Would not, perhaps yes. But of course it *could* exist, it's not like gcc is the only C compiler there is for Linux to have been developed with originally.
It's as much the other way around, GNU would be a fringe phenomenon without the success of Linux... Somehow I don't see Stallman successfully leading an international free operating system development, way too much ego in that head (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a wrong thing for starting something like Linux).
You can say that there wouldn't be Linux without all the GNU stuff that make up the OS outside kernel. But you could also say that if there were no GNU, Linux would use some other software with some other GNU-like license. But that's just "what if" speculation. We do have significant amounts of GPL software, and Linux is GPL software, and that works rather nicely, and it's good. Yet the most prominent Linux software packages often aren't GPL (like Apache), which is also good.
The magnetic field is not like a solid container were you can just store substance, which is what would be desirable to do with a million degree hot plasma (it cannot touch anything without evaporating it, that is why you need the magnetic field in the first place).
Minor nitpick: as far as I know, the problem really isn't that the super hot plasma would melt the container walls, because the mass of the plasma is really really small (high pressure comes from temperature, not density). The real problem with solid container is that the plasma would rapidly cool down if it could touch container walls, and fusion temperatures could not be reached.
If the price of the DVD is too much, then just download it for free... According to the site it'll be available 1st of October, so you'll have to wait a bit for a real legal download, but that's fair enough in my book. Just compare that to what MPAA&co think about putting Hollywood movies available for free about 1 month after the release...
No, the modified BSD licence - which everyone uses nowadays - allows you to mix BSD and GPL code. The result is always GPL.
Thanks for the clarification. No wonder I was modded troll:-)
Re:Declare your bias, why don't you?
on
OpenBSD 3.7 Reviewed
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
You have issues with BSD licensing? How much freeer do you want it?
Fact 1: BSD license isn't free enough to allow merging in GPLed code.
Fact 2: GPL isn't free enough to allow merging in BSD licensed code.
Wether this restriction of freedom is justifiable or not, wether it is unavoidable or not, the fact is that IMHO this is a significant restriction on freedom (both for the programmer and for the code). It forces people to "re-invent the wheel", and therefore it goes against one of the basic motivations and justifications for FOS software.
Let's take that overwriting the book takes, let's say 5 weeks. Writing a text on a new paper takes, instead 3 weeks.
No, let's say that re-using pages of an existing book is essentially free in this context, or at least a lot cheaper than getting new pages. There might have been limited supply of pages for writing as well, at least limited supply of inexpensive pages.
Compare: making all users run as root to speed up login times.
There's value in user identification, it makes it possible to have different files and settings for different users. There's no intrinsic value in disabling HyperThreading (except in cases where it actually increases performance, but I think that's very rare in practice). But giving root access to every account is a problem we haven't been able to solve. There are various half-assed attempts, like sudo and groups in Unix, or Power User status in WinXP, but frankly they suck, we put up with crap like that only 'cos we don't have anything better (or, as most people with Windows, just run everything as administrator).
Of course human nature may make this an unsolvable problem, at least until we have so sophisticated AI that it can reliably decide when root access is being used for evil vs when it's being used legitimely.
However, the HT-related security problems can be solved without any noticeable performance hit, so there's no reason to put up with disabling HT entirely.
We already have a good interface for driving cars. They are called hands and feet.
No, that's not a "good interface". It may be the best we can do at this time, but it definitely isn't a very good interface.
For starters, drivers don't have individual control of every wheel, so there's need for all kinds of electronic assitants (ABS, EBD, DSC, ESP, ASR, pick your three letter acronym) to do that for you when such control is useful. And an important reason for not having all wheels turning in production automobiles is that it's not really that useful when you still have only one steering wheel. And just think about the inefficiency and limited control of automatic transmission vs the clumsiness of manual transmission; with neural control you would have "manual" transmission that's as convenient as an automatic one.
Also reaction times could be radically reduced. Now the neural impulse travelling to the muscles would be avoided, and feet and hands actually moving would be avoided too, both taking a more or less fixed amount of time that can't be reduced any other way, except by bypassing those nerves and muscles completely.
No, you look forward to a replacement for Adobe's PDF Reader.
