You know, I hope so. But a lot of people parrot this kind of stuff on here. I think the truth is -- and I'm being entirely serious here -- that with a lot of geeks, socializing doesn't come naturally, even with people of their own sex. And most geeks are very smart, capable people, and they're prideful, too, especially with regards to their intelligence. After all, when we were in HS, most of us weren't good at sports, weren't popular, but what we did have was intelligence. We turned the geek monicker around, reclaimed it for ourselves. It was meant to insult us but we wear the label with pride.
Because we're so prideful, we spend a lot of time rationalizing away our shortcomings. We're not good at socializing with people, but we're smart -- it must be that our intellect intimidates them. Or, we belittle social mores as being cultural cruft, saying (in all earnestness) that all that small talk jibber jabber is useless, and that we're choosing not to do it because there's no point. We'd rather not admit that we have a very hard time doing it, and it makes us uncomfortable. We hide behind our intelligence.
Back in HS, jocks taped our buns together and shoved us in lockers and generally tortured us, girls shunned us, and we were generally social outcasts. We are scarred, emotionally, by this treatment. It was cruel, there's no doubt about it. But when I was in college, I had a run in with a bully that tortured me in middle school -- he came up to me, having recognized me, and started making small talk. I didn't know what to do. But it turned out that he was a really nice guy, and it occured to me then that judging a person on actions taken at age 13 wasn't very fair of me; he'd grown a lot since then. He appologized for the way he'd acted. Turns out his home life hadn't been so great.
Anyway, I'm getting off on a tangent here, but my point is, because girls and jocks and the like scare us, we pigeonhole them. We make them out to be 2 dimensional, steryotypical people. We don't bother getting to know them, now that we're out of school and everyone (believe it or not) is a lot more mature. We continue to hide behind our intelligence. We say things like, all those jocks are bagging groceries now, girls just can't think the way we do, etc, etc. And it's silly. It's trite. What it essentially is, is lack of self confidence.
But learning to interact with people is like learning anything, including Linux, Math and Science -- it requires practice and you will be ridiculed for not knowing how to perform basic tasks, just like people on #debian will yell at you for not rtfming and making you feel like a dork for not knowing how to inline assembly into your shell scripts (ha ha), as if everyone can do it.
Learning is tough. Girls, people, social stuff, well, it's scary, and I can appreciate that. But you have to face it, not hide behind silly generalizations and coy superiority. People may not be as smart as you are, when it comes to computers or math, but that's not all there is to intelligence. It's really an extremely worthwhile lesson. And sensitivity, which is hard for us too, and so we belittle it as something "unnecessary and stupid", will get you a long way.
The "girl" thing is especially difficult because unlike with jocks, for the most part, we can't just ignore them -- homosexuals exempted, of course, but I'm sure they get just as nervous talking to a cute guy as we do a cute girl -- because there's the sexual attraction and the need for love and attention from the opposite sex. Anyway, you get where I'm going with this, I'll stop talking now.
This is the last time I'm going to post, because I'm tiring of this thread (and I'll bet you are too) and in all likelyhood we'll never see eye to eye on this. I agree that LiGnuX is stupid. So does RMS, which is the main reason it was dropped.
The HURD is not the name of GNU's OS project. The HURD is the name of the kernel of the GNU System. GNU itself is an OS project. It was created to build a Free UNIX-like OS. It isn't a place like sourceforge that just has a bunch of free projects having nothing to do with each other hosted on it. They had a goal -- to produce the GNU system. HURD is just one part of that. Linux has since then replaced the HURD as the kernel of the GNU system, although RMS and others still believe that the HURD's microkernel design is more elegant than Linux's monolithic one, and hope it will eventually mature. In the meantime, they specify that they are running a Linux-based GNU system. GNU/Linux. The idea for the GNU system goes back to 1984, when the project was founded.
To reiterate, you may not care, and may go ahead and call your whole system Linux if it pleases you, but no one is trying to rename Linux (the kernel). GNU people call their system the GNU system; now, because people mostly run Linux as the kernel of the GNU system, we say GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd (and even GNU/NetBSD) to differentiate. It really isn't complex. I don't care what you call your system. But at least try to understand that no one is trying to steal Linux's baby or take credit away from him.
There are lots of people that claim that there is an inherent difference in processing capabilities between women and men; everytime some crackpot does, it's all over Newsweek and other "scientifically rigorous" sources, like Fox News or CNN. More often than not, the research is not published in peer-reviewed journals. When it has been, all of these claims have been completely debunked, everytime. People used to claim that Black people were more like monkeys than white people, too. There's lots of "scientific evidence" for this from even fairly well respected scientists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Saying that this is complete and utter bullshit is not being politically correct, it's just actually paying attention to science. There's just no basis for it.
You say you're a nerd, but you throw around meaningless trite like "scientific fact" and link to ABC TV as a source of science?
You know, when John Lennon said "woman is the nigger of the world" I thought he was exaggerating, but running into people prattling this sort of ridiculous nonsense just makes my blood boil. You should be ashamed of yourself, really. If you're going to try to convince some backwoods uneducated redneck that women are mentally inferior -- oh no, wait, they aren't inferior, it's just that they suck at math and science and are good at "social things", right? (sarcasm) -- then by all means, go ahead and give them your link.
If you're going to come onto Slashdot and do it, have the decency to respect our intelligence and provide links to peer-reviewed journals with experiments that have been repeated by people that didn't come into the equation already agreeing with the experiment's outcome. Then -- and only then -- will I begin to take this "Women have different mental strengths than men" bullshit.
You call it science, but it's just sexism. Plain and simple.
How right you are! And after thinking about it, I concur that Zorn's Lemma is a necessary prerequisite to making this particular example work. But here's a shot at it, assuming Zorn's:
Let \Omega_n be a function mapping C^{n+1} to C. As a corollary of the Axiom of Choice, R is well ordered; and because R and R^2 have the same cardinality, there exists a bijection between them. Because R^2 is trivially isomorphic to C, we can show easily that if R is well ordered, C is well ordered. Therefore, of the n roots (counting multiplicity) of the polynomial with coefficients a\in C^{n+1}, we can pick one which is the largest, or the smallest. Let \Omega_n(a) be that root.
Then \Omega_n(a) is an analytical solution to the polynomial a_{n+1}x^n + a_n x^{n-1} \ldots a_1. Therefore, by repeated application of polynomial long division and \Omega_n, we can obtain all n roots (including multiplicity) to the polynomial designated by a.
Yes, it requires the Axiom of Choice (so much stuff does) and yes, it uses the rather peculiar well-ordered reals corollary of the axiom of choice, which most mathematicians consider the wierdest of them all, but, if you accept the axiom of choice, this angle should work (although I'm open to flaws in my logic being pointed out to me, of course).
But then, this means that computing Omega_n requires first coming up with a well ordering on the reals. Good luck *grin*
As I said, by analytical we mean an algebraic composition of a restricted set of functions and operators. In Abel's proof, he uses extensions on fields to demonstrate, essentially, that it is impossible to solve an arbitrary polynomial by radicals. This is important because radicals are the inverse functions that solve simple polynomials -- the inverse of x^n is the nth root. So essentially what Abel says is, using addition, subtraction, multiplication, division by non-zero, and any radical functions, it is impossible to derive a general formula for nth order polynomials where n > 4. This is relevant because these are the operations used to construct the polynomial, plus radicals (which are usually used, in simple cases, to invert polynomials).
As for integrals, you can take the definite integral of 1/x dx from 1 to n as the definition of log. It isn't the only one (the trivial definition is just that it's the inverse of e^x, but using an integral definition allows you to use your knowledge of Calculus to derive some other interesting properties of logarithms, just as the inverse function definitions allow you to show simple stuff like log(ab) = log(a) + log(b) and the like.)
But again, in light of our defining log n using integrals: what does it mean to be analytical? We say that you can integrate 1/x analytically, but if I were to tell you that log is defined in terms of the integral of 1/x, would you still say that?
That was the point of my (rather contrived) omega function thing. If I don't restrict the body of operations/functions I am using to construct my analytical solution, I can simply define my solution and say it exists, assuming I can prove it is well-defined.
If you restrict yourself to the "simple" functions like +,-,*,/, roots, trig functions, exponential functions -- all the stuff you learned in high school algebra -- it isn't particularly hard to show that lots and lots of integrals don't have analytical solutions.
In fact, delving deeper, there are a large class of integrals that are not even computable if you use the rather flawed but somewhat simpler Riemann integral to compute them. Lebesgue Integrals are much more general (but unfortunately, rather more complex to motivate).
The article in question is slashdotted, but my guess is either that this is media sensationalism, or the writeup is claiming something different from the student -- it seems like perhaps a new way to numerically approximate polynomial roots has been discovered.
