Where I work I swap hardware, including video cards and NICs in and out of WinXP boxes (to be precise we change configs too much to waste our time with actual boxes, we just leave the parts sitting out on our desks) several times per day. For me that's never triggered an XP activation failure. Maybe it has to do with our licensing.
But one day one of my XP HDs randomly decided that the partition XP was on wasn't C: anymore. That set off the activation. Of course Windows didn't tell me that, it gave me a cryptic error code and made me go Googling for it. The Microsoft KB noted that this error usually came up on volume licenses (like ours) and that you pretty much had to just re-image the drive.
Which just brings up the question of why a volume-licensed copy of Windows that can just be re-imaged willy-nilly as long as it stays within the organization cares if it gets moved to D:.
When you're running the Vista installer it doesn't ask what hard drive you want the bootloader installed on, by the way. It just puts it on your primary drive. Even if you're installing Vista to your secondary drive and the primary disk is only there because the "installation media" is on a network share and you need an OS running to get it. I still haven't figured out how to get a working Vista bootloader on that secondary disk (making it dependent on the primary disk to boot), and the Vista bootloader on the primary disk hosed itself out of the blue two days later, leaving both disks unbootable. Such concerns may only apply to developers in corporate settings for whom hard drives are basically boot disks, but it sure is a pain to do anything with Vista but install it on one computer and leave it there. Whether this is a bug or a feature is for us all to speculate; I think it's a little of both.
If a laptop is your secondary box and it's what you've got, that's cool. Just make sure that BSD supports its hardware. ACPI support and wifi chipset support are considerably different than in Linux (better for some h/w, worse for other). I'm running FreeBSD on my very old laptop right now and it works great except for ACPI (which is probably due to non-compliant hardware, what can you do). Often people wind up having better luck on Linux for ACPI.
Of course there are a few differences in terms of software availability too: no ALSA (sound is really easy to get working, though, especially for the simple stereo chipsets that most laptops have) is the big one for me. The build process for the system and kernel on FreeBSD is pretty nice. They put everything from the ports tree in/usr/local. FreeBSD's ifconfig works for both wired and wireless cards (I've never run Linux on a laptop so when someone told me you needed a seperate program for Linux I thought it was madness). If you need to work with Windows networks all the commands for that are totally different (so you should probably hide it behind scripts or GUI if possible). The kernel, basic system utilities and ports tree really feel unified and "right" to me on BSD, more than on GNU/Linux.
Totally agree about Gentoo's documentation; Gentoo docs occasionally bail me out on any modern Unix system, especially for desktop config-related stuff. The FreeBSD handbook is a great resource for all system-level stuff (at least when it's up-to-date), and FreeBSD has better manpages than any Linux I've used.
Just thought I'd mention some things, since I don't often hear of people putting *BSD on laptops.
Well if ya don't want to support the De Beers monopoly and all the harm it causes then don't. "Here, babe, I got you this nice ring, I paid an arm and a leg for it... AND SO DID SOME KID IN AFRICA!... err, marry me?"
Or would you just let your concerns be bowled over by corporate propaganda telling you that you can buy her love? I don't actually know that much about the behavior of the diamond miners, but I do know that jewlery ads on TV make me sick and I change the channel every time they come on. And comments and links from this article's discussion have certainly taught me something. Grow a pair and stand up against those manipulative fuckers.
Funny, for my life I could not find a satisfactory solution (or even find a google solution) to get the XP dual boot file configured properly to reference the Mandriva... Finally gave up, and let lilo handle it, the configuration was painless and flawless. Go figure.)
Apparently it's possible to do this. Instructions are about 3/4 the way down. I wouldn't call this "easy", but it will get you Linux without overwriting your MBR, like the article says. Though there's really no need to be apprehensive about letting LILO or GRUB call NTLDR, it's just one extra step in the process. Given that such a large proportion of LILO/GRUB users dual-boot it's really no surprise that those bootloaders handle the situation well.
I haven't tried these instructions, and if you're happy with what you've got don't fuck with it, but they seem reasonable enough from my knowledge of NTLDR. It sounds like you've seen Windows' boot.ini file at least, but, as the article describes, there's more than meets the eye there. There are some aspects of NTLDR's configuration that don't make much sense, but at least it's not hard to throw together a working configuration. On the other hand, Vista's bootloader is completely ridiculous. Once you get in a mess with it you're not getting out. I would never configure it to boot anything but the copy of Vista on its own partition, and let LILO/GRUB handle everything else.
