They claim to be making lagers, but whatever they are doing, the results certainly don't taste like any lager I know. Lagers are excellent beers. As you said, the stuff Bud and Miller make should not be called beer in the first place, not to even mention lager.
First, GNU is not Linux. I agree that there is awfully lot of software that relies on gnu. But that does not tie the software to Linux. Most of application that I use on daily bases works just as well on any version of BSD, and even Windows. I agree that there are programs out there that compile only on red hat and nothing else, but I would not say that majority of free software is like that. AFAIK Solaris ships with Gnome desktop.
Yes, there are incompatibilities in Unix world. First there is the old east-west (System V and BSD) division, then GNU and nonGNU, then linux and unix.
One of the main ideas of free software is that you can take any damn thing that only compile on some obscure version of Red Hat, edit the damn code, write a good makefile or configure script, and make it run on whatever common or exotic system you use. If there is an application you care about that does not compile with your cc, fix it and submit the patches.
And your point is? What does that have to do with anything?
Now, whether or not the rm command would fail once, say, glibc was removed would depend on the particular setup.
After rm starts, it and all libraries it needs, including glibc, are loaded into memory. It does not matter what you do to the files on the disk at that moment. In this aspect, there is no difference between BSD and Linux, no matter what your "setup" is.
How does asking a sensible question and thinking critically make you an idiot?
It doesn't, however, the post displayed no critical thinking. It was critical all right, but it clearly wasn't a result of thinking. The lack of thinking showed in the question:
"What was the cause 30 years ago?"
while the original article never implied that there was any cause 30 years ago. The proper question would be for example "What happen 30 years ago?". I wouldn't do as fat as calling the author of the comment an idiot, however, the question certainly does betray a serious lack of thinking.
Anyway, the thing that I found curious about this whole thing is why they used the metric "400 1 litre bottles" - how would that be any different from filling a single 400 litre bottle?
Because 400 one litre bottles will need more plastic than one 400 litre bottle, thus making it even more harmful to the environment.
I'm aware that dpkg/apt, as you say, reduces labour and essentially allows instant (or near-instant) gratification...that is its' primary appeal. My main objection to apt is that on 2 seperate occasions (once with Xandros, and once with Debian itself) I've had apt go berserk when trying to uninstall Open Office...the dep chain somehow got confused and I ended up with a completely corrupted system. It was deleting things in what seemed like an entirely random manner. That in my mind is not a stable system.
It never happened to me, and I am a debian user for over 10 years. It is true that apt does have its issues, not the least one being that it is only as good as the packages you install. It is possible that a badly packaged application could mess up your dependencies. And it is true that in a truly well designed system, that shouldn't happen. However, at least according to my experience, it happens only extremely rarely. One time I had a computer where dependencies kept getting messed up. Than I discovered that it was a hard disc problem. The part of the disc where apt kept its information ad random read and write errors. Maybe it was something similar in your case. Just to make sure, you are talking about debian stable here, right?
The real problem where apt is concerned I think isn't necessarily that it itself is all that great, but more that with Linux anywayz there isn't any real alternative, since for the most part, rpm is worse. Subpackaging is an attrocity in both systems as well...it makes source compilation outside either system (for scenarios where you find a package where there isn't an rpm/deb; it does happen) largely impossible.
Oh, crap. That means that I was apparently only dreaming about compiling the newest qt on my debian box yesterday. And here I was, looking forward to compiling and installing several applications that need qt 4.2 later today. I guess I will have to find some other source of entertainment for this evening.
Seriously, though. During all the years of running debian, i nearly always compiled and installed software that was not packaged for debian. There were times when I had more stuff in/usr/local than in/usr, and I never had any trouble with it. I have no idea what you are talking about here.
The other thing is that saying you can put a custom kernel in without the system complaining isn't anything Debian users should be bragging about...it can be done in Slackware, minus the screwing around with making a kernel deb.
There is no need to make a kernel package in debian either. It's just that it is much easier to use one most of the time.