However, from what I remember, Abel's theorem was proven using Galois Groups and Field extensions. This implies that what it actually proves is that analytical solutions using a particular set of functions -- in particular, the field operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division by non-zero) extended to include radicals (square, cubic, etc roots), composed in any way possible (as in a ruler and compass construction proof) cannot possibly generate an analytical formula depicting the solution for polynomials of order greater than 4.
Does this mean that an analytical formula using other functions is impossible? Not at all. Trivially, I will define a function called, say, omega, which, given a n-dimensional complex vector, gives a solution to one of the roots of the function a_n * x^n + a_(n-1) * x^(n-1) +... + a_0 where a_n are the elements of said vector. Then, by repeated application of omega and polynomial long division, I have an analytical solution to any polynomial, of any order, in complex space.
Clearly, this solution is analytical in the sense that it a) provides an exact solution and b) is algebraic in nature. However, it isn't useful, because it depends on a function (omega) which cannot itself be defined analytically in terms of other functions (or at least, not ones we know how to compute).
The reason Abel's proof is so important is because it deals with the 4 fundamental operations that polynomials themselves use (the field ops) and adds radicals, which are inverse ops to the building blocks of polynomials themselves. So it essentially says, we cannot use the functions that we constructed the polynomial with to solve it.
Now, my omega function may seem a little bit contrived to non-math types, but actually a large number of functions are arbitrarily defined this way. Logarithms are a good simple example. An analytical formula for the likes of log n wouldn't be possible either, and yet we study logarithms without having an express analytical means of calculating them.
What you should ask yourself is, what does analytical mean, anyway? It really isn't useful (or correct) to say that no analytical solution exists unless you explicitly restrict what particular set of 'basic' functions/operators the analytical solution can contain. In Abel's case (and it's a beautiful proof, by the way) he uses the field operators plus radicals. But what if you added logarithms into the mix? Exponential functions?
It's impossible to say. If you don't restrict your base, you open yourself up to the attack that I just used with the omega function (which certainly exists, after all, I just defined it.)
This is really late, but I think you really must be daft. RMS doesn't want to rename the Linux project. He wants Linux based OSs to be called GNU/Linux. It shouldn't be such a subtle distinction for someone as apparently technically competent as you.
Linus's project is Linux, the kernel. The kernel is and always will be called Linux, plain and simple -- even RMS calls it Linux.
Linus's project is not Linux + glibc + gcc + binutils + bash + whatever GNU tools are required to produce a system that actually boots into something you can do productive work with. Linus' project is just Linux.
To the non-techinical user, for example, UNIX systems seem to be a command line, because a non-technical user associates the interface to the system with the system itself. So a non-technical user, upon being told that the command line is called bash, might start calling the whole system bash, if left to his own devices. But this would clearly be completely wrong, because bash by itself does nothing at all. Clearly you can understand this.
You keep saying RMS wants to rename Linus' project, heck you've repeated this same claim at least 3 times in this thread. This is blatantly and completely wrong. Since you don't seem to be the special ed type I can only assume you are deliberately overlooking this fact. RMS wants to rename the whole OS, of which only a small part can be credited to Linus and yet which is popularly refered to as simply 'Linux'. He doesn't like the fact that his project developed a whole OS from scratch, minus the kernel, taking 20 years to do so, incorporating the work of lots and lots of selflessly motivated hackers, and that one admittedly very brilliant coder comes along, writes the kernel, drops it into the mix as the last piece of a puzzle, and gets the credit not for writing the kernel, but for writing the whole OS.
Notice that he wants it called GNU/Linux, not RMS/Linux. RMS may be synonymous with GNU but as you pointed out, lots of people have contributed to the GNU project and they all deserve a certain amount of credit.
To recap, RMS himself refers to Linux (Linus' project, the kernel) as Linux. GNU/Linux is Linux + GNU, all the GNU utilities, that make it work. So far, outside of the embedded sphere, there are no distributions that are not packaging GNU with Linux to produce their OS. You could probably hack together BSD/Linux or something, and in that case, calling it GNU/Linux would be foolhardy -- but wouldn't you say that it would be rather weird to call the Linux kernel running with the BSD userland simply Linux? I mean, wouldn't that be a rather different system? Even with a Linux kernel, it would still feel like BSD.
Do you see what I'm getting at? I am not telling you to call the OS GNU/Linux. You can call it whatever you want. But stop saying, for gods sake, that RMS is trying to rename Linus' project, because he isn't. He wants people to understand that the kernel is only a small part of the whole package. The average media drone? I don't expect him to get it. You? You ought to.
As for Emacs, I'm not even going to get into it, because what you're saying is totally false. It seems like you're confused rather than malicious, though. For a more detailed understanding of the situation leading up to the Lucid fork (in which both parties behaved rather badly), go read the info jwz posted on his site.
While I definitely prefer black text on a white background, I have to point out that you missed his point. A book does not have a backlight like a monitor/LCD screen does. It does not shine in your eyes. When a pixel is black, there is no light coming out of it -- as a result, a black background is probably better for your eyes.
However, better for your eyes does not mean more legible.
If you actually took the time to reread what I wrote, you would realize (it seems none of my sibling posts have) that I am in fact not comparing Linux to Windows at all.
Instead, what I am doing is making an analogy regarding modular design. It is common sense that a system designed to be stable should minimize the number of components that are so essential that, if they were to crash, would cause the whole system to come down.
In MS Windows, this unfortunately includes the Windows GDI -- for some illuminating reading on some of the core design decisions Microsoft made with NT/XP, check out the ReactOS FAQ and mailing list. In trying to reimplement Windows they've really dug some interesting stuff up (none of it was secret, but now it's all in one place.)
My point is that when someone says, "The reason Windows is fundamentally insecure is because it was designed in a kludgy, non-modular way, where non-essential things like the GDI can crash the whole system," all the Slashdrones immediately understand the insightful nature of the observation. Having the GDI in ring 0 is just braindead.
However, due to their fanatical devotion to Linus -- let me say that I greatly admire the man and consider him one of the best, if not the best, OSS dev out there today -- they take his opinions on the macro/microkernel debate without so much as a critical thought. But as Bob Dylan said, "Even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked."
The truth is, the logic that makes "putting the Windows GDI in the kernel" stupid is the same logic that ought to damn macrokernel-based designs. Here's something interesting for you to contemplate: most Windows cashes happen in drivers, not in the GDI. Actually, the Win32 GDI is quite mature and while a) it probably has caused its share of crashes and b) putting it in the kernel was one of the stupidest design decisions ever, most crashes do not happen because of faults in the GDI these days. They've had a lot of time to iron these bugs out.
The problem is, simply put, drivers. These are mostly written by third parties and due to NT's monolithic kernel design, they are running in kernel space. So a crash in a driver means the whole system comes down.
A microkernel sandboxes things like drivers and has them run in something more like user space; as a result, just as process on Linux can't crash the kernel, a driver on L4 can't crash the kernel.
Now, when Linus started developing Linux, he had a number of very good reasons to go with a monolithic design. One: it was easier, from a design perspective, both for developing and hacking. Two: the major microkernel, CMU Mach (and similarly, GNU Mach) were a) very slow, much too slow to be practical on the 386s that were state of the art in 1991 and b) actually not really all that micro-. Not to mention that GNU Mach, at least, didn't solve the driver problem because it actually ran most drivers in kernel space.
Furthermore, at the time, Linus didn't expect Linux to become what it is today; reading his early posts, he fully expected Hurd to be released RSN and he was just providing something for hackers to mess around with until that happened. And it never happened.
Don't think that by pointing out a problem with Linux that I am in any way against it. I run only Linux, and I'm a zealot by any stretch of the imagination. I just worry about its future -- in the old days, Linux was a Free Software only kind of beast, with all its drivers open source because they were reverse engineered by the community. But look at how fast Linux is gaining popularity: how long will it be before it really does begin to compete with MS on the desktop, and IP-happy hardware vendors start releasing binary drivers en masse?
And then we're back to square one: normal users running non-free blackbox kernel modules written by corps that care nothing f
Interestingly, this criticism of Gates' OS design is reminiscent of one Dr. Andrew S. Tanenbaum's criticism of Linus Torvalds' fledgling kernel, once upon a time.
Criticism, which, frankly, is absolutely on the money. Monolithic operating systems are easy. Writing them that way is the same reason that when you write a program the sloppy way, you write it all in one big file, and when you write it the right way, you seperate the backend from the UI, break the code up into logical segments, put the relevant APIs into their own libraries and link them, etc.
