Applying just one cause to someone laying off a thousand people is highly misleading.
I don't think you'd ever see anyone lay people off if they didn't think it would help the company. Different bosses will have different levels of concern for their workers, but there will always be at least some "help the company" as part of the reason that people are laid off. But also, in order tp lay the people off, the boss must put concern for the company ahead of concern for those workers. So there will almost always be at least some lack of care for the workers in such a decision.
There's rarely just one simple reason that a person acts a certain way, or that anything happens the way it does in all of existence as we know it (an apple fell from a tree and hit the ground. Because of gravity, sure. Also because the apple is denser than air. Because the apple's mass had grown to the point that the tree could no longer hold it up. Because there wasn't a guy sitting under the tree for the apple to hit on the head.)
This is why technical people shouldn't be in control over DNS issues. A domain name is like a trademark -- only to the underlying protocols of the Internet are are domain names arbitrary.
Companies do have (or should at least have) all rights to exact control over future potential domain names because those names might coincide with their names, a violation of their trademarks.
In short: domain names are content, not a mechanism!
Now, this might sound stupid to a bunch of techies. But ask all the Internet users out there and just about all of them will say "ibm.com" is IBM's website. Some companies (monster.com, for example) refer to themselves by their domain names. Now, a million people that have used Mac/Windows computers and think that paging is called "virtual memory" doesn't make it so; but if the effect on real people of choosing a domain is similar to choosing a name under which to do business, then the domain names fall under copyright law.
If we have a technical problem of companies gunking up the One True Purpose of DNS (whatever that is), we as techies can try to start a new way to remember IP addresses. But if it gets big enough, and becomes ingrained in the lives of the mainstream population, you can bet that the trademark lawyers will swarm.
Most of the commonly-used HTML and CSS elements work properly in IE. Those that don't are caught while you're testing your website. You grumble, change the website (preferably in a way that's still within the applicable standards), write a comment in the code specifiying why you did it this way, and move on.
For all I can tell, which isn't much, the site in question in this case shouldn't be much more complicated than a damn form submission. Even if you can't get style elements perfectly consistent across all browsers (and, as many others have argued, you shouldn't anyway because browsers are often designed for people with different needs), it shouldn't be hard at all to code up a site that's at least usable in every browser that would ever consider visiting the site.
And as far as the anti-IE comments in the second paragraph go, passing the ACID test doesn't make a browser perfectly "standards compliant", it just means it renders one (very complicated) page correctly. Few browsers can pass ACID. Even fewer (I'd suppose none) are fully "standards compliant" (unless they choose to operate on a very small set of standards). I code websites and I'm often frustrated by long-standing IE bugs, but ACID is a complicated test designed to make failure look bad. Useful websites rarely need half that level of complication.
Well, you might have to have a nice laser printer if you wanted to print off 45 minutes' worth of reading material every day... but with a bit of scripting (similar to the kind of scripting that allows those personalized Google pages with news stories from multiple sources and such... webcomics are particularly easy because they're in the same format every day) you could easily compile such a thing.
Your paper bill might run kind of high, though... perhaps if you have a laptop you could have a script download and compile the same information onto the laptop and read it from there.
Ya'know, people can drive whatever they want. Great. Good for them. There's a family that lives down the street from me that owns a Ford Excursion. They have a lot of kids, need to get them around, need to lug stuff, fine. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit in their garage, and they have a very short driveway. When they park the vehicle, it occupies the entire driveway, plus the entire sidewalk, and nearly out to the street. It is, of course, illegal to park a vehicle so that it covers the sidewalk. Especially when you do it every day for years and have no plan to change it. During the winter when I was on crutches after knee surgery it was very difficult for me to get around them. Apparently nobody in my neighborhood will confront them about it because they don't want to be rude. Hah. They have every right to drive a huge car, but I wouldn't mind seeing them ticketed for parking illegally.