A lot of Debian fanboys here might love apt...but it isn't the silver bullet it's made out to be. As I said earlier, for end users who don't use much other than Open Office, XMMS, VLC, and Firefox, it'd be fine...but for those of us who want to use our systems for something slightly more meaningful, there are areas where it is wanting.
Of the applications you have listed, firefox is the only one I ever use, and I have installed that myself, without using a debian package (I don't thing there is a recent firefox package for stable). Again, I have no idea what you are talking about. Can you define what do you mean by "more meaningful"?
Lack of software used to be one of my main reasons for not using Windows on the desktop. It is no longer the case, thanks to Cygwin, and many other porting efforts. But as you said, even though most software I use is actually available for Windows, hunting it down, installing it and keeping it upgraded is a major pain. Stuff that's installed out of the box on Linux, or that is available for an easy installation from centralized repositories, has to be downloaded from 50 different websites and installed in 10 different ways on Windows. And then you have to keep track of upgrades, and with most upgrades, manually download them and install them again.
Another huge problem on Windows is integration. On Linux, all software I use on daily basis typically works right out of the box. On a new machine, I usually have to just copy few configuration files from an old machine to get the exact same configuration. Things work nicely with each other, and with the system, out of the box.
On Windows, some applications understand Cygwin paths, some don't. Each application has it's own user interface, different from all the other ones. After installing a new application, I have to find where it got installed, and manually add the directory to the $PATH. Then you upgrade to a new version, which installs to a different place, and you have to edit all the places that pointed to the old version. Some applications work with the TXmouse, some don't. Dtto with VirtuaWin. Each application that needs a scripting language, a shell, ghostscript or any other interpreter installs its own copy. As a result, I have maybe 20 copies of python, 10 copies of ghostscript, two versions of TeX, 15 shells, 5 different seds, each using different configuration, each behaving slightly differently, and you are never sure which one of them is going to be called. Lately some installers have been searching the system trying to find out if various pieces of supporting software are present, and installing them only if they cannot be found, but they mostly only find stuff if it is in some sort of standard location, and since there really is no such thing as a standard location on Windows, most of the time you still end up with several copies of everything, but I must say that it is an improvement. But still, to get work done, I'll pick Linux over Windows any time.
Ehm, typically, if you use any Unix type system on more than one networked computer, you keep your entire home directory on one server, and mount it from all the other computers. Which means, not just your configuration settings, but all your files are immediately available from all machines. You have the exact same environment no matter which machine you are actually sitting at. It has been that way for decades.
Well, this is "news for nerds". Everybody knows that USA is the only country that has nerds. We European geeks are all really cool and not at all nerdy, and the same goes for geeks from Asia, Africa, Australia, South and Cental America and Canada, and Antarctica. That's why we never read Slashdot... oops!?
Did you learn how to read from old texts for adults in a foreign language?
Actually, my first English teacher was really a translator (there weren't that many English teachers in my country at that time), and after I learned the basics, she had me translate "The Prince and the Pauper". I was about 10 years old at that time, and I rather liked it.:)
I mostly agree with the rest of your post, though. I was just arguing against the opinion that the project is doomed to be a flop, just because the laptops will actually need more money than $100.
I wish you good luck, I really hope this project works. And myself, I have lerned that it is good to have supporters, even though they often have no idea what they are talking about.;)
Unfortunately, you don't get it either. There will always be a couple of dedicated hackers who read uncommented printouts, etc. I did when I was a kid too. But most of my friends didn't, and that's the point. You can't justify spending billions of dollars for something that a couple of hardcore geeks will use and the rest will throw in the trash. You have to plan for even those without the intelligence and dedication necessary to do what you did.
Yes, I agree, when I was learning how to use a computer, most of my friends did not bother to do it, then had absolutely no interest in it. Later, when they actually needed to use a computer for something, lot of them came to me or others like me for help. In the end, it was me and others like me who ended up providing the training. When the country eventually emerged from communism and started communicating freely with the west, there was already well established "culture" of computing, and it didn't take a long time for the country to catch up with the "west" as far as computer literacy (whatever that means) goes.