Linux works ok because a) there aren't many binary drivers, yet and b) UNIX like OSs are by design far more modular than VMS-based ones hacked to death with a dull shovel (NT), and so while the kernel may be monolithic, the rest of the system isn't. But ultimately, with computational power where it is right now, the complaint that "microkernels are slower" no longer holds much water for me. Especially when you consider that modern microkernels like L4 really aren't that much slower.
Sometimes, I really wonder if people like you bother to think for themselves or just accept whatever ridiculous claims they are spoon fed. It amazes me that you can repeat this sort of mindless propaganda.
I've been to Cuba, and it is nothing like what you describe. While it is true that their government is considerably more authoritarian than the US's has classically been, Cubans arguably have the best overall standards of living, health care, education, etc, of all of Latin America. Their infant mortality rate is lower than the US. While their economic, social and political policies are at odds with the United States', they are by no means the hell hole they are frequently made out to be by the US media.
I think you should read more about Fidel Castro, the man. The Wikipedia entry is a good place to start; it gives a rather balanced viewpoint. As with all Wikipedia articles, read the Talk page too, to see what sorts of debates are going on (especially since the content on the page will most likely have changed by the time you read it).
I'm not a huge Castro fan but frankly I think the man has done a damn site better for his people than the capitalist-but-nonetheless-sadistic puppet dictatorships we Americans have set up throughout Central and South America to further our own trade interests.
The way you talk, it sounds like you're one of those Cuban republicans living in Florida that's still sore about Fidel coming to power in the 50s and nationalizing the industries that made your family wealthy, while the average Cuban starved.
I think the issue here is with majority/minority parties. Le Front National did get 20% (note, not over 30%) of the French vote, but that was widely seen as a "protest" vote (which is an unfortunate phenomenon exacerbated by the french IRV-like system). Jacques Chirac won in a land-slide in the next round.
Anyway, getting back to the point, the GP's point wasn't that reactionary parties don't exist in Europe, just that the "mean" is much further to the left that ours is in the US.
Viewed from this perspective, everyone in the US seems "right wing". Technically, we do have left wing parties -- the Greens, the Communists, etc -- but they don't typically get much attention come Election day.
Essentially, if you take the two most majorly supported parties in any European nation today, they will both be considered "leftist" from a US perspective, while local Europeans might consider one to the left and one to the right. By the same token, they see it in reverse: our two most major parties, from their perspective, both appear to be rather far on the right.
It's really not a way of slamming the US; it's just an observation (and a good one, I think) that because most non-US countries are further to the left politically than the US is, and because Slashdot is read by lots of non-Americans, Americans seem to see rather "leftist" views emphasized on Slashdot as non-American mods mod up views politically consistant with the ones they're comfortable with.
RMS does not want to rename Linux anything at all. Linux is Linux, plain and simple. The problem is, most people think Linux is something it isn't. This is the whole kernel/OS issue. I presume you must know this, given that you read Slashdot, and are simply being deliberately misleading to further your own anti-RMS agenda. But just in case, on the off chance you really don't understand, this is the deal:
Unlike (for example) the Free BSDs, Linux-based Operating Systems are not developed as one centrally managed, coherent project. Rather, they are sort of thrown together from a patchwork quilt of projects written by many, many different people. The kernel, which exists primarily to provide basic low-level services to programs (and by low-level I mean, really, really low level -- I don't mean a command line), is only one part of the whole package. While the remaining required parts were written by a wide spectrum of hackers from all walks of OSS life, a stunningly large number of them wrote for the GNU project.
The kernel is an essential part, yes. But not the only essential part. For example, unless you like inlining int 0x80 calls into your C programs, you probably use a C library to interface with your kernel. Guess who wrote that? If it didn't exist, nothing would run. If you don't write your programs in C, your program's standard library in all likelyhood talks to glibc. You know what that g stands for, right?
In fact, without other programs, the kernel wouldn't even boot. Because Linux based OSs depend on "many processes doing small tasks and doing them well". The Linux kernel by itself depends on/sbin/init, for example.
Furthermore (and this is incidental, but worth noting), the Linux kernel is developed against GCC and the GNU binutils chain. Indeed, it doesn't compile properly with any other compiler (even those expressly designed to be drop in replacements for gcc, like Intel's icc or the Pentium optimized pgcc).
In fact, the GNU tools are so ubiquitous that even the BSDs can't manage to do everything on their own, though they would dearly love to. They depend on GCC/binutils if they want to ship a free, development ready system!
Your comment about 'text editor macros that someone else turned into a program' is misleading as well. While it is true that GNU emacs was not the first emacs, GNU emacs is an RMS creation. Like all good OSS projects, it isn't predominently written by its creator anymore -- but then that's true of the Linux kernel also, and so using this as a smear is sort of a non-starter.
RMS is an amazing programmer. So is Linus. Frankly, anyone that says otherwise is insulting OSS in general; these two men are giants. If you want to talk about poor coders becoming OSS leaders, pick on ESR, not RMS. RMS is the real deal.
Anyway, getting over the ad homniem, and back to the GNU/Linux vs Linux issue, the distinction is useful, because the kernel and userland are the userland+kernel are three different beasts that just happen to be related. I can understand people who know nothing about tech being confused about this; I can even understand people that understand the distinction prefering to say simply Linux... but what I absolutely cannot abide is some Slashbot who has, in all likelyhood, never contributed anything of worth to the OSS movement slandering RMS, of all people, based on a misunderstanding of the situation.
The GNU/Linux debacle exists because of the following facts: a) There is, on average, more GNU code than Linux kernel code in even the most stripped down distributions, and (unlike with X or other popular components of a GNU/Linux system that people often bring up) much of it is not optional. b) Technical people like to be precise, and saying "Linux" when you mean the whole OS is decidedly not precise, especially if you hack both user and kernelspace.
If you cannot grok that, I don't know what to say.
I personlly don't care which term you use, or your personal feelings for RMS, but if you're going to criticize, criticize without just pulling stuff out of your rear orifice.
I actually speak French very well. At one point in time, the French subjunctive was actually much more like the modern English subjunctive; reading Moliere one can still see arcane uses like 'si j'eusse' and the like. These have now been replaced with l'indicatif imparfait, and subjunctives NEVER follow si. It is still rather common for people to try to (incorrectly) place a Conditionnel after si, whence the French saying, "Le si n'aime pas le -rait".
The Modern English subjunctive is completely different from the Romance mood of the same name.
The French subjunctive nowadays is mostly just habitual, used in secondary clauses after certain classes of verbs (such as falloir). In those places, its use is not optional and as such one could argue that it doesn't really have any meaning on its own anymore, and has rather taken on a sort of idiomatic sense.
Of course, this is not entirely accurate, because in some places, notably after "croire", using or not using the subjunctive does distinguish between a hypothetical phrase and a non-hypothetical one. But such examples are rare; normally, you must either use the subjunctive in French, or you must not. Choice is uncommon.
As for Spanish, I do not speak it well, and so can't claim to be much of an authority on its use. I know that it retains a much more active subjunctive than French does (in particular, the simple past and imperfect subjunctive continue to be employed in modern speech) but if memory serves, it, like its French counterpart, cannot be selectively employed to change the meaning of a sentence.
Greek, interestingly, has both a Subjunctive and Optative mood, IIRC, and the latter is more like the English subjunctive. I don't remember what the former was, I haven't studied Greek since High School.
As for "was" and "were", I am, alas, an idiot, and you are absolutely correct. Thanks for pointing it out.
Oh, btw, my original post covers the Subjunctive past in English. The Subjunctive present is used in phrases like "They mandated that I be shot for installing Debian on a production server." Compare to French.
You should add "and didn't inform me of the shortcoming before I agreed to buy it". Lots of software ships with known bugs, but these are usually non-critical and always reported.
If they aren't, it's definitely fraud. And while I probably wouldn't have called the GP a "fucktard", I agree with the spirit of the comment.
Hi. Grammar Nazi here. ...but may not be fired if it were the vendors fault.
I notice you're making an attempt to use the subjunctive mood. I applaud your efforts! It's a poetic part of the English language that is slowly dying away. But that's no reason to use it incorrectly.
In this case, you should have said 'if it was'. You see, many people aware of the subjunctive mood but unschooled in its arcane ways simply assume that any conditional phrase in the third person using 'to be' ought to substitute 'were' for 'was'. This is actually not the case. The subjunctive mood and indicative mood are both appropriate after 'if', but they mean different things.
The English subjunctive (unlike the French/Spanish mood of the same name, but more like the Ancient Greek optative) indicates that a state is contrary to hypothesis. So, for example, I might say, "If I were a woman, I'd be incredibly attracted to Grammar Nazis". The use of 'were' in this context demonstrates that I am not a woman, and am speaking hypothetically.
