On the other hand, the Debian's "centralized" approach means that many third parties don't bother making their own.debs, and Debian users are forced to work around the standard packages (not necessarily a bad thing, but then, why use packaging system if you're just going to work around it?), or wait interminably for a busy package maintainer to release a new package. For instance, my laptop require X 4.1.99 or later (or patches for the Radeon Mobility chipset), but the X Strike Force hasn't yet managed to move past 4.1.0.
Other things about Debian have languished, for instance the installer. Debian's default installers, using a 2.2 kernel, won't even boot on my laptop (eventually found my way around to the ide images). Debian's installers are the only installers that didn't boot on my laptop -- Sorcerer installed like a dream, as did Red Hat's and Mandrake's.
My preference has turned out to be source management systems, like those found in Sorcerer and Lunar Penguin.
I wanted to put in a good word for Mandrake's rpm management tools. They have urpmi and friends which operate from the the command line, and a very nice gui wrapper for these (whose name I always forget 'cause you usually start it from an icon). Not only do these help manage dependencies, but they also track rpm archives for you.
Thus, when you type "urpmi foo.rpm", you get something like "foo.rpm requires bar.rpm. Is this okay?" followed by "please insert cd 3" or else it automatically grabs it from the net (if you've configured it to do so). Really surprising, and very nice, was when uninstalling "foo.rpm", it asked if it was okay to remove "bar.rpm". I'm not sure if it always does that latter bit, because I saw it happen during an installation.
Interesting take on "portage". I went with Sorcerer and Lunar Penguin because I had more control than I would with a ports-like system. In fact, it was a problem with a Debian maintainer that strongly motivated me to go for a packaging system that didn't rely so heavily on other people.
What Microsoft meant to say was "two months of code reviews and half-day seminars [regarding security] surpasses everything ever done [before] by Microsoft".
I recently bought a second copy of Tribes II from Tux Games (which seems to load somewhat slowly right now). I think there are a few other places, too, but I'm not able to find them right now.
There are several good linux gaming sites, such as linuxgames and icculus.org. icclus.org has a nice faq and lots of projects, and linuxgames is a cornucopia of helpful info for gaming on linux.
And thanks for the code. SDL, OpenAL, and the Loki installer/uninstaller/updater are still with us. As is my stack of 8 Loki games (2 copies of tribes).
Although my story doesn't involve any courts, I'm also reminded of a former employer. I started as the assistant to the office manager. Once I was trained, the office manager bailed and I was "promoted". I really should have realized what this meant, but I was fairly naived.
As the office manager, I also did accounts payable and receiveable. Accounts payable consisted of calling creditors and explaining "no, we can't pay you this week, either". Accounts receiveable was easy -- there was only one, someone who subletted some office space. My boss kicked him out (for no reason I could see), making accounts receiveable even easier.
When we finally landed a big contract with a big payment up-front, I made sure to bring payroll and taxes up to date before anything else was paid. Then, I quit.
The issue with latex versus pslatex versus pdftex is which fonts are used. latex uses bitmap fonts by default. pslatex wraps the call to latex with some commands to use type 1 fonts. Both latex and pslatex produce dvi files, but the dvi from pslatex scales much better. Note, of course, that TeX, via metafont, can create the output file at whatever resolution -- but that output is best viewed at exactly that resolution. pdflatex seems a lot like pslatex, except it automatically pushes the output through to pdf. All of that is from memory and guesses, so the details could easily be wrong.
One very nice thing about using pslatex (besides the superior scaling of the dvi file), is that the fonts used make your words take less space. It is a wonderful surprise when you're trying to sqeeze that last column into an 8-page paper, but aren't willing to abuse \scriptsize for the bibliography.
It's pretty easy to discover a group of porn sites heavily interlinking in order to increase their inbound link count. These parts of the web are abnormally cliqueish, by which I mean they approach a fully interconnected set of nodes. Most of the web doesn't work like that.
It's not hard to find popular sites using this methodology, and in this case "popular" is probably as close as you'll ever come to defining a metric for what makes a website a good website. It all depends on what physics (or whatever) sites people link to, which hopefully will be related to how good those sites are. Note that all of the link counts need to take into account some sense of "community" -- i.e. The magazines Popular Science and Science serve very different communities. So link counts need to be taken relative to other sites "around" them, or some such.