Now would we welcome additional trainig, literature, lesson plans, money or other kind of support? Definitely! Were our effort doomed to failure because of the lack of those? Obviously not.
For a while, after the fall of communism, I worked for a nonprofit where a part of my job was driving with a friend and colleague from town to town, from school to school, in an old decrepit car (it belonged to the friend, the nonprofit we worked for didn't have a car, and neither did I), that made so much noise that every tim we saw the cops we stoped on the side of the road and pretended to study the map, just so we wouldn't get out registration confiscated, and installed and modems for the schools' computers, so that they can connect to a BBS and participate in an international UNESCO project on acid rain. We would certainly be extremely happy if somebody donated money to buy a better car, to establish a real internet connection to the schools, to give us some training literature which we could give to the teachers instead of the flyers we typed on our office computer, printed on an old 9pin dot matrix printer and copied on an old scratched up copy machine. We would be glad to have a new office computer and printer, with some new software. Maybe I wouldn't have to write our own TSR keyboard and screen drivers for our national alphabet (on the other hand, I had somebody telling me years later that they just finished typing their master thesis using that software, so perhaps it was good I had to write it). Eventually, money for most of these things have been found somehow (except the car, last time I heard, the foundation still did not own a car, people who work there still use their own, but at least they all seem to have decent cars now). However, even though we did not have the money for all that at that time, the project was still rather sucessful.
Secondly, and by God I don't know how many times this will have to be repeated: it's not about teaching kids about computers. The computer is a tool for learning. Sure, some will learn how to program. But the majority won't.
I never said they will. I was just arguing that even without official support for training and other stuff, the project still wouldn't have to be a flop. In the project I wrote about above, we had bunch of school that would like to participate, but they didn't have computers. If we had the OLPC hardware, we could have added perhaps some 20 schools to our project.
This is a project for the majority, and if it is to be incorporated into the school curriculum in a meaningful way, saying "the kids will figure out ASM themselves" won't cut it, because it never was about that in the first place.
The way I see it, the laptop is just a tool. It will have to be used differently in different situations. In some places, giving them to the "local geeks" and letting them figure it out may be the best way. In other places (IMHO any deployment in U
I find the other crowd more interesting. You know, those that get upset about free speech rights but think that guns should be outlawed
I suppose some of these people are simply pacifists, people who are against violence, people who believe in nonviolent protests, civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. And in sume situations, such resistance can indeed be very powerful. Ater all, having weapons is only one way how to add strength to a revolt.
But I believe that a majority of the "gun control" crowd doesn't actually particularly care about any of the two amendments. They pick safety over freedom, free speech doesn't really mean anything to them, (actually, I believe many people find the concept somewhat annoying, if the person speaking expresses an opposing or unpopular opinion), and "guns are bad and dangerous". And politicians simply encourage that position: it is an easy way to get votes.
I also think that in many cases a preference for one of the amendment is more question of a "culture", or an atempt to distinguish oneself form "the other group", rather than of some well reasoned political opinion. Some years ago, I lived for a while in a very small midwestern town, which also had fairly large liberal arts college. Politically, the town was divided pretty clearly between the "locals" and "the college folks". Lot of the people associated with the college were "anti gun", IMHO simply because they associated guns with tobacco chewing gun wielding conservative rednecks. On the other hand, I have heard the locals mention "free speech" as something "them college folks would fuss about" on several occasions.
So what if the Chinese army could, hypothetically, wipe out a couple thousand guys with handguns. No duh! The point is that the Chinese people had guns, and the will to use them, there's absolutely no way the Chinese government would ever dare attack their own people.
What makes you think so? I don't see any reason. It's not like there are no armed resistance groups in the world that are being attacked and practically wiped out by their governments. In Iraq under Hussain, Kurds were relatively well armed, but that didn't seem to stop the government from trying to genocide them. You can find that happening all over the world.
People who think that government can be held in check by an unarmed populace are fools.
How odd. There seem to be number of examples of nonviolent revolutions, where unarmed populace managed to overthrow an oppresive government. While weapons can definitely strenghten your arguments, they are by no means necessary, and don't necessarily make that much difference.
