Linus communicates very much like an academic. With him, it's not personal - it's Ideas. He says what he really thinks and makes big assertions and if he's wrong, others will push back. I think this is an excellent way to conduct debate if all parties are mature enough to handle it, but it's also critical that one is always open to recognizing a superior argument. I can't say whether Linus has that critical trait, but unfortunately many lesser academics sadly lack it as well, so I think the comparison stands regardless.
Machine guns are legal to possess in the US, military service or no. Nothing post-1986 though, which is a shame. I've e-slobbered over many a Swiss gun collection over the Internet.
Gun rights are far from the only way I measure freedom, but I do think they're enumerated second in the US Constitution for a good reason. Obviously as a general libertarian all the stuff you mention toasts my nuts, but I'm optimistic that things can be worked out as the wave of terror-paranoia seems to be passing.
Are there countries "more free" than the US? Probably, but I don't think you'll find any that are better in every aspect. The US is still pretty good, let's hope it stays that way.
* Threatens people with physical/gun violence (like Bruce Perens), thus hurting the cause of gun rights which he seems to care about. Could somebody post a relevant link about this? I'd appreciate it.
Exactly! Cell phones are transferring data so fast these days, you get all these bits flying around and smashing into your peptide bonds and shit like goddamn billiard balls... pretty soon you've got 1s and 0s mixed in with your As, Ts, Cs, and Gs and its all a just big fucking mess. Somebody stop the madness!
Some of us value the rights and life of the human individual more than some society's precious fucking traditions. Do you really think the victims CONSENT to such culture-driven atrocities?
I wonder if you will ever stop respecting others' disrespect and cruelty more than you respect your fellow man.
(By the way, the example of the Indian community is stupid. Dead people don't feel pain.)
I think many people question Intel's motives about "performance per watt" because they pay it lip service, but AMD is kicking their ass at it in the server field.
I'm sure this offer was not declined because OS X is not suitable for the project. It couldn't be because it offers little opportunity for the project to customize the system for the limited environment it will be running in. I am sure it also has nothing to do with the fact that it does not natively support most of the thousands of open-source applications that the project will certainly want to take advantage of, rather than paying for proprietary software. I am equally convinced that Apple would not make such an offer as a cheap publicity stunt. The MIT project leadership are simply a bunch of idiots who are too dumb to know that they should transfer their work into the divine hands of Jobs, who can do no wrong.
Mix-n-match? SMP stands for symmetric mulitprocessing. Symmetric, as in the same on both sides. Any SMP system would obviously be a matching pair, and that is something that, while done often, has not been offered as an affordable option to consumers. I didn't think it was possible to misread my post that badly.
The article summarized this idea well by calling it "a solution without a problem". The whole thing is just so amazingly ill-considered that it's very hard to take it seriously. The only need I could see for something like this is if someone with a P4 needed PCI-E now, and _also_ knew that they wanted to go AMD later. Even then, would they put up with buying a $50 expansion board and running their expensive new processor on that hacked solution??
If PCChips/ECS want to be ambitious, why not endeavor to bring affordable SMP to the masses? Even if the server-classed chips required are expensive, many people must be put off by $300, server-oriented mainboards. This way, they could grab some serious attention in the high-end market and gain credibility. What they're doing now is only going to leave people scratching their heads...
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 1
I really don't know what it is that makes Fedora so goddamn lethargic, but there are definitely faster distros out there. Ubuntu is still on the "heavy" side, but does better for me on things like boot time, time-to-desktop, and overall responsiveness on memory-limited machines. Gentoo, properly done, is excellent. However, it's Gentoo.
I'm currently becoming quite partial to Arch, a binary distro that offers excellent customizability and speed in a much friendlier package. Like Gentoo, it is mostly non-automatic as far as hardware setup is concerned, and so is recommended for experienced users. The major weakness right now is a lack of diversity in packages, but most of the cool, fairly mainstream stuff you'll want to be using is included, and packages are of high quality. It's worth a look.
