Yes, most of what the parent says is horrible nasty stuff and you might wish s/h/it would just go away and be nasty elsewhere.
But, FWIW, I think the gist of these comments is pretty accurate. My own doctor has made similar comments to me. My g/f works in the local hospital and overtime has just been banned for everyone in the department for financial reasons. She is a radiographer - she'd administer radiotherapy if you went in with cancer.
Now, how do you feel about her being told that she mustn't work overtime?
Second: You don't have to throw out everything completely at once. For example first switching to Mozilla and OpenOffice and later switching to Linux can be done.
Third: Web browser and office suite are a minute proportion of the entire NHS. You've also got document management, appointments, prescriptions, patient records (paper and computerised) and probably dozens more I haven't even considered. Some of these systems will be already integrated with other things like Office or IE, some maybe not. There is no way it is as simple as "first, get rid of Office..."
Linux has a lot better continuity record than Microsoft does. It's the rule, not the exception, that code written to run on Linux ten years ago still runs flawlessly on Linux today. That is simply not the case with Microsoft.
So what happens to you when Microsoft drops the version of Windows you are tied to?
While occasional glibc changes have meant that Linux is not all the rose-tinted land you make it out to be, your comments are true in general terms. I know this. You know this.
Tell me, have you ever worked with a manager who demands that every piece of software bought in comes with the backing of a big company. So there's what they like to call "third party liability"? Trust me, plenty such managers exist. Even though they'd be unlikely to ever get anywhere in suing this third party, many managers like to believe that if necessary, they could. Some people call it pointing the finger, some people call it covering your [ass|arse]. Whatever, it amounts to the same thing: the manager is ensuring that s/he doesn't get fired if the project goes tits-up - instead they can move the blame elsewhere. And a lot of IT projects have the potential to go tits up.
"then what's the hindrance against going to the other way?"
That's easy. The hindrance is: every time you try to move away from Windows, Steve Ballmer sends along a top salesman to tell you all about how much more it's going to cost, and how you are better off staying with Microsoft.
And Steve Ballmer has the money and inclination to throw a lot of salesmen at you.
Yet, I would not bet on clockless cores to become the new mainstream, by far not.
Mainly because Intel's marketing has depended on clock speed for the last 20 years. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see some of the technology used in future generations of mainstream processors - low power consumption is a selling point when your electricity and air con bills are somewhere up in the stratosphere, particularly if it can still achieve reasonable performance. I don't see it replacing x86 or x86-64, but I could easily envisage the technology being used in a couple of x86-generations time. RISC technology did the same thing...
The AMULET1 microprocessor is the first large scale asynchronous circuit produced by the APT group. It is an implementation of the ARM processor architecture using the Micropipeline design style. Work was begun at the end of 1990 and the design despatched for fabrication in February 1993. The primary intent was to demonstrate that an asynchronous microprocessor can offer a reduction in electrical power consumption over a synchronous design in the same role.
What does it mean when Dell and Suse or IBM and ??? (RedHat?, Debian?, Knoppix?, all three and more?) deliver a server with 'certified' linux?
Has anyone bought one of these for work and taken a good look at the install?
Yes. My former employer was an IBM shop, had 250 Linux servers and around 1,200 desktops.
We bought servers without an operating system. Some (not all) models arrived in parts - disks, memory processors and rack-mounting kit were all shipped in separate boxes and you fitted them yourself. My understanding was "every bit of hardware here works under Linux".
Experience demonstrated that this was indeed the case, only you sometimes had to download kernel patches (which were generally open source, they just hadn't made it to the mainstream kernel).
I don't know whether or not the pre-built servers had these patches pre-installed - I'd imagine so.
Here's a fun trick: Go to your friend's house and ask if you can check your email quick from their computer and visit the site. Sit across the street and laugh as unmarked vans take your friend away.
Does it strike anyone else as odd that the Secret Service would deface a website in this manner?
Odd? Unthinkable. Unless you had already rounded up every single important person in the group, why on Earth would you signal to them that they were under investigation? The tone and design looks more like some kid-in-a-basement-circa 2001 than US Government Office circa 2004.
I call bullshit. More likely someone with the relevant passwords put that up when it became clear that they were under investigation.
It's not just the government who'll have access to the database, it's every employee too.
Well, it is just the government who'll have access to the database. But you have to understand what the government is in the context of "who requires access to this system?"
It's not Tony Blair.
It's not the Labour Party.
It's every single government agency. That's driving licenses, social security, healthcare, local councils, law enforcement and education just off the top of my head.
Does the person who thinks they have nothing to hide expect me to believe that there's not a single corruptible person employed by any of those organisations?
More to the point, how do other political parties feel about this? After all, the opposition is not obliged to oppose the government on every single issue. Frequently, they don't.