Look, I fully support the right or citizens to bear arms, and as I wrote above, loaded guns can definitely add strength to your words and actions, on the other hand, if you think that just because you and your friends have few semiautomatic rifles in your garage you are somehow magically protected from your government, I am afraid you are being the fool.
In addition to that, there are examples in history of democratic countries that allowed their citizens to bear arms only to be overrun by well armed, well organized milicia with totalitarian ideology. All that was needed was for a group of populist politicians get a significant majority of the gun bearing crowd to their side. Right to bear arms is not an automatic guarantee of democracy, in fact, it can cut both ways.
You cannot look at this problem through the eyes of a western businessman. You see a computer, you see a person who does not know how to use it, and as a result you see need for training, user manuals, instructors, etc. It doesn't have to be that way:
I grew up in a communist country in the 70's and early 80's. The only computers we had (by we I mean the public, not the government) were donated to us from the west. Weth very few exceptions they came wit no instructions, no manuals, often with very little software. So we learned how to use them. We figured it out. I know people who learned how to program by reading printouts of programs they found somewhere on a floppy with software that happened to have come with a source, and tried to figure out what the program actually does, without even knowing much English. We did have some manuals and books, mostly old editions, also donated, and we circulated these around. Not everybody was able to do that, but there were plenty of us whe could. And believe me that we would be pretty upset if at that time somebody in the west said: "Don't send them computers, they won't be able to use them without having proper trainig and infrastructure."
4 bytes are more than enough. All you need to do is load your program into that buffer, and put a jump instruction to the entry point of the program (if you are overwriting executable code) or simply the address of the entry point (if you manage to overwrite a function return address). It seems that in this case, the memory being on the heap, it's none of those two cases, on the other hand, from my pld days of programming in assembly under DOS, we did all sorts of tricks with allocating memory, loading instructions into it, and executing them. Sometimes this was the only way to overcome various limitation of the architecture (combination of 8086 and DOS).
but my point is that the nullity doesn't really tell you very much
If I understand it correctly, that's exactly the point. "Nullity" is what we usually call an "undetermined value". If a number is nullity, that means we have no information about it. The concept is really nothing new, what this guy did is he developed an axiomatic system, supposedly consistent with axioms of arithmetics, which formalizes this concept. Is it a revolutionary discovery? Definitely not. Is it useful? Maybe. At this moment I cannot see any application other than replacing IEEE 754 in computer science.
because he doesn't define how the + and * operators map up with it (nullity + a = ?)...
Actually, he does: Axiom 4: nullity + a = nullity, and Axiom 15: nullity * a = nullity. He also defines additive and multiplicative inverses to all new "numbers" he introduces. Look at his paper, it's at
I went through the paper and during a brief examination, I wasn't able to find a contradiction. I am not saying there isn't one, but he does claim to have proved consistency of his axiomatic system with standard axioms of arithmetic, even though he used an automatic theorem prover of some sort, if I recall correctly.
He will work around this problem by restating the standard rules of exponents:
(a^x)*(a^y) = a^(x+y) only if none of a^x, a^y is nullity. Look at his paper, he has for example a theorem like this:
(a * b)^(-1) = b^(-1) * a^(-1) except when one of a and b is 0 and the other is finite negative. (T81)
I think his arithmetics system is valid, and it does allow one to divide by zero in a consistent way, however, it will result in bunch of hard to remember exceptions for most arithmetics theorems involving exponents.
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They claim to be making lagers, but whatever they are doing, the results certainly don't taste like any lager I know. Lagers are excellent beers. As you said, the stuff Bud and Miller make should not be called beer in the first place, not to even mention lager.
No, you drink Bud and Miller. Them not beers.
Ehm, Pilsner is a kind of lager. Besides, I doubt it's an American favorite. Americans don't really drink beer very much.
First, GNU is not Linux. I agree that there is awfully lot of software that relies on gnu. But that does not tie the software to Linux. Most of application that I use on daily bases works just as well on any version of BSD, and even Windows. I agree that there are programs out there that compile only on red hat and nothing else, but I would not say that majority of free software is like that. AFAIK Solaris ships with Gnome desktop.