Well, kudos for the informative reply I guess, but the truth is that I already knew most of this. That all sounds to me like waste due to various inefficiencies in the CMOS device, not power that is necessarily required for any type of computation. Thus the talk about "power used for computation" wasn't making any sense to me. The OP clarified that they were talking about idle power vs. active power, which makes things much more sensible.
I really don't understand all this hate for the GIMP. It's not that damn complicated. Once I figured out that all of the most direct-to-image functions are contained in the right-click context menu, the program only took a bit of exploration to become proficient in. I haven't run into anything yet that I needed a howto for, except for creating animated GIFs, which I suspect is a somewhat tricky hack in any image editor.
After using it for a while, it's my opinion that the GIMP's interface is quite well thought out, while still being accessible to the new user (who isn't a Photoshop curmudgeon and unwilling to learn). I've used some legitimately difficult OSS programs, like vi, emacs, Blender 3D. These are tough to learn. Still, are they bad interfaces? There's certainly a method to their madness that makes professional users love them. They're simply not targeted to the casual user.
Personally, i'm okay with the idea that OSS projects can be targeted at serious users, not the type of user who'll "use" it for 5 minutes, then pan it on the Internet. Maybe there could be a cut-down image editor that looks like a mutant MSPaint, so the Windows users are comfortable. I'm sure any lack of features would escape most usability critics' attention span.
I don't know about you, but I think that when I look back on my life many years later, I'll consider it much more important to have spent time watching something emotive and novel than consuming political propaganda. The films I've seen, the art and music I've enjoyed, and the places I've explored either in person or by proxy will be very much valued, when all is said and done. I can't say the same for Fahrenheit 9/11, for example. Perhaps it is important for the number of people it reached for whom its ideas were new, I'll grant that. But to the informed and interested viewer, it was little more than a rehash of world events through the prism of Moore's crazed psyche. I mean, seriously, the argument that seeing one man's inherently biased and un-countered rant rendered on film is prerequisite to making important choices is total bullshit, assuming you bother to read once in a while. Yes, I'm being a bit overzealous with the critique of Fahrenheit, but I can't see how anything like it can be considered truly enlightening and significant on a personly level.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I think you may have your priorities severely confused. Yes, there are important and momentous events and conflicts happening in the world. There always are. They oblige us to become involved and to form our own opinions and to seek truth, but more obsession does not mean more effect. The truly important things are the things that happen in the midst of constant turmoil that make life worth bothering with. Nobody and no philosophy is going to force us to seek these things out and partake in them, and it's up to us to make sure they don't pass us by. That's the uglier truth.
I don't know whether this documentary is really any good or not, or whether it warrants this sleep-deprived, starry-eyed rant at all. But to rank works like this to be *by definition* of lesser importance than political discourse reveals a very narrow point of view.
(And please stop with the mouth-frothing. It's very unsanitary.)
By that logic, I guess if someone felt that a person didn't develop "personhood" until about a year after birth, they would be perfectly justified in killing their 6 month old baby, right? After all, they do, in a sense, own it. What right do we have to tell them what to do? Hell, I'm not even a PARENT. What right have I to tell a PARENT what to do or not to do to their child? They should DECIDE. After all, they'll be having to deal with the personal ramifications (i.e. guilt), right? Who needs prison when you have guilt! It's a good thing all people are such moral creatures...
Yeah. Right.
It seems to me that your view on the abortion issue is so nice and simple and pure because it _avoids the issue entirely_. You specify the holy Third Trimester (capitalized, no less) as The Point at which a human should be considered a person, at which point presumably they should be entitled to some protection from harm by the government. Or maybe they don't, because you shy away from enforcing that protection, presumably because you are male. Which makes a difference, because if you were a woman, you may or may not be faced with a similar moral dillemma in your lifetime, which gives you much more right to intervene. Sorry, I'm getting sarcastic again. But anyway, you declare in your opinion that third-trimester fetuses ARE PEOPLE, but shy away from protecting them. And yet you claim the moral high ground in this debate. Fascinating.
There are less sensical positions I've heard in this debate, but not many. I guess a score 4, Insightful is fitting on Slashdot, sadly, for something that is mostly just illogic, bluster, and ad-hominem. Maybe it SCORES 4 for NICE use OF the caps LOCK.