Yeah, well Gaim 2.0 will never have voice support, and it's supposed to be a big priority for 3.0. That said, voice chat would just clutter an IM client, if you want to voice chat install some fucking VOIP shit or something. Like Skype? Meh.
There is no vi for Plan 9 because the Plan 9 folk didn't like vi, wrote their own editors that they thought were better, explained why they thought theirs were better, and then everyone that used Plan 9 drank the Kool-Aid.
They Plan 9 folk kind of have a point. vi was designed to be used over really slow connections, this is why it has such terse and efficient commands. But you can be even more efficient by doing selection and movement with a mouse, and if your connection has the bandwidth (such as with a local connection) to do it that's what you ought to do (it really is more efficient for most types of movements and selections, especially if your editor has a good "mouse language"). So they made editors where you have to do it that way. What if you're going over a slow connection? Use ed. Well, actually, their simple editor sam has a front-end that can be used separately on your local machine that communicates with the server using ed-like commands.
vi would also not be a natural fit for a system with no terminal emulators. I bet you really think it's useless now;-). But terminal emulators are a silly holdover, and if they can be replaced with something better, why not? That is the mindset that permeates most of the ways that Plan 9 is different from Unix. They wanted to get rid of all the cruft (termcaps, anyone? God, what a horrible mess...). What's really interesting about Plan 9 is that its users buy into the ideas of the creators to the degree that despite vi's popularity on every other OS nobody has ever ported vi to Plan 9 from what I can tell. I mean, there are better things for them to be spending their time on anyway, learning a new editor is easy.
There actually is a program called vi on Plan 9, and it's something completely different; its name is the result of the naming convention for architecture-specific compilers and simulators.
KDE users don't drink the Kool-Aid to nearly that degree, which is why that came to my mind in the original post. But I do think some of the same aspects, both technically and socially, play into the fact that there's no Gecko browser for KDE... Konq is actually pretty nice, but unfortunately KDE apps feel like a fish out of water on non-KDE systems (Rosegarden is one that I wind up using). I guess Gnome apps would on non-Gnome systems, but there aren't as many prominent apps that are Gnome-branded. QT apps, though rare, can fit in pretty well (LyX is one of the few QT-but-not-KDE programs I've used... I think Opera uses QT also).
New Balance? Wow... I read a few years ago an article about how New Balance made their shoes somewhere in New England, had very high worker morale for that industry, and relied on savings on shipping and innovative improvements in efficiency to stay competitive with foreign sweatshops.
I haven't actively researched this, though, so the article might have just been a fluff piece, or they might have some sweatshops now. When I was in 7th grade I had a pair of NB shoes and my history teacher commented that they were made in the USA (the tag reflected this as well). As a long-distance runner, I'm a big fan of Asics, though.
Yes, letting you download files again is an enhancement over CDs. The audio quality of a CD over your average cassette tape is an enhancement (yeah, some audiophile with really nice tapes and a really nice tape deck might disagree, but that's not the point), but that doesn't mean that if I bought a CD and it had tape hiss in it I wouldn't be upset.
Enhancements are the reason that we adopt new media. Redownloading seems like the kind of enhancement that should come with the territory.
Who cares if its memory usage is high because of caching? The pages that aren't used anymore just get swapped out to disk by the operating system when some other program needs a page of memory. Surely you aren't running out of space in your swap partition because of a measly Firefox cache?
People say that Firefox uses more memory than Opera without that taken into account as well. That may be true, and I've always found Opera to be very stable and fast. Opera's a great browser. I use Firefox now because it runs just as fast on this computer, it gives me more screen real estate, and because I think GTK+ apps look better than most others with my 80s-style FVWM theme. On anything with less than 128MB RAM I'd use Opera for sure.
My original parent-post (now my great grandpa) was ridiculing lay-creationists for not directly reading Darwin's work. That's a silly thing to criticize them for when the majority of lay-evolutionists don't directly read it either.
The behavior of scientists researching/advocating ID and that of scientists researching/advocating evolution has been quite different over time; often those members of the ID crowd have turned to misleading public grandstanding rather than advancing research in any way. But the amateurs sitting on the sidelines waiting to jump into Internet debates on the subject are mostly followers who've read and studied material a few layers removed from actual scientific research. They wouldn't have much of a chance to understand the real stuff directly.
