Until this problem is solved, Linux will be an outsider.
Hey, the 1990s called, they want their Linux complaints back.
Joking aside, though: Sure, if you want to use your special webcam, blinking USB cupwarmer or the supermouse with three scroll wheels that you bought on Walmart, Linux may well have a problem.
However, for almost any kind of mainstream hardware, drivers aren't a problem in Linux. You'd have to go to pretty serious lengths (like the things mentioned above) to not get your hardware detected by the latest and greatest distros.
All in all, it sure wouldn't hurt having a good way to distribute drivers for Linux without requiring having a compiler installed on the target system and so forth, but for the most part, it really isn't a problem anymore.
It's not as if the suns independently orbit the planet or anything. I would imagine that the distance between the suns would be far less than the distance from any of the suns to the planet (Otherwise, it seems that the planet's orbit would be so unstable that it would probably have been eaten by one of the suns long ago).
As such, the suns would just appear in the sky as a constellation of bodies, and night and day would still function as on Earth. Probably, even season could work as on Earth.
If Nintendo all of the sudden relies on a Windows PC to do all this magic, I will have to turn in my fanboy card.
That you won't have to do. Regardlessly of whether this router requires Windows, both the DS and the Revolution are still compatible with standard 802.11b (and g?) WiFi networks. So you can still use an ordinary WiFi AP to do that magic.
Anime is heavily tied to Japanese culture (although I can't understand how they can put up with the repetitivness)
I think the GP's point was that you experience as repetitivness because you are not immersed deeply enough in that Japanese culture. I'm pretty deeply immersed into the Anime culture, and I don't see it as repetitivness anymore.
Likewise, I can't make an analogy with the American movie/series culture repetitivness, since I'm too deeply immersed in that, too. However, to make another analogy: To the unimmersed, any given operating system looks more or less the same (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux with GNOME or KDE, what's the difference?), but to those of us who are immersed in computer culture, we can discuss the difference of details that mere mortals wouldn't notice even if they were explicitly pointed out.
So I can have your Social Security number and you won't mind? Thanks. Just post it on Slashdot. Thanks.
That's quite a different thing. Even if you don't agree with the rules, you still have to play by them.
It's exactly the same thing as companies who are against software patents while anyway patenting software: That's not hypocrisy, that's staying in business. You may want to change the rules, but as long as you can't, you still need to play by them.
Likewise, I agree with the GP that piracy isn't theft, by definition. That doesn't make it either agreeable or condemnable -- there are other condemnable things than theft (murder, for example). It just means that it's not theft. However, that doesn't mean that I can just go around in public and pirate stuff. As long as the party with the most force behind it (the government, for example) doesn't agree with me, it doesn't matter what I think. If they think it's theft, I'll be thrown in prison for theft regardlessly of whether it actually is theft. It's not hypocrisy, it's common sense.
This statement is really oversimpistic, and childish. There is nothing wrong with the HTTP medium. Why is it the fault of the web site makers - why can't you share in some of the blame?
It's neither simplistic nor childish. It's merely a statement of facts. Did you pay any attention to my analogy of distruting a free magazine with the ads on the side? Would you "blame" anyone for not taking the ad brochure while taking a copy of the magazine?
It's exactly the same with HTTP. If they publish the content as one resource and the ads as another resource, then they are just that -- two different resources. They have put the content up their for anyone to fetch without restriction -- how can you then blame anyone for doing just that?
Also, I never pretended there to be anything "wrong" with the HTTP medium. It works perfectly. But it doesn't force the ads on anyone.
Why is it ok for someone to force you to see their ad in a hard medium, but not in a soft medium?
I neither said that it was OK nor that it wasn't. I wasn't making any moral judgement on it at all. The thing is -- when you publish something over HTTP, you effectively aren't forcing anyone to fetch the ad resources. It's not a moral issue; it's a fact.
In a hard medium, on the contrary, you are forcing anyone reading it to see the ads as well. That isn't a moral issue either, but just as well another fact. The difference is that the content and the ads are one and the same resource. Over HTTP, they are different resources, which can be fetched selectively.
Therefore, it's not a matter of it being OK. They have put the content on the web for anyone to fetch -- and that's exactly what people are doing.
If they want to force the ads on you, they'd better make it part of the HTML resource, so that the content and the ads, as in a hard medium, are in fact one and the same resource. Then the readers are forced to see the ads as well as the content.
Why is there a contradiction between karma whoring and the post being informative?
The important part is whether people (or mods, more accurately) appreciate the post. What do the posters intentions matter? What if I write a +5 Insightful post just for the sake of karma -- Would the fact that I did it for karma that make it less insightful? Or could it be that it is the actual content of the post that matters?
In my opinion, copying the article is informative regardlessly of whether the article is slashdotted -- it's one less click to read it.
If the people who make this site are losing money (and they are not wealthy enough to keep it going) the site will be lost.
Indeed. However, when those people have decided on publishing their content over a protocol like HTTP, which explicitly allows for public and, in particular, selective fetching of information from their content, they have but themselves to blame.