Yeah, microbial nanowires must be the solution, because it's not like the human body has a thing for attacking foriegn cells, especially bacteria, right? Sorry to be sarcastic, but this doesnt seem to me to get anybody any closer to solving that particular problem. Better progress would probably be had in researching truly biologically-neutral conductors than in a elaborate scheme to get microbial nanowires to evade the human immune system. Besides, it doesn't even seem to be known that the conductive structure of these organisms is non-toxic to human cells, anyway. Not every biologically manufactured chemical is benign in every biological system, you know...
This development is all sorts of interesting, but for this particular application? I'm just not seeing the basis for enthusiasm.
That's an interesting argument. I agree that they should be "above the appearance of impropriety", insofar as I completely support measures like publically viewable source code, multi-party auditing, etc. I would be arguing for keeping a paper trail if I didn't think it would be ineffective and grant a false sense of security.
However, I don't think that a person publically acknowledging their political viewpoints and donating to causes they support should be considered a bad thing. As long as it does not reflect overtly in their professional conduct, I don't see why any person should not speak their mind and contibute in the appropriate venues.
I am curious as to why you think that private bias is more dangerous - because I beleive the opposite. Debate is a healthy thing in a democratic society, and knowing where various people stand is also, in my opinion, a good thing. It's better, at least, than expecting everyone to participate in a ridiculous charade of impartiality when we all know it isn't the case. I'd rather people, especially powerful people, wear their opinion on their lapel rather than keep a political knife behind their backs.
So democrats question it. Who cares? this means nothing.
The OP made an assertion about what a person said, and you tried to confirm it with a source that does not back it up. This is not about hair-splitting, it's about maintaining intellectual honesty during debate. If you didn't want to talk about what O'Dell did or did not say, frankly, you should not have tried to mislead people about it in the first place.
So if nobody with a political agenda is qualified to run the company, who the fuck do you suggest DOES run the company? Public statements have nothing to do with it, unless you think that privately-held bias is less dangerous than publically admitted bias...
Maybe you're just being deliberately moronic, I don't know. The point claimed was that O'Dell said he would "do do anything to make sure that Bush won Ohio. What you quote does not substantiate that, at all. He does say that he was "committed to helping". He did help. He sent money.
When someone says to a criminal defendant that they're "committed to helping them defeat the charges against them", does that mean to you that they are willing to break into the jail, kill the guards, and extract the person with a helicopter? When implying that someone else might be unable to read, you might want to read the entire thread, yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
The full name is Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
Yee haw!
Linus communicates very much like an academic. With him, it's not personal - it's Ideas. He says what he really thinks and makes big assertions and if he's wrong, others will push back. I think this is an excellent way to conduct debate if all parties are mature enough to handle it, but it's also critical that one is always open to recognizing a superior argument. I can't say whether Linus has that critical trait, but unfortunately many lesser academics sadly lack it as well, so I think the comparison stands regardless.
Maybe they will. There are even some in the company who would like to invest in nuclear fusion research.
Machine guns are legal to possess in the US, military service or no. Nothing post-1986 though, which is a shame. I've e-slobbered over many a Swiss gun collection over the Internet. Gun rights are far from the only way I measure freedom, but I do think they're enumerated second in the US Constitution for a good reason. Obviously as a general libertarian all the stuff you mention toasts my nuts, but I'm optimistic that things can be worked out as the wave of terror-paranoia seems to be passing. Are there countries "more free" than the US? Probably, but I don't think you'll find any that are better in every aspect. The US is still pretty good, let's hope it stays that way.
Yeah, last time I was there I appreciated their many fine examples of privately owned rifles and handguns.
Exactly! Cell phones are transferring data so fast these days, you get all these bits flying around and smashing into your peptide bonds and shit like goddamn billiard balls... pretty soon you've got 1s and 0s mixed in with your As, Ts, Cs, and Gs and its all a just big fucking mess. Somebody stop the madness!
