There's currently a dodgy bug where udev assigns devices different names than the install system, sometimes causing the system to not boot. It's easily fixable by editing your fstab, but can recur; you might want to hold off on upgrading if you're using strange drivers for your disks.
By default, no. You'll have to install some extra packages from the non-free repository to play non-free media. However, all your multimedia requirements are just an apt-get install away; flash 9 (which fixes lots of long-standing Linux flash issues), mp3, win32 codecs, etc... I've been using it on my laptop for a while, and it's been pretty solid; I've got no complaints yet.
The article makes a lot of shaky assertions, but it gets one thing right: computer science curricula in higher education are becoming something of a joke. I think it misfires in saying that the way to go is to be more practical and interdisciplinary; I think the problem is that computer science programs are too practical. "Computer science" has come to be less the study of algorithms and information management, and more a vocational degree--universities aren't graduating computer scientists so much as they're graduating computer mechanics.
I wonder if part of this is that universities are being forced to spend time drilling into undergrad students concepts that should've been learned long beforehand through a proper high school education or (god forbid) natural curiosity--and, moreover, if this trend will seep into graduate school as more people pick up master's or doctorate degrees for purposes of job differentiation.
Re:For great justice...
on
Game Writing
·
· Score: 1
Now, that's not entirely fair. Deus Ex, for instance, had an amazing story written by somebrilliantpeople.
We now know that electronic technology has no more to contribute to computing than the physical equipment. We now
know that a programmable computer is no more and no less than an
extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism without
chaning a single wire, and that the core challenge for computing science is a conceptual one, viz. what (abstract) mechanisms we can conceive without getting lost in the complexities of our own making.
But in the mean time, the harm was done: the topic became know as
"computer science" - which, actually, is like referring to surgery as
"knife science" - and it was firmly implanted in people's minds that
computing science is about machines and their equipment. Quod non.
(These days I cannot enter a doctor's, dentist's, or lawyer's office
without being asked my advice about their office computer. When I then
tell them that I am totally uninformed as to what hard- and software
products the market currently offers, their faces invariably get very
puzzled.)
An illegal download doesn't prevent the 'owner' from benefiting from the origninal. Whereas when you steal a physical object, it does. If I steal a loaf of bread from you, you no longer have that loaf of bread to eat. If I copy the recipie for making that bread without your permission, it does you no harm (unless, possibly, you're the proprieter of a bakery.)
There's a word for something like that: it's called a public good, by definition a non-market item, and the recording industry has spent the last century and millions of dollars convincing people that music isn't one.
Ew. Just look at the Qt theme in that YaST screenshot. Maybe that'll get cleaned up before release, but I somehow doubt it, as themes take a while to create and there's no Qt equivalent of gtk-engine-qt. Could somebody please explain to me why Novell decided to ditch SuSE's long history of innovative KDE hacking altogether and hop on the GNOME bandwagon?
I hate to nit-pick, but it's worth noting that Lua is entirely platform-independent, requiring only an ANSI C compiler to build the complete interpreter and compiler set.
The Coyotos project attempts to implement a full OS that can be mathematically proven safe and secure. It's actually quite a fascinating project; reading the mailing lists and watching BitC and Coyotos develop feels a bit like what it must've felt like to watch UNIX and C grow up in the 70s.
Aside from the fact that it appears to have been written by somebody whose teachers apparently overlooked the usage of the apostrophe when teaching him English, the article didn't really say all that much. Reading the summary, I was expecting some details about Lua itself, or maybe even some information about where it is headed in the future. All the article pointed out was that Lua was being used in some games....... Real informative.
But seriously, Lua's a great language. Full lexical scoping and first-class functions alone give it insane flexibility and power, and its table data structure is implemented very well. In general, Lua is one of the most well-thought-out languages I've ever seen; its creators have taken great pains to get all of its functionality into it while still maintaining a low profile (the stand-alone interpreter takes ~150KB of space) without resorting to kludges or hacks, and these efforts have paid off. I wouldn't think of using anything else to extend a program.