Now, consider the phrase: "If he was there, why didn't you talk to him?" This phrase uses the indicative mood, because the second clause is not dependent on me assuming a hypothetical situation. The man in question was there; I am not suggesting he wasn't. Rather, I am calling into question your behaviour given that he was there.
The confusion arises from two uses of the word 'if'. One creates a hypothetical situation and comments on it -- in this case, we use the subjunctive mood. But the other simply establishes a prerequisite condition for the following clause. Your sentence and my latter example both fall into this category. Let's look at why.
Subjunctive: "If the fault were with with the vendor, we would have to have some serious words with them.... But it isn't, so I'm having some serious words with you." I could ommit the italicized portion of the sentence, but the subjunctive 'were' clearly implies that it is, in fact, not the vendor's fault, and that I am speaking hypothetically.
Indicative: "An employee can be badly blamed for a faulty vendor choice, but may not be fired, if it was the vendor's fault." We establish the vendor being at fault as a necessary precondition for our comment; we are discussing what happens if the vendor is at fault. We are not hypothesizing that he is at fault when in fact, he isn't. There is no fact here. We are not speaking contrary to hypothesis; there is no hypothesis.
I know it's pretty tricky, but when mastered, proper use of the subjunctive gives a speaker a certain educated flair that really impresses the ladies... Erm... Yeah.
This announcement was brought to you by GNAA, the Grammar Nazi Association of America.
Everyone keeps bring up MySQL, but MySQL is like Gentoo as far as most Corps are concerned -- and well it should be. If you have serious database needs and don't just want a fast, glorified DB filesystem, use Oracle. If you don't want to shell out any money, use PostgreSQL.
MySQL works great for sites like Slashdot, people's blogs and PHP webapps, but I have never worked for a company that would dream about using MySQL for anything serious, like financial/customer data (which is what most companies use DBs for). It just isn't reliable enough. It is getting better, but its focus has always been in the "be really, really fast" arena (and even there, an optimized PostgreSQL is starting to be pretty competitive).
Lots of commercial (read: proprietary) software for Linux (like Oracle 8) uses libc5, IIRC, which isn't even available much less supported on most distros.
All your points are well made. There is quite a bit of anti-Redhatism, but I think that's mostly because if folks have learned anything working in IT, it's that suits change their POV on issues as soon as someone pulls hard enough on their purse strings.
This hasn't happened yet at companies like Google or Redhat. We all respect them, but we're still nervous about how they'll change when the shit hits the fan. At the moment, Redhat is profitable, and so they have no need to change their business angle. But as competition in the Linux sphere gets more and more cutthroat, you're going to see them doing what all companies do to protect their bottom lines -- making fiscally conservative decisions. And that means that if supporting GPL'd projects isn't profitable, it's going to be the first thing to go. It isn't like this is "evil" or "wrong", it's just a side effect of what Redhat is -- a company. It makes us nervous.
Now, I think your point about how many OSS projects have @redhat contributions on them is a good one, but it's a little deceptive. Redhat pays people to work on OSS projects -- there's nothing wrong with this, in fact I think it's great -- and as a result these hackers are hacking on company time with company e-mail addresses. While all Debian (for example) maintainers have an @debian e-mail address, most of them don't use it for much other than expressly Debian-related activities. Remember that Debian hackers are hacking in their free time. They're rather harder to identify than Redhat hackers because of this.
But they're there. Redhat's Fedora Core takes so much Debian technology it's crazy (this is also good, OSS is about sharing). Before the X.org fork, the Debian X Strike Force maintained such a huge set of patches to X that it practically constituted a fork -- much of it, especially as related to non x86 archs, was never merged in. Now, Branden Robinson and his crew are major contributors to X.org.
Debian has more packages available for it than any other distribution anywhere, because it has more maintainers -- ie, more people officially working on it -- than any other distro. They don't get paid, sure, but it is rather substantial. They're packages are also extremely high quality. Things just don't break on Debian, and Debian stable is just about the only Linux distro anywhere that calls it self stable and actually is, I mean in the BSD/Solaris sense. Put it in a corner and forget about it.
I do have issues with this one point: It doesnt get thrown onto some mailing list, argued about for a few days, crammed into somebodys bugzilla or wiki, opened and closed three times, moved catagories, sit through a developer moving appartments, ignored by an irc channel with 60 idling people, dissapear into usenet, etc.
Debian, which has no paid developers, arguably gets things fixed faster than virtually any other Distro, and they are very serious about it. The difference is, the bugs they fix are the ones the developers care about, not the ones IBM's high paying customers care about -- unless IBM's high paying customers are paying Debian developers to fix it (which I don't think happens, yet). It's a question of motivation. With Debian, money doesn't really matter -- although of course in practice I'm sure a lot of Debian developers would work fulltime if anyone offered to pay them to.
Anyway, you say Redhat isn't inherently evil, and I agree. But I would not say it's superior either (you didn't expressly say that, but there was the implication).
I agree with what you are saying, but it's irrelevant, because as pretty as eyecandy is, there is no data out there that suggests that it actually makes a system easier to use. In fact, what few studies have been done seem to indicate the opposite.
What makes a system easy to use is a consistant, simple UI. The first Macs were like this; Google is a good modern example. You'll note that neither of these are bloated interfaces.
Now, I'll admit that early Linux didn't have a consistant, elegant UI. But my point is that the added complexity of eye candy does not produce an easy to use interface on its own. So I think your point, as it relates to eye candy, is irrelevant in this discussion (but nonetheless insightful, in an offtopic sort of way.)
Choosing network transparency as a primary focus of X was a mistake. Better to optimize for the most common usage scenario, and add bells and whistles afterwards.
FWIW, this wasn't how it happened. At the time the X Window System was developed, the desktop computer was not the most common usage scenario; centralized servers with many terminals connected to them were. The X Window System was a natural extension of this paradigm. I wouldn't call network transparency "bells and whistles", given when it was designed.
This begs the question, is network transparency still a relevant feature? I believe it is. You say:
A GUI for administration? No thanks.
which, granted, was in response to me mentioning administration. I'll agree that I don't often need GUI tools (at least on Linux) to administrate a remote system; however, X's network transparency is useful in many other ways. For example, in the computer lab scenario, where a few powerful servers act as clients to a roomfull of diskless X servers. This ends up being cheaper in the long run, because essentially the servers are only monitors and keyboards and as long as their network connections are fast enough they never really need to be upgraded (either hardware or software) to keep up with evolving software and its increasingly demanding hardware requirements.
It's not to save time or increase productivity, but to get that responsive, "snappy" feel which is more pleasant.
On this point, I have to disagree. I think saving time and increasing productivity are of paramount importance. However, I will grant that a responsive, "snappy" feeling is very important and that work should be done to optimise X servers further in order to make this more of a reality. But truth be told, my current Linux system feels snappy enough. It could possibly be just a little bit snappier, but throwing network transparency out the window for that small gain seems silly to me.
That's the irony; the "afterthought" methods like VNC and whatever Windows does work at least as well on the network. VNC is much better than X over high latency links, and it allows you to pull up somebody else's session and share it with them, which is fantastic if you're trying to help them do something in the GUI.
I have never used VNC, but I know that the Windows GDI does not work with drawing primitives, but rather at the widget level, which is one of the reasons that it can be so fast. VNC most likely sends these widget drawing instructions across the network.
This is only possible because Windows has only one widget set, and because that widget set is standardized by a particular group (MS). While many Linux naysayers decry this very aspect of Linux -- that we have so many widget sets -- I personally do not think that in the anarchistic gift economy of OSS that it could be any other way. Could you imagine the outcry that would ensue if someone said that from now on, we're all using GNOME/KDE/whatever? It would never work, so it isn't even worth worrying about.
Anyway, knowing this about the way Windows works, it would seem that VNC intercepts these widget drawing calls and passes them over the network. But because Windows programmers have direct access to the hardware, there is no guarantee that every drawing instruction will be passed over the network, meaning the best that VNC can ever be is "good enough" -- it cannot be "true" network transparency. It is always possible (even likely) that an application won't run exactly the same way over the network as it does when you're at the computer itself.
Now, I'm not saying VNC sucks or anything, but my point is that choices were made early on in both the development of Windows and X, and those choices result in Windows doing some stuff a little faster (at the expense of true network transparency and widget freedom).
It's up to us to decide which paradigm is the bette
Slashdot Mirror
Now now, let's not go insulting gay people by associating them with pyramid scammers.
You know, I hope so. But a lot of people parrot this kind of stuff on here. I think the truth is -- and I'm being entirely serious here -- that with a lot of geeks, socializing doesn't come naturally, even with people of their own sex. And most geeks are very smart, capable people, and they're prideful, too, especially with regards to their intelligence. After all, when we were in HS, most of us weren't good at sports, weren't popular, but what we did have was intelligence. We turned the geek monicker around, reclaimed it for ourselves. It was meant to insult us but we wear the label with pride.