I must be strange then, since I am very fond of the latest Acrobat Reader (version 7.0). It doesn't even feel very bloated or sluggish to me, and I'm using it on a 2 years old laptop. So what's supposed to be wrong with it? I'm talking about Windows version here btw, haven't chacked if the latest version is available for Linux.
Especially the new(ish) "Search" functionality is wonderful, especially with it's ability to search multiple PDFs. I'm talking about the search pane that lists all the occurences of search string (in multiple files if searching multiple files) and then allows you to just click to go to any of them, it's a life saver when browsing technical documents and standards. Sure I can list a dozen small improvements to the actual implementation, but it works very well as it is, I couldn't live without it anymore.
Is there an open source PDF reader with equal search functionality? 'cos I'd sure like to have something like that on Linux, too.
From TFA: "In principle, quantum computers would need only 10,000 qubits to outperform today's state-of-the-art computers with billions and billions of regular bits," Lafyatis said.
Yes, but as far as I understand, that *only* applies to problems you can solve with 10k qubits, and that's quite a limited set.
It is my understanding that, for example, doing a filtering operation on a 2 hour film consisting of 5 megapixel images, 10k qubits would not help you much. AFAIK 1 qubit is still just one "serial" bit, even though it can be infinitely many "parallel" bits. So, as far as I understand (which could be totally wrong) 10k qubits would allow you to handle about 21x21 pixel piece of a truecolor image at a time...
But I really don't know what I'm talking about here, feel free to enlighten me...;-)
Quantum computers can simulate classical computers with no problems
So, what kind of scale are we talking about here? To simulate, say, a million-transistor CPU and a megabyte of RAM, how many qubits would you need? About as many as you need transistors, or radically less?
If the answer is millions, then I think my comparison to a jumbo jet is valid, as we're probably about as far from a quantum computer simulating even a 4004 with hundreds of bytes of RAM, than we're from ubiquitous flying cars replacing jumbos;-)
they're not an improvement over silicon for everything.
Indeed, talking about quantum computers as an improvment on silicon computers is like talking about jumbo jets as an improvement over cars. Ie not an improvment at all, unless you have something very specific to do (factor a large integer or cross an ocean). And you need the simpler alternative to use the more advanced one (car to get to the airport, regular computer to feed and extract data for quantum computing).
You don't need to use punishment and threats. You can generally get kids to buy into rules providing the rules are seen by them to be reasonable, and you get to shape their views of the world from birth on.
Sure, that works, provided the kid is not a teenager...;-)
There's a fault in that logic. Just because they've survived before, doesn't mean that they'll survive in the future.
Earth is so impregnated with (bacterial) life, that to kill it all, you'd need to raise the temperature of entire surface to +100C for extended perioid of time.
Sure it could happen, but it's very unlikely it'll happen any sooner than the Sun is about to go red giant.
Because the bacteria haven't survived just "a few" extinction events, they've survived *every* extinction event in last 4000+ million years. They've survived time when large asteroid impacts probably still were rather a common phenomenon. They must have survived multiple close-by supernovas. They've survived the appearance of more advanced life forms, actually feasted on them.
I have great confidence that at least the bacteria will carry on the legacy of life on Earth, even if all Eukaryotes fail.
Many millennia later, other civilizations will have grown in far outlying areas of the universe. They will look at the dry and barren planet, covered by rocks and dirt, and say "nothing could have ever lived here. It's always been a dead planet"
Nah. You underestimate the ability of the bacteria, plants, insects and rats to survive. And crocodiles, never underestimate the crocodiles... Just a few millenia after such a disaster the Earth would again be covered in life.
Who cares about recorded lessons? The real issue is, does a student have a right to remember or use, let alone share any information gained from a lecture (or a book or whatever) without written permission from the lecturer (or the author or whatever)? After all, isn't that protected IP?
I mean, just think about it... The student might some day be a lecturer himself, so what right does he have to distribute the IP he may have memorized?
I wonder why for example NSTA hasn't taken such a firm stand on IP issues, like MPAA and RIAA have. Such lackluster attitude towards these serious issues will undermine the future of modern society!
I personally think that all these window managers with so called "features" are just a big bloat. I use evilwm.
Hint: if you try it, get the source packet (eg `apt-get source evilwm`) and compile yourself, because you probably want to change some of the key bindings, at least if you have non-US keyboard;-)
...but first you need to convince me why a cell phone needs a hard drive to begin with.
