As a Gentoo user I wouldn't expect any package to be summarily left out. What I worry about is for packages such like Mono to become deeply embedded in distributions and create lots of dependencies, like Python. Python is increasingly a boil on the butt of GNU/Linux systems. Mono could go the same way.
Bill and Windows restructured the working world within about 20 years and got a significant percentage of the population using computers. How that happenned is irrellevant because we now have to deal with it.
Personal computers were well on their way to widespread use before Bill & Co. The idea that the Windows was uniquely necessary to cause the revolution is absurd. Other efforts from Apple, IBM or others would have accomplished the same things. The state of the art might even be farther advanced.
Stop whining and start coming up with solutions.
I would love to search all posts for this phrase and see the millions of times it has come up. It is a typing reflex imprinted in the small minds of Microsoft droids with nothing substancial to say. Nitwit.
And very few people would call Gates a robber baron at all.
The parallels between Gates and the robber barrons of 1880-1920 are pretty obvious. Perhaps it is your healthy non-geek detachment that prevents you from observing it. Gates has profoundly distorted an industry of great promise and gathered tremendous wealth to himself through careful construction of a monopoly. He did so through maniacal competitiveness, and cunning much like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford. Has he affected history? Certainly. Positively? Doubtful. His legacy is DRM and the anti-virus industry. Like the robber barrons, later in life he chooses to disgorge some of that wealth in a very public way in an effort to whitewash his image. He may leave his name on a couple of buildings, but posterity will see him reviled like his predecessors.
Any respectable/. user should have most of this suite installed already (excluding a few things)
Really? I was not aware that a self-respecting slashdot user was a drooling Windoze monkey. Better to reject proprietary gifts that can legally be revoked, and contribute towards free software substutes of the non-free components that run on the GNU system or BSD. 6 months of Norton Anti-Virus? Wow.
Nuclear power doesn't derive its energy from the sun.
In a sense it does, just not our Sun. Uranium was introduced into our Sun's primordial gas cloud by supernova explosions and associated nucleosynthesis. Planet formation concentrated it in the inner solar system (Earth). There is an interesting calculation you can do to estimate the date of the U forming supernova. The ratio of U235/U235 today is about 1/128. It is assumed that the ratio was 1 at the time of the explosion. We know the decay constants of both materials. Solving for time we find the age to be about 6 Gyr. The Earth is about 4.6Gyr.
I dealt with the same creep. It seems to me it would be useful for a user to see this information. I had no indication of bad standing until I got booted.
Thanks for the interesting link. I wonder if their censorship software is smart enough to detect modified versions of forbidden language like: F@lun G0ng. You would think these kind of usages would spring up for the same reasons they have in the west.
They move into an industry with established technology companies with the expressed purpose of taking it over by dumping wads of development cash into it and making their product tightly interoperable with the rest of the MS family.
Spare us the tripe about M$ outworking the rest of the world. And the wads of cash are a lot less of a factor than their ability to actively obstruct competition with their OS hegemony. The fact has been shown repeatedly in government anti-trust suit. Your statement is disingenuous.
I think you responded to the abortion question very well. The other two issues are more difficult to dodge. My posting was stated in vigorous terms because I object to the slashdot moderators tacit democrat party leanings. I would be more interested to read about the some Republican's lonely battle opposing Teddy kennedy. This story did not provoke any meaningful debate of the use of computing technology in political campaigning. It deserves a -2 Flamebait itself.
More stable, but less of a consistent platform (Do you write for Linux or Solaris or AIX or NetBSD or...?).
GNU/Autoconf/Automake have provided a great *nix portability solution since the early 1990's. Almost all GNU/Linux packages use it to great effect even on Cywin/Win32 systems. Writing for Windows only nowadays is truly inexplicable.
That was the idea! Better the a shot of espresso in the morning? I figured that a backhanded partisan story should be exposed with a blatant, hyper-opposing response.
Utah is the reddest of red states. Pete Ashdown is facing an uphill battle selling his party's platform of secular socialism, white flag diplomacy, and state sponsored infanticide to the Mormons.
Get off your soapbox. Some of us like languages that actually have syntaxes and can really do low-level work.
