"much" faster? Only the kernel and glibc make more than a negligible difference; Fedora, Mandrake and other distros offer CPU-specific versions of those.
Wrong. Please troll again. Gentoo is much much faster in some cases.
By caving in to his SCO-like demand to call the system "GNU/Linux", for starters.
This is not a SCO-like demand. SCO hasn't shown any proof of its claims. RMS's claim, OTOH, that the current distros have far more GNU code than Linux kernel code, is a fact. Go look at any distro if you don't believe it. And stop trying to use bandwagon buzzwords and name calling to make your arguments. Actual facts work much more nicely. If you want to prove it, go do a GNU vs. Linux SLOC count (or whatever metric would make sense) of a major distro.
I metamoderate every Troll moderation I see as unfair for this reason.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
They also use his misdefinition of the term "freedom" as applied to software
[snip]
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Maybe I'm wrong, but you apparently just don't 'get it'. We live in a society increasingly dependent on technology. If our basic human rights become exclusively delivered by tech (they become more so daily), and tech is one big maze of toll roads, then we lose those rights. RMS doesn't misuse the word freedom; he apparently understands its meaning far more deeply than you do.
You're talking about install time. Yes Gentoo is 'slower' at installing apps. However, once the app is installed, it is much faster than the generic i386 cruft you get from normal distributions, simply because Gentoo apps are compiled for your specific processor.
Which do you do more over the life of an application; install it or use it?
The obvious answer is that you use it far more times than you install it (only once per version). Gentoo's method clearly wins in that respect.
But the article is about modular distros, not performance. Gentoo is pretty good at that as well. It will get better at it too. I don't have a link handy, but you'll be able to customize your own Gentoo Live CD (a.k.a Modular Gentoo).
> Also, they can only compile for the lowest common processor. (e.g. A pentium II)
That may be true for traditional proprietary software, but NOT for F/OS Software. Witness Gentoo; I compile everything for my computer's specific processor. And surely you don't believe that the Hotspot Java VM does its optimizations 'for free'! Every runtime optimization check introduces a performance hit.
At my uni, CompSci focused on programming, mathematics, algorythms, etc, while CompEng was Electrical Engineering with a focus in microcomputer/controller based systems.
Most uni's publish there degree requirements online, so your best bet would be to compare what classes you have to take for a CompSci degree vs. a CompEng degree.
Another big clue would be to determine which classes are prerequisites for the major classes. CompEng has Physics as a prereq while in CompSci Physics was a degree requirement but not a prereq for the major classes. Engineering is more of a 'hard science' than Computer Science (at least at many schools).
The injunction would require Novell to assign to SCO all copyrights that Novell has wrongfully registered, prevent Novell from representing any ownership interest in those copyrights, and require Novell to retract or withdraw all representations it has made regarding its purported ownership of those copyrights.
Its like they don't even believe that they own the copyrights and want to secure them via litigation. Of course, that shouldn't surprise anyone...
There are serious doubts as to whether polygraph machines actually work or are simply junk science... and that criticism is of using polygraphs in a controlled environment like an interrogation room used by law-enforcement types. Now this company wants us to believe that an under-paid & under-trained security screener working in a chaotic environment like a busy airport is going to be able to detect a lie using their unproven product? Ha!
I left out the XNOR gate, which would also work for your statement. However, XNOR logic would mean that not only would two wrongs make a right but also that two rights would make a right. And we all know that SCOX isn't capable of making two rights out of anything...
Did you mean that SCOX NAND'ing or perhaps NOR'ing? Using NAND logic would mean that any wrong would make a right, while using NOR logic would mean that only two wrongs would make a right; other combinations of wrongs and rights would just be plain wrong.;-)
Just image a large warehouse filled with racks upon racks of these things running as an OpenMosix cluster... Super (space efficient) computing at its best.;)
Another thing is assembly language programs cannot return values like ordinary functions can.
Ummmm, no.
If you look closely at the relationships between opcode, assembler, and higher level languages, you'll see that this statement is not only incorrect, but that it isn't even 'framed' correctly.
I own a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid, and the thing came standard with a 7 year warranty on the battery pack. Most car parts are designed to fail just after the warranty expires. So if these vehicles use similiar batteries, I don't think you'll have to change out the battery in 1-2 years.
Mandrake is a company that exists in a Fair Market (Fair Markets look down on unnatural monopolies, deceptive advertising, etc. as opposed to a true Free Market). That is the theory at least. The thing that makes a Fair Market work is that bad companies and their ideas die off, hopefully rather quickly. Companies are supposed to adapt to market forces; market forces aren't supposed to adapt to companies. The point is that Mandrake is not a charity or a non-profit. If you want Linux and other GPL products to succeed in the market, let the non-profitable Linux companies die. The faster the better, I say.
We should spending our money on Linux services that are actually useful, and not propping up Linux companies that just don't 'get it'.