What I would love to see, however, is for them to realize that their arrangement is rude and try to come up with something less intrusive. I would also love to see people with tall vehicles of all types (minivans, SUVs, mail trucks, delivery vans, etc.) to avoid parking in parallel spaces very near intersections, because tall vehicles in these spaces obstruct the view of cross traffic. No reason to call the cops, I would just appreciate some courtesy. I would appreciate it if engineers designing SUVs that will drive a vast majority of their miles on congested roads designed the headlights with some concern for the other drivers on those roads. Some SUVs have unreasonably high headlights that shine directly into the rear- and side-view mirrors of regular cars and blind the drivers. Particularly these new high-intensity headlights. Perhaps if the high headlights provide the best visibility on dark rural roads, certain big vehicles need a city-driving headlight setting where the lights are aimed lower as well as normal and high-beams.
Personally SUVs don't bother me by themselves... however, their drivers should take it upon themselves to drive with caution and courtesy, knowing that large vehicles simply by virtue of their size can cause lots of problems in congested traffic. These aren't problems that can be solved by the government, but they are problems that require that drivers care if they bother other people.
And you're not using 'p', '1'...'h6' tags? Those are some pretty important tags there...
I never used to use 'p' tags on my websites. I said, "what do they do that can't be done with some 'br' tags?" Forgive me, I was clueless.
For many types of web documents if you have good CSS your HTML isn't much more than 'p', 'h1'...'h6' tags. Now some docs are more complex, but they still probably have heavy use of these important tags.
But the real point of this post is that a user agent is for the user. If the user wants a bigger font it should be easy. If the user wants to change a page's color scheme it should be easy. If a user wants to lie on a bed a bit further back from the screen and browse the web with a cheap infared remote, and a web browser makes that work, the web browser has done good for that user. (these days I find the best browser for this purpose is Lynx in an xterm that has a really big font size... so I'm right back to 'p', 'h1'...'h6' and so on.)
There are several projects doing stuff like this. This is a listing of different kernel sources and patchsets that gentoo provides, for example: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-kernel.xml
Whether EULAs are required for a particular piece of software or not, they are obnoxious. In order to simply use a piece of GPL software without distributing it you need not agree to the GPL or anything else. From a user's perspective, being confronted with a dialog full of legalese is worse than not being confronted with a dialog full of legalese. Perhaps one might say that from a human perspective being required to agree to a contract that you don't understand is worse than not being required to agree to a contract that you don't understand... (Bought a car recently? Seen all the paperwork? Understand much of it? Many people knowledgeable in the law refuse to buy cars if they have to sign certain types of contracts because they find them unfair. Non-knowledgeable people like myself can only wonder what they're signing away... a dealer that required less signing and that could clearly explain what I'm signing and why would reduce my stress and have a better chance at my business.)
Anyhow, I think that the annoyance of having to agree to many EULAs in order to use a new computer is a valid disadvantage for a Windows system. Companies may make a choice to license their software under terms such that a EULA need not be agreed to upon installation, and they don't, therefore adding to the difficulty and frustration of a Windows installation.
That doesn't mean that I or anyone else is slamming software because it's commercial. I'm just as annoyed at Firefox because you have to agree to the license on every update. Well, you don't when you get it from portage... but that's another story. It simply means that EULAs *are* annoying and confusing. And that eliminating them, from a user's perspective, is good. Whether that end is worth the means to eliminate them from the perspective of a commercial software provider is up to that provider to decide.
He wasn't comparing KDE to WindowMaker, he was saying that he used WindowMaker. Perhaps all WindowMaker by itself does is manage windows. But it does so in a neat and clean way that makes it (running WindowMaker without any other desktop environment) a compelling alternative to KDE for many users even if they aren't similar at all (with its easy configuration, that desktop paperclip thing, and a few choice dockapps many users get all the functionality they want, and choose that functionality on an opt-in basis; the downside is that they're on their own to find it).
Thanks to the fact that KDE is open source he probably is running some KDE code most of the time in the form of libraries and applications... I know I am, despite using Fluxbox for all my window managing/desktop needs. KDE is much bigger than a window manager and improvements in KDE will affect most desktop *nix users. I think that's important to remember for people that "don't use KDE".
If you consider the object of jail time "to prevent a criminal from committing more crime", certainly suspending a corporation's operations stops that corporation from committing more crime.