Yes, there are incompatibilities in Unix world. First there is the old east-west (System V and BSD) division, then GNU and nonGNU, then linux and unix.
One of the main ideas of free software is that you can take any damn thing that only compile on some obscure version of Red Hat, edit the damn code, write a good makefile or configure script, and make it run on whatever common or exotic system you use. If there is an application you care about that does not compile with your cc, fix it and submit the patches.
From my Linux box:
/bin/rm
morgan@myhost:/usr/include$ which rm
And your point is? What does that have to do with anything?
Now, whether or not the rm command would fail once, say, glibc was removed would depend on the particular setup.
After rm starts, it and all libraries it needs, including glibc, are loaded into memory. It does not matter what you do to the files on the disk at that moment. In this aspect, there is no difference between BSD and Linux, no matter what your "setup" is.
How does asking a sensible question and thinking critically make you an idiot?
It doesn't, however, the post displayed no critical thinking. It was critical all right, but it clearly wasn't a result of thinking. The lack of thinking showed in the question:
"What was the cause 30 years ago?"
while the original article never implied that there was any cause 30 years ago. The proper question would be for example "What happen 30 years ago?". I wouldn't do as fat as calling the author of the comment an idiot, however, the question certainly does betray a serious lack of thinking.
The number one fact that they missed is that people who write BBC News articles are idiots. Wait, we knew that last year, already. Never mind.
Anyway, the thing that I found curious about this whole thing is why they used the metric "400 1 litre bottles" - how would that be any different from filling a single 400 litre bottle?
Because 400 one litre bottles will need more plastic than one 400 litre bottle, thus making it even more harmful to the environment.
I'm aware that dpkg/apt, as you say, reduces labour and essentially allows instant (or near-instant) gratification...that is its' primary appeal. My main objection to apt is that on 2 seperate occasions (once with Xandros, and once with Debian itself) I've had apt go berserk when trying to uninstall Open Office...the dep chain somehow got confused and I ended up with a completely corrupted system. It was deleting things in what seemed like an entirely random manner. That in my mind is not a stable system.
/usr/local than in /usr, and I never had any trouble with it. I have no idea what you are talking about here.
It never happened to me, and I am a debian user for over 10 years. It is true that apt does have its issues, not the least one being that it is only as good as the packages you install. It is possible that a badly packaged application could mess up your dependencies. And it is true that in a truly well designed system, that shouldn't happen. However, at least according to my experience, it happens only extremely rarely. One time I had a computer where dependencies kept getting messed up. Than I discovered that it was a hard disc problem. The part of the disc where apt kept its information ad random read and write errors. Maybe it was something similar in your case. Just to make sure, you are talking about debian stable here, right?
The real problem where apt is concerned I think isn't necessarily that it itself is all that great, but more that with Linux anywayz there isn't any real alternative, since for the most part, rpm is worse. Subpackaging is an attrocity in both systems as well...it makes source compilation outside either system (for scenarios where you find a package where there isn't an rpm/deb; it does happen) largely impossible.
Oh, crap. That means that I was apparently only dreaming about compiling the newest qt on my debian box yesterday. And here I was, looking forward to compiling and installing several applications that need qt 4.2 later today. I guess I will have to find some other source of entertainment for this evening.
Seriously, though. During all the years of running debian, i nearly always compiled and installed software that was not packaged for debian. There were times when I had more stuff in
The other thing is that saying you can put a custom kernel in without the system complaining isn't anything Debian users should be bragging about...it can be done in Slackware, minus the screwing around with making a kernel deb.
There is no need to make a kernel package in debian either. It's just that it is much easier to use one most of the time.
A lot of Debian fanboys here might love apt...but it isn't the silver bullet it's made out to be. As I said earlier, for end users who don't use much other than Open Office, XMMS, VLC, and Firefox, it'd be fine...but for those of us who want to use our systems for something slightly more meaningful, there are areas where it is wanting.