Some of us value the rights and life of the human individual more than some society's precious fucking traditions. Do you really think the victims CONSENT to such culture-driven atrocities?
I wonder if you will ever stop respecting others' disrespect and cruelty more than you respect your fellow man.
(By the way, the example of the Indian community is stupid. Dead people don't feel pain.)
Combined with new gene therapy techniques, I wonder what kind of market this gene-splicing will create for fluorescent green tatoos...
I think many people question Intel's motives about "performance per watt" because they pay it lip service, but AMD is kicking their ass at it in the server field.
I'm sure this offer was not declined because OS X is not suitable for the project. It couldn't be because it offers little opportunity for the project to customize the system for the limited environment it will be running in. I am sure it also has nothing to do with the fact that it does not natively support most of the thousands of open-source applications that the project will certainly want to take advantage of, rather than paying for proprietary software. I am equally convinced that Apple would not make such an offer as a cheap publicity stunt. The MIT project leadership are simply a bunch of idiots who are too dumb to know that they should transfer their work into the divine hands of Jobs, who can do no wrong.
Kudos to Apple!!
Mix-n-match? SMP stands for symmetric mulitprocessing. Symmetric, as in the same on both sides. Any SMP system would obviously be a matching pair, and that is something that, while done often, has not been offered as an affordable option to consumers. I didn't think it was possible to misread my post that badly.
The article summarized this idea well by calling it "a solution without a problem". The whole thing is just so amazingly ill-considered that it's very hard to take it seriously. The only need I could see for something like this is if someone with a P4 needed PCI-E now, and _also_ knew that they wanted to go AMD later. Even then, would they put up with buying a $50 expansion board and running their expensive new processor on that hacked solution?? If PCChips/ECS want to be ambitious, why not endeavor to bring affordable SMP to the masses? Even if the server-classed chips required are expensive, many people must be put off by $300, server-oriented mainboards. This way, they could grab some serious attention in the high-end market and gain credibility. What they're doing now is only going to leave people scratching their heads...
I'm currently becoming quite partial to Arch, a binary distro that offers excellent customizability and speed in a much friendlier package. Like Gentoo, it is mostly non-automatic as far as hardware setup is concerned, and so is recommended for experienced users. The major weakness right now is a lack of diversity in packages, but most of the cool, fairly mainstream stuff you'll want to be using is included, and packages are of high quality. It's worth a look.
Well, kudos for the informative reply I guess, but the truth is that I already knew most of this. That all sounds to me like waste due to various inefficiencies in the CMOS device, not power that is necessarily required for any type of computation. Thus the talk about "power used for computation" wasn't making any sense to me. The OP clarified that they were talking about idle power vs. active power, which makes things much more sensible.
So, this power "used for computing". Where does it go?
New and improved! As seen on TV!
I really don't understand all this hate for the GIMP. It's not that damn complicated. Once I figured out that all of the most direct-to-image functions are contained in the right-click context menu, the program only took a bit of exploration to become proficient in. I haven't run into anything yet that I needed a howto for, except for creating animated GIFs, which I suspect is a somewhat tricky hack in any image editor.
After using it for a while, it's my opinion that the GIMP's interface is quite well thought out, while still being accessible to the new user (who isn't a Photoshop curmudgeon and unwilling to learn). I've used some legitimately difficult OSS programs, like vi, emacs, Blender 3D. These are tough to learn. Still, are they bad interfaces? There's certainly a method to their madness that makes professional users love them. They're simply not targeted to the casual user.
Personally, i'm okay with the idea that OSS projects can be targeted at serious users, not the type of user who'll "use" it for 5 minutes, then pan it on the Internet. Maybe there could be a cut-down image editor that looks like a mutant MSPaint, so the Windows users are comfortable. I'm sure any lack of features would escape most usability critics' attention span.