If you consider the object of jail time "to punish a criminal", it is very hard to likewise punish a corporation; it has no physical entity and cannot feel pain. If a company's operations are suspended this affects shareholders, customers and innocent employees, as well as guilty employees. Imagine a factory breaking environmental laws and the workers being told to go home, not until the plant is fixed but until the sentence is up. And not just workers at the violating plant, but workers at all of their plants.
If you consider the object of jail time "to reform a criminal" then you can just forget about applying this logic to corporations; their obligation is to make the greatest profit possible.
I think that ultimately it's reasonable to fine corporations, suspend operations of facilities that are violating the law until they can be shown clean, and prosecute as many individuals as knowingly participated in the crime. Note that this could be quite an expensive and time-consuming ordeal if there are many participants with tough lawyers. The government has to make some of the same choices with respect to prosecution/investigation that the corporations do with respect to following the law.
For one thing, you're misusing the term "virtual memory", which refers to the concept of separate programs getting their own address space. You don't want to disable that, and I imagine it would be nearly impossible to do so anyway;-). Using disk space for extra RAM is typically called swapping.
Point number two: it is perfectly possible to disable swapping in Linux and probably in most other systems. However, in speed tests on systems with lots of RAM enabling swapping has actually been shown to lead to speed increases in many situations. This has led some people with enough RAM that they don't need to swap to set up half of their RAM as a RAM disk and then use that as a swap partition. Supposedly this yields great performance.
If this storage device is cheaper than adding a similar amount of RAM to a system then it might give you something of a performance boost.
Parent said, "The irony of a former and now once again oil man heading anything on enviromental quality".
Well, there's another angle on this type of thing. Here is a person that has worked for a major oil company. The oil companies are the ones that are dealing with pollution and the environmental effects of drilling oil on a day-to-day basis. Who would better understand the choices that they make than someone that has worked for an oil company? And, if you care strongly about environmental issues, where better to work than a company in the energy field? In those types of companies, if you rise up high enough, you could be responsible for making environmentally responsible decisions of great effect. It doesn't look like our dependance on oil is going to end any time soon, and we can't that nobody working for oil compnaies cares about the environment in a meaningful way.
I don't know much about this person in particular. I'm just saying that in general, that kind of employment history alone shoudln't discredit him.
Who defines junk? You, or Microsoft? Clearly GP thinks it's junk and Microsoft does not.
Well, as a technical matter, Microsoft pretty much has to write the rules in this case, since it's webmail.
But I'd be rather disinclined to use a webmail service that would override my preferences to send through messages that I had told it I thought were junk. I would strongly consider leaving that service for one that served me better.
But Microsoft is like the Federal Government of computing. The Government is always expanding its power over people and for some reason people continue to vote for the politicians that do this.
Some of the reasons people vote this way: apathy; perceived lack of alternative choice; promises that the increased powers will aid security; other positive actions by/attributes of the politician.
(Microsoft even releases Home and Pro editions of operating systems that are the same in concept and principle and most of the code, and just have different sets of features enabled. It gives the users a choice to make when buying a computer, a radio box to click. Remind anyone of... *begin voice* THE TWO PARTY POLITICAL SYSTEM??? *end voice*)
Pardon my metaphor that has probably overstayed its welcome by this point, but I do think that it provides an understanding of why people stick with a software company that occasionally seems more intent on pleasing other companies than its customers.
You see,/. was just trying to test whether they could go back in time and change the article that they had previously posted, this disproving the article whose URL is up yonder.
However, they forgot to travel back in time first. Oops.
Now I happen to be a vegetarian. A morally consistent one? Probably not. After all, I drink milk and eat eggs. Tsk, tsk. I don't think I've used bug spray yet this summer, but if I go somewhere with ridiculous bug coverage, I probably would. It would be for protection from bugs that are trying to bite me and could be carrying diseases. Yeah, some of them aren't. Tough to make that kind of thing selective. But there's some "need" to do this, or at least I would benefit from it. There's no need for humans to eat meat; in my mind it doesn't benefit me or enrich my life in any way. So why do it?
