Never, ever did the "userland" need to be mentioned in the name of the product until Stallman declared it so. There is no need for it now.
There is a need for distinct products, such as in your example, to have distinct names.
Linux distributions have distinct names and Stallman doesn't get to overrule what those names are. If he really cared about freedom he'd be on the other side of his argument.
"All of that being said, calling it GNU/Linux rather than Linux is better than calling a whole OS Linux when only the kernel and util-linux are actually Linux, or calling it Linux/BSD/GNU or Linux/System5/GNU. None of these are accurate."
The "it" you are referring to doesn't need to be referred to at all. If you want to talk components, there are names for those. Otherwise use the name of the distribution. No need for contrived names for subsets when those names are chosen to satisfy an agenda. Respect the choices made by the people who have done the work, GNU/Linux was coined by someone NOT responsible for the work.
Nothing in the GPL stipulates that the FSF gets to rename your project if you use some of their code. It has only occurred in this case due to Stallman's jealousy and no one should entertain his ego. GNU/Linux is a term that should be universally rejected, software freedom demands it.
Fortran is the most used and therefore the biggest target for continued improvement. Saying it is the "most optimizable" means nothing. As a tools company you aren't going to focus on what none of your customers do.
x86 is the most modern high-performance instruction set by your reasoning. Sometimes alternatives are just not sufficiently compelling, that doesn't mean they are inferior.
Why concern yourself with the opinions of those still stuck using Fortran because they're afraid of work? They are doing it wrong. Language is useless without agreed upon usage.
To use the rice analogy, you would say "bowls of rice", not "rices". Now, if enough stupid people or even an entire community intentionally made that error, it may well become adopted as correct usage. It would still be ignorant.
Understand that scientists and researchers are not programmers and don't know any better.
"I guess I was mistaken in assuming the computer-science way of thinking about the concept of "code" (vs. "program", "algorithm", or "function", which are definitely discrete, countable things) should extended to other fields."
You were not mistaken, the world just grows more poorly educated. Yesterday's illiteracy is today's literacy. Making "code" synonymous with "program" and subsequently requiring a plural form serves no purpose, sounds stupid, and is stupid.
No doubt others wish to "commentate" on the matter so I step down from my soap boxen.
"Those tiny dots are blurring to about 2 um. Individual cells are roughly 4 to 8 um range. So you can probably spot individual cells."
Assuming good optics and sufficient magnification, neither of which is inherently a properly of smartphone cameras. It is quite difficult to achieve meaningful resolution down to the photosite level of a sensor and smartphones don't make that a goal.
Talking resolution in the absence and many important details is something a fool would do. Love the hand-waving, though, it matches nicely your previous comment. You are quite the/. engineer.
None of these things differentiate a smartphone from a notebook PC with a cabled webcam and a notebook would be superior in many ways.
"Very large range of travel" is not a feature of a smartphone, is it simply capable of enabling that. Other devices are too, namely devices a webcam connects to.
Not sure how you consider these points you made to be "engineering" either.
"Beer guts exist because people exercise less than they should and have a diet that doesn't match their metabolism and activity pattern."
People should keep urban myths like this out of "scientific" oriented texts so people might actually learn the truth.
Weight management isn't as simple as calories in vs. calories out. The problem with diets is not that they don't match "metabolism and activity pattern." It is "a correlation at best, but no causation."
The iPhone web browser work on less of the web than any other phone browser when it was introduced. Any website that assumed a mouse pointer was broken. That was 100% of commerce sites and most sites that required input via forms. Anything with flash was broken and that was a huge portion of the web. No other phone had problems of this magnitude.
"It really was something. It blew away anything else at the time."
No it didn't, the iPhone had the most incompatible phone browser ever introduced "at the time". Every phone browser then was better than Apple's, it's just that their platforms sucked. Apple's approach is only now considered good after the industry accomodated their removal of the pointer which had been a mandatory element up until then. Then there's flash...