And in the end, this solves a lot of things. For instance, the algorithms will be independent of written human lanugage. They'll also be more robust when classifying pages that use graphics for scientific typesetting (LaTeX) constructs that aren't available in HTML (yet). This is important.
Suppose it is economically helpful to manipulate your stories for the purpose of attracting slashdot eyes. This would mean that slashdot's readership is manipulating the press. But there's more.
Eventually, non-slashdot readers would find themselves innundated by exactly the material that slashdot readers wanted to see. I expect the result would be the majority of these non-slashdot readers aligning their opinion with the slashdot faction (if it's said/written enough times, it must be true!).
This seems pretty far-fetched, but maybe the computer/technical world is 1) cliquish enough and 2) so sheep-like that it could happen. However, I expect that editors don't conciously try to create stories which attract slashdot readers. I think publishing firms prefer to take their bribes up front.
-Paul Komarek
Re:Rock or something ....
on
The Future of MREs
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Do they still have those gelatin-covered hot-dog or sausage things? I'm not a real militar person, but I used to do search and rescue with Civil Air Patrol, in a rather army-and-survival centred squadron. I was warned never to eat those slimey hot-dog things, which made me want to try one so I could say "They're not that bad." However, once I actually saw them, I decided to take the advice I'd been given.
We used to make some sort of cookie-like think using the creamer, sugar, and a flame.
The other advice I received was to dring *plenty* of water when living off of MREs. That's one more piece of advice I learned to respect.
However, I expect that the former British Empire has a lot to do with the widespread familiarity with English. In this case, imperialism has a lot to do with it. For instance, the country of India uses English to overcome the many, many Hindi (and other?) dialects. This is clearly because of British Imperialism.
The other poster just had the wrong imperialist country. =-)
Here here! Socialism and capitalism are not enemies, nor are the incompatible. You'd think the continued survival of several socialist/capitalist European govt's would have driven this point home to the masses, but the US masses don't seem to know that Europe is more than a theme park.
For reference, my view of Socialism is simply putting social priorities ahead of individual priorities.
And hence it is demonstrated that the United States and China are in fact close siblings. China has it's sparsely populated west with citizens who don't believe they're part of the country, and we have Texas. We both have massive agriculture, education problems, and a population ruled by popularity and fashion. We both have massive government corruption and selective censorship. And we both think that we own Taiwan.;-)
I think the idea is that the Capitalists have no problem screwing their own kind. Like when Sigourney Weaver comments about the Aliens (quoted inaccurately from memory here) "at least they don't screw their own." Although one of the quotes indicated that a capitalist would sell his hangman the needed rope, I think the idea of most of the quotes is that capitalists' number one priority is profit and personal gain.
As a concrete example, consider the Arthur Anderson/Enron/Enron employee situation. It's pretty clear that Enron screwed it's own employees. Arthur Anderson could be accused of hanging themselves in the effort to make a profit.
1) Read all the other dissenting replies first. They're better than the sparse comments I'm going to make.
2) Education: I propose that the level of education among settlers in the US was unusually high for a developing nation. The leaders were incredibly well educated, and often came from aristocratic backgrounds.
3) The American economy and government erected nationalistic (i.e. protectionist) barriers as they developed. Now the United States is persecuting developing nations (via WTO and such) who wish to protect their economies from the ravages of western multinational corporations.
Every person is master of their fate, regardless of the governmental system. However, we're all on this planet together, and some fates will cross. Left at this level, you have anarchy (by definition).
Authoritarianism means that there is no codified manner for the governed people to affect their governments (well, that's an ad-hoc definition, I'd be happy to see better definitions). It doesn't mean that the government micromanages people's lives. There are advantages and disadvantages to this style of government. Among the advantages is reduced administration costs per capita when compared with more participatory forms of government.
Human rights are an orthogonal issue. It's easy to side with you there, that every person deserves protection of their basic human rights. However, I'd caution against casting the first stone against China, considering the human rights track record in most countries is poor. If China is doing more good than bad for it's people, then progress is being made and we can expect improvements. They probably won't happen overnight, though.