We all complain about stupid patents, but has anyone tried to do something about it? Looking at the Petition Practices webpage there doesn't seem to be any non-litigation way to revoke a patent.:( It seems like there should be a way to let the USPTO know about any prior art.
Darl might have called them in. Any plublicity is good plublicity (especially for a pump and dump scheme), and having the police there obviously helps with that.
The team consists of 6 Ph.D faculty, and the vision subsystem description notes that:
A group needs to be formed who can now proceed to writing code to actually perform in the robosoccer environment. (sic)
There is a saying that is "more true" in engineering: Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach.
Does anyone think these yahoo's have a chance of actually fielding a working robosoccer team? Maybe they plan on getting a bunch of students to do the lower level design & implementation work, but that won't solve the problem of first capturing a practical system design that might actually work...
It's been over three weeks since my last newsletter! Lots of things have been happening, but I haven't had time to write about them. Here are a few of them.
IEEE VOTING SYSTEM STANDARD ---
A seemingly obscure standards subcommittee of IEEE may determine whether we have trustworthy voting systems or not. And things are not going well.
IEEE is the "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers." It is a highly respected organization with a huge number of electrical engineers, many of whom have substantial expertise in computer-related topics. It is reasonable to expect that IEEE involvement in voting technology would be a good thing.
There is an IEEE standards committee (called P1583) that is writing standards for voting systems, including security standards for DREs. (http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc38/1583/) Although this committee may seem obscure, this standard may very well be the basis for future Federal regulation of voting equipment.
Recently, several voter-verifiable-audit-trail advocates with strong technology credentials have joined the P1583 committee in an effort to ensure the standard requires an adequate level of security. I am one of them.
Unfortunately, many of the current members on the committee are working very hard to prevent us from contributing to the standard. As we have gotten more involved, the tactics have become more extreme. The standard is now being rushed to a vote by the Standards Association, in an apparent attempt to freeze it before our most important suggestions can be incorporated. Many of the suggestions we HAVE made are dismissed for the flimsiest of reasons, and rules seem to be made up on the fly to exclude us from the standards-writing process.
So far as I can see, the committee is controlled by voting companies -- the chair of the committee works for ES&S, and even the IEEE standards people on the committee, including the president of the Standards Association, voted with them as a block in a teleconference earlier this week.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has taken an interest in e-voting and in the behavior of the P1583 committee as well. They issued a press release on Friday (see http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/20030919_eff_ pr.php), along with an action alert for IEEE members (http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/IEEE/). You can send a letter expressing your views, too (it will be especially effective if you are an IEEE member).
There will be more updates on this topic, no doubt.
Today I got this follow-up & correction:
There is a correction to the Voter Verification Newsletter emailed last night. I was writing about the IEEE P1583 voting equipment standards committee. Here is what I said:
So far as I can see, the committee is controlled by voting companies -- the chair of the committee works for ES&S, and even the IEEE standards people on the committee, including the president of the Standards Association, voted with them as a block in a teleconference earlier this week.
In fact, the president was not in the teleconference and, so far as I know, is not a member of the committee. The individual in question, Don Heirman, is a CANDIDATE for president of the Standards Association in the IEEE election that is currently underway.
Unless I am wrong, though, the byte is not SI. The SI quantifiers only act as defined within the environment of SI, and so may act differently with bytes. In other words, the terms "kilobyte," "megabyte," "gigabyte," and "terabyte" have no defined SI meaning. This is similar to a U.S. hundredweight weighing 100 lbs., and an Imperial one weighing 112.
Actually, the fact that a byte is not SI defined is the moot point. The prefixes kilo, giga, mega, etc. are well known, well defined SI standards and are not redefined anywhere else.
Its about time computer scientists started adhereing to a few scientific practices, principles, & standards and stopped being a bunch of ignorant elitists. Bravo to the hard drive makers for getting it right
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Please troll again. Gentoo is much much faster in some cases.
Um, no...
This is not a SCO-like demand. SCO hasn't shown any proof of its claims. RMS's claim, OTOH, that the current distros have far more GNU code than Linux kernel code, is a fact. Go look at any distro if you don't believe it. And stop trying to use bandwagon buzzwords and name calling to make your arguments. Actual facts work much more nicely. If you want to prove it, go do a GNU vs. Linux SLOC count (or whatever metric would make sense) of a major distro.
Two wrongs don't make a right.Maybe I'm wrong, but you apparently just don't 'get it'. We live in a society increasingly dependent on technology. If our basic human rights become exclusively delivered by tech (they become more so daily), and tech is one big maze of toll roads, then we lose those rights. RMS doesn't misuse the word freedom; he apparently understands its meaning far more deeply than you do.
You're talking about install time. Yes Gentoo is 'slower' at installing apps. However, once the app is installed, it is much faster than the generic i386 cruft you get from normal distributions, simply because Gentoo apps are compiled for your specific processor.
Which do you do more over the life of an application; install it or use it?
The obvious answer is that you use it far more times than you install it (only once per version). Gentoo's method clearly wins in that respect.