Whether that's morally consistent or not, there's no way to live life in our society without harming other people, animals, the environment, whatever. I (and clearly you, based on your comment) realize this. We each try to balance the things that are important to us and the things that help other people. Vegetarianism is part of that for some poeple.
For the benefit of all Gentoo users out there, Gentoo has had this patch up since Wednesday (July 6). If you're running zlib 1.2.2-r1, you have the patch.
I think what he's trying to say is, "why would I ever want to use this?" I guess the purpose of this is to be the digital analog to passing out a survey around the office and having a collection bin where everyone drops it off. You e-mail this "form document" around to everyone, and they click "submit" and it contacts your server and throws some data at it. It took me quite a while to glean this from TFA and all the comments here, and it will take me longer to figure out how this is more useful than setting up a web server with a simple form page and target page. It's not like that kind of thing is hard... if you can figure out how to do all this stuff with Office you can surely figure out how to implement HTML that's been around forever.
Is part of the idea that you can automatically generate Office documents based on the data that people send back to you? What exactly would this be used for?
You're misunderstanding the "limiting bandwidth" concept. They're not narrowing the school's internet pipe, they're just instituting something like daily rate limits. Which I think is not a bad idea, especially if bandwidth is tight. I go to University of Illinois and I think their cap in the dorms is 700MB/day. I never got even close to that. My brother, unsurprisingly, found a way around it by changing his MAC address; needless to say, he was eventually discovered and told to stop.
Obviously, if you live off campus you can enter into whatever type of Internet service contract you desire. I think the one I was using last year had a bandwidth cap but I never ran up against it.
Do bandwidth limits impinge on the legal users of bandwidth? Not if you consider their purpose to preserve bandwidth and not to stop piracy.
Absolutely. When I read the list of goals for some new OSes I think that the authors ought to be writing a new window manager or desktop system, or at MOST a replacement for X.
If you want to learn operating system fundamentals, writing your own from scratch is not a bad idea (I took a class last semester that did this as a final project, with a considerable amount of guidance, and learned a lot). If you want to create a great user experience you don't have to touch the kernel. If you do, the most you'd probably want is to tweak things. There are various alternate versions of Linux, for example, optimized for different applications. One of them is probably just fine for your project, unless you're suffering from our good friend, Not Invented Here syndrome.
Yup. Well, what's funny is that in newspapers in Champaign, IL a few years ago there was a full-page ad for some tanning parlor lashing out against the "sun-scare" industry (the ad may have been more effective without the silly ad hom attacks that got in the way of whatever they were trying to say).
At any rate, I've pretty much learned to laugh at advertisements by this point (when I read ads about computer-related subjects and understand how manipulative and incorrect they are, I realize just how much so other ads must be about subjects I don't understand so well, but I can't recognize it); I'll keep an open mind about the actual research, though.
If a company installs an internal modification of a GPL program on internal computers, does this count as distribution to the user of that computer, who can then request the source code? Or does it not count, because the software is never licensed to that user, only to the company itself?
I think that the second would apply, and the people responsible for developing the program in the company would have to be careful about defining their work as for the company.
I'm working with ColdFusion now, and I think that its way of integrating itself into the markup helps keep my web pages' code looking nice, for sure. It makes the most common operations very simple and I love the "query of queries" feature (I've used PHP and I don't know of anything like that in PHP).
On a smaller level I really don't like CFML because it doesn't feel consistent; it's not a scripting language in the way that PHP is, and so every step has to be in its own tag, and sometimes because HTML and CFML tags look so similar I get tricked into thinking they behave in the same way. And it often makes for much more typing than PHP.
So... if I had to get some stuff done in a work environment where I would have to move from development to test to production machines and get it all done quickly and without having to worry about the mechanics too much, I'd use ColdFusion. If I was coding for joy, I'd either use PHP or try to learn perl.
MySQL is dual-licensed; it is available for free download, and if you wish you may distribute it under the terms of the GPL. A commercial license can also be bought, and I think that includes things like support and possibly the ability to distribute under different terms. I don't remember exactly...
Slashdot Mirror
Applying just one cause to someone laying off a thousand people is highly misleading.