If they want to force people to view their ads, then they should use a medium where the audience is forced to view the ads, like a physical magazine. Putting an ad-driven site online with HTTP is like publishing free magazines in two seperate stacks -- one with the magazines, and the other with the ads -- and trust people to pick the ads along with the magazines.
But then again, who says the day isn't here soon when we'll be able to buy glasses with built-in AdBlock.:-)
It is true that we aren't even closely out of addresses. I think less than 50% of the IPv4 address space is allocated. That's not the problem, however. The problem with the lack of IPv4 addresses is the fact that the address space is too small, and thus it has become fragmented, which makes routing extremely complex. So "out of addresses" may be a misnomer, is a fully valid excuse.
Also, it is true as you say that NAT hasn't broken the internet or anything. It is, however, a PITA. You can't design any protocol which calls back or does any similar action if you want to account for NAT. True end-to-end addressability is indeed what I'm looking forward to the most with IPv6, and is also the reason why I'm using it now. It has done wonder for my own situation.
The only thing that I might agree with is that IPv6 doesn't solve any security problems. That is, of course, because it was never meant to solve security problems. IPv6 is just the packet switching protocol, and security is supposed to be handled either in IPSec (which I think sucks for everything except very special purposes) or at the application level with eg SSL or TLS.
However, IPv6 does even indirectly solve a security problem. Since the address space is so extremely huge, it's effectively impossible to scan for computers the way you can do today with IPv4. It would most likely take millenia to find a single computer on the IPv6 network. Of course, this may change as latency decreases and bandwidth increases, but nonetheless: It's certainly not a bad thing, and in particular, the fact that he does not recognize this makes me wonder how much of a security expert he really is...
Oh indeed! What is the world coming to when moderators think that the "In Communist Russia..." jokes are redundant? What next? No more dupes?! Correct grammar?! We've all seen hell freezing over lately anyway, so God knows where the world is heading next!
We've better stop it, and the sooner the better. So please, for God's sake, mod GP up!
Realistically I feel that if IBM really want to premote the Power line or processors they will have to have a Apple style lower end system that can be purchased at a reasonable price.
So what do you think they should do in order to promote it, then?
Was your school using 486 Minix servers or something?
My school is running a fairly old quad-CPU Sun Sparc server with 4 GB of RAM. I don't know the exact clock frequency of it (how do you check that in Solaris?), but it is less than 1 GHz. Most of the time, more than 100 people are logged into it, and there are no speed problems whatsoever.
I happen to have an account at the University of Augsburg as mentioned in this article, and that thing has 8 1.65 GHz POWER5 CPUs and 8 GBs of RAM. When I compile stuff on it, it just smokes anything I've seen. I never even imagined anything could be that fast. It would hardly surprise me if it could actually handle the load of a large portion of the FOSS community compiling kernels on it.
I beg to difer. Multi-threaded code is dead easy to write once you understand some basic concepts and provided you don't write code like a demented COBOL hacker.
The thing with using multiple threads is that all of a sudden, your program is non-deterministic, and that is what makes it hard to debug. It's all about experience, of course, but even experienced programmers can, every once in a while, forget to lock some shared resource, and then you may have a problem which crashes your program every time it runs, but never ever shows up while debugging it, since threads are (of course) scheduled differently while debugging.
If you only use one thread, then at least your program will always be fully deterministic.
That said, you can hardly deny that it is more work to write multithreaded programs, right? I mean, I fully agree that it's often well worth the extra trouble, but there is still extra trouble in doing all the synchronization.
That's not quite true. While RISC makes microcode unnecessary, it is really quite different in nature.
Would you mind elaborating just a bit on why you consider them so different? I'm no CPU engineer, but the way I've understood the whole thing, the instruction set of a RISC architecture seems fairly similar to the micro-ops in a microcode-based CISC architecture.
Slashdot Mirror
Joking aside, though: Sure, if you want to use your special webcam, blinking USB cupwarmer or the supermouse with three scroll wheels that you bought on Walmart, Linux may well have a problem.
However, for almost any kind of mainstream hardware, drivers aren't a problem in Linux. You'd have to go to pretty serious lengths (like the things mentioned above) to not get your hardware detected by the latest and greatest distros.
All in all, it sure wouldn't hurt having a good way to distribute drivers for Linux without requiring having a compiler installed on the target system and so forth, but for the most part, it really isn't a problem anymore.
Yeah, it would make the web platform-independent...
As such, the suns would just appear in the sky as a constellation of bodies, and night and day would still function as on Earth. Probably, even season could work as on Earth.
Likewise, I can't make an analogy with the American movie/series culture repetitivness, since I'm too deeply immersed in that, too. However, to make another analogy: To the unimmersed, any given operating system looks more or less the same (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux with GNOME or KDE, what's the difference?), but to those of us who are immersed in computer culture, we can discuss the difference of details that mere mortals wouldn't notice even if they were explicitly pointed out.
It seems that Slashdot isn't the only ones covering this. :-)
Just, for reference, here's a link to Sun's product page on this.