I don't know about you, but I think that when I look back on my life many years later, I'll consider it much more important to have spent time watching something emotive and novel than consuming political propaganda. The films I've seen, the art and music I've enjoyed, and the places I've explored either in person or by proxy will be very much valued, when all is said and done. I can't say the same for Fahrenheit 9/11, for example. Perhaps it is important for the number of people it reached for whom its ideas were new, I'll grant that. But to the informed and interested viewer, it was little more than a rehash of world events through the prism of Moore's crazed psyche. I mean, seriously, the argument that seeing one man's inherently biased and un-countered rant rendered on film is prerequisite to making important choices is total bullshit, assuming you bother to read once in a while. Yes, I'm being a bit overzealous with the critique of Fahrenheit, but I can't see how anything like it can be considered truly enlightening and significant on a personly level.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I think you may have your priorities severely confused. Yes, there are important and momentous events and conflicts happening in the world. There always are. They oblige us to become involved and to form our own opinions and to seek truth, but more obsession does not mean more effect. The truly important things are the things that happen in the midst of constant turmoil that make life worth bothering with. Nobody and no philosophy is going to force us to seek these things out and partake in them, and it's up to us to make sure they don't pass us by. That's the uglier truth.
I don't know whether this documentary is really any good or not, or whether it warrants this sleep-deprived, starry-eyed rant at all. But to rank works like this to be *by definition* of lesser importance than political discourse reveals a very narrow point of view.
(And please stop with the mouth-frothing. It's very unsanitary.)
By that logic, I guess if someone felt that a person didn't develop "personhood" until about a year after birth, they would be perfectly justified in killing their 6 month old baby, right? After all, they do, in a sense, own it. What right do we have to tell them what to do? Hell, I'm not even a PARENT. What right have I to tell a PARENT what to do or not to do to their child? They should DECIDE. After all, they'll be having to deal with the personal ramifications (i.e. guilt), right? Who needs prison when you have guilt! It's a good thing all people are such moral creatures...
Yeah. Right.
It seems to me that your view on the abortion issue is so nice and simple and pure because it _avoids the issue entirely_. You specify the holy Third Trimester (capitalized, no less) as The Point at which a human should be considered a person, at which point presumably they should be entitled to some protection from harm by the government. Or maybe they don't, because you shy away from enforcing that protection, presumably because you are male. Which makes a difference, because if you were a woman, you may or may not be faced with a similar moral dillemma in your lifetime, which gives you much more right to intervene. Sorry, I'm getting sarcastic again. But anyway, you declare in your opinion that third-trimester fetuses ARE PEOPLE, but shy away from protecting them. And yet you claim the moral high ground in this debate. Fascinating.
There are less sensical positions I've heard in this debate, but not many. I guess a score 4, Insightful is fitting on Slashdot, sadly, for something that is mostly just illogic, bluster, and ad-hominem. Maybe it SCORES 4 for NICE use OF the caps LOCK.
This development is all sorts of interesting, but for this particular application? I'm just not seeing the basis for enthusiasm.
However, I don't think that a person publically acknowledging their political viewpoints and donating to causes they support should be considered a bad thing. As long as it does not reflect overtly in their professional conduct, I don't see why any person should not speak their mind and contibute in the appropriate venues.
I am curious as to why you think that private bias is more dangerous - because I beleive the opposite. Debate is a healthy thing in a democratic society, and knowing where various people stand is also, in my opinion, a good thing. It's better, at least, than expecting everyone to participate in a ridiculous charade of impartiality when we all know it isn't the case. I'd rather people, especially powerful people, wear their opinion on their lapel rather than keep a political knife behind their backs.
The OP made an assertion about what a person said, and you tried to confirm it with a source that does not back it up. This is not about hair-splitting, it's about maintaining intellectual honesty during debate. If you didn't want to talk about what O'Dell did or did not say, frankly, you should not have tried to mislead people about it in the first place.
So if nobody with a political agenda is qualified to run the company, who the fuck do you suggest DOES run the company? Public statements have nothing to do with it, unless you think that privately-held bias is less dangerous than publically admitted bias...
When someone says to a criminal defendant that they're "committed to helping them defeat the charges against them", does that mean to you that they are willing to break into the jail, kill the guards, and extract the person with a helicopter? When implying that someone else might be unable to read, you might want to read the entire thread, yourself.