I don't think you'd ever see anyone lay people off if they didn't think it would help the company. Different bosses will have different levels of concern for their workers, but there will always be at least some "help the company" as part of the reason that people are laid off. But also, in order tp lay the people off, the boss must put concern for the company ahead of concern for those workers. So there will almost always be at least some lack of care for the workers in such a decision.
There's rarely just one simple reason that a person acts a certain way, or that anything happens the way it does in all of existence as we know it (an apple fell from a tree and hit the ground. Because of gravity, sure. Also because the apple is denser than air. Because the apple's mass had grown to the point that the tree could no longer hold it up. Because there wasn't a guy sitting under the tree for the apple to hit on the head.)
sorry i mistyped.
This is why technical people shouldn't be in control over DNS issues. A domain name is like a trademark -- only to the underlying protocols of the Internet are are domain names arbitrary.
Companies do have (or should at least have) all rights to exact control over future potential domain names because those names might coincide with their names, a violation of their trademarks.
In short: domain names are content, not a mechanism!
Now, this might sound stupid to a bunch of techies. But ask all the Internet users out there and just about all of them will say "ibm.com" is IBM's website. Some companies (monster.com, for example) refer to themselves by their domain names. Now, a million people that have used Mac/Windows computers and think that paging is called "virtual memory" doesn't make it so; but if the effect on real people of choosing a domain is similar to choosing a name under which to do business, then the domain names fall under copyright law.
If we have a technical problem of companies gunking up the One True Purpose of DNS (whatever that is), we as techies can try to start a new way to remember IP addresses. But if it gets big enough, and becomes ingrained in the lives of the mainstream population, you can bet that the trademark lawyers will swarm.
Most of the commonly-used HTML and CSS elements work properly in IE. Those that don't are caught while you're testing your website. You grumble, change the website (preferably in a way that's still within the applicable standards), write a comment in the code specifiying why you did it this way, and move on.
For all I can tell, which isn't much, the site in question in this case shouldn't be much more complicated than a damn form submission. Even if you can't get style elements perfectly consistent across all browsers (and, as many others have argued, you shouldn't anyway because browsers are often designed for people with different needs), it shouldn't be hard at all to code up a site that's at least usable in every browser that would ever consider visiting the site.
And as far as the anti-IE comments in the second paragraph go, passing the ACID test doesn't make a browser perfectly "standards compliant", it just means it renders one (very complicated) page correctly. Few browsers can pass ACID. Even fewer (I'd suppose none) are fully "standards compliant" (unless they choose to operate on a very small set of standards). I code websites and I'm often frustrated by long-standing IE bugs, but ACID is a complicated test designed to make failure look bad. Useful websites rarely need half that level of complication.
Do you have a printer attached to your computer?
Well, you might have to have a nice laser printer if you wanted to print off 45 minutes' worth of reading material every day... but with a bit of scripting (similar to the kind of scripting that allows those personalized Google pages with news stories from multiple sources and such... webcomics are particularly easy because they're in the same format every day) you could easily compile such a thing.
Your paper bill might run kind of high, though... perhaps if you have a laptop you could have a script download and compile the same information onto the laptop and read it from there.
Ya'know, people can drive whatever they want. Great. Good for them. There's a family that lives down the street from me that owns a Ford Excursion. They have a lot of kids, need to get them around, need to lug stuff, fine. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit in their garage, and they have a very short driveway. When they park the vehicle, it occupies the entire driveway, plus the entire sidewalk, and nearly out to the street. It is, of course, illegal to park a vehicle so that it covers the sidewalk. Especially when you do it every day for years and have no plan to change it. During the winter when I was on crutches after knee surgery it was very difficult for me to get around them. Apparently nobody in my neighborhood will confront them about it because they don't want to be rude. Hah. They have every right to drive a huge car, but I wouldn't mind seeing them ticketed for parking illegally.