Of the applications you have listed, firefox is the only one I ever use, and I have installed that myself, without using a debian package (I don't thing there is a recent firefox package for stable). Again, I have no idea what you are talking about. Can you define what do you mean by "more meaningful"?
Exactly!
Lack of software used to be one of my main reasons for not using Windows on the desktop. It is no longer the case, thanks to Cygwin, and many other porting efforts. But as you said, even though most software I use is actually available for Windows, hunting it down, installing it and keeping it upgraded is a major pain. Stuff that's installed out of the box on Linux, or that is available for an easy installation from centralized repositories, has to be downloaded from 50 different websites and installed in 10 different ways on Windows. And then you have to keep track of upgrades, and with most upgrades, manually download them and install them again.
Another huge problem on Windows is integration. On Linux, all software I use on daily basis typically works right out of the box. On a new machine, I usually have to just copy few configuration files from an old machine to get the exact same configuration. Things work nicely with each other, and with the system, out of the box.
On Windows, some applications understand Cygwin paths, some don't. Each application has it's own user interface, different from all the other ones. After installing a new application, I have to find where it got installed, and manually add the directory to the $PATH. Then you upgrade to a new version, which installs to a different place, and you have to edit all the places that pointed to the old version. Some applications work with the TXmouse, some don't. Dtto with VirtuaWin. Each application that needs a scripting language, a shell, ghostscript or any other interpreter installs its own copy. As a result, I have maybe 20 copies of python, 10 copies of ghostscript, two versions of TeX, 15 shells, 5 different seds, each using different configuration, each behaving slightly differently, and you are never sure which one of them is going to be called. Lately some installers have been searching the system trying to find out if various pieces of supporting software are present, and installing them only if they cannot be found, but they mostly only find stuff if it is in some sort of standard location, and since there really is no such thing as a standard location on Windows, most of the time you still end up with several copies of everything, but I must say that it is an improvement. But still, to get work done, I'll pick Linux over Windows any time.
Ehm, typically, if you use any Unix type system on more than one networked computer, you keep your entire home directory on one server, and mount it from all the other computers. Which means, not just your configuration settings, but all your files are immediately available from all machines. You have the exact same environment no matter which machine you are actually sitting at. It has been that way for decades.
Well, this is "news for nerds". Everybody knows that USA is the only country that has nerds. We European geeks are all really cool and not at all nerdy, and the same goes for geeks from Asia, Africa, Australia, South and Cental America and Canada, and Antarctica. That's why we never read Slashdot... oops!?
Even if they don't deport you, it will cost you several hours at each border crossing before they let you in.
I think we need the "-1 Gross" moderation.
Did you learn how to read from old texts for adults in a foreign language?
:)
;)
Actually, my first English teacher was really a translator (there weren't that many English teachers in my country at that time), and after I learned the basics, she had me translate "The Prince and the Pauper". I was about 10 years old at that time, and I rather liked it.
I mostly agree with the rest of your post, though. I was just arguing against the opinion that the project is doomed to be a flop, just because the laptops will actually need more money than $100.
I wish you good luck, I really hope this project works. And myself, I have lerned that it is good to have supporters, even though they often have no idea what they are talking about.
Unfortunately, you don't get it either. There will always be a couple of dedicated hackers who read uncommented printouts, etc. I did when I was a kid too. But most of my friends didn't, and that's the point. You can't justify spending billions of dollars for something that a couple of hardcore geeks will use and the rest will throw in the trash. You have to plan for even those without the intelligence and dedication necessary to do what you did.
Yes, I agree, when I was learning how to use a computer, most of my friends did not bother to do it, then had absolutely no interest in it. Later, when they actually needed to use a computer for something, lot of them came to me or others like me for help. In the end, it was me and others like me who ended up providing the training. When the country eventually emerged from communism and started communicating freely with the west, there was already well established "culture" of computing, and it didn't take a long time for the country to catch up with the "west" as far as computer literacy (whatever that means) goes.