Your post is completely ridiculous. Sure, many people that attack Darwin get their talking points from others that have read Darwin rather than from their own readings of Darwin. But how many people that support evolutionary ideas get their ideas directly from scientific research? Lots of people get their ideas from some secondary source that reads and interprets the research and distributes it. Even more people start arguments based on arguments they've heard from sources that have read these interpretations of the research and attached opinions to it.
But you're right about one thing: it really would be a waste of time for people, regardless of their opinions, to directly read research in a field they're not experts in.
There are problems with adding features aside from the product's focus. In the case of Excel, it happened to be almost perfect for these additional things people wanted to use it for, they only needed to add a couple features. I've never used the GIMP, but it doesn't sound like it's even close to being a good drawing tool; it would need severe changes in its interface, for one thing. The only reason people try to use it as one is because it's the only graphics tool they've ever heard of for Linux.
If the GIMP changes into a drawing program just because a bunch of yahoos want a drawing program we don't just gain a drawing program. We also lose an image manipulation program (even if we don't lose it entirely we lose resources as they're shifted away to supporting drawing functions). There are good drawing programs out there. There are limited development resources for the GIMP. It seems totally legit for GIMP developers to tell people about a program that better suits their needs rather than cram tons of extra features into their own program.
The GIMP, as many of my sibling-posts have pointed out, has made it easier to draw circles in recent versions. Which seems awfully similar to the kind of minor changes that Microsoft made to Excel. You and I know that Excel, even with its changes, still sucks for making lists compared to Word. And the GIMP probably still sucks as a drawing program, at least compared to something like Inkscape (I haven't used either program, but that seems to be the consensus). That doesn't mean that Microsoft should make any *significant* changes to Excel to facilitate listmaking, nor that the GIMP should change significantly for drawing. Developers should listen to users but should not do whatever they tell them to do. They should learn the users' needs and come up with a good way to meet them.
Best example of Happy Sexy People ads I've seen... when I was on a bus in Champaign, IL I saw an advertisement for a church that said, "[insert church name]: Church is not a spectator sport!" and then had three pictures of HSP faces... if there was anything else on the ad it was either too small to read or not very memorable. One of the pictures was a slightly overexposed shot of an semi-airhead-looking blonde chick that looked like her mind was totally blown by God, or by an acoustic-geetar sing-a-long about God, or something like that.
A few months later I was driving south on the Stevenson through the southwest 'burbs (near Downers Grove or Lemont) and saw a billboard for a new housing development. Three HSP pictures. One of them was the exact same picture that the church ad used. That girl's mind was totally blown by a spacious backyard, french doors and prices from the low $200s. And by an acoustic-geetar sing-a-long about God, of course.
Let's say that there's an election coming up for president of teh world. George W. Bush is running against Adolf Hitler. Those are your only choices, and everyone has to vote or be killed. 10% of the people are Nazis and 90% aren't. 90% of Nazis vote for Hitler and 10% vote for Bush. 90% of non-Nazis vote for Bush and 10% vote for Hitler.
Overall, 82% vote for Bush, so most people vote for Bush. 90% of Nazis vote for Hitler, so most Nazis vote for Hitler. Nazis are still people, they're just in a small, evil minority.
The reason they use GPUs is that they're very powerful and better-suited to this type of computation than the CPU. The other specialized chips aren't. Maybe some of those new physics accelerators could be used, though I don't know enough about them to know if they'd be useful or not.
Did you read the other parts of my post before calling it stupid? Debian can't distribute old versions of Firefox with security backports as "Debian Firefox" anymore. For at least those versions they have no choice but to remove Firefox branding. That's what I meant. Some people would argue that Debian and MoFo need to come to a compromise about this for the good of the Free Software movement; I don't think that's the case and that's the point I was trying to make.
I don't think of you as "being incredibly stupid". Maybe a bit rude, though.
I didn't know Pine rendered HTML, but I used Mutt for all my email in college. It made no attempt at parsing/rendering HTML whatsoever. So if someone sent an email only in HTML or with a useless text version you had to manually tell it to open in Lynx or something. So at least Mutt doesn't "handle" IFRAMEs at all.
Now I'm not sure what Lynx does with IFRAMEs. I imagine once you open it in Lynx you're probably screwed. Unless you have a special sandboxed Lynx installation.