Nah, it's not about if you need one or not (of course you do). What I'd need to be convinced about is, will the hard drive survive when I drop the phone while riding a bicycle and it hits the pavement and it's parts are thrown all around. Any current phone can handle that kind of repeated abuse pretty well (well, at least my Nokias have...).
No, mobile phone isn't a place for moving parts... Solid state all the way is the only way.
It's no more priating than using the original hardware. Why would it be?
It might be some other kind of licence breach, if the software licence doesn't allow the software to be run using an emulator, if the law of your country allows such a licence to be legal, but piracy it is not.
Of course if you weren't asking if using emulators is piracy, but if using pirated software is piracy... Well, duh, is using pirated software piracy...? Gee, I don't know...
Nice... Pricey... Doesn't come with a keyboard layout for my country... Have to consider it anyway, as the US layout does have certain advantages for programming (namely position of []{} keys). Thanks for the tip!
A white dwarf is pretty much solid carbon - there's no way a young star can turn into a white dwarf by gravitational collapse.... there's no way a young star can turn into a white dwarf by gravitational collapse.
That's exactly what I mean. A difference between a brown dwarf and a (future) white dwarf is just that. Brown dwarf wasn't dense enough to collapse into a density comparable to a white dwarf, because if it had enough mass, it would have first started to fuse Hydrogen and lived a life as a regular star, it would not be a brown dwarf at all.
Talking about that tiny star in the article, I wouldn't be so sure it'll end up being solid carbon at the core, it's fusion might stop at Helium already. But it'd still be a white dwarf, wouldn't it, just a bit eccentric one. Or could it be that it would never become a true white dwarf, just a... "brownish dwarf" that consists of increasing amount of Helium that is slowly fused from original Hydrogen?
As far as I understand, the core of a white dwarf is degenerate matter, a stable soup of atomic nuclei and electrons, while the core of a gas giant or a brown dwarf is still atoms. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here...
For me it's exactly the opposite. I just *hate* touchpads, they just don't get the mouse cursor where I want fast enough, except when I accidentally touch it with my palm, then it moves the mouse cursor where ever (and with point-to-focus that can be a real pain)... Though I think it might be correctable with practice I suppose...
OTOH, the IBM-style TrackPoint (or clitoris, as it's often called around here, it being red and all;-) is just excellent. Hardly any hand movement needed, it's just an inch from regular index finger position, and once you get used to it, it's both speedy and accurate. Though IMHO still no match for a real mouse, far superior to both trackballs and touchpads.
What I'd want is a normal PC keyboard with a built in Trackpoint, not some glorified mouse wheel...:-)
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Would not, perhaps yes. But of course it *could* exist, it's not like gcc is the only C compiler there is for Linux to have been developed with originally.
It's as much the other way around, GNU would be a fringe phenomenon without the success of Linux... Somehow I don't see Stallman successfully leading an international free operating system development, way too much ego in that head (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a wrong thing for starting something like Linux).
You can say that there wouldn't be Linux without all the GNU stuff that make up the OS outside kernel. But you could also say that if there were no GNU, Linux would use some other software with some other GNU-like license. But that's just "what if" speculation. We do have significant amounts of GPL software, and Linux is GPL software, and that works rather nicely, and it's good. Yet the most prominent Linux software packages often aren't GPL (like Apache), which is also good.
Minor nitpick: as far as I know, the problem really isn't that the super hot plasma would melt the container walls, because the mass of the plasma is really really small (high pressure comes from temperature, not density). The real problem with solid container is that the plasma would rapidly cool down if it could touch container walls, and fusion temperatures could not be reached.
If the price of the DVD is too much, then just download it for free... According to the site it'll be available 1st of October, so you'll have to wait a bit for a real legal download, but that's fair enough in my book. Just compare that to what MPAA&co think about putting Hollywood movies available for free about 1 month after the release...
Thanks for the clarification. No wonder I was modded troll
Fact 1: BSD license isn't free enough to allow merging in GPLed code.
Fact 2: GPL isn't free enough to allow merging in BSD licensed code.
Wether this restriction of freedom is justifiable or not, wether it is unavoidable or not, the fact is that IMHO this is a significant restriction on freedom (both for the programmer and for the code). It forces people to "re-invent the wheel", and therefore it goes against one of the basic motivations and justifications for FOS software.
