It shouldn't take 5 pages of text to tell that this person has a serious addiction and needs help. *reloading slashdot a few more times* Hrrmm... no new articles. *reloading slashdot again* Huh. Still no new articles... *reloading slashdot*.... That guy should really seek help - he'll spend all his time online doing nothing if he doesn't break the habit...
I have to agree to a large degree with this article. Obviously there are some things I take issue with, but on the whole I would agree with the correlation this author is drawing. Atleast people are finally paying attention to geeks - and recognizing their worth and valuable contributions to society.
As a curious sidenote - national post's servers throw out alot of extranneous icmp/7 packets.. or so my firewall says so....
Sigh. I haven't had much luck with the moderators the past few days. That was meant as a tongue-in-cheek joke - it seems the ACs invariably post a question like that to any list announcing Product X running linux. I was just trying to mock them - rather like saying "d00d u r s0 l335!" to a script kiddie.
You've completely missed the point of my post - there's no data either way. And *duh*, of course it's a benefit that you can tweak the kernel to your heart's content. Did I say otherwise?
I don't like it one bit - this animal is extinct for a reason. What's worse, this animal won't have any of it's kind to "raise" it. Humans would be a sorry lot indeed if we couldn't pass key knowledge onto our offspring - other animals are the same way. The results are completely unpredictable if we try to reanimate long-dead species and reintegrate them into the ecosystem.
What next - bring back plants from the Jurassic period? We've never had contact with them... they could attact some heretofore unknown disease, or be particularily deadly to us.
We shouldn't meddle with the affairs of mother nature - this is her lab, not ours. And history has proven time and time again that incompetence breeds massive failures - sometimes fatal. Just watch any AOLer on Usenet to get a good idea of what clueless people are capable of. What if we mess something up and can't repair it? Who are we going to go to for expertise - god? He's been on vacation for thousands of years. Good luck.
Umm, not to rain on anybody's parade - but this article is *really* scant on details. What distro did they use (some optimize packages, some don't)? Did they compile the kernel with -O6, or use what came with the distro? There's dozens (nay, hundreds) of kernel tweaks you can apply to give you increased performance - one that comes to mind is the minimum timeslice which if you adjust upwards can help on hardware with small cpu caches. I don't believe anything until I see some raw data - I want numbers, and lots of 'em.
Just read the article, and to preempt the usual misinformed-just-enough-to-flame crowd: BIND is still open source - it's a particular add-on, the DNSafe that does not meet the OSD definition. Another reader was quick to point out that this is being worked on as well.
Excellent idea - Multiple "mini-slashdots" linked off the main page. It would atleast save me a click or two -and- raise visibility of the forum(s) in question.
I just wanted to make a quick point about the PKI idea mentioned - it would be a "blind" system, in that you submit a signed document, and it returns the information you allowed to be released - specifically the document would contain an auth request to release your age, which you would sign and return to them. That is then passed electronically to the government agency, who returns the requested information (and only the requested information).
properly implimented, this could ensure privacy. Unfortunately, the government would be able to tell what sites you were requesting access to. Some strict laws would need to be passed, which tends to limit this option.
Okay, I've gotten pretty fed up with all these censorware systems - which are all fundamentally flawed in that you entrust a third party to tell you what's "good" and what's "bad". This is the current state of the art in censorware - make a list, and compare the page to the list.
Here's a few ideas to submit to your clueon-lacking congressmen:
Pass federal legislation requiring ISPs to make certain you're an adult before giving you an account. Now the responsiblity falls squarely where it should - on the parent's shoulders. Obvious restrictions would need to be made for public-access terminals, however.
public-key infrastructure. Have several offices around the country (Maybe the DMV could provide this?) that can certify you as an adult and issue you a cryptographic key. This could be used for a variety of purposes - signing legal documents online, filing your taxes online, etc. But without all the privacy-invading extras in our current "national ID" proposal in congress.
Do nothing. A perfectly valid solution - although the most politically incorrect of the three. If your child is determined to get into drugs, porno, or criminal activity - they're going to find a way. As a parent, it's your responsibility to instill the proper values into your children to ensure that they don't. Schools shouldn't be doing it, churches shouldn't be doing it, and the government sure as hell shouldn't be. It's your responsiblity as a responsible parent - Stop slacking and have a talk with your child NOW about this.
I read it as an article trying to say that "the brain is serial!", rather than saying that visual input is serial. I say that the brain can be dynamically reconfigured to be serial or parallel, depending on the problem it's facing.
I have to agree, and disagree, at the same time. The human brain can keep track of several different things at once. My fiendishly simple example is what I do in the morning:
I start breakfast, and then take a shower while the water boils or whatnot. While taking a shower, I often think of what I'm going to code after breakfast. I would consider that to be "multi-tasking".
Now, here's another thing - how many times do you wake up in the morning with an answer to a complex coding problem? For me - it's *alot*. I find the answers just float in from dimension X into my head. That's parallel processing - part of my brain solved the problem while the other part handled something completely different without either part being aware of what the other was doing.
