Windows NT was the ground-up rewrite; Windows 95 (and 98/ME) had a ton of DOS code still in them.
A ton of Windows 3.11 code maybe. There isn't a ton of DOS code anywhere... I mean, DOS isn't much of an OS feature-wise, it doesn't do most of the things a typical definition of OS includes, and consequently it doesn't have that much code in it.
Android isn't particularily "Linuxy". If you want to take advantage of the wast amount of open source Linux/Unix software, Android is hardly the way to go, because it doesn't provide Unix-like environment.
IOW, no, that's not what Android is for. Android is Android, and is useful when you want Android. If you want anything else, you shouldn't choose Android.
When I started reading your reply I thought you were repeating a line out of office space, but now that I realize that you were serious it makes it even funnier.
You mean somebody would write something like that seriously?
Is it so that not only creationists are impossible to make parody of, but MBAs are that too?
Nah, I suspect it's just you. I mean, if MBAs really were like that, just think what kind of world would be live in...
Why the fuck would a CONVERTIBLE have aircon and soundproofing ? Next you'll be bitching that a car built in 1952 doesn't have an ipod dock.
Same reason any car would have aircon and soundproofing. Now if it's not convertible, but a car without any roof at all, and no passenger seat, then you'd have a point. Just because some might be willing to live without them, doesn't remove the reasons for having them, it just means for these few people the reaons aren't good enough. And hey, modern convertibles have both, what a surprise!
What would you consider misuse of a country TLD? Domains are administrative boundaries. If you're ok with using a domain that is governed by the rules of a company or government in a foreign country, and you abide by their rules, then what is wrong with that?
Of course the entire top level domain thing is largely broken from today's point of view, because it's so US-centric. Non-country domains should be global. Country domains should be somehow related to that country.
What I mean is, if you go to porn.<country tld>, you should get porn site from that country, or at least content with "performers" who are mostly from that country, and advertising meant for that country, even for foreign web clients, because presumably they're planning a vacation or something. And porn.com should take me to an international site, with properly targeted ads and service links and all that, while porn.org should take me to some non-profit porn organization that is relevant globally. Anything else is highly improper, a scam, outright immoral.
Same of course applies to other Web content, as insignificant as it is compared to porn.
Planets of other solar systems are exoplanets, and calling them "planets" is just a colloquial short form.
Pluto, Eris, and other similar objects outside the inner solar system are called "dwarf planets", and calling them "planets" is just a colloquial short form.
(I'm not sure how Ceres fits into this scheme.;-)
I'm actually fine with that, except when it causes confusion. Which is practically always. I mean, if you're asked to list planets, do you list exoplanets or dwarf planets (I mean, apart from maybe listing Pluto, if disagreeing with IAU definition).
(What do MBAs actually do? Cause at my work all they seem to do is regurgitate things I say and make very boring power point presentations with the same clip art and generic percentage data about general stuff)
MBAs talk to other MBAs. It takes an MBA to do that, really. Without MBAs in between, you don't know what engineers and other riff-raff would be up to. Just look at the OSS communities without MBAs, they're total disasters, no useful output what so ever, total waste of human resources.
And, of course, this will be modded insightful instead of offtopic, just so Slashdotters can rejoice in their atheism once again despite it having nothing to do with the actual article.
It's not off topic. Not sure about Catholicism in particular (they've grown to have a somewhat more pragmatic approach to things over past millennium, than the newer flavors of Christianity) but a lot of people with religious agenda have anti-science agenda too. Or at least, that's a vocal minority in the US, but I fear it's not just a minority who mostly agrees with them...
A security hole so @#^%&@ adobe can update its garbage flash player every thirty seconds because of security issues.
No, more like a retarded way of allowing flash player to update. If that's specifically for flash, then it should require signed packages, or possibly a fixed URL where it downloads Android updates from, or both (to avoid DNS spoofing etc).
Either that, or mentioning Flash was just sensationalism, and it's just one use case.
