It's the legacy code that creates so much bloat, and swapping out the kernel won't change anything if the same mountain of code still runs.
Loading large amounts of legacy code that gets run doesn't cause bloat. That's caused by loading huge quantities of legacy code at boot that never gets run because you don't have the hardware it was written to support or none of your software needs the old API it implements. Getting rid of legacy support isn't the best answer to bloat. Better is to load only those parts of the legacy support that are needed at boot, bring in the old APIs as needed then get rid of them when the program exits. This would shorten boot time and cut down the RAM requirements at the expense of a slightly longer load time for legacy apps.
Re:Time to Get Rid of The Gates Borg Icon
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Fresh Air For Windows?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Considering that Microsoft is often considered ot be the 800 lb gorilla in the software world, there's a better idea: King Kong on the Empire State Building fighting off biplanes.
Try to understand the idea before you try to be funny.
The reason why the OP was modded funny was that he did get the idea backwards. If he'd been right it might have been Insightful, but it certainly wouldn't have been funny.
Actually, old people don't need to use magazine photographs. In Korea, only young people use photographs. In Soviet Russia, of course, magazine photos use young people.
It wouldn't even make the news, from an earthquake point of view, they're measured in thousands of megatons.
That's what I would have thought, but according to Wikipedia, when the wreck of the Kielce was being salvaged in the English Channel near Folkestone, the roughly 3,000 tones of HE it was carrying detonated, causing an earthquake measured at 4.5 on the Richter scale.
No, it will deliver the package back in the future. Why does everything have to be Trek?
I thought it Fedex would be forced to turn the package over to the frelling Peacekeepers and Chriton would have to go in with Moia to recover it. Shows to go what I know, doesn't it?
AIUI, wearing and tacking are two separate ways to change course across the wind. In tacking, you turn your ship across the wind, using the ship's momentum to keep you going until your sails can catch the wind. (If you fail, your ship is said to be "in irons," pointing directly into the wind with no forward motion.) Wearing ship is much easier but, as you note, takes more room. You turn away from the wind going all the way around in a big turn and emd up with the wind on the other side of your ship. Although it's slower, it does have the advantage of avoiding any chance of getting stuck.
What do you store antimatter in if it explodes on contact with matter?
Actually, it doesn't. I remember a program item back at LACon II in '84 where Dr. Forward had something to say about exactly that. He said that recent calculations had shown that if you dropped a lump of anti-matter on the floor it would sizzle like a drop of water in a hot frying pan taking several minutes to vanish. You see, the reaction only takes place on the surface and, of course, the bigger the piece, the less of it is surface. Also, the reaction heats the surroundings, creating a buffer of hot (think thin) gas between the anti-matter and the floor. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
No, he had problems with his retina starting to bleed into his eye. He had to have the spots cauterized with a laser, which caused dead spots in his vision and eventually, there was so much loss he had (effectively) no visual acuity left at all.
Heck, even if he told you to not ask questions, you could probably absorb a surprising amount just being close by.
Dan would never have done that. He was always willing to explain, and even take suggestions. And yes, I did learn a lot about good programming from him. We were working on a subroutine package for others to use. In it, he used a number of functions and subroutines he created with five or six arguments, and never had trouble keeping them in the right order. This is because he had a pattern that he always used; all he had to do was ask himself what was expected, and he knew without guessing what order they were in. Compare this to the various printf() functions in C, where each one has the arguments in a different order, with no rhyme or reason to it. Even though FORTRAN doesn't require you to declare variables, he did, and had me keep the list alphabetized. This made it much easier to check back and find out just what something was called, or what type of variable it was. (He always used IMPLICIT NONE.) When I started doing C programming, I did roughly the same thing: main() was first, and the rest of the functions were alphabetized to make finding them simpler.
No! I was a seeing eye person! Dan didn't need me to lead him around, he still had enough sight for that. He needed me to read monitors, type, and do other things that needed sharp sight.
I wish this had been developed in time for Dan Alderson to have gotten one. The last two years he was at JPL, I was his "seeing eye person" because diabetic retinopathy had ruined his vision. Jerry Pournelle once dedicated a book to him, calling him "the sane genius." Among other things, Dan wrote the navigation software that was used by Project Voyager, and he was still doing things that most programmers would have sworn were impossible when his health failed completely and he was forced to retire.
How is this different from the police state of the former USSR.
Well, at least you don't have to have an internal passport to travel from one part of the country to the other. Yet. BTW, the Soviet's didn't invent that little piece of oppression because it was already in place, having been invented in Czarist Russia long before the Revolution.
Electronics do not and should not have any protection above and beyond a paper document.