What I would love to see, however, is for them to realize that their arrangement is rude and try to come up with something less intrusive. I would also love to see people with tall vehicles of all types (minivans, SUVs, mail trucks, delivery vans, etc.) to avoid parking in parallel spaces very near intersections, because tall vehicles in these spaces obstruct the view of cross traffic. No reason to call the cops, I would just appreciate some courtesy. I would appreciate it if engineers designing SUVs that will drive a vast majority of their miles on congested roads designed the headlights with some concern for the other drivers on those roads. Some SUVs have unreasonably high headlights that shine directly into the rear- and side-view mirrors of regular cars and blind the drivers. Particularly these new high-intensity headlights. Perhaps if the high headlights provide the best visibility on dark rural roads, certain big vehicles need a city-driving headlight setting where the lights are aimed lower as well as normal and high-beams.
Personally SUVs don't bother me by themselves... however, their drivers should take it upon themselves to drive with caution and courtesy, knowing that large vehicles simply by virtue of their size can cause lots of problems in congested traffic. These aren't problems that can be solved by the government, but they are problems that require that drivers care if they bother other people.
And you're not using 'p', '1'...'h6' tags? Those are some pretty important tags there...
I never used to use 'p' tags on my websites. I said, "what do they do that can't be done with some 'br' tags?" Forgive me, I was clueless.
For many types of web documents if you have good CSS your HTML isn't much more than 'p', 'h1'...'h6' tags. Now some docs are more complex, but they still probably have heavy use of these important tags.
But the real point of this post is that a user agent is for the user. If the user wants a bigger font it should be easy. If the user wants to change a page's color scheme it should be easy. If a user wants to lie on a bed a bit further back from the screen and browse the web with a cheap infared remote, and a web browser makes that work, the web browser has done good for that user. (these days I find the best browser for this purpose is Lynx in an xterm that has a really big font size... so I'm right back to 'p', 'h1'...'h6' and so on.)
There are several projects doing stuff like this. This is a listing of different kernel sources and patchsets that gentoo provides, for example: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-kernel.xml
Whether EULAs are required for a particular piece of software or not, they are obnoxious. In order to simply use a piece of GPL software without distributing it you need not agree to the GPL or anything else. From a user's perspective, being confronted with a dialog full of legalese is worse than not being confronted with a dialog full of legalese. Perhaps one might say that from a human perspective being required to agree to a contract that you don't understand is worse than not being required to agree to a contract that you don't understand... (Bought a car recently? Seen all the paperwork? Understand much of it? Many people knowledgeable in the law refuse to buy cars if they have to sign certain types of contracts because they find them unfair. Non-knowledgeable people like myself can only wonder what they're signing away... a dealer that required less signing and that could clearly explain what I'm signing and why would reduce my stress and have a better chance at my business.)
Anyhow, I think that the annoyance of having to agree to many EULAs in order to use a new computer is a valid disadvantage for a Windows system. Companies may make a choice to license their software under terms such that a EULA need not be agreed to upon installation, and they don't, therefore adding to the difficulty and frustration of a Windows installation.
That doesn't mean that I or anyone else is slamming software because it's commercial. I'm just as annoyed at Firefox because you have to agree to the license on every update. Well, you don't when you get it from portage... but that's another story. It simply means that EULAs *are* annoying and confusing. And that eliminating them, from a user's perspective, is good. Whether that end is worth the means to eliminate them from the perspective of a commercial software provider is up to that provider to decide.
He wasn't comparing KDE to WindowMaker, he was saying that he used WindowMaker. Perhaps all WindowMaker by itself does is manage windows. But it does so in a neat and clean way that makes it (running WindowMaker without any other desktop environment) a compelling alternative to KDE for many users even if they aren't similar at all (with its easy configuration, that desktop paperclip thing, and a few choice dockapps many users get all the functionality they want, and choose that functionality on an opt-in basis; the downside is that they're on their own to find it).
Thanks to the fact that KDE is open source he probably is running some KDE code most of the time in the form of libraries and applications... I know I am, despite using Fluxbox for all my window managing/desktop needs. KDE is much bigger than a window manager and improvements in KDE will affect most desktop *nix users. I think that's important to remember for people that "don't use KDE".
If you consider the object of jail time "to prevent a criminal from committing more crime", certainly suspending a corporation's operations stops that corporation from committing more crime.
