What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs
to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds?
Eric S. Raymond, if you're reading this/. article, let me remind you: you are not Linus or RMS. Even if you do see yourself as being as influential as them, saying so comes across as arrogant.
Linus started off Linux, Stallman wrote the main code of GCC, GDB and Emacs (we'll forgive him that one;-). You wrote fetchmail (and several converters, minor utilities and drivers for esoteric hardware). Nothing like GCC or Linux. You've certainly created publicity (positive and negative), but they have written important code, and you tend to look worse for making the comparison.
Well, just about every kid in the 1950s read comics; most of those of course weren't juvenile delinquents, but his skewed sample provided ample grist that resulted in Senate hearings on the topic.
This sort of thing is parodied beautifully at the famous "bread is dangerous" site
Entrapment? Do you mean to say that you think speed cameras encourage you to go faster?
Or do you think that entrapment laws say you shouldn't be in trouble for breaking the law (and this isn't the DMCA, this is a reasonable law to prevent you from accidentally killing another person) if you didn't know you were going to get caught?
If you shoplift, and a policeman you hadn't seen comes round the corner and arrests you, has your privacy been violated?
Equally tragic was the response of especially the Army and Air Force - they did not deploy nearly fast enough. Just the presence of troops would have prevented a lot of the carnage.
And where were the National Guard? Iraq, mostly.
It just demonstrates the Bush administration's priorities. The National Guard is supposed to protect people, and shouldn't really be sent overseas unless there is a real risk to Americans (like a real war in which the enemy could attack the US). Does anyone really think they're doing more to help citizens by occupying Iraq than they could have by evacuating New Orleans?
Seriously though, this could be amazing for cancer patients. Imagine being able to remove lots of tissue around the cancer to ensure it doesn't spread, and it just growing back. Maybe it will even be possible to do operations like mastectomies without permenant damage.
IANA biologist, but IIRC some people believe that we lost the regeneration mechanism in favour of systems like scarring, which doesn't restore things to how they were before the injury but is faster and therefore less likely to cause infection.
In my school's library, they have a fingerprint scanner instead of library cards (which I still think is bizarre overkill and no better than cards for stopping theft).
They gave me a sheet of paper to sign, with small print that most people probably ignore. As I was interested, I looked through to find out how they protect my information. It turns out that they store a "hash" of the fingerprint which cannot be used to recover the print except by a method which only certain people at the company which sold the system know.
So rather than a real secure hash, my fingerprint is protected by security through obscurity. I suspect it's much more like weak encryption than a hash, and that anyone who was really interested could get my fingerprint out, if they had the library's software available to reverse engineer.
There's very little motive in a school, but if this type of system spreads to offices or even banks, there are going to be real problems.
Does it matter? Is grub faster to boot or something? Is lilo unreliable or insecure?
This is way less important even than vi vs emacs. I use lilo, because I know the syntax. I tried to install grub; system wouldn't boot; I went back to lilo. Maybe grub's fault; maybe mine. Who cares? Lilo boots up Linux for me. I don't change because it isn't broken. Others use grub. It works for them. I see it for 5 seconds each bootup. I don't care unless it stops working. It doesn't.
And when you start to do interesting stuff like that, you discover that configuration problems are as much of a problem with ntldr as with grub or lilo.
There seem to have been a lot of over-complex explanations of this. What it boils down to is this:
The SI system of units is designed so that things will often work out nicely like this. E=kMC^2, where k is a constant, will always be true no matter which units of measurement you use (so long as you don't invent any non-linear units*). Because SI units are almost all defined in terms of other SI units (e.g. the unit of energy, the Joule, can be expressed as kg m^2/s^2), k = 1 in this case, which happens a lot with the SI syste.
So yes, the system is rigged to make it easier, but not in a "dishonest" way.
*Like decibels for sound intensity, not that it would make much sense for time, distance energy or mass.
I was messing around with Mandrake for months before I switched, and I kept Windows XP as the default on the boot loader because things seemed to just work. Lots of things didn't work quite right in Mandrake: the official build of Xine had no DVD support, (WTF?) the nVidia drivers were a pain, and it took ~5 mins to boot up, 3 mins of which was spent setting up the network (it's so much better being told how to configure the network manually). I wanted to try Red Hat, but that was around the time that it was splitting into Fedora and the expensive ones, and Fedora was still a little bit crap. Under Debian I couldn't get X to load, but that was probably my fault.
It wasn't till I tried Gentoo that I felt things were actually working better in Linux (or at least I had the power to fix what was wrong), and now I boot Windows every fortnight or so, usually to test something for a friend who uses windows or to play a game. I know that Mandrake would have been fixable, but Gentoo has a way of making you learn everything you need just to install it:-)
You really don't seem to understand why laws are hard to enforce on the internet. Even American sites would move their servers to Europe if need be (or have a European server to redirect from the.com domain).
Slashdot Mirror
See?