That's why you should put programs you install under/usr/local, not straight under/usr.
Not the issue. That's a given. It's when I suddenly find out I don't have some bizarre version of gtk, or ncurses (great name, because that's what I'm doing when I find it missing), and I'm suddenly without internet, it gets a bit tense. I prefer the portability over raw efficiency. It is far and away one of the best things about a Mac. I can take something as bloated as MS Office or Photoshop straight from one machine to the next.
That's what installing under/opt (or where ever), and applications having their own library dirs, solves quite elegantly. Only thing that "intrudes" the overall system is a symbolic link in/usr/bin or/usr/local/bin to a wrapper (usually a shell script) that sets library search path before launching the actual binary.
This does not make anything easier, it just makes it wrong.
The ubuntu app center makes things easier without this sort of nasty kludge.
Let's imagine I have a Fedora and an Ubuntu box. I want an app for both of them (let's say some kind of sharing/collaboration tool). Please enlighten me, how does Ubuntu App Center make this easier?
That's probably another use, but I really don't think that's the main place where it'd be useful. I DREAM of being able to just download an application archive, extract it *anywhere I want*, and just run it. Just use it, without having to worry. Any application - not the apps (and versions) that some distribution maintainer has gotten around to porting to my flavor.
Replace "extract" with "extract, configure for user dir install, compile, install", then you have that with many apps. And for many of them, you could make that into one alias.
Of course compilation will take a few minutes, as opposed to a few seconds of just extracting, and there are potentially many more things that may need user tweaking, but basically that's the experience GNU autotools and similar systems try to provide. It'd need a few finishing touches to provide no-brains-required OS independent user-installable packages for Unix this way, but not terribly much.
Sadly many "hackers" cannot figure out how to download such tools.
And that's actually best reason to exclude any "hacker tool" for official distributions, unless they have a solid use case for regular Linux-user
And yes, testing what ports are open is a solid use case, even if these days it probably goes way over the head of most regular Linux users. IMHO of course.
The fact is that post-Grokster, the way a program is marketed is legally significant, and the way this program has been marketed is definitely a bit sketchy, IMO. Grokster didn't lose because their program lacked legal uses; it lost because they promoted the illegal ones.
By the same token, if you even imply that you're vetting the legality of packages, it tends to come back to haunt you when someone finds an obscure illegal use for foo that you did include. That's not to say that you can't internally equate probably used illegally with not very interesting.
I think this wasn't about use, but about marketing. So you should say, if someone finds some other packet you included officially marketed as suitable for illegal uses. This can of course happen, but isn't as likely as finding illegal use for, say, a compiler that can be used for writing or downloading and compiling a program that hacks various government computers and initiates a nuclear war.
Every server and desktop Linux box has by definition a "sysadmin", except maybe those where the admin access password has been permanently forgotten (for desktop Ubuntu this means using automatic login without user password) and updates are set to happen automatically. Whether sysadmin job is being done or neglected, that's another matter, but the job exists.
Doing an actual SQL injection attack is a task that doesn't exist for like 99.9% of Linux users. Not to mention, if installing the tool is a problem, then that person shouldn't be doing that in the first place...
Which is actually pretty smart. There are solar systems that we know are wildly different from ours (hot jupiters, massive apparently rocky planets). We don't really have a clue what kind of a universal definition of a planet would make sense and be a useful classification tool.
So what makes it smart?
Well, it's smart (or whatever word you want to use for "not stupid") only if you think definitions should reflect reality. If you prefer making definitions, and then trying to match reality to that, then there's no reason to avoid defining unknown, of course.
And looking at this one solar system, Pluto is clearly different from the first 8 proper planets, so for an analytical mind it's only natural to want to classify it differently.
The four inner planets aren't particularly different. They only look different because they're a bit more massive and exposed for a few billion years to intense sunlight.
Well, isn't volatile content of Pluto pretty high? Which means, there would be even less of it left it it was in the inner solar system and all the volatiles had evaporated...