It's funny; I say this and yet I still have FF installed via portage on Gentoo. I just periodically get pissed off at it and say, "I'm going to start using official MoFo binaries next weekend," and then never bother to learn how to set up portage for that; there is a way to tell portage, "I'm managing this package myself," but I don't know how hard you have to work to track versions. Since it is Gentoo and I'm compiling things anyway I guess packages that relied on particular versions or features would test for them in configure scripts (suboptimal, but at least it prevents breakage).
I wound up with both Mozilla and Firefox installed, and I have to wait for them both to compile. I don't even know what package forced the Mozilla install, equery says nothing depends on it (/me fires up emerge -C). Seems to me that if other packages rely on Gecko libraries that Gecko should have its own package. I guess that's just not how MoFo distributes it. They should. Or maybe Debian should fork it and call it State Farm.
As I understand it Debian does contribute patches back to Mozilla. But Debian wants to backport security fixes to versions of Firefox that Moz. Foundation no longer supports. I'm pretty sure this is true.
As I understand it Mozilla used to let them call these versions "Debian Firefox" but now they don't anymore. I'm not entirely sure this is quite right. Also there's a DFSG issue that I don't remember the details of.
Mozilla Foundation doesn't have to "deal with" Iceweasel at all, except to respond to all of this publicity. This looks "big-picture bad" to some people but to Debian keeping the stable branch secure is more important than Firefox advocacy. In other words, the "small-picture" disagreements that made this happen are actually the big picture.
For most users there's not much of a reason to use package management for a program like Firefox. It's frequently-updated and for most people frequently-used, and it has an auto-update system if you use the official binaries. People will usually want the updated version. For people that have a good reason to stick with a really old version, or who don't use the browser enough to keep it updated independently of other software Iceweasel gives them their security backports. And I can understand why MoFo wouldn't want their trademark applied to software that's maintained by Debian.
View->Toolbars->Customize. Drag the search box where you want it. This works, at least, on FF 1.5.0.7/Windows. I'll try it when I get home, too, because for some reason I remember not being able to move the toolbars around on Linux...
Man, I can't believe I got sidetracked and looked for the feature. I clicked "Reply" with the intention of telling you to modify the source and recompile... oh well.
If you have a random number generator that uses radioactive decay, the atoms just decay, right? You tell a computer to measure them somehow and generate a seed or number using some algorithm (I don't know exactly how this works). The non-deterministic parts, the atoms that decay, aren't really part of the computer, they're a phenomenon that the computer measures. Well, sometimes there are errors because of solar flares. So then we're talking about an ideal computer that can only be defined in theory and then, of course, our
When GP, or anyone else, says that computers do exactly as they're told, it's usually implied that they must be told to do so in their own special language. No computer I've heard of has a "Prove Riemann's Hypothesis" (PRH) opcode (though an HCF opcode might sufficeintly emulate all human attempts thus far), so to tell a computer to prove Riemann's Hypothesis you'd need to first generate an algorithm to prove the hypothesis. I think some people did essentially that a while back with the four-color theorem.
Let's have a counterpoint to this. Clearly you care about having great graphics. I have a 20" SDTV, I don't get good enough reception to justify a bigger/better set and I don't watch enough to justify a cable/sat. subscription. I care about being able to get basic cheap TV.
For you to get your great graphics you have to "ween people off" of SD sets; that is, you want to force me to spend lots of money (I'd bet my TV will be working long after SD broadcasts go dead, and I don't plan on getting a new one until one of those two things happens). If I keep my cheap TV game manufacturers have to write SD-capable games, compromising your graphics.
There are a few people like you and a few people like me. Lots of people fall somewhere in the middle. Eventually HD will take over the middle and then I'll either buy an HD set or abandon TV forever out of hermetic spite. But I'd rather than date came later rather than sooner, and millions of people's bank balances feel the same way.
And as for your "sports fan" example, you're severely exaggerating on both ends. If you actually care about the game you'll get excited about it HD or not rather than sitting 2 feet from the screen, playing with yourself as you count pixels. If you don't care about the game take those three hours and go for a nice long run; no HDTV experience can simulate actually doing something with your life. Frankly, if HDTV draws even more people to spend their entire Sundays on the couch watching beautiful broadcasts of football games I don't consider that a good thing.