Because we're so prideful, we spend a lot of time rationalizing away our shortcomings. We're not good at socializing with people, but we're smart -- it must be that our intellect intimidates them. Or, we belittle social mores as being cultural cruft, saying (in all earnestness) that all that small talk jibber jabber is useless, and that we're choosing not to do it because there's no point. We'd rather not admit that we have a very hard time doing it, and it makes us uncomfortable. We hide behind our intelligence.
Back in HS, jocks taped our buns together and shoved us in lockers and generally tortured us, girls shunned us, and we were generally social outcasts. We are scarred, emotionally, by this treatment. It was cruel, there's no doubt about it. But when I was in college, I had a run in with a bully that tortured me in middle school -- he came up to me, having recognized me, and started making small talk. I didn't know what to do. But it turned out that he was a really nice guy, and it occured to me then that judging a person on actions taken at age 13 wasn't very fair of me; he'd grown a lot since then. He appologized for the way he'd acted. Turns out his home life hadn't been so great.
Anyway, I'm getting off on a tangent here, but my point is, because girls and jocks and the like scare us, we pigeonhole them. We make them out to be 2 dimensional, steryotypical people. We don't bother getting to know them, now that we're out of school and everyone (believe it or not) is a lot more mature. We continue to hide behind our intelligence. We say things like, all those jocks are bagging groceries now, girls just can't think the way we do, etc, etc. And it's silly. It's trite. What it essentially is, is lack of self confidence.
But learning to interact with people is like learning anything, including Linux, Math and Science -- it requires practice and you will be ridiculed for not knowing how to perform basic tasks, just like people on #debian will yell at you for not rtfming and making you feel like a dork for not knowing how to inline assembly into your shell scripts (ha ha), as if everyone can do it.
Learning is tough. Girls, people, social stuff, well, it's scary, and I can appreciate that. But you have to face it, not hide behind silly generalizations and coy superiority. People may not be as smart as you are, when it comes to computers or math, but that's not all there is to intelligence. It's really an extremely worthwhile lesson. And sensitivity, which is hard for us too, and so we belittle it as something "unnecessary and stupid", will get you a long way.
The "girl" thing is especially difficult because unlike with jocks, for the most part, we can't just ignore them -- homosexuals exempted, of course, but I'm sure they get just as nervous talking to a cute guy as we do a cute girl -- because there's the sexual attraction and the need for love and attention from the opposite sex. Anyway, you get where I'm going with this, I'll stop talking now.
This is the last time I'm going to post, because I'm tiring of this thread (and I'll bet you are too) and in all likelyhood we'll never see eye to eye on this. I agree that LiGnuX is stupid. So does RMS, which is the main reason it was dropped.
The HURD is not the name of GNU's OS project. The HURD is the name of the kernel of the GNU System. GNU itself is an OS project. It was created to build a Free UNIX-like OS. It isn't a place like sourceforge that just has a bunch of free projects having nothing to do with each other hosted on it. They had a goal -- to produce the GNU system. HURD is just one part of that. Linux has since then replaced the HURD as the kernel of the GNU system, although RMS and others still believe that the HURD's microkernel design is more elegant than Linux's monolithic one, and hope it will eventually mature. In the meantime, they specify that they are running a Linux-based GNU system. GNU/Linux. The idea for the GNU system goes back to 1984, when the project was founded.
To reiterate, you may not care, and may go ahead and call your whole system Linux if it pleases you, but no one is trying to rename Linux (the kernel). GNU people call their system the GNU system; now, because people mostly run Linux as the kernel of the GNU system, we say GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd (and even GNU/NetBSD) to differentiate. It really isn't complex. I don't care what you call your system. But at least try to understand that no one is trying to steal Linux's baby or take credit away from him.
There are lots of people that claim that there is an inherent difference in processing capabilities between women and men; everytime some crackpot does, it's all over Newsweek and other "scientifically rigorous" sources, like Fox News or CNN. More often than not, the research is not published in peer-reviewed journals. When it has been, all of these claims have been completely debunked, everytime. People used to claim that Black people were more like monkeys than white people, too. There's lots of "scientific evidence" for this from even fairly well respected scientists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Saying that this is complete and utter bullshit is not being politically correct, it's just actually paying attention to science. There's just no basis for it.
You say you're a nerd, but you throw around meaningless trite like "scientific fact" and link to ABC TV as a source of science?
You know, when John Lennon said "woman is the nigger of the world" I thought he was exaggerating, but running into people prattling this sort of ridiculous nonsense just makes my blood boil. You should be ashamed of yourself, really. If you're going to try to convince some backwoods uneducated redneck that women are mentally inferior -- oh no, wait, they aren't inferior, it's just that they suck at math and science and are good at "social things", right? (sarcasm) -- then by all means, go ahead and give them your link.
If you're going to come onto Slashdot and do it, have the decency to respect our intelligence and provide links to peer-reviewed journals with experiments that have been repeated by people that didn't come into the equation already agreeing with the experiment's outcome. Then -- and only then -- will I begin to take this "Women have different mental strengths than men" bullshit.
You call it science, but it's just sexism. Plain and simple.
How right you are! And after thinking about it, I concur that Zorn's Lemma is a necessary prerequisite to making this particular example work. But here's a shot at it, assuming Zorn's:
Let \Omega_n be a function mapping C^{n+1} to C. As a corollary of the Axiom of Choice, R is well ordered; and because R and R^2 have the same cardinality, there exists a bijection between them. Because R^2 is trivially isomorphic to C, we can show easily that if R is well ordered, C is well ordered. Therefore, of the n roots (counting multiplicity) of the polynomial with coefficients a\in C^{n+1}, we can pick one which is the largest, or the smallest. Let \Omega_n(a) be that root.
Then \Omega_n(a) is an analytical solution to the polynomial a_{n+1}x^n + a_n x^{n-1} \ldots a_1. Therefore, by repeated application of polynomial long division and \Omega_n, we can obtain all n roots (including multiplicity) to the polynomial designated by a.
Yes, it requires the Axiom of Choice (so much stuff does) and yes, it uses the rather peculiar well-ordered reals corollary of the axiom of choice, which most mathematicians consider the wierdest of them all, but, if you accept the axiom of choice, this angle should work (although I'm open to flaws in my logic being pointed out to me, of course).
But then, this means that computing Omega_n requires first coming up with a well ordering on the reals. Good luck *grin*
As I said, by analytical we mean an algebraic composition of a restricted set of functions and operators. In Abel's proof, he uses extensions on fields to demonstrate, essentially, that it is impossible to solve an arbitrary polynomial by radicals. This is important because radicals are the inverse functions that solve simple polynomials -- the inverse of x^n is the nth root. So essentially what Abel says is, using addition, subtraction, multiplication, division by non-zero, and any radical functions, it is impossible to derive a general formula for nth order polynomials where n > 4. This is relevant because these are the operations used to construct the polynomial, plus radicals (which are usually used, in simple cases, to invert polynomials).
As for integrals, you can take the definite integral of 1/x dx from 1 to n as the definition of log. It isn't the only one (the trivial definition is just that it's the inverse of e^x, but using an integral definition allows you to use your knowledge of Calculus to derive some other interesting properties of logarithms, just as the inverse function definitions allow you to show simple stuff like log(ab) = log(a) + log(b) and the like.)
But again, in light of our defining log n using integrals: what does it mean to be analytical? We say that you can integrate 1/x analytically, but if I were to tell you that log is defined in terms of the integral of 1/x, would you still say that?
That was the point of my (rather contrived) omega function thing. If I don't restrict the body of operations/functions I am using to construct my analytical solution, I can simply define my solution and say it exists, assuming I can prove it is well-defined.
If you restrict yourself to the "simple" functions like +,-,*,/, roots, trig functions, exponential functions -- all the stuff you learned in high school algebra -- it isn't particularly hard to show that lots and lots of integrals don't have analytical solutions.
In fact, delving deeper, there are a large class of integrals that are not even computable if you use the rather flawed but somewhat simpler Riemann integral to compute them. Lebesgue Integrals are much more general (but unfortunately, rather more complex to motivate).
If Fermat had had HTML, he woulda been able to fermat his own margins...
Do I hear crickets?
Rereading my post, it seems I should have said an n+1 dimensional complex vector, as an nth order polynomial has n+1 terms...
:)
Ah well... You can't win em all
The article in question is slashdotted, but my guess is either that this is media sensationalism, or the writeup is claiming something different from the student -- it seems like perhaps a new way to numerically approximate polynomial roots has been discovered.