Decentralized networks (see Usenet or Freenet) are more or less immune to specialized (i.e. aimed at one location) DDoS attacks by nature; the only way to bring down a site is to bring down the entire network, and there is some work being done towards making even that impossible. Unfortunately, making dynamic content (e-mail, forums, more or less anything you'd be inclined to use a server-side language for) available through these sorts of networks ranges from painfully annoying to impossible.
What I'd like to see is a sort of Bittorrent-like system implemented for the web; people who access websites can then serve those sites to others in a somewhat-decentralized fashion. That would require quite a bit of work (and maybe some fundamental restructuring of the internet a la IPv6 or similar), though, to be at all feasible on a large scale.
This post can safely be ignored; it is nothing but the musings of a computer science student with no grounding in network programming.
I don't type backslash very often, but the pipe character does come in handy for shell commands.
That said, I can't stand keyboards that put the backslash key next to the backspace and increase the size of the enter key. I always end up typing a bunch of backslashes whenever I make a mistake, I press enter whenever I want to type a backslash, and I can't for the life of me understand why it is done like that. I mean, have you ever intentionally typed "enter" by pressing that big tab at the top of the key?
There are two types of crazies: the psychopath and the standard-grade wackaloons.
Standard wackaloons lack the concentration and knowledge to find an exploitable hole in an OS, and psychopaths are too busy killing people or running businesses to worry about such unfulfilling goals as virus-writing.
Using (or not using) software for philosophical reaons is stupid. There's no point in limiting yourself just because you disagree with a company's tactics---Microsoft sure as hell isn't going to be hurt by a bunch of starry-eyed nerds rabidly proclaiming that the end times are here and Linux is the way to salvation. I don't know how many people realize this, but a lot of the philosophically-based Linux advocacy does the same thing for peoples' view of the platform as hygenically-impaired streetcorner priests peddling Bibles and preaching hellfire does for Christianity.
Myself, I use UNIX-based solutions whenever I can, not because they are not Windows but because, in my view, UNIX simply Does Things Right. Transparent protocols, simple algorithms, and orthogonal programs and APIs vs. bloated, monolithic apps, unreadable binary file formats, and knobs that change things in completely unrelated parts of the system when flipped. UNIX is infinitely easier for me to use and manage than Windows, and nothing short of a complete paradigm shift will change that.
Linux, on the other hand, seems to have been moving to emulate Windows out of desperation to best it. Complex systems (OpenOffice, Firefox, etc.) galore, and integration in all the wrong ways. Rather than play to the strengths of the open development model championed by the earliest iterations of UNIX, GNU/Linux is layering on complexity by the gallon, all because people place abstract philosophical ideals higher on their priority lists than real, tangible code quality.
If the server is outside the USA, it will be blocked. Just like a tarriff, if a company does not pay, they can not sell their product inside this country.
Gee, that almost sounds familiar. This is real rich. The entire political system seems hell-bent on turning this place into a police state---the Republicans in the name of family values and moral sanctity, and the Democrats in the name of increased tax revenue.
And people scoffed when I said I wanted to break away and start up an isolated farming commune on a deserted island somewhere. Well, you just go ahead and scoff again when I'm freely downloading gobs of porn while you have to pay obscene amounts of money to skim through panty ads in the Sears catalog!
You mean there's more than one? I thought it was just x = x. ..
On another note, a system of identity on the internet is a good idea as outlined in TFA, but I think that Microsoft's approach---undoubtedly, to hold all of the information in one central repository, probably controlled by itself, and just be expected to be on its best behavior and not take a peek for marketing or other reasons---isn't the correct one. If there's a system of persistent identity, it'll need to be decentralized, and it'll need to be secure. I'm thinking that a distributed system like Usenet or Kademlia might be appropriate, and that information should be encrypted. If the information is requested, the keyholder can choose to relinquish it by releasing their public key to the requester; they can then, at their discretion, release their private key as well to any number of parties in order that the source of the information be unverifiable after its initial use. This is probably not the best implementation, but something along these lines might be appropriate.
this is all exceptionally complicated stuff, though, and will certainly require some overhead to implement. Of a company like Microsoft, which has become famous for doing half-assed technical jobs and relying on powerful business tactics to back them up, I don't expect all that much.