No, let's say that re-using pages of an existing book is essentially free in this context, or at least a lot cheaper than getting new pages. There might have been limited supply of pages for writing as well, at least limited supply of inexpensive pages.
There's value in user identification, it makes it possible to have different files and settings for different users. There's no intrinsic value in disabling HyperThreading (except in cases where it actually increases performance, but I think that's very rare in practice). But giving root access to every account is a problem we haven't been able to solve. There are various half-assed attempts, like sudo and groups in Unix, or Power User status in WinXP, but frankly they suck, we put up with crap like that only 'cos we don't have anything better (or, as most people with Windows, just run everything as administrator).
Of course human nature may make this an unsolvable problem, at least until we have so sophisticated AI that it can reliably decide when root access is being used for evil vs when it's being used legitimely.
However, the HT-related security problems can be solved without any noticeable performance hit, so there's no reason to put up with disabling HT entirely.
Sounds like it doesn't fix the problem, it replaces it with another (reduced performance). That's not a *real* fix to any problem.
Compare: doing suicide to "fix" personal problems.
No, that's not a "good interface". It may be the best we can do at this time, but it definitely isn't a very good interface.
For starters, drivers don't have individual control of every wheel, so there's need for all kinds of electronic assitants (ABS, EBD, DSC, ESP, ASR, pick your three letter acronym) to do that for you when such control is useful. And an important reason for not having all wheels turning in production automobiles is that it's not really that useful when you still have only one steering wheel. And just think about the inefficiency and limited control of automatic transmission vs the clumsiness of manual transmission; with neural control you would have "manual" transmission that's as convenient as an automatic one.
Also reaction times could be radically reduced. Now the neural impulse travelling to the muscles would be avoided, and feet and hands actually moving would be avoided too, both taking a more or less fixed amount of time that can't be reduced any other way, except by bypassing those nerves and muscles completely.
Apparently you haven't met some of the potatoes they served at school cafeteria back when I was in primary school...
I must be strange then, since I am very fond of the latest Acrobat Reader (version 7.0). It doesn't even feel very bloated or sluggish to me, and I'm using it on a 2 years old laptop. So what's supposed to be wrong with it? I'm talking about Windows version here btw, haven't chacked if the latest version is available for Linux.
Especially the new(ish) "Search" functionality is wonderful, especially with it's ability to search multiple PDFs. I'm talking about the search pane that lists all the occurences of search string (in multiple files if searching multiple files) and then allows you to just click to go to any of them, it's a life saver when browsing technical documents and standards. Sure I can list a dozen small improvements to the actual implementation, but it works very well as it is, I couldn't live without it anymore.
Is there an open source PDF reader with equal search functionality? 'cos I'd sure like to have something like that on Linux, too.
Yes, but as far as I understand, that *only* applies to problems you can solve with 10k qubits, and that's quite a limited set.
It is my understanding that, for example, doing a filtering operation on a 2 hour film consisting of 5 megapixel images, 10k qubits would not help you much. AFAIK 1 qubit is still just one "serial" bit, even though it can be infinitely many "parallel" bits. So, as far as I understand (which could be totally wrong) 10k qubits would allow you to handle about 21x21 pixel piece of a truecolor image at a time...
But I really don't know what I'm talking about here, feel free to enlighten me...
So, what kind of scale are we talking about here? To simulate, say, a million-transistor CPU and a megabyte of RAM, how many qubits would you need? About as many as you need transistors, or radically less?
If the answer is millions, then I think my comparison to a jumbo jet is valid, as we're probably about as far from a quantum computer simulating even a 4004 with hundreds of bytes of RAM, than we're from ubiquitous flying cars replacing jumbos
Indeed, talking about quantum computers as an improvment on silicon computers is like talking about jumbo jets as an improvement over cars. Ie not an improvment at all, unless you have something very specific to do (factor a large integer or cross an ocean). And you need the simpler alternative to use the more advanced one (car to get to the airport, regular computer to feed and extract data for quantum computing).
Sure, that works, provided the kid is not a teenager...
Earth is so impregnated with (bacterial) life, that to kill it all, you'd need to raise the temperature of entire surface to +100C for extended perioid of time.