Now would we welcome additional trainig, literature, lesson plans, money or other kind of support? Definitely! Were our effort doomed to failure because of the lack of those? Obviously not.
For a while, after the fall of communism, I worked for a nonprofit where a part of my job was driving with a friend and colleague from town to town, from school to school, in an old decrepit car (it belonged to the friend, the nonprofit we worked for didn't have a car, and neither did I), that made so much noise that every tim we saw the cops we stoped on the side of the road and pretended to study the map, just so we wouldn't get out registration confiscated, and installed and modems for the schools' computers, so that they can connect to a BBS and participate in an international UNESCO project on acid rain. We would certainly be extremely happy if somebody donated money to buy a better car, to establish a real internet connection to the schools, to give us some training literature which we could give to the teachers instead of the flyers we typed on our office computer, printed on an old 9pin dot matrix printer and copied on an old scratched up copy machine. We would be glad to have a new office computer and printer, with some new software. Maybe I wouldn't have to write our own TSR keyboard and screen drivers for our national alphabet (on the other hand, I had somebody telling me years later that they just finished typing their master thesis using that software, so perhaps it was good I had to write it). Eventually, money for most of these things have been found somehow (except the car, last time I heard, the foundation still did not own a car, people who work there still use their own, but at least they all seem to have decent cars now). However, even though we did not have the money for all that at that time, the project was still rather sucessful.
Secondly, and by God I don't know how many times this will have to be repeated: it's not about teaching kids about computers. The computer is a tool for learning. Sure, some will learn how to program. But the majority won't.
I never said they will. I was just arguing that even without official support for training and other stuff, the project still wouldn't have to be a flop. In the project I wrote about above, we had bunch of school that would like to participate, but they didn't have computers. If we had the OLPC hardware, we could have added perhaps some 20 schools to our project.
This is a project for the majority, and if it is to be incorporated into the school curriculum in a meaningful way, saying "the kids will figure out ASM themselves" won't cut it, because it never was about that in the first place.
The way I see it, the laptop is just a tool. It will have to be used differently in different situations. In some places, giving them to the "local geeks" and letting them figure it out may be the best way. In other places (IMHO any deployment in U
I find the other crowd more interesting. You know, those that get upset about free speech rights but think that guns should be outlawed
I suppose some of these people are simply pacifists, people who are against violence, people who believe in nonviolent protests, civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. And in sume situations, such resistance can indeed be very powerful. Ater all, having weapons is only one way how to add strength to a revolt.
But I believe that a majority of the "gun control" crowd doesn't actually particularly care about any of the two amendments. They pick safety over freedom, free speech doesn't really mean anything to them, (actually, I believe many people find the concept somewhat annoying, if the person speaking expresses an opposing or unpopular opinion), and "guns are bad and dangerous". And politicians simply encourage that position: it is an easy way to get votes.
I also think that in many cases a preference for one of the amendment is more question of a "culture", or an atempt to distinguish oneself form "the other group", rather than of some well reasoned political opinion. Some years ago, I lived for a while in a very small midwestern town, which also had fairly large liberal arts college. Politically, the town was divided pretty clearly between the "locals" and "the college folks". Lot of the people associated with the college were "anti gun", IMHO simply because they associated guns with tobacco chewing gun wielding conservative rednecks. On the other hand, I have heard the locals mention "free speech" as something "them college folks would fuss about" on several occasions.
So what if the Chinese army could, hypothetically, wipe out a couple thousand guys with handguns. No duh! The point is that the Chinese people had guns, and the will to use them, there's absolutely no way the Chinese government would ever dare attack their own people.
What makes you think so? I don't see any reason. It's not like there are no armed resistance groups in the world that are being attacked and practically wiped out by their governments. In Iraq under Hussain, Kurds were relatively well armed, but that didn't seem to stop the government from trying to genocide them. You can find that happening all over the world.
People who think that government can be held in check by an unarmed populace are fools.
How odd. There seem to be number of examples of nonviolent revolutions, where unarmed populace managed to overthrow an oppresive government. While weapons can definitely strenghten your arguments, they are by no means necessary, and don't necessarily make that much difference.