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Where I work I swap hardware, including video cards and NICs in and out of WinXP boxes (to be precise we change configs too much to waste our time with actual boxes, we just leave the parts sitting out on our desks) several times per day. For me that's never triggered an XP activation failure. Maybe it has to do with our licensing.
But one day one of my XP HDs randomly decided that the partition XP was on wasn't C: anymore. That set off the activation. Of course Windows didn't tell me that, it gave me a cryptic error code and made me go Googling for it. The Microsoft KB noted that this error usually came up on volume licenses (like ours) and that you pretty much had to just re-image the drive.
Which just brings up the question of why a volume-licensed copy of Windows that can just be re-imaged willy-nilly as long as it stays within the organization cares if it gets moved to D:.
When you're running the Vista installer it doesn't ask what hard drive you want the bootloader installed on, by the way. It just puts it on your primary drive. Even if you're installing Vista to your secondary drive and the primary disk is only there because the "installation media" is on a network share and you need an OS running to get it. I still haven't figured out how to get a working Vista bootloader on that secondary disk (making it dependent on the primary disk to boot), and the Vista bootloader on the primary disk hosed itself out of the blue two days later, leaving both disks unbootable. Such concerns may only apply to developers in corporate settings for whom hard drives are basically boot disks, but it sure is a pain to do anything with Vista but install it on one computer and leave it there. Whether this is a bug or a feature is for us all to speculate; I think it's a little of both.
If a laptop is your secondary box and it's what you've got, that's cool. Just make sure that BSD supports its hardware. ACPI support and wifi chipset support are considerably different than in Linux (better for some h/w, worse for other). I'm running FreeBSD on my very old laptop right now and it works great except for ACPI (which is probably due to non-compliant hardware, what can you do). Often people wind up having better luck on Linux for ACPI.
/usr/local. FreeBSD's ifconfig works for both wired and wireless cards (I've never run Linux on a laptop so when someone told me you needed a seperate program for Linux I thought it was madness). If you need to work with Windows networks all the commands for that are totally different (so you should probably hide it behind scripts or GUI if possible). The kernel, basic system utilities and ports tree really feel unified and "right" to me on BSD, more than on GNU/Linux.
Of course there are a few differences in terms of software availability too: no ALSA (sound is really easy to get working, though, especially for the simple stereo chipsets that most laptops have) is the big one for me. The build process for the system and kernel on FreeBSD is pretty nice. They put everything from the ports tree in
Totally agree about Gentoo's documentation; Gentoo docs occasionally bail me out on any modern Unix system, especially for desktop config-related stuff. The FreeBSD handbook is a great resource for all system-level stuff (at least when it's up-to-date), and FreeBSD has better manpages than any Linux I've used.
Just thought I'd mention some things, since I don't often hear of people putting *BSD on laptops.
Why, yes it is!
It's a fine blend of California dirt and Wyoming dust.
Thanks for noticing!
Well if ya don't want to support the De Beers monopoly and all the harm it causes then don't. "Here, babe, I got you this nice ring, I paid an arm and a leg for it... AND SO DID SOME KID IN AFRICA!... err, marry me?"
Or would you just let your concerns be bowled over by corporate propaganda telling you that you can buy her love? I don't actually know that much about the behavior of the diamond miners, but I do know that jewlery ads on TV make me sick and I change the channel every time they come on. And comments and links from this article's discussion have certainly taught me something. Grow a pair and stand up against those manipulative fuckers.
Apparently it's possible to do this. Instructions are about 3/4 the way down. I wouldn't call this "easy", but it will get you Linux without overwriting your MBR, like the article says. Though there's really no need to be apprehensive about letting LILO or GRUB call NTLDR, it's just one extra step in the process. Given that such a large proportion of LILO/GRUB users dual-boot it's really no surprise that those bootloaders handle the situation well.
I haven't tried these instructions, and if you're happy with what you've got don't fuck with it, but they seem reasonable enough from my knowledge of NTLDR. It sounds like you've seen Windows' boot.ini file at least, but, as the article describes, there's more than meets the eye there. There are some aspects of NTLDR's configuration that don't make much sense, but at least it's not hard to throw together a working configuration. On the other hand, Vista's bootloader is completely ridiculous. Once you get in a mess with it you're not getting out. I would never configure it to boot anything but the copy of Vista on its own partition, and let LILO/GRUB handle everything else.
Yeah, well Gaim 2.0 will never have voice support, and it's supposed to be a big priority for 3.0. That said, voice chat would just clutter an IM client, if you want to voice chat install some fucking VOIP shit or something. Like Skype? Meh.