Apple did do the App store well, but don't forget that Jobs told us that we really don't want Apps on a phone, it's too unsafe. Palm did apps better than Apple in many ways. You could transfer apps between phones on a Palm and it was very quick. Apple wouldn't get their cut that way, of course.
Right, like people only choose between two brands of cars, to use a popular analogy. Linux's failure on the desktop has nothing to do with its own shortcomings, it's because there's only room for two and those are preordained.
Since when do people have to be looking for a "second" alternative? What does that even mean?
"And you know what? They were more successful than just about any other smart phone. Things looked good... good enough to dismiss the iPhone as a toy when it came out."
No they weren't and things didn't look good either. The iPhone was successful not only for what it was but because its competition sucked so bad. The iPhone was not technically a smartphone in its first year, no Apps, and might have failed had competition "looked good".
Frankly, the touchscreen MS phones were terrible. The non-touchscreens were better. Symbian was a far better OS and Palm had far better apps, but all were unstable and had terrible, fatal flaws. The iPhone was the first device that didn't crash multiple times a day.
What people have wanted to do with smartphones hasn't changed nor is there any reason to call them "toys".
MS will squander what's left of Nokia. Buying a failed business doesn't turn them into Apple.
"We need to change this perception and reward students who try really hard and/or do well in school..."
That won't be successful as long as the rewards "we" offer are not the ones students want. Education is a cultural issue and our culture is one of lives getting easier and lazier. It will never be "cool" to pursue what your peers don't want.
Good education requires the expectation of achievement that children take as a given. Instead, we publicly value ignorance over education and today's parents were spoon-fed on that pathetic value system. Using tablets in place of books is entirely beside the point; that are a tactical consideration only.
"Now, at $214 a pop, that is orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks."
You don't know what an "order of magnitude" is. Textbooks do not cost $20,000+ per year per student in K12 or anywhere else.
$200 could buy a tablet outright rather than lease for a year. eBook software won't change that equation and other educational software is value-add a book can't offer.
And, of course, the horrors of exposing children to display screens. We couldn't possibly know the effect of that by now!!!
"I find the summary nearly trollish. There is no standard bearer in internet radio... Lots... listen to... independent internet radio stations... which are... more in the spirit of "radio" than automated algorithmic music-recommendation services like Pandora and Last.... My conclusion is that neither Pandora nor Last.fm are actually "radio" at all.... Radio, to me... is a real person exposing their tastes, quirks, personality and even mistakes."
So because you take a romantic, hipster view of "radio" the summary is a troll. How dare they not conform to your definition!
By your standard Pandora is more "radio" than Clear Channel is.
Besides, what matters is what people want, not whether you are happy with them calling the result "radio". There are a few of you that drink PBRs and listen to other people's music, but that's not what people demand generally speaking. An algorithm CAN expose listeners to new music in a successful, interactive way. DJs' tastes are inherently bounded and slow to evolve and broadcast is not interactive by definition. You are simply a musical Luddite.
Running iOS on top of a hypervisor seems incredibly unlikely when the goal is to use the least power possible, especially in a heterogeneous processor environment that the 5S just introduced. Not only is this wrong and stupid, but Apple doesn't care about jailbreaking that much anyway, nor would the hypervisor itself be immune to jailbreaking attacks.
No surprise that some conspiracy theorists joined in on your comment though. No shortage of desire to upvote uninteresting perspectives.
Demand paging would not produce "too much writing" when there is enough RAM in the system. PC's put swap on SSD these days and that's OK because of (a) wear leveling, and (b) PC's have lots of memory.
And you mean "that's YOUR theory". Judging by your other comments, it's an uninformed one.
Why would you want demand paging on a device that (a) intentionally has more memory than any single application needs, (b) has no suitable paging device, and (c) is designed to be ultra-low power? I'd rather avoid the latency and power hit.
It is not reasonable to argue except to the ignorant. Virtual memory provides real value to a platform even when a paging device makes no sense.