But the biggest thing about Pluto not being a planet for me is, it's in 3:2 resonance with Neptune. IOW, it doesn't have independent orbit, it's orbit is controlled by Neptune. That doesn't sound very planet-like to me. A matter of opinion of course.
1) The IAU definition doesn't cover extrasolar planets. Hence, the definition is applicable to only one star system.
Which is actually pretty smart. There are solar systems that we know are wildly different from ours (hot jupiters, massive apparently rocky planets). We don't really have a clue what kind of a universal definition of a planet would make sense and be a useful classification tool.
Better to refrain from making a universal definition of planet, until we have a lot more data points, having observed complete planetary systems around other stars. And that won't happen until we have either interstellar probes or solar system wide optical interferometers.
And looking at this one solar system, Pluto is clearly different from the first 8 proper planets, so for an analytical mind it's only natural to want to classify it differently.
Unless you have a reference, I'd suspect there would be very little effect on life on Earth when passing through those bubbles, for the same reason why gamma ray observatories are impractical on earth surface... There would probably be slightly increased cancer rates, and perhaps some atmospheric effects like auroras, but not much else.
Oh how I miss Gopher, Archie, and Veronica and gang. The modern-day World Wide Web is basically commerce-oriented with actual information content on a steady decline. Sad.
I hope you mean relative information content, because absolute information content is certainly increasing, and very rapidly at that, and that's what matters. Even effective signal-to-noise ratio isn't really getting worse considering all the search tools available. It is easier than ever to get to the interesting information (whatever that may be for an individual), and ignore irrelevant stuff (whatever that may be for an individual).
I also just want a simple search. Not annoying searches on every key stroke, not hover searches...
If you want simple search, why don't you use the search box of the browser? I do. I've been meaning to check out Google's search page to check out all these "instant" features, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
"Reasonable" is in the eye of the beholder. A judge, looking at the GPL, might find that it is very different than any other sort of license he's seen, and might judge it as something other than reasonable.
And then what? Declare the code to be public domain? Anything is possible of course, but...
Windows XP is $100 at ebay. You can't write off the entire market as drones that will buy whatever the big box stores hand them. People know Windows, like Windows, so you have to give them a reason to switch.
No. People know certain specific applications, people like those (especially games). They don't care what OS is, as long as it's best for these particular applications. And for many applications and hardware configurations, that's XP.
Programs are dynamic and I don't see an issue with stating that organisms are programs, because programs are simply a set of operations and parameters based on a language.
The real problem is we don't understand the compiler (biology) for the DNA (code) as well as we should. So the medical sciences are a lot like reverse engineering a program with a lot higher difficulty. But one could absolutely say that if we did understand how it all worked that it could be programmed in a code.
The thing with biology is, you can't separate the compiler and the code. DNA defines the machinery that defines what that DNA means. Function of proteins is largely determined by the environment, which is determined by how those same proteins work. Etc.
To decode DNA into computer code would require simulating cellular machinery at quantum mechanical level (because exact folding and functioning of proteins depends on very subtle interactions between electron "clouds" of individual atoms in molecules participating in the reactions). Not gonna happen in foreseeable future, or perhaps never without a major breakthrough in quantum computing or something like that.
What we can hope from "understanding" is, that when we observer cellular machinery or individual proteins working, we can understand why it works like that. But going the other way, reliably predicting how they work without observation... Not going to happen without a quantum computing revolution or something like that. The best we can hope for is guessing "this protein has these functional groups, so it may do something like this", and being right most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows NT was the ground-up rewrite; Windows 95 (and 98/ME) had a ton of DOS code still in them.
A ton of Windows 3.11 code maybe. There isn't a ton of DOS code anywhere... I mean, DOS isn't much of an OS feature-wise, it doesn't do most of the things a typical definition of OS includes, and consequently it doesn't have that much code in it.
>
Isn't that what Android is for?