If you consider the object of jail time "to punish a criminal", it is very hard to likewise punish a corporation; it has no physical entity and cannot feel pain. If a company's operations are suspended this affects shareholders, customers and innocent employees, as well as guilty employees. Imagine a factory breaking environmental laws and the workers being told to go home, not until the plant is fixed but until the sentence is up. And not just workers at the violating plant, but workers at all of their plants.
If you consider the object of jail time "to reform a criminal" then you can just forget about applying this logic to corporations; their obligation is to make the greatest profit possible.
I think that ultimately it's reasonable to fine corporations, suspend operations of facilities that are violating the law until they can be shown clean, and prosecute as many individuals as knowingly participated in the crime. Note that this could be quite an expensive and time-consuming ordeal if there are many participants with tough lawyers. The government has to make some of the same choices with respect to prosecution/investigation that the corporations do with respect to following the law.
For one thing, you're misusing the term "virtual memory", which refers to the concept of separate programs getting their own address space. You don't want to disable that, and I imagine it would be nearly impossible to do so anyway ;-). Using disk space for extra RAM is typically called swapping.
Point number two: it is perfectly possible to disable swapping in Linux and probably in most other systems. However, in speed tests on systems with lots of RAM enabling swapping has actually been shown to lead to speed increases in many situations. This has led some people with enough RAM that they don't need to swap to set up half of their RAM as a RAM disk and then use that as a swap partition. Supposedly this yields great performance.
If this storage device is cheaper than adding a similar amount of RAM to a system then it might give you something of a performance boost.
Parent said, "The irony of a former and now once again oil man heading anything on enviromental quality".
Well, there's another angle on this type of thing. Here is a person that has worked for a major oil company. The oil companies are the ones that are dealing with pollution and the environmental effects of drilling oil on a day-to-day basis. Who would better understand the choices that they make than someone that has worked for an oil company? And, if you care strongly about environmental issues, where better to work than a company in the energy field? In those types of companies, if you rise up high enough, you could be responsible for making environmentally responsible decisions of great effect. It doesn't look like our dependance on oil is going to end any time soon, and we can't that nobody working for oil compnaies cares about the environment in a meaningful way.
I don't know much about this person in particular. I'm just saying that in general, that kind of employment history alone shoudln't discredit him.
Who defines junk? You, or Microsoft? Clearly GP thinks it's junk and Microsoft does not.
Well, as a technical matter, Microsoft pretty much has to write the rules in this case, since it's webmail.
But I'd be rather disinclined to use a webmail service that would override my preferences to send through messages that I had told it I thought were junk. I would strongly consider leaving that service for one that served me better.
You'd think...
But Microsoft is like the Federal Government of computing. The Government is always expanding its power over people and for some reason people continue to vote for the politicians that do this.
Some of the reasons people vote this way: apathy; perceived lack of alternative choice; promises that the increased powers will aid security; other positive actions by/attributes of the politician.
(Microsoft even releases Home and Pro editions of operating systems that are the same in concept and principle and most of the code, and just have different sets of features enabled. It gives the users a choice to make when buying a computer, a radio box to click. Remind anyone of... *begin voice* THE TWO PARTY POLITICAL SYSTEM??? *end voice*)
Pardon my metaphor that has probably overstayed its welcome by this point, but I do think that it provides an understanding of why people stick with a software company that occasionally seems more intent on pleasing other companies than its customers.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/1 7/1728230&tid=14
/. was just trying to test whether they could go back in time and change the article that they had previously posted, this disproving the article whose URL is up yonder.
You see,
However, they forgot to travel back in time first. Oops.
Now I happen to be a vegetarian. A morally consistent one? Probably not. After all, I drink milk and eat eggs. Tsk, tsk. I don't think I've used bug spray yet this summer, but if I go somewhere with ridiculous bug coverage, I probably would. It would be for protection from bugs that are trying to bite me and could be carrying diseases. Yeah, some of them aren't. Tough to make that kind of thing selective. But there's some "need" to do this, or at least I would benefit from it. There's no need for humans to eat meat; in my mind it doesn't benefit me or enrich my life in any way. So why do it?
