If the CD digitally stores 44,100 samples a second, why isn't 22,050 an absolute cutoff? I would imagine it would HAVE to be, since it's not physically possible to make the wave go up-down-up-down any faster than 1/2 the sampling rate.)
The head article said "No reason you can't run Linux on them" - well I can think of one really big one. The driver to understand the handwriting is going to be in software, and would need to be reimplemented from the ground up if you stick a different OS on it. I can't imagine that being a trivial task.
The actual HTML file had links in it that looked like so: href="foo.txt", but the view source displayed them with a fake space in the quotes like so href=" foo.txt". Since we were trying to debug why the link wasn't working at the time, this apparent extra space led us on a wild goose chase.
I consider uses of a computer where you don't ever add new functionality and instead just use programs provided by others to be "trivial" uses. Not that they aren't important (trivial != irrelevant), but that they aren't very taxing on the system design. It doesn't take much to make a system function well under that situation, and as such it's not a good measure of how good or bad the OS is. It's not that it's trivial from the user's point of view - it's trivial from the OS's point of view.
No, see what I was thinking was that with links you can easily make different directories to do what you are talking about: Here's my directory of stuff for Project X. Here's another directory with stuff for Project Y. Here's another directory with stuff for Group Z in it. But in reality those files aren't even *in* those directories at all. Just links to them are, and there can be as much overlap between the directories as you wish. If a file is part of all three (X,Y,Z), then put a link to it in all three directories.
The reason people don't already do this is twofold:
1 - Not a lot of users understand it.
2 - It's hard to keep track of it when you can't go backwards to find all the places a file is linked from.
I'm thinking that instead of starting over and throwing existing file concepts out the window, we just make links a lot nicer in the next generation filesystems so it's possible to make better use of them. For one thing, we need a second kind of delete command for "delete this file. No really, I mean actually delete it, not just this one filename that points at it, I want you to go find all the other filenames that point at it and delete them too so it really does in fact go away."
TCP/IP - When did we start talking about open protocols here?
"We" didn't. You did. "TCP/IP stack" does not refer to the protocol on paper. It refers to the implementation of it - the code that does the actual work in the OS to make TCP/IP function. It's no secret that the BSD TCP/IP stack is the basis for a large number of operating systems' implementations, including even Microsoft's.
ReiserFS, CVS, RCS, etc. - What?
vim, emacs - Outside the nerd kingdome, these would not be considered "successful"
Perl, Python, Gcc, Bash, Tcsh, etc - Sure.
ReiserFS - a filesysem.
RCS - a revision control system for keeping track of versions of a file with successive diffs.
CVS - a tool built on top of RCS that collects sets of files together into projects and does revision control on the whole project.
(CVS is MAJORLY successful if you think about the fact that nearly every other OSS project uses it.)
vim, emacs - You dismiss these as being popular only amongst nerds, yet go on to say... ...that Perl, Python, Gcc, Bash, Tcsh, etc are not similarly dismissable. That's not consistent.
I don't think that any slashdot reader is going to disagree with you that those projects are important have been met with great success within the open source community. But if you look at the OSS projects that have really garnered widespread recognition, development, and support, the list is relatively short.
By definition, those who find such projects useful and like using them are the Open Source Community. Filtering them out is unfair. It would be like saying, "Yeah, but how popular is Microsoft Office outside of those people who use Microsoft Office? Applying such a filter turns the whole mental excercise into a self-fufilling prophecy.
We are doing things now to get away from things like that. Microsoft has their "My Documents" or "My Pictures" folders that applications default to when opening and saving files. No need to search the hard drive for this stuff. Seem's simple but this is a step away from the underlying OS.
No it isn't. Defaulting to a particular directory doesn't get you any further or closer to the OS. In fact, in order to have "no need to search the hard drive for this stuff" in MyDocuments, you are taking a step BACK in functionality to a time when the abstraction known as a "subdirectory" didn't exist and everyone had to keep crud piled together in one long list.
look at OS X for a beautiful hardware support/driver model for a Unix-based OS
What's that? Having the hardware made by the same company that made the OS so there's no wrestling with IP issues or having to browbeat the manufacturer into giving you the same specs he's willing to give the other guys?