But the article is about modular distros, not performance. Gentoo is pretty good at that as well. It will get better at it too. I don't have a link handy, but you'll be able to customize your own Gentoo Live CD (a.k.a Modular Gentoo).
> Also, they can only compile for the lowest common processor. (e.g. A pentium II)
That may be true for traditional proprietary software, but NOT for F/OS Software. Witness Gentoo; I compile everything for my computer's specific processor. And surely you don't believe that the Hotspot Java VM does its optimizations 'for free'! Every runtime optimization check introduces a performance hit.
There is a real photo of Fonda and Kerry at a 1970 anti-war rally in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania (which they both spoke at).
I like Inside the Object Model: The Sensible Use of C++ by David M. Papurt.
At my uni, CompSci focused on programming, mathematics, algorythms, etc, while CompEng was Electrical Engineering with a focus in microcomputer/controller based systems.
Most uni's publish there degree requirements online, so your best bet would be to compare what classes you have to take for a CompSci degree vs. a CompEng degree.
Another big clue would be to determine which classes are prerequisites for the major classes. CompEng has Physics as a prereq while in CompSci Physics was a degree requirement but not a prereq for the major classes. Engineering is more of a 'hard science' than Computer Science (at least at many schools).
Anyways, here's the link: http://ir.sco.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=1269 26
I find this interesting:
Its like they don't even believe that they own the copyrights and want to secure them via litigation. Of course, that shouldn't surprise anyone...
There are serious doubts as to whether polygraph machines actually work or are simply junk science... and that criticism is of using polygraphs in a controlled environment like an interrogation room used by law-enforcement types. Now this company wants us to believe that an under-paid & under-trained security screener working in a chaotic environment like a busy airport is going to be able to detect a lie using their unproven product? Ha!
I left out the XNOR gate, which would also work for your statement. However, XNOR logic would mean that not only would two wrongs make a right but also that two rights would make a right. And we all know that SCOX isn't capable of making two rights out of anything...
[insert 3 rights make a left joke here]
I don't follow you. For an XOR I get this truth table:
A XOR B = Q
0 XOR 0 = 0
0 XOR 1 = 1
1 XOR 0 = 1
1 XOR 1 = 0
Did you mean that SCOX NAND'ing or perhaps NOR'ing? Using NAND logic would mean that any wrong would make a right, while using NOR logic would mean that only two wrongs would make a right; other combinations of wrongs and rights would just be plain wrong. ;-)
Just image a large warehouse filled with racks upon racks of these things running as an OpenMosix cluster... Super (space efficient) computing at its best. ;)
... or at least, my fellow almni have.
Another thing is assembly language programs cannot return values like ordinary functions can.
Ummmm, no.
If you look closely at the relationships between opcode, assembler, and higher level languages, you'll see that this statement is not only incorrect, but that it isn't even 'framed' correctly.
I own a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid, and the thing came standard with a 7 year warranty on the battery pack. Most car parts are designed to fail just after the warranty expires. So if these vehicles use similiar batteries, I don't think you'll have to change out the battery in 1-2 years.
Mandrake is a company that exists in a Fair Market (Fair Markets look down on unnatural monopolies, deceptive advertising, etc. as opposed to a true Free Market). That is the theory at least. The thing that makes a Fair Market work is that bad companies and their ideas die off, hopefully rather quickly. Companies are supposed to adapt to market forces; market forces aren't supposed to adapt to companies. The point is that Mandrake is not a charity or a non-profit. If you want Linux and other GPL products to succeed in the market, let the non-profitable Linux companies die. The faster the better, I say.
We should spending our money on Linux services that are actually useful, and not propping up Linux companies that just don't 'get it'.
We all complain about stupid patents, but has anyone tried to do something about it? Looking at the Petition Practices webpage there doesn't seem to be any non-litigation way to revoke a patent. :( It seems like there should be a way to let the USPTO know about any prior art.
Any IP lawyers care to comment?
Darl might have called them in. Any plublicity is good plublicity (especially for a pump and dump scheme), and having the police there obviously helps with that.
Global Associated News also interviewed Darl McBride today.
The team consists of 6 Ph.D faculty, and the vision subsystem description notes that:
There is a saying that is "more true" in engineering: Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach.
Does anyone think these yahoo's have a chance of actually fielding a working robosoccer team? Maybe they plan on getting a bunch of students to do the lower level design & implementation work, but that won't solve the problem of first capturing a practical system design that might actually work...
I got this in my inbox yesterday:
Today I got this follow-up & correction:
Actually, the *bi prefixes are IEC (60027-2), and IEEE (1541-2002) standards, and a proposed ISO standard.
Actually, the fact that a byte is not SI defined is the moot point. The prefixes kilo, giga, mega, etc. are well known, well defined SI standards and are not redefined anywhere else.
Its about time computer scientists started adhereing to a few scientific practices, principles, & standards and stopped being a bunch of ignorant elitists. Bravo to the hard drive makers for getting it right