Of course there are missing programs, but there are also self-crippling programs that watch the apparent Windows version.
So six of them have artificial limitations? That's gonna be hacked sometime just after the release day, methinks.
That wasn't a troll!
Telnet
Linus started off Linux, Stallman wrote the main code of GCC, GDB and Emacs (we'll forgive him that one
Entrapment? Do you mean to say that you think speed cameras encourage you to go faster?
Or do you think that entrapment laws say you shouldn't be in trouble for breaking the law (and this isn't the DMCA, this is a reasonable law to prevent you from accidentally killing another person) if you didn't know you were going to get caught?
If you shoplift, and a policeman you hadn't seen comes round the corner and arrests you, has your privacy been violated?
What's so special about speeding then?
WTF didn't we all think of that?
They could have had the sense to keep the National Guard around in case of an emergency. What are they supposed to be there for?
Also, how was your last sentence supposed to end?
It just demonstrates the Bush administration's priorities. The National Guard is supposed to protect people, and shouldn't really be sent overseas unless there is a real risk to Americans (like a real war in which the enemy could attack the US). Does anyone really think they're doing more to help citizens by occupying Iraq than they could have by evacuating New Orleans?
What's that supposed to mean?
Isn't India independent now?
Seriously though, this could be amazing for cancer patients. Imagine being able to remove lots of tissue around the cancer to ensure it doesn't spread, and it just growing back. Maybe it will even be possible to do operations like mastectomies without permenant damage.
IANA biologist, but IIRC some people believe that we lost the regeneration mechanism in favour of systems like scarring, which doesn't restore things to how they were before the injury but is faster and therefore less likely to cause infection.
In my school's library, they have a fingerprint scanner instead of library cards (which I still think is bizarre overkill and no better than cards for stopping theft).
They gave me a sheet of paper to sign, with small print that most people probably ignore. As I was interested, I looked through to find out how they protect my information. It turns out that they store a "hash" of the fingerprint which cannot be used to recover the print except by a method which only certain people at the company which sold the system know.
So rather than a real secure hash, my fingerprint is protected by security through obscurity. I suspect it's much more like weak encryption than a hash, and that anyone who was really interested could get my fingerprint out, if they had the library's software available to reverse engineer.
There's very little motive in a school, but if this type of system spreads to offices or even banks, there are going to be real problems.
Yes.
Now try and compile a kernel to fit in 512 bytes. That's the size of a boot sector.
FYI, file will identify a whole x86 disk or partition as "x86 boot sector".
Does it matter? Is grub faster to boot or something? Is lilo unreliable or insecure?
This is way less important even than vi vs emacs. I use lilo, because I know the syntax. I tried to install grub; system wouldn't boot; I went back to lilo. Maybe grub's fault; maybe mine. Who cares? Lilo boots up Linux for me. I don't change because it isn't broken. Others use grub. It works for them. I see it for 5 seconds each bootup. I don't care unless it stops working. It doesn't.
And when you start to do interesting stuff like that, you discover that configuration problems are as much of a problem with ntldr as with grub or lilo.
There seem to have been a lot of over-complex explanations of this. What it boils down to is this:
The SI system of units is designed so that things will often work out nicely like this. E=kMC^2, where k is a constant, will always be true no matter which units of measurement you use (so long as you don't invent any non-linear units*). Because SI units are almost all defined in terms of other SI units (e.g. the unit of energy, the Joule, can be expressed as kg m^2/s^2), k = 1 in this case, which happens a lot with the SI syste.
So yes, the system is rigged to make it easier, but not in a "dishonest" way.
*Like decibels for sound intensity, not that it would make much sense for time, distance energy or mass.
Do you think someone could port WINE to Windows...
I totally agree about Mandrake, RH and Gentoo.
:-)
I was messing around with Mandrake for months before I switched, and I kept Windows XP as the default on the boot loader because things seemed to just work. Lots of things didn't work quite right in Mandrake: the official build of Xine had no DVD support, (WTF?) the nVidia drivers were a pain, and it took ~5 mins to boot up, 3 mins of which was spent setting up the network (it's so much better being told how to configure the network manually). I wanted to try Red Hat, but that was around the time that it was splitting into Fedora and the expensive ones, and Fedora was still a little bit crap. Under Debian I couldn't get X to load, but that was probably my fault.
It wasn't till I tried Gentoo that I felt things were actually working better in Linux (or at least I had the power to fix what was wrong), and now I boot Windows every fortnight or so, usually to test something for a friend who uses windows or to play a game. I know that Mandrake would have been fixable, but Gentoo has a way of making you learn everything you need just to install it
I won't be getting Longhorn/Vista.
Amen.
Show me a game with more replayability than Tetris.
You really don't seem to understand why laws are hard to enforce on the internet. Even American sites would move their servers to Europe if need be (or have a European server to redirect from the .com domain).
Yes, but this guy was overclocking. Probably shouldn't have made the front page though.