People fear change so it will probably take a while.
No. The reason it will probably take a while is that people fear changes that take their control away, not because they fear change in general. It's the same reason I expect the adaption of automatic driving systems for highways will lag very far behind the technology when it starts becoming practical. People don't want to become dependant on a machine to do their driving for them, and they don't want to be dependant on a machine to do their organizing for them either. This thing would be twenty times more annoying than the Microsoft Office Clippy thing.
There's no such thing. Trolling is not admirable. Satire, on the other hand is, but trolling isn't the same thing as satire. The key difference is intent. A satirist WANTS to have people realize his post was meant to ridicule the opposing view, and not meant to be his honest heartfelt opinion. A troll, on the other hand doesn't. He wants to have his post mistaken for the real thing, because he enjoys the flamewar.
The Registry *IS* a filesystem, as far as I'm concerned: \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOME\LONG\PATH\TO\TheSettingYo uWant Sure looks like a directry tree filename to me. The only big difference between that and the filesystems we are used to using for files is that:
1 - It cannot store really big streams of bytes.
2 - "files" (key/values) have types specifying what data is allowed to be in them, like in the olden days on mainframes.
If you come from a background where you are used to different filesystems having different extra capabilities, this doesn't look like something different from a filesystem. Some filesystems can store permission bits, some cannot. Some keep redundant checksums, some do not. Some allow any arbitrary long filename, some restrict you to 8.3 format. If something exactly like the Registry had been implemented on a unix system, they would have just called it a new filesystem type.
(I agree that a database filesystem is a good idea. I disagree with the notion that the Windows Registry has anything to do with that idea, however.)
This notion that a file is "located" in one place only, and therefore you need two files to locate the file in two places is already false. You may have heard of a little-known family of operating systems called UNIX. Their filesystems typically have a thing called linking. If you "put" a file in a directory you aren't *really* putting it there. You are just putting one *reference to* the file there. And that one reference to the file doesn't have any precedence over another one you may make later somewhere else. When you "remove" a file you don't really remove it. You just drop the reference to it that was in that directory. Only after the file becomes fully orphaned (all the references go away so you could never find it again anyway) does it physically get deleted. It's like languages with garbage collection. The concept already exists and people don't use it much. I think that speaks volumes. The notion that a thing can exist in multiple locations at the same time is counter-intuitive. It's incredebly useful, but not the sort of thing a lot of people are going to "get".
I just wish hardlinking had some means of following the reference bidirectionally, so that given a file the system could efficiently tell me all the linked names it has. Right now the only way to do that is to scan the whole filesystem for other filenames pointing at the same inode number, and THAT is horribly inefficient.
If you think the benefit of changable code that open source advocates claim is purely based on in-house people making the changes, you aren't thinking it through. So long as SOMEONE SOMEWHERE makes that change you can gain from it. Over time this tends toward programs that the user population wants to use. The big problem most open source programs have is that their audience is typically tech-saavy people only, and therefore the changes that get made are driven by the needs of the tech-saavy only. It's not that the developers are unable to meet the needs of the less tech-saavy - it's that they have no incentive to.
And that's why the most successful Open Source software is that software that tends to have a tech-saavy userbase ANYWAY regardless of whether it was Open Source or not. For example, syadmin tools, programming language compilers, dynamic web servers (not just serving static pages, but running programs on the server), ascii text editors, and so on.
The other place Open Source software does very well is in an embedded device where the user never deals directly with the software anyway.
The only way closed source software has saved ME time is that when it says something cannot be done, I tend to believe it more, so I don't waste much time TRYING to get it to work. I just accept that it's hopeless and move on.
And considering that Office 11 is apparently openly based on XML file formats
When MS claims it's going to do something openly without the intent of screwing the standard up to mutate it into a proprietary one, I will never believe them until it has already happened. You might call this predjudicial, but I call it basic pattern recognition capacity combined with a functioning memory.
Re:Are you kidding?
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's not a troll. Don't think because I have a varying opinion on something that I'm just some asshole looking to start some shit.