It is very likely that the sugary-syntax language you use is glued to the standard C library to meaningfully interact with your system, assuming you are using a *nix system. I cannot vouch for what goes on behind a Windoze machine. You must be a Python programmer. That is ok. It is a lot better than being a VB programmer. But Python has nearly reached the precipice to oblivion that Perl reached a few years back. It is out of vogue. Go back to the classics. Try guile! You can link C libraries in the same way. I do admit I am hoping for a renaissance for the Lisp languages in 2006. As for the elegant and necessary Lisp parentheses, just use Emacs show-paren-mode and you will never be bothered by matching ')', '}' or anything else.
Can anyone translate this into English? What is XGL and why should we care?
Back in the early 90's I used a 3D library from Sun called xgl. It was Sun's attempt to compete with SGI's GL. Quite nice too. I wonder why it was never release as software libre.
I still think C++ was invented as a joke. I mean, fancy allowing standard operators to be overloaded.
C++ was well intentioned, but yes, it has turned into a bit of a joke. Operator overloading is indeed a carnival of confusion that would have been best avoided. As a Lisp programmer I chuckle at the artificial distinction between operators, functions and methods.
And reference variables? I now have to carefully examine very function prototype when I need to know if a function call might have side effects.
I don't find these to be egregious. C's pass by value is a bit idiomatic, although it is simple and works well. Use const properly to avoid side effects.
And now garbage collection? That just a feature to fix poorly written code.
Agreed. I would rather see threads in the standard library instead of GC. GC promotes sloppy programming. It appeals to legions of Java and C# programmers, the bottom feeders of the programming world.
When I found the C language, I stopped looking. Ah well.
C will always be useful because assembler will always be with us. So yes, everyone should program in C. But for even more karmic hacking I prefer Lisp.
There are many examples of what biologists term 'gigantism' on islands.
There are even more examples of dwarfism on islands because of the low energy environment and relative lack of predators. Pygmy mammoths are one good example. The recently found hobbits are another.
My message is simple: Embrace science, reject religion and it's false promises. The afterlife is a lie. When you die that is it, you're dead.
You think you are a nihilist but your message is confused. If life is without meaning, then why be kind to your fellow man? What does it acheive? Wouldn't it be more clever to out compete or even kill him and get the most out of your life? Your reflex notion of treating your neighbor kindly without a thought of reward is Judeo-Christian. Considering the source, why don't you reject that idea as well? I am glad that many of history's greatest scientists and mathematicians are not like you. Most were motivated by believing the universe to be a place of order, but also beauty and meaning, and approached it with some humility. You embrace their results but reject their methods. Merry Christmas!
(To stop all US comments about why we Europeans don't need this) Galileo will be a civil system. It will be run by a private consortium and will offer guaranteed levels of service
Such statements are either naive or deceptive. I expect more from you sophisticates. What do you think China will do with 1 cm accuracy? Track Pandas? No, they will develop Galileo guided weapons and giving them further options in Taiwan, Kashmir, and even Siberia. All possible for a pitance of a few $100M. Galileo creates a strategic threat to the US and countermeasures will have to be developed. I can assure you there will be nothing guaranteed about service levels if the system is used to attack US interests.
You are so confused it is difficult to know where to begin.
Energy consumption *may* rise with economic growth.
This year economic growth was 4%. Energy usage growth was 2.2% as just proudly announced by the department of energy. Positive growth is unlikely to ever correlate with flat or negative energy usage.
In addition, we should spend more money on electric passenger and freight railroad systems. Maybe electrically-powered freight could even replace a lot of long-distance trucks in the next 20-30 years (using roll-on roll-off cars where the trailers are driven onto the railcars).
That additional power on the electric grid must come from somewhere. Hydropower? The greenies routinely block dam projects in order to protect minute populations of slim-eating crustations. Nuclear? LOL! Solar power? Not enough surface area on the planet. Wind? Greenies block wind projects to protect migrating birds. That leaves coal and gas power plants with their nasty climate altering CO2 emissions. You are back to square 1.
Energy itself can also be saved by people adopting more reasonable lifestyles.
I thought this is where your arguments for collectivism would start. Happily I am wrong.