... + a_0 where a_n are the elements of said vector. Then, by repeated application of omega and polynomial long division, I have an analytical solution to any polynomial, of any order, in complex space.
However, from what I remember, Abel's theorem was proven using Galois Groups and Field extensions. This implies that what it actually proves is that analytical solutions using a particular set of functions -- in particular, the field operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division by non-zero) extended to include radicals (square, cubic, etc roots), composed in any way possible (as in a ruler and compass construction proof) cannot possibly generate an analytical formula depicting the solution for polynomials of order greater than 4.
Does this mean that an analytical formula using other functions is impossible? Not at all. Trivially, I will define a function called, say, omega, which, given a n-dimensional complex vector, gives a solution to one of the roots of the function a_n * x^n + a_(n-1) * x^(n-1) +
Clearly, this solution is analytical in the sense that it a) provides an exact solution and b) is algebraic in nature. However, it isn't useful, because it depends on a function (omega) which cannot itself be defined analytically in terms of other functions (or at least, not ones we know how to compute).
The reason Abel's proof is so important is because it deals with the 4 fundamental operations that polynomials themselves use (the field ops) and adds radicals, which are inverse ops to the building blocks of polynomials themselves. So it essentially says, we cannot use the functions that we constructed the polynomial with to solve it.
Now, my omega function may seem a little bit contrived to non-math types, but actually a large number of functions are arbitrarily defined this way. Logarithms are a good simple example. An analytical formula for the likes of log n wouldn't be possible either, and yet we study logarithms without having an express analytical means of calculating them.
What you should ask yourself is, what does analytical mean, anyway? It really isn't useful (or correct) to say that no analytical solution exists unless you explicitly restrict what particular set of 'basic' functions/operators the analytical solution can contain. In Abel's case (and it's a beautiful proof, by the way) he uses the field operators plus radicals. But what if you added logarithms into the mix? Exponential functions?
It's impossible to say. If you don't restrict your base, you open yourself up to the attack that I just used with the omega function (which certainly exists, after all, I just defined it.)
This is really late, but I think you really must be daft. RMS doesn't want to rename the Linux project. He wants Linux based OSs to be called GNU/Linux. It shouldn't be such a subtle distinction for someone as apparently technically competent as you.
Linus's project is Linux, the kernel. The kernel is and always will be called Linux, plain and simple -- even RMS calls it Linux.
Linus's project is not Linux + glibc + gcc + binutils + bash + whatever GNU tools are required to produce a system that actually boots into something you can do productive work with. Linus' project is just Linux.
To the non-techinical user, for example, UNIX systems seem to be a command line, because a non-technical user associates the interface to the system with the system itself. So a non-technical user, upon being told that the command line is called bash, might start calling the whole system bash, if left to his own devices. But this would clearly be completely wrong, because bash by itself does nothing at all. Clearly you can understand this.
You keep saying RMS wants to rename Linus' project, heck you've repeated this same claim at least 3 times in this thread. This is blatantly and completely wrong. Since you don't seem to be the special ed type I can only assume you are deliberately overlooking this fact. RMS wants to rename the whole OS, of which only a small part can be credited to Linus and yet which is popularly refered to as simply 'Linux'. He doesn't like the fact that his project developed a whole OS from scratch, minus the kernel, taking 20 years to do so, incorporating the work of lots and lots of selflessly motivated hackers, and that one admittedly very brilliant coder comes along, writes the kernel, drops it into the mix as the last piece of a puzzle, and gets the credit not for writing the kernel, but for writing the whole OS.
Notice that he wants it called GNU/Linux, not RMS/Linux. RMS may be synonymous with GNU but as you pointed out, lots of people have contributed to the GNU project and they all deserve a certain amount of credit.
To recap, RMS himself refers to Linux (Linus' project, the kernel) as Linux. GNU/Linux is Linux + GNU, all the GNU utilities, that make it work. So far, outside of the embedded sphere, there are no distributions that are not packaging GNU with Linux to produce their OS. You could probably hack together BSD/Linux or something, and in that case, calling it GNU/Linux would be foolhardy -- but wouldn't you say that it would be rather weird to call the Linux kernel running with the BSD userland simply Linux? I mean, wouldn't that be a rather different system? Even with a Linux kernel, it would still feel like BSD.
Do you see what I'm getting at? I am not telling you to call the OS GNU/Linux. You can call it whatever you want. But stop saying, for gods sake, that RMS is trying to rename Linus' project, because he isn't. He wants people to understand that the kernel is only a small part of the whole package. The average media drone? I don't expect him to get it. You? You ought to.
As for Emacs, I'm not even going to get into it, because what you're saying is totally false. It seems like you're confused rather than malicious, though. For a more detailed understanding of the situation leading up to the Lucid fork (in which both parties behaved rather badly), go read the info jwz posted on his site.
While I definitely prefer black text on a white background, I have to point out that you missed his point. A book does not have a backlight like a monitor/LCD screen does. It does not shine in your eyes. When a pixel is black, there is no light coming out of it -- as a result, a black background is probably better for your eyes.
However, better for your eyes does not mean more legible.
Wow, and out come the slashbots.
If you actually took the time to reread what I wrote, you would realize (it seems none of my sibling posts have) that I am in fact not comparing Linux to Windows at all.
Instead, what I am doing is making an analogy regarding modular design. It is common sense that a system designed to be stable should minimize the number of components that are so essential that, if they were to crash, would cause the whole system to come down.
In MS Windows, this unfortunately includes the Windows GDI -- for some illuminating reading on some of the core design decisions Microsoft made with NT/XP, check out the ReactOS FAQ and mailing list. In trying to reimplement Windows they've really dug some interesting stuff up (none of it was secret, but now it's all in one place.)
My point is that when someone says, "The reason Windows is fundamentally insecure is because it was designed in a kludgy, non-modular way, where non-essential things like the GDI can crash the whole system," all the Slashdrones immediately understand the insightful nature of the observation. Having the GDI in ring 0 is just braindead.
However, due to their fanatical devotion to Linus -- let me say that I greatly admire the man and consider him one of the best, if not the best, OSS dev out there today -- they take his opinions on the macro/microkernel debate without so much as a critical thought. But as Bob Dylan said, "Even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked."
The truth is, the logic that makes "putting the Windows GDI in the kernel" stupid is the same logic that ought to damn macrokernel-based designs. Here's something interesting for you to contemplate: most Windows cashes happen in drivers, not in the GDI. Actually, the Win32 GDI is quite mature and while a) it probably has caused its share of crashes and b) putting it in the kernel was one of the stupidest design decisions ever, most crashes do not happen because of faults in the GDI these days. They've had a lot of time to iron these bugs out.
The problem is, simply put, drivers. These are mostly written by third parties and due to NT's monolithic kernel design, they are running in kernel space. So a crash in a driver means the whole system comes down.
A microkernel sandboxes things like drivers and has them run in something more like user space; as a result, just as process on Linux can't crash the kernel, a driver on L4 can't crash the kernel.
Now, when Linus started developing Linux, he had a number of very good reasons to go with a monolithic design. One: it was easier, from a design perspective, both for developing and hacking. Two: the major microkernel, CMU Mach (and similarly, GNU Mach) were a) very slow, much too slow to be practical on the 386s that were state of the art in 1991 and b) actually not really all that micro-. Not to mention that GNU Mach, at least, didn't solve the driver problem because it actually ran most drivers in kernel space.
Furthermore, at the time, Linus didn't expect Linux to become what it is today; reading his early posts, he fully expected Hurd to be released RSN and he was just providing something for hackers to mess around with until that happened. And it never happened.
Don't think that by pointing out a problem with Linux that I am in any way against it. I run only Linux, and I'm a zealot by any stretch of the imagination. I just worry about its future -- in the old days, Linux was a Free Software only kind of beast, with all its drivers open source because they were reverse engineered by the community. But look at how fast Linux is gaining popularity: how long will it be before it really does begin to compete with MS on the desktop, and IP-happy hardware vendors start releasing binary drivers en masse?
And then we're back to square one: normal users running non-free blackbox kernel modules written by corps that care nothing f
Interestingly, this criticism of Gates' OS design is reminiscent of one Dr. Andrew S. Tanenbaum's criticism of Linus Torvalds' fledgling kernel, once upon a time.
Criticism, which, frankly, is absolutely on the money. Monolithic operating systems are easy. Writing them that way is the same reason that when you write a program the sloppy way, you write it all in one big file, and when you write it the right way, you seperate the backend from the UI, break the code up into logical segments, put the relevant APIs into their own libraries and link them, etc.