To bad, eh? ;-)
It's exactly the same thing as companies who are against software patents while anyway patenting software: That's not hypocrisy, that's staying in business. You may want to change the rules, but as long as you can't, you still need to play by them.
Likewise, I agree with the GP that piracy isn't theft, by definition. That doesn't make it either agreeable or condemnable -- there are other condemnable things than theft (murder, for example). It just means that it's not theft. However, that doesn't mean that I can just go around in public and pirate stuff. As long as the party with the most force behind it (the government, for example) doesn't agree with me, it doesn't matter what I think. If they think it's theft, I'll be thrown in prison for theft regardlessly of whether it actually is theft. It's not hypocrisy, it's common sense.
It's exactly the same with HTTP. If they publish the content as one resource and the ads as another resource, then they are just that -- two different resources. They have put the content up their for anyone to fetch without restriction -- how can you then blame anyone for doing just that?
Also, I never pretended there to be anything "wrong" with the HTTP medium. It works perfectly. But it doesn't force the ads on anyone.
I neither said that it was OK nor that it wasn't. I wasn't making any moral judgement on it at all. The thing is -- when you publish something over HTTP, you effectively aren't forcing anyone to fetch the ad resources. It's not a moral issue; it's a fact.In a hard medium, on the contrary, you are forcing anyone reading it to see the ads as well. That isn't a moral issue either, but just as well another fact. The difference is that the content and the ads are one and the same resource. Over HTTP, they are different resources, which can be fetched selectively.
Therefore, it's not a matter of it being OK. They have put the content on the web for anyone to fetch -- and that's exactly what people are doing.
If they want to force the ads on you, they'd better make it part of the HTML resource, so that the content and the ads, as in a hard medium, are in fact one and the same resource. Then the readers are forced to see the ads as well as the content.
The important part is whether people (or mods, more accurately) appreciate the post. What do the posters intentions matter? What if I write a +5 Insightful post just for the sake of karma -- Would the fact that I did it for karma that make it less insightful? Or could it be that it is the actual content of the post that matters?
In my opinion, copying the article is informative regardlessly of whether the article is slashdotted -- it's one less click to read it.
If they want to force people to view their ads, then they should use a medium where the audience is forced to view the ads, like a physical magazine. Putting an ad-driven site online with HTTP is like publishing free magazines in two seperate stacks -- one with the magazines, and the other with the ads -- and trust people to pick the ads along with the magazines.
But then again, who says the day isn't here soon when we'll be able to buy glasses with built-in AdBlock. :-)
It is true that we aren't even closely out of addresses. I think less than 50% of the IPv4 address space is allocated. That's not the problem, however. The problem with the lack of IPv4 addresses is the fact that the address space is too small, and thus it has become fragmented, which makes routing extremely complex. So "out of addresses" may be a misnomer, is a fully valid excuse.
Also, it is true as you say that NAT hasn't broken the internet or anything. It is, however, a PITA. You can't design any protocol which calls back or does any similar action if you want to account for NAT. True end-to-end addressability is indeed what I'm looking forward to the most with IPv6, and is also the reason why I'm using it now. It has done wonder for my own situation.
The only thing that I might agree with is that IPv6 doesn't solve any security problems. That is, of course, because it was never meant to solve security problems. IPv6 is just the packet switching protocol, and security is supposed to be handled either in IPSec (which I think sucks for everything except very special purposes) or at the application level with eg SSL or TLS.
However, IPv6 does even indirectly solve a security problem. Since the address space is so extremely huge, it's effectively impossible to scan for computers the way you can do today with IPv4. It would most likely take millenia to find a single computer on the IPv6 network. Of course, this may change as latency decreases and bandwidth increases, but nonetheless: It's certainly not a bad thing, and in particular, the fact that he does not recognize this makes me wonder how much of a security expert he really is...
We've better stop it, and the sooner the better. So please, for God's sake, mod GP up!
I think that it would be a fairly safe bet to say that there will be another twelve revisions of the Linux kernel before we see Longhorn.
I can't believe Slashdot would be so embarrased by their ugly HTML to actually ban the W3C validator...
My school is running a fairly old quad-CPU Sun Sparc server with 4 GB of RAM. I don't know the exact clock frequency of it (how do you check that in Solaris?), but it is less than 1 GHz. Most of the time, more than 100 people are logged into it, and there are no speed problems whatsoever.
I happen to have an account at the University of Augsburg as mentioned in this article, and that thing has 8 1.65 GHz POWER5 CPUs and 8 GBs of RAM. When I compile stuff on it, it just smokes anything I've seen. I never even imagined anything could be that fast. It would hardly surprise me if it could actually handle the load of a large portion of the FOSS community compiling kernels on it.
Indeed -- only Windows is nowhere to be seen. ;-)
I don't say that I'm necessarily right about that, just take it as food for thought.
The scars run deep.
Would you mind elaborating on just how Outlook is better than Evo, for one who has never used Outlook?
If you only use one thread, then at least your program will always be fully deterministic.
That said, you can hardly deny that it is more work to write multithreaded programs, right? I mean, I fully agree that it's often well worth the extra trouble, but there is still extra trouble in doing all the synchronization.