Also, Marxian utopia comes after after massive industrialisation. I don't think China has reached that point, but the United States has. I don't think China is waiting for anyting. Instead, China seems to be moving full-speed ahead when it comes to economy. In that sense, they're likely to make all the same problems for their people that American citizens suffer. That is, gross environment negligence, overworked citizenry, increasing crime rate, increasing separation of wealthy and poor, etc. I'm hoping that China maintains some socialist priorities as they march toward an open government and capitalist economy (which I believe is the prevailing wind in China), unlike the United States.
Here's my token response, that I feel inclined to write everything discussions of governmental systems arises.
1) The United States is still on course for Marx's communisum. Witness the anti-globalisation protests, and the prospect if increased worker protections because of better communication. The Soviet Union did not follow Marx's theory, and Lenin was rebuked by Marx.
2) Socialism can (and I believe should) be defined in a manner that has nothing to do with communism: socialism is a system which places society above the individual, i.e. the good of the many versus the good of one. There are many socialist systems of various sizes (including nations whose town populations rival our state populations) surviving quite well. Socialism is a statement about priorities, not a blueprint for an economy. Americans (like myself) have a tough time separating society and economy, because in the United States they are joined at the hip.
3) Greed and sloth (laziness) occur in every culture. Capitialism in the US is fairly robust to sloth, but suffers hugely because of greed. Socialist systems are more likely to resist greed (which depends on individualism), but less likely to resist sloth.
4) Capitalism does not guarantee, or even make stipulations, that a hard worker will advance over his peers. Fairness is not built-in to capitalist economies. "The American Dream is only a dream," to quote Gordon Gano.
5) The asshole factor is clearly at work in both the US capitalist economy, as well as the US Federal Republic governmental system.
In short, the parent post doesn't hold water, and is libelous to Socialist and Communist systems. Furthermore, it similarly propogates ridiculous stereotypes about Capitialist economies.
After checking 3/5 pages of >=+2 comments, I got tired of checking if this opinion has already been stated. At risk of repeating someone else's post, here's my opinion.
If and when mainstream processors become true commodities (there's a good definition in here somewhere), the value of Intel's brand will vanish. This will reduce Intel's revenues, and hence R&D and capex budgets. Companies like AMD, who have always run their business on slim margins, will have a structural advantage over "fat" companies like Intel; this will allow them to survive.
The above scenario occurs when nobody has any cost-efficient means of stimulating the mainstream market for cpus. This will leave customization and services as the profitable parts of cpu design and manufacturing. It is easy to imagine that focus will turn toward other bottlenecks in system architecture. For example, suppose an effort is made to push parallel processing into mainstream computers, with multiple vendors create a multitude of approaches requiring quick and cheap cpu modifications. I expect that such a market will favor increasing openness in cpu design, just as the software markets are discovering the serviceability benefits of open source software.
Therefore, my prediction (woohoo, let's guarantee that I'll be completely wrong by predicting the future) is that cpu commoditization will lead to the prominence of open cpu designs. Because of the increasing success in open source software, this shift will occur somewhat quickly and less painfully than it has for operating systems. Of course there are major differences between open cpu cores and open source software, there will be plenty of exciting socioeconomic developments leading to profitable open cpu cores.
In the end, this could be a major win for established semi-open cores like SPARC. However, community-developed open cores like the FCPU and various efforts with open StrongARM implementations, will have a jump on building the community infrastructure that allows open markets to be efficient and useful.
That's my contribution on the subject. It won't be a technical change that we'll see next in the cpu market; rather it will be a socioeconomic change.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, the Debian's "centralized" approach means that many third parties don't bother making their own .debs, and Debian users are forced to work around the standard packages (not necessarily a bad thing, but then, why use packaging system if you're just going to work around it?), or wait interminably for a busy package maintainer to release a new package. For instance, my laptop require X 4.1.99 or later (or patches for the Radeon Mobility chipset), but the X Strike Force hasn't yet managed to move past 4.1.0.