There is no vi for Plan 9 because the Plan 9 folk didn't like vi, wrote their own editors that they thought were better, explained why they thought theirs were better, and then everyone that used Plan 9 drank the Kool-Aid.
;-). But terminal emulators are a silly holdover, and if they can be replaced with something better, why not? That is the mindset that permeates most of the ways that Plan 9 is different from Unix. They wanted to get rid of all the cruft (termcaps, anyone? God, what a horrible mess...). What's really interesting about Plan 9 is that its users buy into the ideas of the creators to the degree that despite vi's popularity on every other OS nobody has ever ported vi to Plan 9 from what I can tell. I mean, there are better things for them to be spending their time on anyway, learning a new editor is easy.
They Plan 9 folk kind of have a point. vi was designed to be used over really slow connections, this is why it has such terse and efficient commands. But you can be even more efficient by doing selection and movement with a mouse, and if your connection has the bandwidth (such as with a local connection) to do it that's what you ought to do (it really is more efficient for most types of movements and selections, especially if your editor has a good "mouse language"). So they made editors where you have to do it that way. What if you're going over a slow connection? Use ed. Well, actually, their simple editor sam has a front-end that can be used separately on your local machine that communicates with the server using ed-like commands.
vi would also not be a natural fit for a system with no terminal emulators. I bet you really think it's useless now
There actually is a program called vi on Plan 9, and it's something completely different; its name is the result of the naming convention for architecture-specific compilers and simulators.
KDE users don't drink the Kool-Aid to nearly that degree, which is why that came to my mind in the original post. But I do think some of the same aspects, both technically and socially, play into the fact that there's no Gecko browser for KDE... Konq is actually pretty nice, but unfortunately KDE apps feel like a fish out of water on non-KDE systems (Rosegarden is one that I wind up using). I guess Gnome apps would on non-Gnome systems, but there aren't as many prominent apps that are Gnome-branded. QT apps, though rare, can fit in pretty well (LyX is one of the few QT-but-not-KDE programs I've used... I think Opera uses QT also).
New Balance? Wow... I read a few years ago an article about how New Balance made their shoes somewhere in New England, had very high worker morale for that industry, and relied on savings on shipping and innovative improvements in efficiency to stay competitive with foreign sweatshops.
I haven't actively researched this, though, so the article might have just been a fluff piece, or they might have some sweatshops now. When I was in 7th grade I had a pair of NB shoes and my history teacher commented that they were made in the USA (the tag reflected this as well). As a long-distance runner, I'm a big fan of Asics, though.
Yes, letting you download files again is an enhancement over CDs. The audio quality of a CD over your average cassette tape is an enhancement (yeah, some audiophile with really nice tapes and a really nice tape deck might disagree, but that's not the point), but that doesn't mean that if I bought a CD and it had tape hiss in it I wouldn't be upset.
Enhancements are the reason that we adopt new media. Redownloading seems like the kind of enhancement that should come with the territory.
The KDE folks did do something. It's called Konq.
Maybe, in the spirit of Firefox's "IE Tab" extension, Konq could gain a "FF Tab" extension.
It would be almost as cool as porting vi to Plan 9!
Who cares if its memory usage is high because of caching? The pages that aren't used anymore just get swapped out to disk by the operating system when some other program needs a page of memory. Surely you aren't running out of space in your swap partition because of a measly Firefox cache?
People say that Firefox uses more memory than Opera without that taken into account as well. That may be true, and I've always found Opera to be very stable and fast. Opera's a great browser. I use Firefox now because it runs just as fast on this computer, it gives me more screen real estate, and because I think GTK+ apps look better than most others with my 80s-style FVWM theme. On anything with less than 128MB RAM I'd use Opera for sure.
My original parent-post (now my great grandpa) was ridiculing lay-creationists for not directly reading Darwin's work. That's a silly thing to criticize them for when the majority of lay-evolutionists don't directly read it either.
The behavior of scientists researching/advocating ID and that of scientists researching/advocating evolution has been quite different over time; often those members of the ID crowd have turned to misleading public grandstanding rather than advancing research in any way. But the amateurs sitting on the sidelines waiting to jump into Internet debates on the subject are mostly followers who've read and studied material a few layers removed from actual scientific research. They wouldn't have much of a chance to understand the real stuff directly.