I think the debate is rather moot - we can do both. If you want to argue over the sematics, you can do so. But when I think of the brain, I think of it as a complex signals processor.
What I mean is, when you see something, it's translated into a signal, which is run through a series of filters and comparisons to tell you what you're seeing. This is also why you don't have an exact copy of what you saw - your brain only stores the "most significant bits" necessary to duplicate the signal. Some brains are better than others about reconstructing the signal. If you don't have all of the signal, your brain fudges it with values from similar experiences (or your values/beliefs). And if you have no signal at all, you post as an Anonymous Coward.
So my point is - it can be both. Infact, look at how society is structured - into clusters of people (brains?) that work in parallel on a project until completion (teamwork). Minimal communication. Why wouldn't your own brain be wired in a similar fashion - with dozens, if not hundreds, of semi-autonomous agents working towards the same goal?
I'll have to go back and look it up. I may be confusing something. I could swear that there was a clause in the GPL that requires that you give credit if you use part of somebody else's code in your own.
No, no. I meant how does it keep track of each person's contributions. For example, if I were to find a bug in wuftpd, and the authors accept it for inclusion into the main source tree - according to some licenses they need to give me credit. The problem is that certain licenses (*cough* GPL *cough*) require you to note the contributions of everybody if you redistribute. Therein lies the problem - how can redhat guarantee compliance with those licenses? And the bigger question - should it?
I have always wondered how credit ought to be given in open source projects. It seems that with all the co-mingling of fluids (code!) and whatnot it quickly becomes a real challenge to say who contributed what. Some licenses (GPL?) even require that you give credit.
The current system appears to be either give people credit inline with the contributed source code, put their names under the authors/contributors section, or create a dedicated CREDITS file to list contributions in more detail. None of these systems is ideal.
How is redhat (and obviously the larger free software community) dealing with this problem?
Well, after reading some of the later comments on this thread, I think it's safe to say people jumped the gun (myself included) over the processor thing. But I still stand by my opinion that Apple made a series of blunders which limited it's market share to education.
Apple can't seem to make up it's mind. First it comes out with the Apple IIe, make a fortune, then blunders that all up and gets stuffed into a niche market (education). Then they get their act together, come out with the iMac, and refocus their corporate efforts. Sales soar. They open source (kinda) Darwin, and release OS X - a modern, fast, unix-based OS. For awhile, everything's going good. Then they start in on this hardware thing. They make firewire proprietary, which effectively kills it. They modify their new CPUs to not be backwards (and possibly forward) compatible with even their own products.
Did I miss something? It seems to me like Apple open sourced, inserted their foot in their mouth, and then shot themselves in the foot.
Portable computers? We don't need no stinkin' portables. Real Geeks just put the cases back on their dual-celery boxes and haul them around from place to place. Wusses! All of 'ya!;)
Rob, a long time ago, in a place far, far away, you said that you would try several moderation systems, and see which one worked out the best. As I recall, when the original incarnation of the moderation system came into being alot of people opposed it. Now that it's been around for awhile, and slashdot has quintupled it's membership...
Just wanted to throw my hat into the ring - C++ is not too hard for first-time programmers. C++ has been my first language that I've actually been serious about (I don't think awk and shell scripting count. *g*). My major problems were making a conceptual leap over pointers, and how to construct classes (hard when there's 50 pages of cruft, and no sample source). It's difficult - but that's what you get for working with such a powerful language like this. Or maybe C++ Primer Plus wasn't a good book to get for a beginner.:)
I think computer literacy is a prerequisite to programming of any serious type. You need to understand how computers work, how they process data, and the various methods of I/O before you can attempt to program. For people who just discovered that Word has a spell-checker... getting them to learn programming will be about as successful as convincing Microsoft to drop their crummy MFC classes in favor of Java...
Just wanted to thank you for answering the concerns of myself and many other slashdotters by letting everybody know how the questioning is going to take place this time around. Kudos!
Slashdot Mirror
It shouldn't take 5 pages of text to tell that this person has a serious addiction and needs help. *reloading slashdot a few more times* Hrrmm... no new articles. *reloading slashdot again* Huh. Still no new articles... *reloading slashdot*.... That guy should really seek help - he'll spend all his time online doing nothing if he doesn't break the habit...
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As a curious sidenote - national post's servers throw out alot of extranneous icmp/7 packets.. or so my firewall says so....
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Foo.
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Sorry.. had to be said. ;)
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So which color pill did you take?
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Well, you know, that does tend to happen when you post the same thing multiple times... ;^)
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You've completely missed the point of my post - there's no data either way. And *duh*, of course it's a benefit that you can tweak the kernel to your heart's content. Did I say otherwise?
--
What next - bring back plants from the Jurassic period? We've never had contact with them... they could attact some heretofore unknown disease, or be particularily deadly to us.