Android isn't particularily "Linuxy". If you want to take advantage of the wast amount of open source Linux/Unix software, Android is hardly the way to go, because it doesn't provide Unix-like environment.
IOW, no, that's not what Android is for. Android is Android, and is useful when you want Android. If you want anything else, you shouldn't choose Android.
When I started reading your reply I thought you were repeating a line out of office space, but now that I realize that you were serious it makes it even funnier.
You mean somebody would write something like that seriously?
Is it so that not only creationists are impossible to make parody of, but MBAs are that too?
Nah, I suspect it's just you. I mean, if MBAs really were like that, just think what kind of world would be live in...
Why the fuck would a CONVERTIBLE have aircon and soundproofing ?
Next you'll be bitching that a car built in 1952 doesn't have an ipod dock.
Same reason any car would have aircon and soundproofing. Now if it's not convertible, but a car without any roof at all, and no passenger seat, then you'd have a point. Just because some might be willing to live without them, doesn't remove the reasons for having them, it just means for these few people the reaons aren't good enough. And hey, modern convertibles have both, what a surprise!
And how is the environment of a built-in GPS really significantly different from the ECU? [...] Perhaps it's not expected to be fail-safe...
But that's the whole point, isn't it? Your vehicle isn't a useless lump of metal and plastic if your GPS unit fails.
...or a flaming ball of death, if it fails at wrong point.
Ok, I'll take that back, that can happen with GPS devices too, though that case was not really fault of electronics.
What would you consider misuse of a country TLD? Domains are administrative boundaries. If you're ok with using a domain that is governed by the rules of a company or government in a foreign country, and you abide by their rules, then what is wrong with that?
Of course the entire top level domain thing is largely broken from today's point of view, because it's so US-centric. Non-country domains should be global. Country domains should be somehow related to that country.
What I mean is, if you go to porn.<country tld>, you should get porn site from that country, or at least content with "performers" who are mostly from that country, and advertising meant for that country, even for foreign web clients, because presumably they're planning a vacation or something. And porn.com should take me to an international site, with properly targeted ads and service links and all that, while porn.org should take me to some non-profit porn organization that is relevant globally. Anything else is highly improper, a scam, outright immoral.
Same of course applies to other Web content, as insignificant as it is compared to porn.
</tongueincheek>
Planets of other solar systems are exoplanets, and calling them "planets" is just a colloquial short form.
Pluto, Eris, and other similar objects outside the inner solar system are called "dwarf planets", and calling them "planets" is just a colloquial short form.
(I'm not sure how Ceres fits into this scheme. ;-)
I'm actually fine with that, except when it causes confusion. Which is practically always. I mean, if you're asked to list planets, do you list exoplanets or dwarf planets (I mean, apart from maybe listing Pluto, if disagreeing with IAU definition).
I say make more people MBAs! We need more MBAs!!
(What do MBAs actually do? Cause at my work all they seem to do is regurgitate things I say and make very boring power point presentations with the same clip art and generic percentage data about general stuff)
MBAs talk to other MBAs. It takes an MBA to do that, really. Without MBAs in between, you don't know what engineers and other riff-raff would be up to. Just look at the OSS communities without MBAs, they're total disasters, no useful output what so ever, total waste of human resources.
And, of course, this will be modded insightful instead of offtopic, just so Slashdotters can rejoice in their atheism once again despite it having nothing to do with the actual article.
It's not off topic. Not sure about Catholicism in particular (they've grown to have a somewhat more pragmatic approach to things over past millennium, than the newer flavors of Christianity) but a lot of people with religious agenda have anti-science agenda too. Or at least, that's a vocal minority in the US, but I fear it's not just a minority who mostly agrees with them...
A security hole so @#^%&@ adobe can update its garbage flash player every thirty seconds because of security issues.
No, more like a retarded way of allowing flash player to update. If that's specifically for flash, then it should require signed packages, or possibly a fixed URL where it downloads Android updates from, or both (to avoid DNS spoofing etc).