Look, I fully support the right or citizens to bear arms, and as I wrote above, loaded guns can definitely add strength to your words and actions, on the other hand, if you think that just because you and your friends have few semiautomatic rifles in your garage you are somehow magically protected from your government, I am afraid you are being the fool.
In addition to that, there are examples in history of democratic countries that allowed their citizens to bear arms only to be overrun by well armed, well organized milicia with totalitarian ideology. All that was needed was for a group of populist politicians get a significant majority of the gun bearing crowd to their side. Right to bear arms is not an automatic guarantee of democracy, in fact, it can cut both ways.
You cannot look at this problem through the eyes of a western businessman. You see a computer, you see a person who does not know how to use it, and as a result you see need for training, user manuals, instructors, etc. It doesn't have to be that way:
I grew up in a communist country in the 70's and early 80's. The only computers we had (by we I mean the public, not the government) were donated to us from the west. Weth very few exceptions they came wit no instructions, no manuals, often with very little software. So we learned how to use them. We figured it out. I know people who learned how to program by reading printouts of programs they found somewhere on a floppy with software that happened to have come with a source, and tried to figure out what the program actually does, without even knowing much English. We did have some manuals and books, mostly old editions, also donated, and we circulated these around. Not everybody was able to do that, but there were plenty of us whe could. And believe me that we would be pretty upset if at that time somebody in the west said: "Don't send them computers, they won't be able to use them without having proper trainig and infrastructure."
4 bytes are more than enough. All you need to do is load your program into that buffer, and put a jump instruction to the entry point of the program (if you are overwriting executable code) or simply the address of the entry point (if you manage to overwrite a function return address). It seems that in this case, the memory being on the heap, it's none of those two cases, on the other hand, from my pld days of programming in assembly under DOS, we did all sorts of tricks with allocating memory, loading instructions into it, and executing them. Sometimes this was the only way to overcome various limitation of the architecture (combination of 8086 and DOS).
but my point is that the nullity doesn't really tell you very much
If I understand it correctly, that's exactly the point. "Nullity" is what we usually call an "undetermined value". If a number is nullity, that means we have no information about it. The concept is really nothing new, what this guy did is he developed an axiomatic system, supposedly consistent with axioms of arithmetics, which formalizes this concept. Is it a revolutionary discovery? Definitely not. Is it useful? Maybe. At this moment I cannot see any application other than replacing IEEE 754 in computer science.
100/0 != 10/0 != 1/0 != 0/0
but he uses the same identifier for all of them
Actually, he doesn't. He uses "infinity" for the first 3 and "nullity" for the last one.
so that would mean:
(100/0) / (1/0) = 1
No, according to his axioms, infinity/infinity = nullity, not 1
That goes against the principle of:
infinity / (infinity - 1) != 1
There is no such principle!
because he doesn't define how the + and * operators map up with it (nullity + a = ?)...
a chineVIII.pdf
Actually, he does: Axiom 4: nullity + a = nullity, and Axiom 15: nullity * a = nullity. He also defines additive and multiplicative inverses to all new "numbers" he introduces. Look at his paper, it's at
http://www.bookofparagon.com/Mathematics/PerspexM
I went through the paper and during a brief examination, I wasn't able to find a contradiction. I am not saying there isn't one, but he does claim to have proved consistency of his axiomatic system with standard axioms of arithmetic, even though he used an automatic theorem prover of some sort, if I recall correctly.
He will work around this problem by restating the standard rules of exponents:
(a^x)*(a^y) = a^(x+y) only if none of a^x, a^y is nullity. Look at his paper, he has for example a theorem like this:
(a * b)^(-1) = b^(-1) * a^(-1) except when one of a and b is 0 and the other is finite negative. (T81)
I think his arithmetics system is valid, and it does allow one to divide by zero in a consistent way, however, it will result in bunch of hard to remember exceptions for most arithmetics theorems involving exponents.
I don't see any way how you can get from 1/(-1*0) to -1*(1/0) using A13. A13 is simply commutativity of multiplication, how does it apply here?