Processes remain, and often run, in the background on phones. That's why phone have grown their memory in the last few years. That's one reason Apple obsoletes older phones---lack of memory. Single apps don't need 8GB of ram when they run on a 4" screen.
" I think it'd be more accurate to say pushing the limit, rather than over it. And 64-bit helps expand the limit."
How can saying nothing be "more accurate" that the simple, straightforward, and correct comment you were replying to?
"True, but that is not what I'm interested in."
Right, you are interested in masturbating to large numbers that you don't understand.
"Not beyond what I've already said. Sorry, but there's things I just should not discuss in a public forum..."
Right...another pretentious, ignorant juvenile. Can't wait to see the revolution you start with this pent-up 64 bit codebase that we all really need in a mobile phone...
"It talked about using the "same codebase", meaning same source code,..."
And since you call yourself a developer, and apparently one knowledgable in this area, you know that it's a pretty shitty codebase that has to change because of word size.
Considering that you are a developer who is "waiting" for 64 bit on iOS, what does this say about your code?
"But hey, if you don't actually have a clue of all the things a 64-bit address space enables, then the above will sound like gibberish..."
Right back at you. Name one useful mobile app that could be enabled by > 4GB virtual space. Come on, Ace...
How many desktop apps, Windows, Mac, or otherwise, cannot be offered in 32 bit? I suspect the answer is essentially none. Sure, there is an occasional one but that's more a business decision than anything. There is no market pressure whatsoever to produce a 4GB phone, much less one over 4GB, and that's an existence proof that you are wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Never, ever did the "userland" need to be mentioned in the name of the product until Stallman declared it so. There is no need for it now.
There is a need for distinct products, such as in your example, to have distinct names.
Linux distributions have distinct names and Stallman doesn't get to overrule what those names are. If he really cared about freedom he'd be on the other side of his argument.
"GNU/Linux and Android are not compatible"
There is no such thing as "GNU/Linux".
"All of that being said, calling it GNU/Linux rather than Linux is better than calling a whole OS Linux when only the kernel and util-linux are actually Linux, or calling it Linux/BSD/GNU or Linux/System5/GNU. None of these are accurate."
The "it" you are referring to doesn't need to be referred to at all. If you want to talk components, there are names for those. Otherwise use the name of the distribution. No need for contrived names for subsets when those names are chosen to satisfy an agenda. Respect the choices made by the people who have done the work, GNU/Linux was coined by someone NOT responsible for the work.
Nothing in the GPL stipulates that the FSF gets to rename your project if you use some of their code. It has only occurred in this case due to Stallman's jealousy and no one should entertain his ego. GNU/Linux is a term that should be universally rejected, software freedom demands it.
"GNU/Linux" is Stallman's desire to take credit for something Linus and large group of programmers did that Stallman failed to do.
Fortran is the most used and therefore the biggest target for continued improvement. Saying it is the "most optimizable" means nothing. As a tools company you aren't going to focus on what none of your customers do.
x86 is the most modern high-performance instruction set by your reasoning. Sometimes alternatives are just not sufficiently compelling, that doesn't mean they are inferior.
Why concern yourself with the opinions of those still stuck using Fortran because they're afraid of work? They are doing it wrong. Language is useless without agreed upon usage.
To use the rice analogy, you would say "bowls of rice", not "rices". Now, if enough stupid people or even an entire community intentionally made that error, it may well become adopted as correct usage. It would still be ignorant.
Understand that scientists and researchers are not programmers and don't know any better.
"I guess I was mistaken in assuming the computer-science way of thinking about the concept of "code" (vs. "program", "algorithm", or "function", which are definitely discrete, countable things) should extended to other fields."
You were not mistaken, the world just grows more poorly educated. Yesterday's illiteracy is today's literacy. Making "code" synonymous with "program" and subsequently requiring a plural form serves no purpose, sounds stupid, and is stupid.