Whether that's morally consistent or not, there's no way to live life in our society without harming other people, animals, the environment, whatever. I (and clearly you, based on your comment) realize this. We each try to balance the things that are important to us and the things that help other people. Vegetarianism is part of that for some poeple.
For the benefit of all Gentoo users out there, Gentoo has had this patch up since Wednesday (July 6). If you're running zlib 1.2.2-r1, you have the patch.
I think what he's trying to say is, "why would I ever want to use this?" I guess the purpose of this is to be the digital analog to passing out a survey around the office and having a collection bin where everyone drops it off. You e-mail this "form document" around to everyone, and they click "submit" and it contacts your server and throws some data at it. It took me quite a while to glean this from TFA and all the comments here, and it will take me longer to figure out how this is more useful than setting up a web server with a simple form page and target page. It's not like that kind of thing is hard... if you can figure out how to do all this stuff with Office you can surely figure out how to implement HTML that's been around forever.
Is part of the idea that you can automatically generate Office documents based on the data that people send back to you? What exactly would this be used for?
You're misunderstanding the "limiting bandwidth" concept. They're not narrowing the school's internet pipe, they're just instituting something like daily rate limits. Which I think is not a bad idea, especially if bandwidth is tight. I go to University of Illinois and I think their cap in the dorms is 700MB/day. I never got even close to that. My brother, unsurprisingly, found a way around it by changing his MAC address; needless to say, he was eventually discovered and told to stop.
Obviously, if you live off campus you can enter into whatever type of Internet service contract you desire. I think the one I was using last year had a bandwidth cap but I never ran up against it.
Do bandwidth limits impinge on the legal users of bandwidth? Not if you consider their purpose to preserve bandwidth and not to stop piracy.
Absolutely. When I read the list of goals for some new OSes I think that the authors ought to be writing a new window manager or desktop system, or at MOST a replacement for X.
If you want to learn operating system fundamentals, writing your own from scratch is not a bad idea (I took a class last semester that did this as a final project, with a considerable amount of guidance, and learned a lot). If you want to create a great user experience you don't have to touch the kernel. If you do, the most you'd probably want is to tweak things. There are various alternate versions of Linux, for example, optimized for different applications. One of them is probably just fine for your project, unless you're suffering from our good friend, Not Invented Here syndrome.
Yup. Well, what's funny is that in newspapers in Champaign, IL a few years ago there was a full-page ad for some tanning parlor lashing out against the "sun-scare" industry (the ad may have been more effective without the silly ad hom attacks that got in the way of whatever they were trying to say).
At any rate, I've pretty much learned to laugh at advertisements by this point (when I read ads about computer-related subjects and understand how manipulative and incorrect they are, I realize just how much so other ads must be about subjects I don't understand so well, but I can't recognize it); I'll keep an open mind about the actual research, though.
If a company installs an internal modification of a GPL program on internal computers, does this count as distribution to the user of that computer, who can then request the source code? Or does it not count, because the software is never licensed to that user, only to the company itself?
I think that the second would apply, and the people responsible for developing the program in the company would have to be careful about defining their work as for the company.
I'm working with ColdFusion now, and I think that its way of integrating itself into the markup helps keep my web pages' code looking nice, for sure. It makes the most common operations very simple and I love the "query of queries" feature (I've used PHP and I don't know of anything like that in PHP).
On a smaller level I really don't like CFML because it doesn't feel consistent; it's not a scripting language in the way that PHP is, and so every step has to be in its own tag, and sometimes because HTML and CFML tags look so similar I get tricked into thinking they behave in the same way. And it often makes for much more typing than PHP.
So... if I had to get some stuff done in a work environment where I would have to move from development to test to production machines and get it all done quickly and without having to worry about the mechanics too much, I'd use ColdFusion. If I was coding for joy, I'd either use PHP or try to learn perl.
MySQL is dual-licensed; it is available for free download, and if you wish you may distribute it under the terms of the GPL. A commercial license can also be bought, and I think that includes things like support and possibly the ability to distribute under different terms. I don't remember exactly...