(I think you meant "differing opinion". A "varying opinion" would be one that keeps changing.
"troll" is one of those words that has changed meaning through the massive overpowering force of the ignorance of the majority. When first coined as an online term, it meant what you imply - it referred to people stating controversial things EVEN THOUGH they don't necessarily believe them - they just state them because they are assholes who think starting arguments is a form of entertainment. Nowadays, however, it has come to mean ANY controversial argument-inducing post, even the heartfelt honest ones. Where am I going with this? Well, I'm just pointing out that just because he called you a troll doesn't necessarily mean he though you were insincere. There are a lot of people who don't use the term that way anymore.
These two paragraphs of yours contradict each other:
Now, the majority of you will go you "you could've fixed this and that by editing this and changing that and rewriting these 30 lines of code yatta yatta yatta" but who gives a fuck.
Reply to this, don't mod it down because you don't agree. If you really think you're right, you'll be able to prove it.
No, we won't be able to prove it - not to you at any rate. In the first paragraph quoted above, you declared that you won't listen to reason, although you didn't really phrase it that way.
Really? Gee, and here I was thinking that the "easy to use" aspect of Windows, and thus less of a need to hire on Linux experts, put them about even...
Windows is easier to LEARN. It is not, however, easier to USE unless the uses to which you put your computer are very trivial.
Re:Why negative attacks don't work for MSoft
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 2
If you want to effect change, you have to point out why the new way is better than the old. And that cannot be done without at least having the unstated implication that there is something inferior about the old when compared to the new. This notion that extolling the virtues of your own product is somehow distinct from pointing out the failures of the competition's is an alien concept to me. You can't say Foo is better than Bar without also logically implying Bar is worse than Foo in the very same breath.
It's just like when MS had two different price rates for OEMs - a cheaper one if you agree to be exclusively MS, and a more expensive one if you don't. People who wanted to extoll the virtues of MS (including MS's own PR) called the cheaper rate a "discount". People who wanted to extoll the faults of MS called the cheaper rate normal and called the expensive rate a price hike, or penalty. Since a company sets prices on its products where it wants, the difference between the two phrasings is purely imaginary.
That depends on whether it's a lie about human activity. Those sorts of lies can alter human activity if they spread far enough and thereby stop being lies. For example, "Cadidate Foo has no chance of winning this election" might start as a lie, but can make itself become true if enough people believe it that said belief makes them abandon that candidate to choose another.
Now, lies about the world OUTSIDE human behaviour cannot become true by repetition, that is true.
The guy who wrote them was an indian (asian, not native american) by the name of "Vinod" somethingorother. I cannot remember the full name, but at the time of the documents' release it was known, I believe.
Not only that, but it would create the (probably true) image in the public eye that MS is embarassed to have the public find out how it conducts business and that's why it's making such a big deal over it. That's not the image they would want to put forth. I think this concern for image is the biggest thing that would hold them back from suing over it. Secondly there's the fact that a suit would make even more people hear about the document.
Slashdot Mirror
If the CD digitally stores 44,100 samples a second, why isn't 22,050 an absolute cutoff? I would imagine it would HAVE to be, since it's not physically possible to make the wave go up-down-up-down any faster than 1/2 the sampling rate.)
The head article said "No reason you can't run Linux on them" - well I can think of one really big one. The driver to understand the handwriting is going to be in software, and would need to be reimplemented from the ground up if you stick a different OS on it.
I can't imagine that being a trivial task.
The actual HTML file had links in it that looked like so: href="foo.txt", but the view source displayed them with a fake space in the quotes like so href=" foo.txt". Since we were trying to debug why the link wasn't working at the time, this apparent extra space led us on a wild goose chase.
I consider uses of a computer where you don't ever add new functionality and instead just use programs provided by others to be "trivial" uses. Not that they aren't important (trivial != irrelevant), but that they aren't very taxing on the system design. It doesn't take much to make a system function well under that situation, and as such it's not a good measure of how good or bad the OS is. It's not that it's trivial from the user's point of view - it's trivial from the OS's point of view.
WTF is "31337"? Another childish abbreviation by people pretending to be computer experts?