Sure it could happen, but it's very unlikely it'll happen any sooner than the Sun is about to go red giant.
Because the bacteria haven't survived just "a few" extinction events, they've survived *every* extinction event in last 4000+ million years. They've survived time when large asteroid impacts probably still were rather a common phenomenon. They must have survived multiple close-by supernovas. They've survived the appearance of more advanced life forms, actually feasted on them.
I have great confidence that at least the bacteria will carry on the legacy of life on Earth, even if all Eukaryotes fail.
Yes. However, it's also true that:
"never improve esoteric knowledge" == "still live in a cave with an expected life span of 15 years"
Many millennia later, other civilizations will have grown in far outlying areas of the universe. They will look at the dry and barren planet, covered by rocks and dirt, and say "nothing could have ever lived here. It's always been a dead planet"
Nah. You underestimate the ability of the bacteria, plants, insects and rats to survive. And crocodiles, never underestimate the crocodiles... Just a few millenia after such a disaster the Earth would again be covered in life.
Who cares about recorded lessons? The real issue is, does a student have a right to remember or use, let alone share any information gained from a lecture (or a book or whatever) without written permission from the lecturer (or the author or whatever)? After all, isn't that protected IP?
I mean, just think about it... The student might some day be a lecturer himself, so what right does he have to distribute the IP he may have memorized?
I wonder why for example NSTA hasn't taken such a firm stand on IP issues, like MPAA and RIAA have. Such lackluster attitude towards these serious issues will undermine the future of modern society!
I personally think that all these window managers with so called "features" are just a big bloat. I use evilwm.
;-)
Hint: if you try it, get the source packet (eg `apt-get source evilwm`) and compile yourself, because you probably want to change some of the key bindings, at least if you have non-US keyboard
Nah, it's not about if you need one or not (of course you do). What I'd need to be convinced about is, will the hard drive survive when I drop the phone while riding a bicycle and it hits the pavement and it's parts are thrown all around. Any current phone can handle that kind of repeated abuse pretty well (well, at least my Nokias have...).
No, mobile phone isn't a place for moving parts... Solid state all the way is the only way.
It's no more priating than using the original hardware. Why would it be?
It might be some other kind of licence breach, if the software licence doesn't allow the software to be run using an emulator, if the law of your country allows such a licence to be legal, but piracy it is not.
Of course if you weren't asking if using emulators is piracy, but if using pirated software is piracy... Well, duh, is using pirated software piracy...? Gee, I don't know...
Nice...
Pricey...
Doesn't come with a keyboard layout for my country...
Have to consider it anyway, as the US layout does have certain advantages for programming (namely position of []{} keys). Thanks for the tip!
there's no way a young star can turn into a white dwarf by gravitational collapse.
That's exactly what I mean. A difference between a brown dwarf and a (future) white dwarf is just that. Brown dwarf wasn't dense enough to collapse into a density comparable to a white dwarf, because if it had enough mass, it would have first started to fuse Hydrogen and lived a life as a regular star, it would not be a brown dwarf at all.
Talking about that tiny star in the article, I wouldn't be so sure it'll end up being solid carbon at the core, it's fusion might stop at Helium already. But it'd still be a white dwarf, wouldn't it, just a bit eccentric one. Or could it be that it would never become a true white dwarf, just a... "brownish dwarf" that consists of increasing amount of Helium that is slowly fused from original Hydrogen?
As far as I understand, the core of a white dwarf is degenerate matter, a stable soup of atomic nuclei and electrons, while the core of a gas giant or a brown dwarf is still atoms. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here...
For me it's exactly the opposite. I just *hate* touchpads, they just don't get the mouse cursor where I want fast enough, except when I accidentally touch it with my palm, then it moves the mouse cursor where ever (and with point-to-focus that can be a real pain)... Though I think it might be correctable with practice I suppose...
;-) is just excellent. Hardly any hand movement needed, it's just an inch from regular index finger position, and once you get used to it, it's both speedy and accurate. Though IMHO still no match for a real mouse, far superior to both trackballs and touchpads.
:-)
OTOH, the IBM-style TrackPoint (or clitoris, as it's often called around here, it being red and all
What I'd want is a normal PC keyboard with a built in Trackpoint, not some glorified mouse wheel...