Other things about Debian have languished, for instance the installer. Debian's default installers, using a 2.2 kernel, won't even boot on my laptop (eventually found my way around to the ide images). Debian's installers are the only installers that didn't boot on my laptop -- Sorcerer installed like a dream, as did Red Hat's and Mandrake's.
My preference has turned out to be source management systems, like those found in Sorcerer and Lunar Penguin.
-Paul Komarek
I wanted to put in a good word for Mandrake's rpm management tools. They have urpmi and friends which operate from the the command line, and a very nice gui wrapper for these (whose name I always forget 'cause you usually start it from an icon). Not only do these help manage dependencies, but they also track rpm archives for you.
Thus, when you type "urpmi foo.rpm", you get something like "foo.rpm requires bar.rpm. Is this okay?" followed by "please insert cd 3" or else it automatically grabs it from the net (if you've configured it to do so). Really surprising, and very nice, was when uninstalling "foo.rpm", it asked if it was okay to remove "bar.rpm". I'm not sure if it always does that latter bit, because I saw it happen during an installation.
-Paul Komarek
Interesting take on "portage". I went with Sorcerer and Lunar Penguin because I had more control than I would with a ports-like system. In fact, it was a problem with a Debian maintainer that strongly motivated me to go for a packaging system that didn't rely so heavily on other people.
-Paul Komarek
I think I got the wrong idea from your post. I think what you meant was "If I was paid to listen to lectures as a student, I would stay awake." ;-)
-Paul Komarek
What Microsoft meant to say was "two months of code reviews and half-day seminars [regarding security] surpasses everything ever done [before] by Microsoft".
-Paul Komarek
I recently bought a second copy of Tribes II from Tux Games (which seems to load somewhat slowly right now). I think there are a few other places, too, but I'm not able to find them right now.
There are several good linux gaming sites, such as linuxgames and icculus.org. icclus.org has a nice faq and lots of projects, and linuxgames is a cornucopia of helpful info for gaming on linux.
-Paul Komarek
And thanks for the code. SDL, OpenAL, and the Loki installer/uninstaller/updater are still with us. As is my stack of 8 Loki games (2 copies of tribes).
-Paul Komarek
Although my story doesn't involve any courts, I'm also reminded of a former employer. I started as the assistant to the office manager. Once I was trained, the office manager bailed and I was "promoted". I really should have realized what this meant, but I was fairly naived.
As the office manager, I also did accounts payable and receiveable. Accounts payable consisted of calling creditors and explaining "no, we can't pay you this week, either". Accounts receiveable was easy -- there was only one, someone who subletted some office space. My boss kicked him out (for no reason I could see), making accounts receiveable even easier.
When we finally landed a big contract with a big payment up-front, I made sure to bring payroll and taxes up to date before anything else was paid. Then, I quit.
-Paul Komarek
Your self-congratulatory and pointless appositive needs to go. We need line item moderation.
-Paul Komarek
The issue with latex versus pslatex versus pdftex is which fonts are used. latex uses bitmap fonts by default. pslatex wraps the call to latex with some commands to use type 1 fonts. Both latex and pslatex produce dvi files, but the dvi from pslatex scales much better. Note, of course, that TeX, via metafont, can create the output file at whatever resolution -- but that output is best viewed at exactly that resolution. pdflatex seems a lot like pslatex, except it automatically pushes the output through to pdf. All of that is from memory and guesses, so the details could easily be wrong.
One very nice thing about using pslatex (besides the superior scaling of the dvi file), is that the fonts used make your words take less space. It is a wonderful surprise when you're trying to sqeeze that last column into an 8-page paper, but aren't willing to abuse \scriptsize for the bibliography.
-Paul Komarek
It's pretty easy to discover a group of porn sites heavily interlinking in order to increase their inbound link count. These parts of the web are abnormally cliqueish, by which I mean they approach a fully interconnected set of nodes. Most of the web doesn't work like that.
It's not hard to find popular sites using this methodology, and in this case "popular" is probably as close as you'll ever come to defining a metric for what makes a website a good website. It all depends on what physics (or whatever) sites people link to, which hopefully will be related to how good those sites are. Note that all of the link counts need to take into account some sense of "community" -- i.e. The magazines Popular Science and Science serve very different communities. So link counts need to be taken relative to other sites "around" them, or some such.