We shouldn't meddle with the affairs of mother nature - this is her lab, not ours. And history has proven time and time again that incompetence breeds massive failures - sometimes fatal. Just watch any AOLer on Usenet to get a good idea of what clueless people are capable of. What if we mess something up and can't repair it? Who are we going to go to for expertise - god? He's been on vacation for thousands of years. Good luck.
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More details! More details!
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Nothing to worry about.. move along now... ;)
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Excellent idea - Multiple "mini-slashdots" linked off the main page. It would atleast save me a click or two -and- raise visibility of the forum(s) in question.
--
properly implimented, this could ensure privacy. Unfortunately, the government would be able to tell what sites you were requesting access to. Some strict laws would need to be passed, which tends to limit this option.
--
Here's a few ideas to submit to your clueon-lacking congressmen:
Pass federal legislation requiring ISPs to make certain you're an adult before giving you an account. Now the responsiblity falls squarely where it should - on the parent's shoulders. Obvious restrictions would need to be made for public-access terminals, however.
public-key infrastructure. Have several offices around the country (Maybe the DMV could provide this?) that can certify you as an adult and issue you a cryptographic key. This could be used for a variety of purposes - signing legal documents online, filing your taxes online, etc. But without all the privacy-invading extras in our current "national ID" proposal in congress.
Do nothing. A perfectly valid solution - although the most politically incorrect of the three. If your child is determined to get into drugs, porno, or criminal activity - they're going to find a way. As a parent, it's your responsibility to instill the proper values into your children to ensure that they don't. Schools shouldn't be doing it, churches shouldn't be doing it, and the government sure as hell shouldn't be. It's your responsiblity as a responsible parent - Stop slacking and have a talk with your child NOW about this.
--
I read it as an article trying to say that "the brain is serial!", rather than saying that visual input is serial. I say that the brain can be dynamically reconfigured to be serial or parallel, depending on the problem it's facing.
--
I start breakfast, and then take a shower while the water boils or whatnot. While taking a shower, I often think of what I'm going to code after breakfast. I would consider that to be "multi-tasking".
Now, here's another thing - how many times do you wake up in the morning with an answer to a complex coding problem? For me - it's *alot*. I find the answers just float in from dimension X into my head. That's parallel processing - part of my brain solved the problem while the other part handled something completely different without either part being aware of what the other was doing.
I think the debate is rather moot - we can do both. If you want to argue over the sematics, you can do so. But when I think of the brain, I think of it as a complex signals processor.
What I mean is, when you see something, it's translated into a signal, which is run through a series of filters and comparisons to tell you what you're seeing. This is also why you don't have an exact copy of what you saw - your brain only stores the "most significant bits" necessary to duplicate the signal. Some brains are better than others about reconstructing the signal. If you don't have all of the signal, your brain fudges it with values from similar experiences (or your values/beliefs). And if you have no signal at all, you post as an Anonymous Coward.
So my point is - it can be both. Infact, look at how society is structured - into clusters of people (brains?) that work in parallel on a project until completion (teamwork). Minimal communication. Why wouldn't your own brain be wired in a similar fashion - with dozens, if not hundreds, of semi-autonomous agents working towards the same goal?
--
I'll have to go back and look it up. I may be confusing something. I could swear that there was a clause in the GPL that requires that you give credit if you use part of somebody else's code in your own.
--
No, no. I meant how does it keep track of each person's contributions. For example, if I were to find a bug in wuftpd, and the authors accept it for inclusion into the main source tree - according to some licenses they need to give me credit. The problem is that certain licenses (*cough* GPL *cough*) require you to note the contributions of everybody if you redistribute. Therein lies the problem - how can redhat guarantee compliance with those licenses? And the bigger question - should it?
--
The current system appears to be either give people credit inline with the contributed source code, put their names under the authors/contributors section, or create a dedicated CREDITS file to list contributions in more detail. None of these systems is ideal.
How is redhat (and obviously the larger free software community) dealing with this problem?
--
Well, after reading some of the later comments on this thread, I think it's safe to say people jumped the gun (myself included) over the processor thing. But I still stand by my opinion that Apple made a series of blunders which limited it's market share to education.
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Did I miss something? It seems to me like Apple open sourced, inserted their foot in their mouth, and then shot themselves in the foot.
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Hmm. I'm having feelings of duplicity.
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Portable computers? We don't need no stinkin' portables. Real Geeks just put the cases back on their dual-celery boxes and haul them around from place to place. Wusses! All of 'ya! ;)
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don't you think it's time for something new?
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I think computer literacy is a prerequisite to programming of any serious type. You need to understand how computers work, how they process data, and the various methods of I/O before you can attempt to program. For people who just discovered that Word has a spell-checker... getting them to learn programming will be about as successful as convincing Microsoft to drop their crummy MFC classes in favor of Java...
--
Just wanted to thank you for answering the concerns of myself and many other slashdotters by letting everybody know how the questioning is going to take place this time around. Kudos!
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