Linux works ok because a) there aren't many binary drivers, yet and b) UNIX like OSs are by design far more modular than VMS-based ones hacked to death with a dull shovel (NT), and so while the kernel may be monolithic, the rest of the system isn't. But ultimately, with computational power where it is right now, the complaint that "microkernels are slower" no longer holds much water for me. Especially when you consider that modern microkernels like L4 really aren't that much slower.
L4-Hurd, baby! Yeah!
Sometimes, I really wonder if people like you bother to think for themselves or just accept whatever ridiculous claims they are spoon fed. It amazes me that you can repeat this sort of mindless propaganda.
I've been to Cuba, and it is nothing like what you describe. While it is true that their government is considerably more authoritarian than the US's has classically been, Cubans arguably have the best overall standards of living, health care, education, etc, of all of Latin America. Their infant mortality rate is lower than the US. While their economic, social and political policies are at odds with the United States', they are by no means the hell hole they are frequently made out to be by the US media.
I think you should read more about Fidel Castro, the man. The Wikipedia entry is a good place to start; it gives a rather balanced viewpoint. As with all Wikipedia articles, read the Talk page too, to see what sorts of debates are going on (especially since the content on the page will most likely have changed by the time you read it).
I'm not a huge Castro fan but frankly I think the man has done a damn site better for his people than the capitalist-but-nonetheless-sadistic puppet dictatorships we Americans have set up throughout Central and South America to further our own trade interests.
The way you talk, it sounds like you're one of those Cuban republicans living in Florida that's still sore about Fidel coming to power in the 50s and nationalizing the industries that made your family wealthy, while the average Cuban starved.
I think the issue here is with majority/minority parties. Le Front National did get 20% (note, not over 30%) of the French vote, but that was widely seen as a "protest" vote (which is an unfortunate phenomenon exacerbated by the french IRV-like system). Jacques Chirac won in a land-slide in the next round.
Anyway, getting back to the point, the GP's point wasn't that reactionary parties don't exist in Europe, just that the "mean" is much further to the left that ours is in the US.
Viewed from this perspective, everyone in the US seems "right wing". Technically, we do have left wing parties -- the Greens, the Communists, etc -- but they don't typically get much attention come Election day.
Essentially, if you take the two most majorly supported parties in any European nation today, they will both be considered "leftist" from a US perspective, while local Europeans might consider one to the left and one to the right. By the same token, they see it in reverse: our two most major parties, from their perspective, both appear to be rather far on the right.
It's really not a way of slamming the US; it's just an observation (and a good one, I think) that because most non-US countries are further to the left politically than the US is, and because Slashdot is read by lots of non-Americans, Americans seem to see rather "leftist" views emphasized on Slashdot as non-American mods mod up views politically consistant with the ones they're comfortable with.
Here we go again, more RMS-bashing.
/sbin/init, for example.
RMS does not want to rename Linux anything at all. Linux is Linux, plain and simple. The problem is, most people think Linux is something it isn't. This is the whole kernel/OS issue. I presume you must know this, given that you read Slashdot, and are simply being deliberately misleading to further your own anti-RMS agenda. But just in case, on the off chance you really don't understand, this is the deal:
Unlike (for example) the Free BSDs, Linux-based Operating Systems are not developed as one centrally managed, coherent project. Rather, they are sort of thrown together from a patchwork quilt of projects written by many, many different people. The kernel, which exists primarily to provide basic low-level services to programs (and by low-level I mean, really, really low level -- I don't mean a command line), is only one part of the whole package. While the remaining required parts were written by a wide spectrum of hackers from all walks of OSS life, a stunningly large number of them wrote for the GNU project.
The kernel is an essential part, yes. But not the only essential part. For example, unless you like inlining int 0x80 calls into your C programs, you probably use a C library to interface with your kernel. Guess who wrote that? If it didn't exist, nothing would run. If you don't write your programs in C, your program's standard library in all likelyhood talks to glibc. You know what that g stands for, right?
In fact, without other programs, the kernel wouldn't even boot. Because Linux based OSs depend on "many processes doing small tasks and doing them well". The Linux kernel by itself depends on
Furthermore (and this is incidental, but worth noting), the Linux kernel is developed against GCC and the GNU binutils chain. Indeed, it doesn't compile properly with any other compiler (even those expressly designed to be drop in replacements for gcc, like Intel's icc or the Pentium optimized pgcc).
In fact, the GNU tools are so ubiquitous that even the BSDs can't manage to do everything on their own, though they would dearly love to. They depend on GCC/binutils if they want to ship a free, development ready system!
Your comment about 'text editor macros that someone else turned into a program' is misleading as well. While it is true that GNU emacs was not the first emacs, GNU emacs is an RMS creation. Like all good OSS projects, it isn't predominently written by its creator anymore -- but then that's true of the Linux kernel also, and so using this as a smear is sort of a non-starter.
RMS is an amazing programmer. So is Linus. Frankly, anyone that says otherwise is insulting OSS in general; these two men are giants. If you want to talk about poor coders becoming OSS leaders, pick on ESR, not RMS. RMS is the real deal.
Anyway, getting over the ad homniem, and back to the GNU/Linux vs Linux issue, the distinction is useful, because the kernel and userland are the userland+kernel are three different beasts that just happen to be related. I can understand people who know nothing about tech being confused about this; I can even understand people that understand the distinction prefering to say simply Linux... but what I absolutely cannot abide is some Slashbot who has, in all likelyhood, never contributed anything of worth to the OSS movement slandering RMS, of all people, based on a misunderstanding of the situation.
The GNU/Linux debacle exists because of the following facts: a) There is, on average, more GNU code than Linux kernel code in even the most stripped down distributions, and (unlike with X or other popular components of a GNU/Linux system that people often bring up) much of it is not optional. b) Technical people like to be precise, and saying "Linux" when you mean the whole OS is decidedly not precise, especially if you hack both user and kernelspace.
If you cannot grok that, I don't know what to say.
I personlly don't care which term you use, or your personal feelings for RMS, but if you're going to criticize, criticize without just pulling stuff out of your rear orifice.
I actually speak French very well. At one point in time, the French subjunctive was actually much more like the modern English subjunctive; reading Moliere one can still see arcane uses like 'si j'eusse' and the like. These have now been replaced with l'indicatif imparfait, and subjunctives NEVER follow si. It is still rather common for people to try to (incorrectly) place a Conditionnel after si, whence the French saying, "Le si n'aime pas le -rait".
The Modern English subjunctive is completely different from the Romance mood of the same name.
The French subjunctive nowadays is mostly just habitual, used in secondary clauses after certain classes of verbs (such as falloir). In those places, its use is not optional and as such one could argue that it doesn't really have any meaning on its own anymore, and has rather taken on a sort of idiomatic sense.
Of course, this is not entirely accurate, because in some places, notably after "croire", using or not using the subjunctive does distinguish between a hypothetical phrase and a non-hypothetical one. But such examples are rare; normally, you must either use the subjunctive in French, or you must not. Choice is uncommon.
As for Spanish, I do not speak it well, and so can't claim to be much of an authority on its use. I know that it retains a much more active subjunctive than French does (in particular, the simple past and imperfect subjunctive continue to be employed in modern speech) but if memory serves, it, like its French counterpart, cannot be selectively employed to change the meaning of a sentence.
Greek, interestingly, has both a Subjunctive and Optative mood, IIRC, and the latter is more like the English subjunctive. I don't remember what the former was, I haven't studied Greek since High School.
As for "was" and "were", I am, alas, an idiot, and you are absolutely correct. Thanks for pointing it out.
Oh, btw, my original post covers the Subjunctive past in English. The Subjunctive present is used in phrases like "They mandated that I be shot for installing Debian on a production server." Compare to French.
Are you including sanction related deaths in that estimate? It seems rather conservative, really.
You should add "and didn't inform me of the shortcoming before I agreed to buy it". Lots of software ships with known bugs, but these are usually non-critical and always reported.
If they aren't, it's definitely fraud. And while I probably wouldn't have called the GP a "fucktard", I agree with the spirit of the comment.
Hi. Grammar Nazi here.
...but may not be fired if it were the vendors fault.
I notice you're making an attempt to use the subjunctive mood. I applaud your efforts! It's a poetic part of the English language that is slowly dying away. But that's no reason to use it incorrectly.
In this case, you should have said 'if it was'. You see, many people aware of the subjunctive mood but unschooled in its arcane ways simply assume that any conditional phrase in the third person using 'to be' ought to substitute 'were' for 'was'. This is actually not the case. The subjunctive mood and indicative mood are both appropriate after 'if', but they mean different things.
The English subjunctive (unlike the French/Spanish mood of the same name, but more like the Ancient Greek optative) indicates that a state is contrary to hypothesis. So, for example, I might say, "If I were a woman, I'd be incredibly attracted to Grammar Nazis". The use of 'were' in this context demonstrates that I am not a woman, and am speaking hypothetically.