And in the end, this solves a lot of things. For instance, the algorithms will be independent of written human lanugage. They'll also be more robust when classifying pages that use graphics for scientific typesetting (LaTeX) constructs that aren't available in HTML (yet). This is important.
-Paul Komarek
Clearly the italicized poster never saw old versions of Mathematica produce 3D ascii surfaces.
-Paul Komarek
Good points. And to add the coup de grace: which content is viewed doesn't matter to ZD Net, so long as Doubleclick registers it.
-Paul Komarek
Suppose it is economically helpful to manipulate your stories for the purpose of attracting slashdot eyes. This would mean that slashdot's readership is manipulating the press. But there's more.
Eventually, non-slashdot readers would find themselves innundated by exactly the material that slashdot readers wanted to see. I expect the result would be the majority of these non-slashdot readers aligning their opinion with the slashdot faction (if it's said/written enough times, it must be true!).
This seems pretty far-fetched, but maybe the computer/technical world is 1) cliquish enough and 2) so sheep-like that it could happen. However, I expect that editors don't conciously try to create stories which attract slashdot readers. I think publishing firms prefer to take their bribes up front.
-Paul Komarek
Do they still have those gelatin-covered hot-dog or sausage things? I'm not a real militar person, but I used to do search and rescue with Civil Air Patrol, in a rather army-and-survival centred squadron. I was warned never to eat those slimey hot-dog things, which made me want to try one so I could say "They're not that bad." However, once I actually saw them, I decided to take the advice I'd been given.
We used to make some sort of cookie-like think using the creamer, sugar, and a flame.
The other advice I received was to dring *plenty* of water when living off of MREs. That's one more piece of advice I learned to respect.
-Paul Komarek
However, I expect that the former British Empire has a lot to do with the widespread familiarity with English. In this case, imperialism has a lot to do with it. For instance, the country of India uses English to overcome the many, many Hindi (and other?) dialects. This is clearly because of British Imperialism.
The other poster just had the wrong imperialist country. =-)
-Paul Komarek
Here here! Socialism and capitalism are not enemies, nor are the incompatible. You'd think the continued survival of several socialist/capitalist European govt's would have driven this point home to the masses, but the US masses don't seem to know that Europe is more than a theme park.
For reference, my view of Socialism is simply putting social priorities ahead of individual priorities.
-Paul Komarek
And hence it is demonstrated that the United States and China are in fact close siblings. China has it's sparsely populated west with citizens who don't believe they're part of the country, and we have Texas. We both have massive agriculture, education problems, and a population ruled by popularity and fashion. We both have massive government corruption and selective censorship. And we both think that we own Taiwan. ;-)
-Paul Komarek
I see what you're saying. Remember that we're talking about the Cisco of *today*.
-Paul Komarek
I think the idea is that the Capitalists have no problem screwing their own kind. Like when Sigourney Weaver comments about the Aliens (quoted inaccurately from memory here) "at least they don't screw their own." Although one of the quotes indicated that a capitalist would sell his hangman the needed rope, I think the idea of most of the quotes is that capitalists' number one priority is profit and personal gain.
As a concrete example, consider the Arthur Anderson/Enron/Enron employee situation. It's pretty clear that Enron screwed it's own employees. Arthur Anderson could be accused of hanging themselves in the effort to make a profit.
-Paul Komarek
To add my voice:
1) Read all the other dissenting replies first. They're better than the sparse comments I'm going to make.
2) Education: I propose that the level of education among settlers in the US was unusually high for a developing nation. The leaders were incredibly well educated, and often came from aristocratic backgrounds.
3) The American economy and government erected nationalistic (i.e. protectionist) barriers as they developed. Now the United States is persecuting developing nations (via WTO and such) who wish to protect their economies from the ravages of western multinational corporations.
-Paul Komarek
Every person is master of their fate, regardless of the governmental system. However, we're all on this planet together, and some fates will cross. Left at this level, you have anarchy (by definition).
Authoritarianism means that there is no codified manner for the governed people to affect their governments (well, that's an ad-hoc definition, I'd be happy to see better definitions). It doesn't mean that the government micromanages people's lives. There are advantages and disadvantages to this style of government. Among the advantages is reduced administration costs per capita when compared with more participatory forms of government.