Does this program do anything that Blender 3D doesn't?
If not, why fragment the development pool available for 3D rendering programs by providing another program that does the same thing? Wouldn't the time and money apparently being invested into Aladdin's freedom be better spent improving the already-available free program?
Slashdot Mirror
NB, all digital representations (including, yes, those of songs and movies) are at base level just numbers.
There's currently a dodgy bug where udev assigns devices different names than the install system, sometimes causing the system to not boot. It's easily fixable by editing your fstab, but can recur; you might want to hold off on upgrading if you're using strange drivers for your disks.
By default, no. You'll have to install some extra packages from the non-free repository to play non-free media. However, all your multimedia requirements are just an apt-get install away; flash 9 (which fixes lots of long-standing Linux flash issues), mp3, win32 codecs, etc... I've been using it on my laptop for a while, and it's been pretty solid; I've got no complaints yet.
Parent is ridiculous. AI gets a good representation from e.g. the Fast Artificial Neural Network Library, and there are lots of innovative and experimental project ideas--see for instance Squeak's collaborative development proposal.
Can we say karma whore?
The article makes a lot of shaky assertions, but it gets one thing right: computer science curricula in higher education are becoming something of a joke. I think it misfires in saying that the way to go is to be more practical and interdisciplinary; I think the problem is that computer science programs are too practical. "Computer science" has come to be less the study of algorithms and information management, and more a vocational degree--universities aren't graduating computer scientists so much as they're graduating computer mechanics.
I wonder if part of this is that universities are being forced to spend time drilling into undergrad students concepts that should've been learned long beforehand through a proper high school education or (god forbid) natural curiosity--and, moreover, if this trend will seep into graduate school as more people pick up master's or doctorate degrees for purposes of job differentiation.
Now, that's not entirely fair. Deus Ex, for instance, had an amazing story written by some brilliant people.
Isn't it already a challenge?
As said by Edsger Dijkstra:
There's a word for something like that: it's called a public good, by definition a non-market item, and the recording industry has spent the last century and millions of dollars convincing people that music isn't one.
Ew. Just look at the Qt theme in that YaST screenshot. Maybe that'll get cleaned up before release, but I somehow doubt it, as themes take a while to create and there's no Qt equivalent of gtk-engine-qt. Could somebody please explain to me why Novell decided to ditch SuSE's long history of innovative KDE hacking altogether and hop on the GNOME bandwagon?
I hate to nit-pick, but it's worth noting that Lua is entirely platform-independent, requiring only an ANSI C compiler to build the complete interpreter and compiler set.
The Coyotos project attempts to implement a full OS that can be mathematically proven safe and secure. It's actually quite a fascinating project; reading the mailing lists and watching BitC and Coyotos develop feels a bit like what it must've felt like to watch UNIX and C grow up in the 70s.
Aside from the fact that it appears to have been written by somebody whose teachers apparently overlooked the usage of the apostrophe when teaching him English, the article didn't really say all that much. Reading the summary, I was expecting some details about Lua itself, or maybe even some information about where it is headed in the future. All the article pointed out was that Lua was being used in some games. ...... Real informative.
But seriously, Lua's a great language. Full lexical scoping and first-class functions alone give it insane flexibility and power, and its table data structure is implemented very well. In general, Lua is one of the most well-thought-out languages I've ever seen; its creators have taken great pains to get all of its functionality into it while still maintaining a low profile (the stand-alone interpreter takes ~150KB of space) without resorting to kludges or hacks, and these efforts have paid off. I wouldn't think of using anything else to extend a program.
They were in the business of innovation?
Decentralized networks (see Usenet or Freenet) are more or less immune to specialized (i.e. aimed at one location) DDoS attacks by nature; the only way to bring down a site is to bring down the entire network, and there is some work being done towards making even that impossible. Unfortunately, making dynamic content (e-mail, forums, more or less anything you'd be inclined to use a server-side language for) available through these sorts of networks ranges from painfully annoying to impossible.
