enact legislation to protect its workforce (yeah right, not until Americans realize that billionaire oil tycoons are not, and will never be 'just regular Joes like you and me'), the WTO would probably slap it on the wrist for obstructing free trade.
My root doctor's been prescribing me this since I was 6 years old.
Try Elite. It's super old, but you can also try to find its sequel, Frontier. Both are at the Home of the Underdogs.
Good Newtonian spaceflight for the time. I don't think that stars and planets produce gravity that affects starships, but otherwise spaceship flight is quite realistically implemented.
I don't think whoever wrote the blurb for the story RTFA on it being debunked last time.
What was debunked is the idea that if you burn lots of money, break a few laws of physics, engineer electronic devices that can modulate information transmissions at rates orders of magnitude faster than the best we've got right now (but will cost under $60 apiece), and break a few more laws of physics, you can transmit data over the power grid in the exobit range. (That's thousands of gigabits.)
Other companies that aren't scams have had much more modest success. The idea works, the problem is finding a way to make it financially workable, too.
Yeah, what useless crap. It only applies directly to everything we know in the universe.
No really, it isn't all that useful. If it were somehow applicalbe to partial differential equations, for example, it might offer a simple way of handling many engineering problems.
Granted, being able to describe shapes with a function can be terribly useful, as it might then become possible to use linear algebra or calculus to directly solve various problems relating to that shape's geometry rather than approximating a solution.
But still, that's just shapes. There's a lot more to the universe than shapes. And no, I'm not willing to consider something like a function of two variables a shape just because it can be plotted in three dimensions.
that there is a wireless bubble right now.
Wireless is sexy and sci-fi. But it's also getting pushed hard right now, when it can't deliver the quality of wireless networking that people in the general public have in their heads. You guys better get caught up fast, or there's going to be some dissilusionment and a wireless bust and a few companies are going to have to die.
I would get a few other Exchange servers together and go to Redmond (killing a few people on the way). Then we would go to Bill Gates's house and request that he turn us into something other than Exchange servers. When he says he can't, we crush his head, and kill a few more people. Then we would leave his house and try and kill a couple more people in the few scant hours before we crash.
No, it's that I haven't sat down and read GTK+ 2.0's documentation because the only project I'm working in right now are GTK+ 1.2 && isn't going to be ported to 2.0 until the next release.
I know a couple people who have had complications.
One got an infection, the other basically destroyed a few of her molars by biting on the tongue ring.
As far as the infection goes, apparently tongue piercings are the most likely to get infected. They are particularly troublesome because they can be fatal (due to the proximity of your tongue to your brain).
I'm not too surprised about the teeth chipping, either.