No doubt others wish to "commentate" on the matter so I step down from my soap boxen.
"Those tiny dots are blurring to about 2 um. Individual cells are roughly 4 to 8 um range. So you can probably spot individual cells."
Assuming good optics and sufficient magnification, neither of which is inherently a properly of smartphone cameras. It is quite difficult to achieve meaningful resolution down to the photosite level of a sensor and smartphones don't make that a goal.
Talking resolution in the absence and many important details is something a fool would do. Love the hand-waving, though, it matches nicely your previous comment. You are quite the /. engineer.
None of these things differentiate a smartphone from a notebook PC with a cabled webcam and a notebook would be superior in many ways.
"Very large range of travel" is not a feature of a smartphone, is it simply capable of enabling that. Other devices are too, namely devices a webcam connects to.
Not sure how you consider these points you made to be "engineering" either.
"Beer guts exist because people exercise less than they should and have a diet that doesn't match their metabolism and activity pattern."
People should keep urban myths like this out of "scientific" oriented texts so people might actually learn the truth.
Weight management isn't as simple as calories in vs. calories out. The problem with diets is not that they don't match "metabolism and activity pattern." It is "a correlation at best, but no causation."
The iPhone web browser work on less of the web than any other phone browser when it was introduced. Any website that assumed a mouse pointer was broken. That was 100% of commerce sites and most sites that required input via forms. Anything with flash was broken and that was a huge portion of the web. No other phone had problems of this magnitude.
The revisionist history is strong on this topic.
"It really was something. It blew away anything else at the time."
No it didn't, the iPhone had the most incompatible phone browser ever introduced "at the time". Every phone browser then was better than Apple's, it's just that their platforms sucked. Apple's approach is only now considered good after the industry accomodated their removal of the pointer which had been a mandatory element up until then. Then there's flash...
Apple did do the App store well, but don't forget that Jobs told us that we really don't want Apps on a phone, it's too unsafe. Palm did apps better than Apple in many ways. You could transfer apps between phones on a Palm and it was very quick. Apple wouldn't get their cut that way, of course.
Right, like people only choose between two brands of cars, to use a popular analogy. Linux's failure on the desktop has nothing to do with its own shortcomings, it's because there's only room for two and those are preordained.
Since when do people have to be looking for a "second" alternative? What does that even mean?
"And you know what? They were more successful than just about any other smart phone. Things looked good... good enough to dismiss the iPhone as a toy when it came out."
No they weren't and things didn't look good either. The iPhone was successful not only for what it was but because its competition sucked so bad. The iPhone was not technically a smartphone in its first year, no Apps, and might have failed had competition "looked good".
Frankly, the touchscreen MS phones were terrible. The non-touchscreens were better. Symbian was a far better OS and Palm had far better apps, but all were unstable and had terrible, fatal flaws. The iPhone was the first device that didn't crash multiple times a day.
What people have wanted to do with smartphones hasn't changed nor is there any reason to call them "toys".
MS will squander what's left of Nokia. Buying a failed business doesn't turn them into Apple.
"We need to change this perception and reward students who try really hard and/or do well in school..."
That won't be successful as long as the rewards "we" offer are not the ones students want. Education is a cultural issue and our culture is one of lives getting easier and lazier. It will never be "cool" to pursue what your peers don't want.
Good education requires the expectation of achievement that children take as a given. Instead, we publicly value ignorance over education and today's parents were spoon-fed on that pathetic value system. Using tablets in place of books is entirely beside the point; that are a tactical consideration only.
"Now, at $214 a pop, that is orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks."
You don't know what an "order of magnitude" is. Textbooks do not cost $20,000+ per year per student in K12 or anywhere else.
$200 could buy a tablet outright rather than lease for a year. eBook software won't change that equation and other educational software is value-add a book can't offer.
And, of course, the horrors of exposing children to display screens. We couldn't possibly know the effect of that by now!!!