What I'd like to see is a sort of Bittorrent-like system implemented for the web; people who access websites can then serve those sites to others in a somewhat-decentralized fashion. That would require quite a bit of work (and maybe some fundamental restructuring of the internet a la IPv6 or similar), though, to be at all feasible on a large scale.
This post can safely be ignored; it is nothing but the musings of a computer science student with no grounding in network programming.
I don't type backslash very often, but the pipe character does come in handy for shell commands.
That said, I can't stand keyboards that put the backslash key next to the backspace and increase the size of the enter key. I always end up typing a bunch of backslashes whenever I make a mistake, I press enter whenever I want to type a backslash, and I can't for the life of me understand why it is done like that. I mean, have you ever intentionally typed "enter" by pressing that big tab at the top of the key?
There are two types of crazies: the psychopath and the standard-grade wackaloons.
Standard wackaloons lack the concentration and knowledge to find an exploitable hole in an OS, and psychopaths are too busy killing people or running businesses to worry about such unfulfilling goals as virus-writing.
If you wear pants, that means that you've got something to hide.
Using (or not using) software for philosophical reaons is stupid. There's no point in limiting yourself just because you disagree with a company's tactics---Microsoft sure as hell isn't going to be hurt by a bunch of starry-eyed nerds rabidly proclaiming that the end times are here and Linux is the way to salvation. I don't know how many people realize this, but a lot of the philosophically-based Linux advocacy does the same thing for peoples' view of the platform as hygenically-impaired streetcorner priests peddling Bibles and preaching hellfire does for Christianity.
Myself, I use UNIX-based solutions whenever I can, not because they are not Windows but because, in my view, UNIX simply Does Things Right. Transparent protocols, simple algorithms, and orthogonal programs and APIs vs. bloated, monolithic apps, unreadable binary file formats, and knobs that change things in completely unrelated parts of the system when flipped. UNIX is infinitely easier for me to use and manage than Windows, and nothing short of a complete paradigm shift will change that.
Linux, on the other hand, seems to have been moving to emulate Windows out of desperation to best it. Complex systems (OpenOffice, Firefox, etc.) galore, and integration in all the wrong ways. Rather than play to the strengths of the open development model championed by the earliest iterations of UNIX, GNU/Linux is layering on complexity by the gallon, all because people place abstract philosophical ideals higher on their priority lists than real, tangible code quality.
This is why "Funny" moderation needs to have a karma bonus.
Gee, that almost sounds familiar. This is real rich. The entire political system seems hell-bent on turning this place into a police state---the Republicans in the name of family values and moral sanctity, and the Democrats in the name of increased tax revenue.
And people scoffed when I said I wanted to break away and start up an isolated farming commune on a deserted island somewhere. Well, you just go ahead and scoff again when I'm freely downloading gobs of porn while you have to pay obscene amounts of money to skim through panty ads in the Sears catalog!
You mean there's more than one? I thought it was just x = x . . .
On another note, a system of identity on the internet is a good idea as outlined in TFA, but I think that Microsoft's approach---undoubtedly, to hold all of the information in one central repository, probably controlled by itself, and just be expected to be on its best behavior and not take a peek for marketing or other reasons---isn't the correct one. If there's a system of persistent identity, it'll need to be decentralized, and it'll need to be secure. I'm thinking that a distributed system like Usenet or Kademlia might be appropriate, and that information should be encrypted. If the information is requested, the keyholder can choose to relinquish it by releasing their public key to the requester; they can then, at their discretion, release their private key as well to any number of parties in order that the source of the information be unverifiable after its initial use. This is probably not the best implementation, but something along these lines might be appropriate.
this is all exceptionally complicated stuff, though, and will certainly require some overhead to implement. Of a company like Microsoft, which has become famous for doing half-assed technical jobs and relying on powerful business tactics to back them up, I don't expect all that much.
Does this program do anything that Blender 3D doesn't?
If not, why fragment the development pool available for 3D rendering programs by providing another program that does the same thing? Wouldn't the time and money apparently being invested into Aladdin's freedom be better spent improving the already-available free program?
Slackware Linux did that a while back---jumped three versions ahead, because people were wondering when they going to upgrade to version 7 of Linux.
Don't print them at all.