Human rights are an orthogonal issue. It's easy to side with you there, that every person deserves protection of their basic human rights. However, I'd caution against casting the first stone against China, considering the human rights track record in most countries is poor. If China is doing more good than bad for it's people, then progress is being made and we can expect improvements. They probably won't happen overnight, though.
Also, Marxian utopia comes after after massive industrialisation. I don't think China has reached that point, but the United States has. I don't think China is waiting for anyting. Instead, China seems to be moving full-speed ahead when it comes to economy. In that sense, they're likely to make all the same problems for their people that American citizens suffer. That is, gross environment negligence, overworked citizenry, increasing crime rate, increasing separation of wealthy and poor, etc. I'm hoping that China maintains some socialist priorities as they march toward an open government and capitalist economy (which I believe is the prevailing wind in China), unlike the United States.
-Paul Komarek
Here's my token response, that I feel inclined to write everything discussions of governmental systems arises.
1) The United States is still on course for Marx's communisum. Witness the anti-globalisation protests, and the prospect if increased worker protections because of better communication. The Soviet Union did not follow Marx's theory, and Lenin was rebuked by Marx.
2) Socialism can (and I believe should) be defined in a manner that has nothing to do with communism: socialism is a system which places society above the individual, i.e. the good of the many versus the good of one. There are many socialist systems of various sizes (including nations whose town populations rival our state populations) surviving quite well. Socialism is a statement about priorities, not a blueprint for an economy. Americans (like myself) have a tough time separating society and economy, because in the United States they are joined at the hip.
3) Greed and sloth (laziness) occur in every culture. Capitialism in the US is fairly robust to sloth, but suffers hugely because of greed. Socialist systems are more likely to resist greed (which depends on individualism), but less likely to resist sloth.
4) Capitalism does not guarantee, or even make stipulations, that a hard worker will advance over his peers. Fairness is not built-in to capitalist economies. "The American Dream is only a dream," to quote Gordon Gano.
5) The asshole factor is clearly at work in both the US capitalist economy, as well as the US Federal Republic governmental system.
In short, the parent post doesn't hold water, and is libelous to Socialist and Communist systems. Furthermore, it similarly propogates ridiculous stereotypes about Capitialist economies.
-Paul Komarek
After checking 3/5 pages of >=+2 comments, I got tired of checking if this opinion has already been stated. At risk of repeating someone else's post, here's my opinion.
If and when mainstream processors become true commodities (there's a good definition in here somewhere), the value of Intel's brand will vanish. This will reduce Intel's revenues, and hence R&D and capex budgets. Companies like AMD, who have always run their business on slim margins, will have a structural advantage over "fat" companies like Intel; this will allow them to survive.
The above scenario occurs when nobody has any cost-efficient means of stimulating the mainstream market for cpus. This will leave customization and services as the profitable parts of cpu design and manufacturing. It is easy to imagine that focus will turn toward other bottlenecks in system architecture. For example, suppose an effort is made to push parallel processing into mainstream computers, with multiple vendors create a multitude of approaches requiring quick and cheap cpu modifications. I expect that such a market will favor increasing openness in cpu design, just as the software markets are discovering the serviceability benefits of open source software.
Therefore, my prediction (woohoo, let's guarantee that I'll be completely wrong by predicting the future) is that cpu commoditization will lead to the prominence of open cpu designs. Because of the increasing success in open source software, this shift will occur somewhat quickly and less painfully than it has for operating systems. Of course there are major differences between open cpu cores and open source software, there will be plenty of exciting socioeconomic developments leading to profitable open cpu cores.
In the end, this could be a major win for established semi-open cores like SPARC. However, community-developed open cores like the FCPU and various efforts with open StrongARM implementations, will have a jump on building the community infrastructure that allows open markets to be efficient and useful.
That's my contribution on the subject. It won't be a technical change that we'll see next in the cpu market; rather it will be a socioeconomic change.
-Paul Komarek
If I understand "clockless" cpus, wouldn't the analogy be a ballet with lots of bands waiting on dancers, and dancers waiting on each other?
-Paul Komarek