Now, consider the phrase: "If he was there, why didn't you talk to him?" This phrase uses the indicative mood, because the second clause is not dependent on me assuming a hypothetical situation. The man in question was there; I am not suggesting he wasn't. Rather, I am calling into question your behaviour given that he was there.
The confusion arises from two uses of the word 'if'. One creates a hypothetical situation and comments on it -- in this case, we use the subjunctive mood. But the other simply establishes a prerequisite condition for the following clause. Your sentence and my latter example both fall into this category. Let's look at why.
Subjunctive: "If the fault were with with the vendor, we would have to have some serious words with them.... But it isn't, so I'm having some serious words with you." I could ommit the italicized portion of the sentence, but the subjunctive 'were' clearly implies that it is, in fact, not the vendor's fault, and that I am speaking hypothetically.
Indicative: "An employee can be badly blamed for a faulty vendor choice, but may not be fired, if it was the vendor's fault." We establish the vendor being at fault as a necessary precondition for our comment; we are discussing what happens if the vendor is at fault. We are not hypothesizing that he is at fault when in fact, he isn't. There is no fact here. We are not speaking contrary to hypothesis; there is no hypothesis.
I know it's pretty tricky, but when mastered, proper use of the subjunctive gives a speaker a certain educated flair that really impresses the ladies... Erm... Yeah.
This announcement was brought to you by GNAA, the Grammar Nazi Association of America.
Everyone keeps bring up MySQL, but MySQL is like Gentoo as far as most Corps are concerned -- and well it should be. If you have serious database needs and don't just want a fast, glorified DB filesystem, use Oracle. If you don't want to shell out any money, use PostgreSQL.
MySQL works great for sites like Slashdot, people's blogs and PHP webapps, but I have never worked for a company that would dream about using MySQL for anything serious, like financial/customer data (which is what most companies use DBs for). It just isn't reliable enough. It is getting better, but its focus has always been in the "be really, really fast" arena (and even there, an optimized PostgreSQL is starting to be pretty competitive).
Lots of commercial (read: proprietary) software for Linux (like Oracle 8) uses libc5, IIRC, which isn't even available much less supported on most distros.
You wrote:
... AND apt-get is NOT the best of them!
Oh yeah? Well then, pray tell, which is better? I'm dying to know! Or were you just talking out of your ass?
FWIW, I agree that installing Debian in this particular case is lunacy. But lobbying IBM to support it is a good idea.
All your points are well made. There is quite a bit of anti-Redhatism, but I think that's mostly because if folks have learned anything working in IT, it's that suits change their POV on issues as soon as someone pulls hard enough on their purse strings.
This hasn't happened yet at companies like Google or Redhat. We all respect them, but we're still nervous about how they'll change when the shit hits the fan. At the moment, Redhat is profitable, and so they have no need to change their business angle. But as competition in the Linux sphere gets more and more cutthroat, you're going to see them doing what all companies do to protect their bottom lines -- making fiscally conservative decisions. And that means that if supporting GPL'd projects isn't profitable, it's going to be the first thing to go. It isn't like this is "evil" or "wrong", it's just a side effect of what Redhat is -- a company. It makes us nervous.
Now, I think your point about how many OSS projects have @redhat contributions on them is a good one, but it's a little deceptive. Redhat pays people to work on OSS projects -- there's nothing wrong with this, in fact I think it's great -- and as a result these hackers are hacking on company time with company e-mail addresses. While all Debian (for example) maintainers have an @debian e-mail address, most of them don't use it for much other than expressly Debian-related activities. Remember that Debian hackers are hacking in their free time. They're rather harder to identify than Redhat hackers because of this.
But they're there. Redhat's Fedora Core takes so much Debian technology it's crazy (this is also good, OSS is about sharing). Before the X.org fork, the Debian X Strike Force maintained such a huge set of patches to X that it practically constituted a fork -- much of it, especially as related to non x86 archs, was never merged in. Now, Branden Robinson and his crew are major contributors to X.org.
Debian has more packages available for it than any other distribution anywhere, because it has more maintainers -- ie, more people officially working on it -- than any other distro. They don't get paid, sure, but it is rather substantial. They're packages are also extremely high quality. Things just don't break on Debian, and Debian stable is just about the only Linux distro anywhere that calls it self stable and actually is, I mean in the BSD/Solaris sense. Put it in a corner and forget about it.
I do have issues with this one point:
It doesnt get thrown onto some mailing list, argued about for a few days, crammed into somebodys bugzilla or wiki, opened and closed three times, moved catagories, sit through a developer moving appartments, ignored by an irc channel with 60 idling people, dissapear into usenet, etc.
Debian, which has no paid developers, arguably gets things fixed faster than virtually any other Distro, and they are very serious about it. The difference is, the bugs they fix are the ones the developers care about, not the ones IBM's high paying customers care about -- unless IBM's high paying customers are paying Debian developers to fix it (which I don't think happens, yet). It's a question of motivation. With Debian, money doesn't really matter -- although of course in practice I'm sure a lot of Debian developers would work fulltime if anyone offered to pay them to.
Anyway, you say Redhat isn't inherently evil, and I agree. But I would not say it's superior either (you didn't expressly say that, but there was the implication).
I agree with what you are saying, but it's irrelevant, because as pretty as eyecandy is, there is no data out there that suggests that it actually makes a system easier to use. In fact, what few studies have been done seem to indicate the opposite.
What makes a system easy to use is a consistant, simple UI. The first Macs were like this; Google is a good modern example. You'll note that neither of these are bloated interfaces.
Now, I'll admit that early Linux didn't have a consistant, elegant UI. But my point is that the added complexity of eye candy does not produce an easy to use interface on its own. So I think your point, as it relates to eye candy, is irrelevant in this discussion (but nonetheless insightful, in an offtopic sort of way.)
You make some good points.
Choosing network transparency as a primary focus of X was a mistake. Better to optimize for the most common usage scenario, and add bells and whistles afterwards.
FWIW, this wasn't how it happened. At the time the X Window System was developed, the desktop computer was not the most common usage scenario; centralized servers with many terminals connected to them were. The X Window System was a natural extension of this paradigm. I wouldn't call network transparency "bells and whistles", given when it was designed.
This begs the question, is network transparency still a relevant feature? I believe it is. You say:
A GUI for administration? No thanks.
which, granted, was in response to me mentioning administration. I'll agree that I don't often need GUI tools (at least on Linux) to administrate a remote system; however, X's network transparency is useful in many other ways. For example, in the computer lab scenario, where a few powerful servers act as clients to a roomfull of diskless X servers. This ends up being cheaper in the long run, because essentially the servers are only monitors and keyboards and as long as their network connections are fast enough they never really need to be upgraded (either hardware or software) to keep up with evolving software and its increasingly demanding hardware requirements.
It's not to save time or increase productivity, but to get that responsive, "snappy" feel which is more pleasant.
On this point, I have to disagree. I think saving time and increasing productivity are of paramount importance. However, I will grant that a responsive, "snappy" feeling is very important and that work should be done to optimise X servers further in order to make this more of a reality. But truth be told, my current Linux system feels snappy enough. It could possibly be just a little bit snappier, but throwing network transparency out the window for that small gain seems silly to me.
That's the irony; the "afterthought" methods like VNC and whatever Windows does work at least as well on the network. VNC is much better than X over high latency links, and it allows you to pull up somebody else's session and share it with them, which is fantastic if you're trying to help them do something in the GUI.
I have never used VNC, but I know that the Windows GDI does not work with drawing primitives, but rather at the widget level, which is one of the reasons that it can be so fast. VNC most likely sends these widget drawing instructions across the network.
This is only possible because Windows has only one widget set, and because that widget set is standardized by a particular group (MS). While many Linux naysayers decry this very aspect of Linux -- that we have so many widget sets -- I personally do not think that in the anarchistic gift economy of OSS that it could be any other way. Could you imagine the outcry that would ensue if someone said that from now on, we're all using GNOME/KDE/whatever? It would never work, so it isn't even worth worrying about.
Anyway, knowing this about the way Windows works, it would seem that VNC intercepts these widget drawing calls and passes them over the network. But because Windows programmers have direct access to the hardware, there is no guarantee that every drawing instruction will be passed over the network, meaning the best that VNC can ever be is "good enough" -- it cannot be "true" network transparency. It is always possible (even likely) that an application won't run exactly the same way over the network as it does when you're at the computer itself.
Now, I'm not saying VNC sucks or anything, but my point is that choices were made early on in both the development of Windows and X, and those choices result in Windows doing some stuff a little faster (at the expense of true network transparency and widget freedom).
It's up to us to decide which paradigm is the bette