The majority of incandescent bulbs' power input goes into generating heat. Replace those bulbs with compact fluorescents or LEDs and you're using 25% as much energy as before for lighting (and before someone starts complaining about Hg in CF bulbs, yes, CF bulbs are recyclable).
I'm with you on all of these. The 20% savings you acheive do nothing but slow energy usage growth, but grow it does.
In addition, who needs a 4,000 sq ft McMansion in the suburps for a 4- or 5- person family.Maybe development will become denser and smaller and heating/AC costs will go down that way.
Lets go a step better. Let the state build all housing and provide central power and heating. Sound good, comrade?
Drilling the ANWR is a Bandaid for a gunshot wound. It might temporarily stop the bleeding, but the patient's still going to croak without major surgery.
No, the obstinate and irrational refusal to drill ANWR is a form of liberal flagellation. They sacrifice an obvious and useful resource, and willingly accept higher gas prices, as a form of penance for their high standard of living. There is no reason not to drain it dry. Do you think the Cariboo care?
Neither is attacking another country to steal their oil...Oh wait...
So you think US supertankers are pulling up to the Iraqi terminals and filling up? That is better description the UN oil for food program than any US policy. You'd be closer to the truth to say that we attacked another country so middle eastern oil could continue to flow at *market prices*.
I'll agree that the majority party does entrain some negative forces. It is the same when either party is in the majority. Moderates tend to be free spending scumbags. The fiscal conservatives have definitely taken a back seat to the 'law and order' types. If the economy dips, expect that to change.
16 months of oil for the US is a huge amount. How can you possibly justify ignoring that. The Cariboo will be fine. The energy industry contributions go to Republicans because Republican policies serve their interests. The democrats and their ill-conceived policies cost energy companies money. It is natural. Now are their entrenched interests in the energy industry, yes. Will those interests prevent a truely disruptive energy alternative to take root, no. The problem is most alternatives (conservation, biofuels, wind power, solar power) aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
As a Gentoo user I wouldn't expect any package to be summarily left out. What I worry about is for packages such like Mono to become deeply embedded in distributions and create lots of dependencies, like Python. Python is increasingly a boil on the butt of GNU/Linux systems. Mono could go the same way.
You make the same mistake that many others make.
Really?
Bill and Windows restructured the working world within about 20 years and got a significant percentage of the population using computers. How that happenned is irrellevant because we now have to deal with it.
Personal computers were well on their way to widespread use before Bill & Co. The idea that the Windows was uniquely necessary to cause the revolution is absurd. Other efforts from Apple, IBM or others would have accomplished the same things. The state of the art might even be farther advanced.
Stop whining and start coming up with solutions.
I would love to search all posts for this phrase and see the millions of times it has come up. It is a typing reflex imprinted in the small minds of Microsoft droids with nothing substancial to say. Nitwit.
And very few people would call Gates a robber baron at all.
The parallels between Gates and the robber barrons of 1880-1920 are pretty obvious. Perhaps it is your healthy non-geek detachment that prevents you from observing it. Gates has profoundly distorted an industry of great promise and gathered tremendous wealth to himself through careful construction of a monopoly. He did so through maniacal competitiveness, and cunning much like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford. Has he affected history? Certainly. Positively? Doubtful. His legacy is DRM and the anti-virus industry. Like the robber barrons, later in life he chooses to disgorge some of that wealth in a very public way in an effort to whitewash his image. He may leave his name on a couple of buildings, but posterity will see him reviled like his predecessors.
Any respectable /. user should have most of this suite installed already (excluding a few things)
Really? I was not aware that a self-respecting slashdot user was a drooling Windoze monkey. Better to reject proprietary gifts that can legally be revoked, and contribute towards free software substutes of the non-free components that run on the GNU system or BSD. 6 months of Norton Anti-Virus? Wow.
Nuclear power doesn't derive its energy from the sun.
In a sense it does, just not our Sun. Uranium was introduced into our Sun's primordial gas cloud by supernova explosions and associated nucleosynthesis. Planet formation concentrated it in the inner solar system (Earth). There is an interesting calculation you can do to estimate the date of the U forming supernova. The ratio of U235/U235 today is about 1/128. It is assumed that the ratio was 1 at the time of the explosion. We know the decay constants of both materials. Solving for time we find the age to be about 6 Gyr. The Earth is about 4.6Gyr.