Your post is completely ridiculous. Sure, many people that attack Darwin get their talking points from others that have read Darwin rather than from their own readings of Darwin. But how many people that support evolutionary ideas get their ideas directly from scientific research? Lots of people get their ideas from some secondary source that reads and interprets the research and distributes it. Even more people start arguments based on arguments they've heard from sources that have read these interpretations of the research and attached opinions to it.
But you're right about one thing: it really would be a waste of time for people, regardless of their opinions, to directly read research in a field they're not experts in.
There are problems with adding features aside from the product's focus. In the case of Excel, it happened to be almost perfect for these additional things people wanted to use it for, they only needed to add a couple features. I've never used the GIMP, but it doesn't sound like it's even close to being a good drawing tool; it would need severe changes in its interface, for one thing. The only reason people try to use it as one is because it's the only graphics tool they've ever heard of for Linux.
If the GIMP changes into a drawing program just because a bunch of yahoos want a drawing program we don't just gain a drawing program. We also lose an image manipulation program (even if we don't lose it entirely we lose resources as they're shifted away to supporting drawing functions). There are good drawing programs out there. There are limited development resources for the GIMP. It seems totally legit for GIMP developers to tell people about a program that better suits their needs rather than cram tons of extra features into their own program.
The GIMP, as many of my sibling-posts have pointed out, has made it easier to draw circles in recent versions. Which seems awfully similar to the kind of minor changes that Microsoft made to Excel. You and I know that Excel, even with its changes, still sucks for making lists compared to Word. And the GIMP probably still sucks as a drawing program, at least compared to something like Inkscape (I haven't used either program, but that seems to be the consensus). That doesn't mean that Microsoft should make any *significant* changes to Excel to facilitate listmaking, nor that the GIMP should change significantly for drawing. Developers should listen to users but should not do whatever they tell them to do. They should learn the users' needs and come up with a good way to meet them.
Best example of Happy Sexy People ads I've seen... when I was on a bus in Champaign, IL I saw an advertisement for a church that said, "[insert church name]: Church is not a spectator sport!" and then had three pictures of HSP faces... if there was anything else on the ad it was either too small to read or not very memorable. One of the pictures was a slightly overexposed shot of an semi-airhead-looking blonde chick that looked like her mind was totally blown by God, or by an acoustic-geetar sing-a-long about God, or something like that.
A few months later I was driving south on the Stevenson through the southwest 'burbs (near Downers Grove or Lemont) and saw a billboard for a new housing development. Three HSP pictures. One of them was the exact same picture that the church ad used. That girl's mind was totally blown by a spacious backyard, french doors and prices from the low $200s. And by an acoustic-geetar sing-a-long about God, of course.
Let's say that there's an election coming up for president of teh world. George W. Bush is running against Adolf Hitler. Those are your only choices, and everyone has to vote or be killed. 10% of the people are Nazis and 90% aren't. 90% of Nazis vote for Hitler and 10% vote for Bush. 90% of non-Nazis vote for Bush and 10% vote for Hitler.
Overall, 82% vote for Bush, so most people vote for Bush. 90% of Nazis vote for Hitler, so most Nazis vote for Hitler. Nazis are still people, they're just in a small, evil minority.
Aren't gcc and cat both files?
Really, you can't do much on Unix without files.
So a true non-file using hacker would have to do crazier stuff than that.
The reason they use GPUs is that they're very powerful and better-suited to this type of computation than the CPU. The other specialized chips aren't. Maybe some of those new physics accelerators could be used, though I don't know enough about them to know if they'd be useful or not.
Did you read the other parts of my post before calling it stupid? Debian can't distribute old versions of Firefox with security backports as "Debian Firefox" anymore. For at least those versions they have no choice but to remove Firefox branding. That's what I meant. Some people would argue that Debian and MoFo need to come to a compromise about this for the good of the Free Software movement; I don't think that's the case and that's the point I was trying to make.
I don't think of you as "being incredibly stupid". Maybe a bit rude, though.
I didn't know Pine rendered HTML, but I used Mutt for all my email in college. It made no attempt at parsing/rendering HTML whatsoever. So if someone sent an email only in HTML or with a useless text version you had to manually tell it to open in Lynx or something. So at least Mutt doesn't "handle" IFRAMEs at all.