Either that, or mentioning Flash was just sensationalism, and it's just one use case.
That's why you should put programs you install under /usr/local, not straight under /usr.
Not the issue. That's a given. It's when I suddenly find out I don't have some bizarre version of gtk, or ncurses (great name, because that's what I'm doing when I find it missing), and I'm suddenly without internet, it gets a bit tense. I prefer the portability over raw efficiency. It is far and away one of the best things about a Mac. I can take something as bloated as MS Office or Photoshop straight from one machine to the next.
That's what installing under /opt (or where ever), and applications having their own library dirs, solves quite elegantly. Only thing that "intrudes" the overall system is a symbolic link in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin to a wrapper (usually a shell script) that sets library search path before launching the actual binary.
This does not make anything easier, it just makes it wrong.
The ubuntu app center makes things easier without this sort of nasty kludge.
Let's imagine I have a Fedora and an Ubuntu box. I want an app for both of them (let's say some kind of sharing/collaboration tool). Please enlighten me, how does Ubuntu App Center make this easier?
That's probably another use, but I really don't think that's the main place where it'd be useful. I DREAM of being able to just download an application archive, extract it *anywhere I want*, and just run it. Just use it, without having to worry. Any application - not the apps (and versions) that some distribution maintainer has gotten around to porting to my flavor.
Replace "extract" with "extract, configure for user dir install, compile, install", then you have that with many apps. And for many of them, you could make that into one alias.
Of course compilation will take a few minutes, as opposed to a few seconds of just extracting, and there are potentially many more things that may need user tweaking, but basically that's the experience GNU autotools and similar systems try to provide. It'd need a few finishing touches to provide no-brains-required OS independent user-installable packages for Unix this way, but not terribly much.
Sadly many "hackers" cannot figure out how to download such tools.
And that's actually best reason to exclude any "hacker tool" for official distributions, unless they have a solid use case for regular Linux-user
And yes, testing what ports are open is a solid use case, even if these days it probably goes way over the head of most regular Linux users. IMHO of course.
The fact is that post-Grokster, the way a program is marketed is legally significant, and the way this program has been marketed is definitely a bit sketchy, IMO. Grokster didn't lose because their program lacked legal uses; it lost because they promoted the illegal ones.
By the same token, if you even imply that you're vetting the legality of packages, it tends to come back to haunt you when someone finds an obscure illegal use for foo that you did include. That's not to say that you can't internally equate probably used illegally with not very interesting.
I think this wasn't about use, but about marketing. So you should say, if someone finds some other packet you included officially marketed as suitable for illegal uses. This can of course happen, but isn't as likely as finding illegal use for, say, a compiler that can be used for writing or downloading and compiling a program that hacks various government computers and initiates a nuclear war.
Fedora users aren't primarily penetration testers.
Ubuntu users aren't primarily sysadmins.
Every server and desktop Linux box has by definition a "sysadmin", except maybe those where the admin access password has been permanently forgotten (for desktop Ubuntu this means using automatic login without user password) and updates are set to happen automatically. Whether sysadmin job is being done or neglected, that's another matter, but the job exists.
Doing an actual SQL injection attack is a task that doesn't exist for like 99.9% of Linux users. Not to mention, if installing the tool is a problem, then that person shouldn't be doing that in the first place...
I'm being a dick here, but making a point. You say the definition is smart while simultaneously *NOT* using it correctly.
> There are solar systems ... rocky planets.
No, they're not planets. According to this "smart" definition.
Planets of other solar systems are exoplanets, and calling them "planets" is just a colloquial short form.
Which is actually pretty smart. There are solar systems that we know are wildly different from ours (hot jupiters, massive apparently rocky planets). We don't really have a clue what kind of a universal definition of a planet would make sense and be a useful classification tool.
So what makes it smart?
Well, it's smart (or whatever word you want to use for "not stupid") only if you think definitions should reflect reality. If you prefer making definitions, and then trying to match reality to that, then there's no reason to avoid defining unknown, of course.