I dealt with the same creep. It seems to me it would be useful for a user to see this information. I had no indication of bad standing until I got booted.
Yes. My sig contains the meat of the response. I was amazed.
And I thought I was the only one. As you well know the slashdot priesthood promotes the following political views:
Others? Cross them on any of these on a regular basis and you will get that nasty message.
Thanks for the interesting link. I wonder if their censorship software is smart enough to detect modified versions of forbidden language like: F@lun G0ng. You would think these kind of usages would spring up for the same reasons they have in the west.
They move into an industry with established technology companies with the expressed purpose of taking it over by dumping wads of development cash into it and making their product tightly interoperable with the rest of the MS family.
Spare us the tripe about M$ outworking the rest of the world. And the wads of cash are a lot less of a factor than their ability to actively obstruct competition with their OS hegemony. The fact has been shown repeatedly in government anti-trust suit. Your statement is disingenuous.
Can anyone do better?
I think you responded to the abortion question very well. The other two issues are more difficult to dodge. My posting was stated in vigorous terms because I object to the slashdot moderators tacit democrat party leanings. I would be more interested to read about the some Republican's lonely battle opposing Teddy kennedy. This story did not provoke any meaningful debate of the use of computing technology in political campaigning. It deserves a -2 Flamebait itself.
More stable, but less of a consistent platform (Do you write for Linux or Solaris or AIX or NetBSD or...?).
GNU/Autoconf/Automake have provided a great *nix portability solution since the early 1990's. Almost all GNU/Linux packages use it to great effect even on Cywin/Win32 systems. Writing for Windows only nowadays is truly inexplicable.
That was the idea! Better the a shot of espresso in the morning? I figured that a backhanded partisan story should be exposed with a blatant, hyper-opposing response.
Utah is the reddest of red states. Pete Ashdown is facing an uphill battle selling his party's platform of secular socialism, white flag diplomacy, and state sponsored infanticide to the Mormons.
Get off your soapbox. Some of us like languages that actually have syntaxes and can really do low-level work.
It is very likely that the sugary-syntax language you use is glued to the standard C library to meaningfully interact with your system, assuming you are using a *nix system. I cannot vouch for what goes on behind a Windoze machine. You must be a Python programmer. That is ok. It is a lot better than being a VB programmer. But Python has nearly reached the precipice to oblivion that Perl reached a few years back. It is out of vogue. Go back to the classics. Try guile! You can link C libraries in the same way. I do admit I am hoping for a renaissance for the Lisp languages in 2006. As for the elegant and necessary Lisp parentheses, just use Emacs show-paren-mode and you will never be bothered by matching ')', '}' or anything else.
Can anyone translate this into English? What is XGL and why should we care?
Back in the early 90's I used a 3D library from Sun called xgl. It was Sun's attempt to compete with SGI's GL. Quite nice too. I wonder why it was never release as software libre.
I still think C++ was invented as a joke. I mean, fancy allowing standard operators to be overloaded.
C++ was well intentioned, but yes, it has turned into a bit of a joke. Operator overloading is indeed a carnival of confusion that would have been best avoided. As a Lisp programmer I chuckle at the artificial distinction between operators, functions and methods.
And reference variables? I now have to carefully examine very function prototype when I need to know if a function call might have side effects.
I don't find these to be egregious. C's pass by value is a bit idiomatic, although it is simple and works well. Use const properly to avoid side effects.
And now garbage collection? That just a feature to fix poorly written code.
Agreed. I would rather see threads in the standard library instead of GC. GC promotes sloppy programming. It appeals to legions of Java and C# programmers, the bottom feeders of the programming world.
When I found the C language, I stopped looking. Ah well.
C will always be useful because assembler will always be with us. So yes, everyone should program in C. But for even more karmic hacking I prefer Lisp.
There are many examples of what biologists term 'gigantism' on islands.
There are even more examples of dwarfism on islands because of the low energy environment and relative lack of predators. Pygmy mammoths are one good example. The recently found hobbits are another.