The election system is first past the post. That means that voting for anything but the 2 largest parties is a waste of time,
Bullshit. If enough people take the approach "I might as well vote for Labour, they're going to get in anyway", you wind up with a party in charge which was elected not because they're popular, but because they're already powerful. Surely the whole point of an election is to put the party the people want in power rather than confirm who's already there?
There is a world of difference between re-compiling the kernel and actually getting your nicely recompiled kernel working properly.
However, it's a step in the right direction - I can see Mandrake or SUSE taking this idea and integrating it with some kind of video-driver update system - "Instructions: install this package, reboot."
Introduction TCCBOOT is a boot loader able to compile and boot a Linux kernel directly from its source code.
TCCBOOT is only 138 KB big (uncompressed code) and it can compile and run a typical Linux kernel in less than 15 seconds on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4.
TCCBOOT is based on the TinyCC compiler, assembler and linker. TinyCC is an experiment to produce a very small and simple C compiler compatible with the GNU C compiler and binary utilities. Screenshots Download ISO image demonstation: tccboot.iso (5.9 MB).
Create a CD from it and boot it to see TCCBOOT in action (PC with at least 64 MB of RAM required). You can also try it with the QEMU PC emulator.
TCCBOOT source code: tccboot-0.1.tar.gz, and README file.
Will somebody PLEASE explain to me why people complain about Slashdot not rendering properly in Firefox? Seriously. I am not a troll. I have used nothing but firefox in the last year, updated regularly, and I have yet to see a single problem as described by so many people.
In theory, the software required is easy. All you need is enough inputs, outputs (doesn't have to be speech) and enough neurones (either real or simulated) to connect it all together.
After that, the complicated bit (training the neural network) is much the same as it is with a baby - talk to it, show it simple things, put liquidised food in one end, keep the other end as clean as possible.
The only minor snag with current technology is the limits to how much it can learn and how long it takes to do so.
You think you've got it bad? My car gets around 40-45 mpg - great! - but petrol costs around £3.80/gallon in the UK.
Note that these are imperial rather than US gallons - Google tells me 1 US gallon = 0.832673844 Imperial gallons. Or around $8.35 per US gallon of fuel.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, most of what the parent says is horrible nasty stuff and you might wish s/h/it would just go away and be nasty elsewhere.
But, FWIW, I think the gist of these comments is pretty accurate. My own doctor has made similar comments to me. My g/f works in the local hospital and overtime has just been banned for everyone in the department for financial reasons. She is a radiographer - she'd administer radiotherapy if you went in with cancer.
Now, how do you feel about her being told that she mustn't work overtime?
Second: You don't have to throw out everything completely at once. For example first switching to Mozilla and OpenOffice and later switching to Linux can be done.
Third: Web browser and office suite are a minute proportion of the entire NHS. You've also got document management, appointments, prescriptions, patient records (paper and computerised) and probably dozens more I haven't even considered. Some of these systems will be already integrated with other things like Office or IE, some maybe not. There is no way it is as simple as "first, get rid of Office..."
A Linux system would be based on open file formats.
Unless, of course, you had to have custom software developed and you didn't specify in the contract that open file formats were used.
Or you use a proprietary database (which happens to use proprietary file formats) on the backend.
Linux has a lot better continuity record than Microsoft does. It's the rule, not the exception, that code written to run on Linux ten years ago still runs flawlessly on Linux today. That is simply not the case with Microsoft.
So what happens to you when Microsoft drops the version of Windows you are tied to?
While occasional glibc changes have meant that Linux is not all the rose-tinted land you make it out to be, your comments are true in general terms. I know this. You know this.
Tell me, have you ever worked with a manager who demands that every piece of software bought in comes with the backing of a big company. So there's what they like to call "third party liability"? Trust me, plenty such managers exist. Even though they'd be unlikely to ever get anywhere in suing this third party, many managers like to believe that if necessary, they could. Some people call it pointing the finger, some people call it covering your [ass|arse]. Whatever, it amounts to the same thing: the manager is ensuring that s/he doesn't get fired if the project goes tits-up - instead they can move the blame elsewhere. And a lot of IT projects have the potential to go tits up.
"then what's the hindrance against going to the other way?"
That's easy. The hindrance is: every time you try to move away from Windows, Steve Ballmer sends along a top salesman to tell you all about how much more it's going to cost, and how you are better off staying with Microsoft.
And Steve Ballmer has the money and inclination to throw a lot of salesmen at you.
Not all unixen alias rm to rm -i. Your plan is good, but not foolproof.
Yet, I would not bet on clockless cores to become the new mainstream, by far not.
Mainly because Intel's marketing has depended on clock speed for the last 20 years. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see some of the technology used in future generations of mainstream processors - low power consumption is a selling point when your electricity and air con bills are somewhere up in the stratosphere, particularly if it can still achieve reasonable performance. I don't see it replacing x86 or x86-64, but I could easily envisage the technology being used in a couple of x86-generations time. RISC technology did the same thing...