No, see what I was thinking was that with links you can easily make different directories to do what you are talking about: Here's my directory of stuff for Project X. Here's another directory with stuff for Project Y. Here's another directory with stuff for Group Z in it. But in reality those files aren't even *in* those directories at all. Just links to them are, and there can be as much overlap between the directories as you wish. If a file is part of all three (X,Y,Z), then put a link to it in all three directories. The reason people don't already do this is twofold: 1 - Not a lot of users understand it. 2 - It's hard to keep track of it when you can't go backwards to find all the places a file is linked from. I'm thinking that instead of starting over and throwing existing file concepts out the window, we just make links a lot nicer in the next generation filesystems so it's possible to make better use of them. For one thing, we need a second kind of delete command for "delete this file. No really, I mean actually delete it, not just this one filename that points at it, I want you to go find all the other filenames that point at it and delete them too so it really does in fact go away."
- TCP/IP - When did we start talking about open protocols here?
"We" didn't. You did. "TCP/IP stack" does not refer to the protocol on paper. It refers to the implementation of it - the code that does the actual work in the OS to make TCP/IP function. It's no secret that the BSD TCP/IP stack is the basis for a large number of operating systems' implementations, including even Microsoft's.RCS - a revision control system for keeping track of versions of a file with successive diffs.
CVS - a tool built on top of RCS that collects sets of files together into projects and does revision control on the whole project.
(CVS is MAJORLY successful if you think about the fact that nearly every other OSS project uses it.)
vim, emacs - You dismiss these as being popular only amongst nerds, yet go on to say...
There's no such thing. Trolling is not admirable. Satire, on the other hand is, but trolling isn't the same thing as satire. The key difference is intent. A satirist WANTS to have people realize his post was meant to ridicule the opposing view, and not meant to be his honest heartfelt opinion. A troll, on the other hand doesn't. He wants to have his post mistaken for the real thing, because he enjoys the flamewar.
The Registry *IS* a filesystem, as far as I'm concerned: \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOME\LONG\PATH\TO\TheSettingYo uWant
Sure looks like a directry tree filename to me. The only big difference between that and the filesystems we are used to using for files is that:
1 - It cannot store really big streams of bytes.
2 - "files" (key/values) have types specifying what data is allowed to be in them, like in the olden days on mainframes.
If you come from a background where you are used to different filesystems having different extra capabilities, this doesn't look like something different from a filesystem. Some filesystems can store permission bits, some cannot. Some keep redundant checksums, some do not. Some allow any arbitrary long filename, some restrict you to 8.3 format. If something exactly like the Registry had been implemented on a unix system, they would have just called it a new filesystem type.
(I agree that a database filesystem is a good idea. I disagree with the notion that the Windows Registry has anything to do with that idea, however.)
This notion that a file is "located" in one place only, and therefore you need two files to locate the file in two places is already false. You may have heard of a little-known family of operating systems called UNIX. Their filesystems typically have a thing called linking. If you "put" a file in a directory you aren't *really* putting it there. You are just putting one *reference to* the file there. And that one reference to the file doesn't have any precedence over another one you may make later somewhere else. When you "remove" a file you don't really remove it. You just drop the reference to it that was in that directory. Only after the file becomes fully orphaned (all the references go away so you could never find it again anyway) does it physically get deleted. It's like languages with garbage collection. The concept already exists and people don't use it much. I think that speaks volumes. The notion that a thing can exist in multiple locations at the same time is counter-intuitive. It's incredebly useful, but not the sort of thing a lot of people are going to "get".
I just wish hardlinking had some means of following the reference bidirectionally, so that given a file the system could efficiently tell me all the linked names it has. Right now the only way to do that is to scan the whole filesystem for other filenames pointing at the same inode number, and THAT is horribly inefficient.
- Apache
- XFree86
- Linux kernel
- FreeBSD kernel
- Gnome
Damn, I ran out of fingers. Let's try the other hand.- KDE
- Mozilla
- ReiserFS
- The TCP/IP stack itself, typically implemented in most OS'es off of BSD's source, including even Windows.