"I find the summary nearly trollish. There is no standard bearer in internet radio ... Lots ... listen to ... independent internet radio stations ... which are ... more in the spirit of "radio" than automated algorithmic music-recommendation services like Pandora and Last. ... ... Radio, to me ... is a real person exposing their tastes, quirks, personality and even mistakes."
My conclusion is that neither Pandora nor Last.fm are actually "radio" at all.
So because you take a romantic, hipster view of "radio" the summary is a troll. How dare they not conform to your definition!
By your standard Pandora is more "radio" than Clear Channel is.
Besides, what matters is what people want, not whether you are happy with them calling the result "radio". There are a few of you that drink PBRs and listen to other people's music, but that's not what people demand generally speaking. An algorithm CAN expose listeners to new music in a successful, interactive way. DJs' tastes are inherently bounded and slow to evolve and broadcast is not interactive by definition. You are simply a musical Luddite.
Running iOS on top of a hypervisor seems incredibly unlikely when the goal is to use the least power possible, especially in a heterogeneous processor environment that the 5S just introduced. Not only is this wrong and stupid, but Apple doesn't care about jailbreaking that much anyway, nor would the hypervisor itself be immune to jailbreaking attacks.
No surprise that some conspiracy theorists joined in on your comment though. No shortage of desire to upvote uninteresting perspectives.
Demand paging would not produce "too much writing" when there is enough RAM in the system. PC's put swap on SSD these days and that's OK because of (a) wear leveling, and (b) PC's have lots of memory.
And you mean "that's YOUR theory". Judging by your other comments, it's an uninformed one.
Why would you want demand paging on a device that (a) intentionally has more memory than any single application needs, (b) has no suitable paging device, and (c) is designed to be ultra-low power? I'd rather avoid the latency and power hit.
It is not reasonable to argue except to the ignorant. Virtual memory provides real value to a platform even when a paging device makes no sense.
Processes remain, and often run, in the background on phones. That's why phone have grown their memory in the last few years. That's one reason Apple obsoletes older phones---lack of memory. Single apps don't need 8GB of ram when they run on a 4" screen.
" I think it'd be more accurate to say pushing the limit, rather than over it. And 64-bit helps expand the limit."
How can saying nothing be "more accurate" that the simple, straightforward, and correct comment you were replying to?
"True, but that is not what I'm interested in."
Right, you are interested in masturbating to large numbers that you don't understand.
"Not beyond what I've already said. Sorry, but there's things I just should not discuss in a public forum..."
Right...another pretentious, ignorant juvenile. Can't wait to see the revolution you start with this pent-up 64 bit codebase that we all really need in a mobile phone...
"It talked about using the "same codebase", meaning same source code, ..."
And since you call yourself a developer, and apparently one knowledgable in this area, you know that it's a pretty shitty codebase that has to change because of word size.
Considering that you are a developer who is "waiting" for 64 bit on iOS, what does this say about your code?
"But hey, if you don't actually have a clue of all the things a 64-bit address space enables, then the above will sound like gibberish..."
Right back at you. Name one useful mobile app that could be enabled by > 4GB virtual space. Come on, Ace...
How many desktop apps, Windows, Mac, or otherwise, cannot be offered in 32 bit? I suspect the answer is essentially none. Sure, there is an occasional one but that's more a business decision than anything. There is no market pressure whatsoever to produce a 4GB phone, much less one over 4GB, and that's an existence proof that you are wrong.
"It also doesn't remove the 4GB per-process limit, it merely allows more total address space across all applications."
What mobile processes are compromised by a 4GB per-process limit? It's a distinction of absolutely no value.
"Merely" allowing more total address space would be the entire value on a mobile phone.
"So what if pointers are larger? BFD."
Of course, you have to fill that memory up somehow!!! Really great way to conserve power.
One of ARM's big claims to fame is power efficiency and one way they do that is reduction in memory footprint. Glad to see you get that.