No they weren't. From TFA:
The AMULET1 microprocessor is the first large scale asynchronous circuit produced by the APT group. It is an implementation of the ARM processor architecture using the Micropipeline design style. Work was begun at the end of 1990 and the design despatched for fabrication in February 1993. The primary intent was to demonstrate that an asynchronous microprocessor can offer a reduction in electrical power consumption over a synchronous design in the same role.
However, if you don't want to install an entire new distro, the util porn-get should work on most unix-a-likes:
http://www.lesbian.mine.nu/porn-get_0.5.1.tar.gz
Wouldn't a kernel patch, by definition, be open source?
Not if it's only a few lines of source code which wrap around a binary driver.
So this isn't a server then?
What does it mean when Dell and Suse or IBM and ??? (RedHat?, Debian?, Knoppix?, all three and more?) deliver a server with 'certified' linux?
Has anyone bought one of these for work and taken a good look at the install?
Yes. My former employer was an IBM shop, had 250 Linux servers and around 1,200 desktops.
We bought servers without an operating system. Some (not all) models arrived in parts - disks, memory processors and rack-mounting kit were all shipped in separate boxes and you fitted them yourself. My understanding was "every bit of hardware here works under Linux".
Experience demonstrated that this was indeed the case, only you sometimes had to download kernel patches (which were generally open source, they just hadn't made it to the mainstream kernel).
I don't know whether or not the pre-built servers had these patches pre-installed - I'd imagine so.
Here's a fun trick: Go to your friend's house and ask if you can check your email quick from their computer and visit the site. Sit across the street and laugh as unmarked vans take your friend away.
Great friend you are. </sarcasm>
Does it strike anyone else as odd that the Secret Service would deface a website in this manner?
Odd? Unthinkable. Unless you had already rounded up every single important person in the group, why on Earth would you signal to them that they were under investigation? The tone and design looks more like some kid-in-a-basement-circa 2001 than US Government Office circa 2004.
I call bullshit. More likely someone with the relevant passwords put that up when it became clear that they were under investigation.
It's not just the government who'll have access to the database, it's every employee too.
Well, it is just the government who'll have access to the database. But you have to understand what the government is in the context of "who requires access to this system?"
It's not Tony Blair.
It's not the Labour Party.
It's every single government agency. That's driving licenses, social security, healthcare, local councils, law enforcement and education just off the top of my head.
Does the person who thinks they have nothing to hide expect me to believe that there's not a single corruptible person employed by any of those organisations?
More to the point, how do other political parties feel about this? After all, the opposition is not obliged to oppose the government on every single issue. Frequently, they don't.
The election system is first past the post. That means that voting for anything but the 2 largest parties is a waste of time,
Bullshit. If enough people take the approach "I might as well vote for Labour, they're going to get in anyway", you wind up with a party in charge which was elected not because they're popular, but because they're already powerful. Surely the whole point of an election is to put the party the people want in power rather than confirm who's already there?
As for databases, well, there'll never be a "one true database" anyway.
Erm... yes there will. That's pretty much the whole point of an ID card, according to David Blunkett.
There is a world of difference between re-compiling the kernel and actually getting your nicely recompiled kernel working properly.
However, it's a step in the right direction - I can see Mandrake or SUSE taking this idea and integrating it with some kind of video-driver update system - "Instructions: install this package, reboot."
Introduction
TCCBOOT is a boot loader able to compile and boot a Linux kernel directly from its source code.
TCCBOOT is only 138 KB big (uncompressed code) and it can compile and run a typical Linux kernel in less than 15 seconds on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4.
TCCBOOT is based on the TinyCC compiler, assembler and linker. TinyCC is an experiment to produce a very small and simple C compiler compatible with the GNU C compiler and binary utilities.
Screenshots
Download
ISO image demonstation: tccboot.iso (5.9 MB).
Create a CD from it and boot it to see TCCBOOT in action (PC with at least 64 MB of RAM required). You can also try it with the QEMU PC emulator.
TCCBOOT source code: tccboot-0.1.tar.gz, and README file.
PHB: What's a beta stage?
Will somebody PLEASE explain to me why people complain about Slashdot not rendering properly in Firefox? Seriously. I am not a troll. I have used nothing but firefox in the last year, updated regularly, and I have yet to see a single problem as described by so many people.
OK, clearly the bit I did on AI was slightly over simplified.
In theory, the software required is easy. All you need is enough inputs, outputs (doesn't have to be speech) and enough neurones (either real or simulated) to connect it all together.
After that, the complicated bit (training the neural network) is much the same as it is with a baby - talk to it, show it simple things, put liquidised food in one end, keep the other end as clean as possible.
The only minor snag with current technology is the limits to how much it can learn and how long it takes to do so.
You think you've got it bad? My car gets around 40-45 mpg - great! - but petrol costs around £3.80/gallon in the UK.
Note that these are imperial rather than US gallons - Google tells me 1 US gallon = 0.832673844 Imperial gallons. Or around $8.35 per US gallon of fuel.