My message is simple: Embrace science, reject religion and it's false promises. The afterlife is a lie. When you die that is it, you're dead.
You think you are a nihilist but your message is confused. If life is without meaning, then why be kind to your fellow man? What does it acheive? Wouldn't it be more clever to out compete or even kill him and get the most out of your life? Your reflex notion of treating your neighbor kindly without a thought of reward is Judeo-Christian. Considering the source, why don't you reject that idea as well? I am glad that many of history's greatest scientists and mathematicians are not like you. Most were motivated by believing the universe to be a place of order, but also beauty and meaning, and approached it with some humility. You embrace their results but reject their methods. Merry Christmas!
(To stop all US comments about why we Europeans don't need this) Galileo will be a civil system. It will be run by a private consortium and will offer guaranteed levels of service
Such statements are either naive or deceptive. I expect more from you sophisticates. What do you think China will do with 1 cm accuracy? Track Pandas? No, they will develop Galileo guided weapons and giving them further options in Taiwan, Kashmir, and even Siberia. All possible for a pitance of a few $100M. Galileo creates a strategic threat to the US and countermeasures will have to be developed. I can assure you there will be nothing guaranteed about service levels if the system is used to attack US interests.
You are so confused it is difficult to know where to begin.
Energy consumption *may* rise with economic growth.
This year economic growth was 4%. Energy usage growth was 2.2% as just proudly announced by the department of energy. Positive growth is unlikely to ever correlate with flat or negative energy usage.
In addition, we should spend more money on electric passenger and freight railroad systems. Maybe electrically-powered freight could even replace a lot of long-distance trucks in the next 20-30 years (using roll-on roll-off cars where the trailers are driven onto the railcars).
That additional power on the electric grid must come from somewhere. Hydropower? The greenies routinely block dam projects in order to protect minute populations of slim-eating crustations. Nuclear? LOL! Solar power? Not enough surface area on the planet. Wind? Greenies block wind projects to protect migrating birds. That leaves coal and gas power plants with their nasty climate altering CO2 emissions. You are back to square 1.
Energy itself can also be saved by people adopting more reasonable lifestyles.
I thought this is where your arguments for collectivism would start. Happily I am wrong.
The majority of incandescent bulbs' power input goes into generating heat. Replace those bulbs with compact fluorescents or LEDs and you're using 25% as much energy as before for lighting (and before someone starts complaining about Hg in CF bulbs, yes, CF bulbs are recyclable).
I'm with you on all of these. The 20% savings you acheive do nothing but slow energy usage growth, but grow it does.
In addition, who needs a 4,000 sq ft McMansion in the suburps for a 4- or 5- person family.Maybe development will become denser and smaller and heating/AC costs will go down that way.
Lets go a step better. Let the state build all housing and provide central power and heating. Sound good, comrade?
Drilling the ANWR is a Bandaid for a gunshot wound. It might temporarily stop the bleeding, but the patient's still going to croak without major surgery.
No, the obstinate and irrational refusal to drill ANWR is a form of liberal flagellation. They sacrifice an obvious and useful resource, and willingly accept higher gas prices, as a form of penance for their high standard of living. There is no reason not to drain it dry. Do you think the Cariboo care?
Neither is attacking another country to steal their oil...Oh wait...
So you think US supertankers are pulling up to the Iraqi terminals and filling up? That is better description the UN oil for food program than any US policy. You'd be closer to the truth to say that we attacked another country so middle eastern oil could continue to flow at *market prices*.
I'll agree that the majority party does entrain some negative forces. It is the same when either party is in the majority. Moderates tend to be free spending scumbags. The fiscal conservatives have definitely taken a back seat to the 'law and order' types. If the economy dips, expect that to change.
16 months of oil for the US is a huge amount. How can you possibly justify ignoring that. The Cariboo will be fine. The energy industry contributions go to Republicans because Republican policies serve their interests. The democrats and their ill-conceived policies cost energy companies money. It is natural. Now are their entrenched interests in the energy industry, yes. Will those interests prevent a truely disruptive energy alternative to take root, no. The problem is most alternatives (conservation, biofuels, wind power, solar power) aren't.