And looking at this one solar system, Pluto is clearly different from the first 8 proper planets, so for an analytical mind it's only natural to want to classify it differently.
The four inner planets aren't particularly different. They only look different because they're a bit more massive and exposed for a few billion years to intense sunlight.
Well, isn't volatile content of Pluto pretty high? Which means, there would be even less of it left it it was in the inner solar system and all the volatiles had evaporated...
But the biggest thing about Pluto not being a planet for me is, it's in 3:2 resonance with Neptune. IOW, it doesn't have independent orbit, it's orbit is controlled by Neptune. That doesn't sound very planet-like to me. A matter of opinion of course.
1) The IAU definition doesn't cover extrasolar planets. Hence, the definition is applicable to only one star system.
Which is actually pretty smart. There are solar systems that we know are wildly different from ours (hot jupiters, massive apparently rocky planets). We don't really have a clue what kind of a universal definition of a planet would make sense and be a useful classification tool.
Better to refrain from making a universal definition of planet, until we have a lot more data points, having observed complete planetary systems around other stars. And that won't happen until we have either interstellar probes or solar system wide optical interferometers.
And looking at this one solar system, Pluto is clearly different from the first 8 proper planets, so for an analytical mind it's only natural to want to classify it differently.
Unless you have a reference, I'd suspect there would be very little effect on life on Earth when passing through those bubbles, for the same reason why gamma ray observatories are impractical on earth surface... There would probably be slightly increased cancer rates, and perhaps some atmospheric effects like auroras, but not much else.
Oh how I miss Gopher, Archie, and Veronica and gang. The modern-day World Wide Web is basically commerce-oriented with actual information content on a steady decline. Sad.
I hope you mean relative information content, because absolute information content is certainly increasing, and very rapidly at that, and that's what matters. Even effective signal-to-noise ratio isn't really getting worse considering all the search tools available. It is easier than ever to get to the interesting information (whatever that may be for an individual), and ignore irrelevant stuff (whatever that may be for an individual).
I also just want a simple search. ...
Not annoying searches on every key stroke, not hover searches
If you want simple search, why don't you use the search box of the browser? I do. I've been meaning to check out Google's search page to check out all these "instant" features, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
"Reasonable" is in the eye of the beholder. A judge, looking at the GPL, might find that it is very different than any other sort of license he's seen, and might judge it as something other than reasonable.
And then what? Declare the code to be public domain? Anything is possible of course, but...
Windows XP is $100 at ebay. You can't write off the entire market as drones that will buy whatever the big box stores hand them. People know Windows, like Windows, so you have to give them a reason to switch.
No. People know certain specific applications, people like those (especially games). They don't care what OS is, as long as it's best for these particular applications. And for many applications and hardware configurations, that's XP.
Programs are dynamic and I don't see an issue with stating that organisms are programs, because programs are simply a set of operations and parameters based on a language.
The real problem is we don't understand the compiler (biology) for the DNA (code) as well as we should. So the medical sciences are a lot like reverse engineering a program with a lot higher difficulty. But one could absolutely say that if we did understand how it all worked that it could be programmed in a code.
The thing with biology is, you can't separate the compiler and the code. DNA defines the machinery that defines what that DNA means. Function of proteins is largely determined by the environment, which is determined by how those same proteins work. Etc.
To decode DNA into computer code would require simulating cellular machinery at quantum mechanical level (because exact folding and functioning of proteins depends on very subtle interactions between electron "clouds" of individual atoms in molecules participating in the reactions). Not gonna happen in foreseeable future, or perhaps never without a major breakthrough in quantum computing or something like that.
What we can hope from "understanding" is, that when we observer cellular machinery or individual proteins working, we can understand why it works like that. But going the other way, reliably predicting how they work without observation... Not going to happen without a quantum computing revolution or something like that. The best we can hope for is guessing "this protein has these functional groups, so it may do something like this", and being right most of the time.