- RCS and CVS
Okay, Hold on, let me take my shoes off. Sorry about the smell...- This little piggy runs DNS Bind
- This little piggy firewalls with Drawbridge
- This little piggy edits text with vim
- This little piggy edits text with emacs
- This little piggy runs sendmail (yeah, it sucks compared to newer mail daemons, but it most certainly counts as "successful".)
Now the other foot:- This little piggy uses gcc.
- This little piggy uses Perl.
- This little piggy uses bash or tcsh.
- This little piggy uses Python.
- And This little piggy uses Slashcode to claim Open Source projects aren't very successful.
Okay, I'd better stop. I've almost run out of appendages and you really don't want me to use the twenty-first one.If you think the benefit of changable code that open source advocates claim is purely based on in-house people making the changes, you aren't thinking it through. So long as SOMEONE SOMEWHERE makes that
change you can gain from it. Over time this tends toward programs that the user population wants to use. The big problem most open source programs have is that their audience is typically tech-saavy people only, and therefore the changes that get made are driven by the needs of the tech-saavy only. It's not that the developers are unable to meet the needs of the less tech-saavy - it's that they have no incentive to.
And that's why the most successful Open Source software is that software that tends to have a tech-saavy userbase ANYWAY regardless of whether it was Open Source or not. For example, syadmin tools, programming language compilers, dynamic web servers (not just serving static pages, but running programs on the server), ascii text editors, and so on.
The other place Open Source software does very well is in an embedded device where the user never deals directly with the software anyway.
The only way closed source software has saved ME time is that when it says something cannot be done, I tend to believe it more, so I don't waste much time TRYING to get it to work. I just accept that it's hopeless and move on.
"troll" is one of those words that has changed meaning through the massive overpowering force of the ignorance of the majority. When first coined as an online term, it meant what you imply - it referred to people stating controversial things EVEN THOUGH they don't necessarily believe them - they just state them because they are assholes who think starting arguments is a form of entertainment. Nowadays, however, it has come to mean ANY controversial argument-inducing post, even the heartfelt honest ones. Where am I going with this? Well, I'm just pointing out that just because he called you a troll doesn't necessarily mean he though you were insincere. There are a lot of people who don't use the term that way anymore.
- Now, the majority of you will go you "you could've fixed this and that by editing this and changing that and rewriting these 30 lines of code yatta yatta yatta" but who gives a fuck.
- Reply to this, don't mod it down because you don't agree. If you really think you're right, you'll be able to prove it.
No, we won't be able to prove it - not to you at any rate. In the first paragraph quoted above, you declared that you won't listen to reason, although you didn't really phrase it that way.If you want to effect change, you have to point out why the new way is better than the old. And that cannot be done without at least having the unstated implication that there is something inferior about the old when compared to the new. This notion that extolling the virtues of your own product is somehow distinct from pointing out the failures of the competition's is an alien concept to me. You can't say Foo is better than Bar without also logically implying Bar is worse than Foo in the very same breath.
It's just like when MS had two different price rates for OEMs - a cheaper one if you agree to be exclusively MS, and a more expensive one if you don't. People who wanted to extoll the virtues of MS (including MS's own PR) called the cheaper rate a "discount". People who wanted to extoll the faults of MS called the cheaper rate normal and called the expensive rate a price hike, or penalty. Since a company sets prices on its products where it wants, the difference between the two phrasings is purely imaginary.
That depends on whether it's a lie about human activity. Those sorts of lies can alter human activity if they spread far enough and thereby stop being lies. For example, "Cadidate Foo has no chance of winning this election" might start as a lie, but can make itself become true if enough people believe it that said belief makes them abandon that candidate to choose another.
Now, lies about the world OUTSIDE human behaviour cannot become true by repetition, that is true.
The guy who wrote them was an indian (asian, not native american) by the name of "Vinod" somethingorother. I cannot remember the full name, but at the time of the documents' release it was known, I believe.
Not only that, but it would create the (probably true) image in the public eye that MS is embarassed to have the public find out how it conducts business and that's why it's making such a big deal over it. That's not the image they would want to put forth. I think this concern for image is the biggest thing that would hold them back from suing over it. Secondly there's the fact that a suit would make even more people hear about the document.