That said, electronics should also not be treated any differently than a paper document.
Exactly. If they're not allowed to make copies of any paper documents you have so that they can inspect them later, they shouldn't be allowed to do that to your hard disk either.
But I still fail to understand the reasoning of all the Vista hate. The one major negative I will give it is that it does have burly system requirements. But modern systems all ship with more than enough horsepower to deal with it fine.
I can't explain why people hate Vista so much because I haven't used it myself. However, I have heard more reasons to dislike it than to like it. One of them is the fact that unless you already have a very muscular computer you pretty much have to buy a new one if you want Vista. I don't know about you, but I still remember when you could expect the newest OS to run on your current hardware as long as it was reasonably mainstream; maybe not at top speed, but acceptably. Now, it almost looks like Microsoft has signed a deal with the hardware people: they make sure customers have to upgrade their hardware to use whatever they're told is the Latest and Greatest and the hardware people will see to it that all their product ships with whatever Redmond wants.
I can't speak for anybody else, but I can't afford to upgrade my hardware right now. I've long been using a dual-boot system, Windows and Fedora and when Fedora 9 came out, I made it my main OS. So far, I haven't needed to use Windows since, but it's still there, Just In Case.
...the company does not intend to release drivers for Linux machines in the near future.Period.
Consider this: one happy customer will tell five people on the average, while an unhappy one will tell ten or more. How many thousands of computer people either have read our complaints, or will before the discussion gets archived? Not only is this bad PR for Lexmark, it's bad PR directed at the people most likely to be recommending what printers other people and business are using, which means it will have a disproportionately large effect. I must admit, however, that it probably wouldn't have happened to a nicer company.
I don't think you understand. We didn't buy the printer for an Ubuntu box and find that it didn't work. We installed Ubuntu as dual-boot on a Windows PC and found that the existing Lexmark printer wouldn't work under Linux.
Most companies find it easier to make the specifications public and let somebody else write the OS drivers. It's good PR, good for sales (granted, Linux is still a minor market, but it's growing.) and doesn't cost them a dime.
My sister preferred buying a new printer. Then, after she'd gotten her new printer working, she donated the old one to LASFS, this world's oldest Science Fiction Club, to be sold at auction. She got a new printer, somebody else got a used one with plenty of life in it, and the club got some money. A real win/win/win situation.
Lexmark not only doesn't provide the details needed to write OS drivers for its newer printers, it won't even provide proprietary drivers like ATI and nVidia do. I know, because when my sister moved from Windows to Ubuntu about a month or so ago, she had to buy a new printer because there wasn't any support for her fairly new Lexmark.
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Loading large amounts of legacy code that gets run doesn't cause bloat. That's caused by loading huge quantities of legacy code at boot that never gets run because you don't have the hardware it was written to support or none of your software needs the old API it implements. Getting rid of legacy support isn't the best answer to bloat. Better is to load only those parts of the legacy support that are needed at boot, bring in the old APIs as needed then get rid of them when the program exits. This would shorten boot time and cut down the RAM requirements at the expense of a slightly longer load time for legacy apps.
Considering that Microsoft is often considered ot be the 800 lb gorilla in the software world, there's a better idea: King Kong on the Empire State Building fighting off biplanes.
The reason why the OP was modded funny was that he did get the idea backwards. If he'd been right it might have been Insightful, but it certainly wouldn't have been funny.
Actually, old people don't need to use magazine photographs. In Korea, only young people use photographs. In Soviet Russia, of course, magazine photos use young people.
I won't argue with you on that. After all I only have Wikipedia's word on it, and we all know it's not always completely accurate.
That's what I would have thought, but according to Wikipedia, when the wreck of the Kielce was being salvaged in the English Channel near Folkestone, the roughly 3,000 tones of HE it was carrying detonated, causing an earthquake measured at 4.5 on the Richter scale.
I thought it Fedex would be forced to turn the package over to the frelling Peacekeepers and Chriton would have to go in with Moia to recover it. Shows to go what I know, doesn't it?
AIUI, wearing and tacking are two separate ways to change course across the wind. In tacking, you turn your ship across the wind, using the ship's momentum to keep you going until your sails can catch the wind. (If you fail, your ship is said to be "in irons," pointing directly into the wind with no forward motion.) Wearing ship is much easier but, as you note, takes more room. You turn away from the wind going all the way around in a big turn and emd up with the wind on the other side of your ship. Although it's slower, it does have the advantage of avoiding any chance of getting stuck.