Now I'm not sure what Lynx does with IFRAMEs. I imagine once you open it in Lynx you're probably screwed. Unless you have a special sandboxed Lynx installation.
It's funny; I say this and yet I still have FF installed via portage on Gentoo. I just periodically get pissed off at it and say, "I'm going to start using official MoFo binaries next weekend," and then never bother to learn how to set up portage for that; there is a way to tell portage, "I'm managing this package myself," but I don't know how hard you have to work to track versions. Since it is Gentoo and I'm compiling things anyway I guess packages that relied on particular versions or features would test for them in configure scripts (suboptimal, but at least it prevents breakage).
I wound up with both Mozilla and Firefox installed, and I have to wait for them both to compile. I don't even know what package forced the Mozilla install, equery says nothing depends on it (/me fires up emerge -C). Seems to me that if other packages rely on Gecko libraries that Gecko should have its own package. I guess that's just not how MoFo distributes it. They should. Or maybe Debian should fork it and call it State Farm.
As I understand it Debian does contribute patches back to Mozilla. But Debian wants to backport security fixes to versions of Firefox that Moz. Foundation no longer supports. I'm pretty sure this is true.
As I understand it Mozilla used to let them call these versions "Debian Firefox" but now they don't anymore. I'm not entirely sure this is quite right. Also there's a DFSG issue that I don't remember the details of.
Mozilla Foundation doesn't have to "deal with" Iceweasel at all, except to respond to all of this publicity. This looks "big-picture bad" to some people but to Debian keeping the stable branch secure is more important than Firefox advocacy. In other words, the "small-picture" disagreements that made this happen are actually the big picture.
For most users there's not much of a reason to use package management for a program like Firefox. It's frequently-updated and for most people frequently-used, and it has an auto-update system if you use the official binaries. People will usually want the updated version. For people that have a good reason to stick with a really old version, or who don't use the browser enough to keep it updated independently of other software Iceweasel gives them their security backports. And I can understand why MoFo wouldn't want their trademark applied to software that's maintained by Debian.
View->Toolbars->Customize. Drag the search box where you want it. This works, at least, on FF 1.5.0.7/Windows. I'll try it when I get home, too, because for some reason I remember not being able to move the toolbars around on Linux...
Man, I can't believe I got sidetracked and looked for the feature. I clicked "Reply" with the intention of telling you to modify the source and recompile... oh well.
If you have a random number generator that uses radioactive decay, the atoms just decay, right? You tell a computer to measure them somehow and generate a seed or number using some algorithm (I don't know exactly how this works). The non-deterministic parts, the atoms that decay, aren't really part of the computer, they're a phenomenon that the computer measures. Well, sometimes there are errors because of solar flares. So then we're talking about an ideal computer that can only be defined in theory and then, of course, our
When GP, or anyone else, says that computers do exactly as they're told, it's usually implied that they must be told to do so in their own special language. No computer I've heard of has a "Prove Riemann's Hypothesis" (PRH) opcode (though an HCF opcode might sufficeintly emulate all human attempts thus far), so to tell a computer to prove Riemann's Hypothesis you'd need to first generate an algorithm to prove the hypothesis. I think some people did essentially that a while back with the four-color theorem.
Let's have a counterpoint to this. Clearly you care about having great graphics. I have a 20" SDTV, I don't get good enough reception to justify a bigger/better set and I don't watch enough to justify a cable/sat. subscription. I care about being able to get basic cheap TV.
For you to get your great graphics you have to "ween people off" of SD sets; that is, you want to force me to spend lots of money (I'd bet my TV will be working long after SD broadcasts go dead, and I don't plan on getting a new one until one of those two things happens). If I keep my cheap TV game manufacturers have to write SD-capable games, compromising your graphics.
There are a few people like you and a few people like me. Lots of people fall somewhere in the middle. Eventually HD will take over the middle and then I'll either buy an HD set or abandon TV forever out of hermetic spite. But I'd rather than date came later rather than sooner, and millions of people's bank balances feel the same way.
And as for your "sports fan" example, you're severely exaggerating on both ends. If you actually care about the game you'll get excited about it HD or not rather than sitting 2 feet from the screen, playing with yourself as you count pixels. If you don't care about the game take those three hours and go for a nice long run; no HDTV experience can simulate actually doing something with your life. Frankly, if HDTV draws even more people to spend their entire Sundays on the couch watching beautiful broadcasts of football games I don't consider that a good thing.