Actually, it doesn't. I remember a program item back at LACon II in '84 where Dr. Forward had something to say about exactly that. He said that recent calculations had shown that if you dropped a lump of anti-matter on the floor it would sizzle like a drop of water in a hot frying pan taking several minutes to vanish. You see, the reaction only takes place on the surface and, of course, the bigger the piece, the less of it is surface. Also, the reaction heats the surroundings, creating a buffer of hot (think thin) gas between the anti-matter and the floor. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
Actually there are penguins in the Galapagos Islands.
No, he had problems with his retina starting to bleed into his eye. He had to have the spots cauterized with a laser, which caused dead spots in his vision and eventually, there was so much loss he had (effectively) no visual acuity left at all.
Dan would never have done that. He was always willing to explain, and even take suggestions. And yes, I did learn a lot about good programming from him. We were working on a subroutine package for others to use. In it, he used a number of functions and subroutines he created with five or six arguments, and never had trouble keeping them in the right order. This is because he had a pattern that he always used; all he had to do was ask himself what was expected, and he knew without guessing what order they were in. Compare this to the various printf() functions in C, where each one has the arguments in a different order, with no rhyme or reason to it. Even though FORTRAN doesn't require you to declare variables, he did, and had me keep the list alphabetized. This made it much easier to check back and find out just what something was called, or what type of variable it was. (He always used IMPLICIT NONE.) When I started doing C programming, I did roughly the same thing: main() was first, and the rest of the functions were alphabetized to make finding them simpler.
No! I was a seeing eye person! Dan didn't need me to lead him around, he still had enough sight for that. He needed me to read monitors, type, and do other things that needed sharp sight.
I wish this had been developed in time for Dan Alderson to have gotten one. The last two years he was at JPL, I was his "seeing eye person" because diabetic retinopathy had ruined his vision. Jerry Pournelle once dedicated a book to him, calling him "the sane genius." Among other things, Dan wrote the navigation software that was used by Project Voyager, and he was still doing things that most programmers would have sworn were impossible when his health failed completely and he was forced to retire.
Well, at least you don't have to have an internal passport to travel from one part of the country to the other. Yet. BTW, the Soviet's didn't invent that little piece of oppression because it was already in place, having been invented in Czarist Russia long before the Revolution.
I'm sure he'd be very pleased to know that. Why don't you go over to and let him know?
While we're at it, let's not forget The Sensuous Dirty Old Man.
Exactly. If they're not allowed to make copies of any paper documents you have so that they can inspect them later, they shouldn't be allowed to do that to your hard disk either.
I can't explain why people hate Vista so much because I haven't used it myself. However, I have heard more reasons to dislike it than to like it. One of them is the fact that unless you already have a very muscular computer you pretty much have to buy a new one if you want Vista. I don't know about you, but I still remember when you could expect the newest OS to run on your current hardware as long as it was reasonably mainstream; maybe not at top speed, but acceptably. Now, it almost looks like Microsoft has signed a deal with the hardware people: they make sure customers have to upgrade their hardware to use whatever they're told is the Latest and Greatest and the hardware people will see to it that all their product ships with whatever Redmond wants.
I can't speak for anybody else, but I can't afford to upgrade my hardware right now. I've long been using a dual-boot system, Windows and Fedora and when Fedora 9 came out, I made it my main OS. So far, I haven't needed to use Windows since, but it's still there, Just In Case.
Consider this: one happy customer will tell five people on the average, while an unhappy one will tell ten or more. How many thousands of computer people either have read our complaints, or will before the discussion gets archived? Not only is this bad PR for Lexmark, it's bad PR directed at the people most likely to be recommending what printers other people and business are using, which means it will have a disproportionately large effect. I must admit, however, that it probably wouldn't have happened to a nicer company.
I don't think you understand. We didn't buy the printer for an Ubuntu box and find that it didn't work. We installed Ubuntu as dual-boot on a Windows PC and found that the existing Lexmark printer wouldn't work under Linux.
Most companies find it easier to make the specifications public and let somebody else write the OS drivers. It's good PR, good for sales (granted, Linux is still a minor market, but it's growing.) and doesn't cost them a dime.
Good point. However, we made sure that the bidders knew why the printer was for sale and that it wouldn't work with Linux.
My sister preferred buying a new printer. Then, after she'd gotten her new printer working, she donated the old one to LASFS, this world's oldest Science Fiction Club, to be sold at auction. She got a new printer, somebody else got a used one with plenty of life in it, and the club got some money. A real win/win/win situation.
Lexmark not only doesn't provide the details needed to write OS drivers for its newer printers, it won't even provide proprietary drivers like ATI and nVidia do. I know, because when my sister moved from Windows to Ubuntu about a month or so ago, she had to buy a new printer because there wasn't any support for her fairly new Lexmark.