Public money shouldn't be spent on teaching software the students can't afford themselves. To complete studies using proprietary software students are inadvertently taught both: how to use the specific software in question and how to steal it so they can do their homework.
Instead of yielding to the idea of teaching 'Industry Standard Software' (as the vendors like to hear us chime), teach students portable design concepts and approaches to using the computer to extend themselves. It's better to cover a few different tools than become dependent on one software's particular metaphors and usability model.
Most students of design are these days entirely dependent on Adobe products, the schools they go to are veritable extensions of the given company's marketing division. Kids come out of school with the same combinations of key presses and clicks as 100's of 1000's of others and have few tools for thinking outside of the workflow and plugin menu of the sole software they're taught on.
In essence, teaching kids to use just one image editor, HTML editor or vector drawing program is to teach them to mistake the tool for the purpose.
With cryptic commands just to copy files Apple will ALWAYS have ~.001% market share. When will Apple get it into their head that programmers shouldn't design user interfaces?
Why doesn't Apple just copy the way Ubuntu does it and get with the 2000's?
* Application bundles - drag and drop install, removal. Ability to drag an.app to anywhere in the file system at any time. App resources all contained in the.app directory structure instead of scattered all over the file system
Firstly it's clear you're talking about emulating OS\X, an installation method I certainly wouldn't like to see as default in any Linux environment near me. I don't want duplicate libraries throughout my (equivalent) ~/Applications directory where they could all be using the same shared library. It's bloated and needless and culls off any chance of a centralised package management system: when on an OS\X system this is something I miss dearly (Fink and Darwin Ports both seem broken and have only a few thousand packages compared to Debian).
Making a ZIP or even ISO (like DMG) with all the libraries statically linked in on Linux is fairly easy and there are already projects which offer this. Why aren't they popular? Perhaps people that try Linux actually find they prefer a system of centralised, security-audited, version-controlled software-management, one that removes the need to go to trawl around websites to find and download software. Having used Debian systems for many years, the 'old' way of aquiring and managing software seems unncessarily backward and time-consuming. I simply don't have the time or interest to upgrade all the software on my system piece by piece, site by site. Yuk. Who would prefer this after using the apt-get update && apt-get upgrade AKA 'drink-beer-instead' method.
Secondly people that believe that libraries and config files on Linux are "scattered all over the filesystem" only point out their lack of understanding - or willingness to understand - why a Linux filesystem is structured as it is. The next time you're on a Linux machine, I thoroughly reccommend giving yourself a little education on the topic by typing the following command into a terminal:
Ive tested on 3 Ubuntu laptops here and found no problem. Here's a little script to test yourselves (can't remember where i found the greppable bit - perhaps a Planet Ubuntu author).
Run this every hour and compare differences in the load count (the last value in the output written to the file 'load_count' in the current directory).. Replace/dev/sda with your own drive. Not sure which? sudo fdisk -l. You'll need smartmontools (sudo apt-get install smartmontools).
I've used 3DSMax and Blender extensively though learnt to be proficient in Maya.
Blender's interface is difficult at first but once learnt I found it more efficient for many tasks - especially rapid mesh-modeling. Moreso, I found Blender's interface much easier on the hands over long periods of working, namely because it prioritises keyboard useage over mouse, has one-key accessible menus (3DSMax has terrible problems here) and distributes mouse input over all three buttons. RSI is a real problem in 3D modeling/animation related work and it's here I think Blender has the one-up. Blender's many keyboard shortcuts need to be learnt for Blender to realise it's real capacity as a tool.
Dell needs to take these things in steed. If Mossberg's criticisms are valid - which they seem to be - then Dell isn't far off from having a system perfectly reccomendable to 'non-techies'. Perhaps then Dell can compete with those preinstalled Ubuntu laptops non-techies do seem to find great out-of-the-box.
Changing the name from the simile of 'cripple' might be a good start.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
gimp
n : disability of walking due to crippling of the legs or feet
[syn: {lameness}, {limping}, {gimpiness}, {gameness}, {claudication}]
Perhaps then community centres and schools might stop thinking it's made by insensitive wankers.
I also have to ask, if they haven't been listening to a prolifera of feature requests/UI changes on the mailing lists why should we believe they're going to listen to them on a blog?
Web 2.Oooh isn't a technology, a thing or even a classifiable approach to client-server engineering. It's the term given to a fad whereby users freely contribute content to increase the bankable assets of entrepreneurs that generally use impossibly complex and dubious EULA's for their own gain.
Perhaps IT staff aren't keen on implementing it because they don't buy into The Silliness. Call it "Capitalism Meets Social Engineering 2.0" and perhaps the guys in suits with MacBooks and artistic mohawks might have takers in IT.
"Praising companies for providing APIs to get your
own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with
gravel. I'm not saying data export isn't important, it's just aiming kinda low.
You mean when I give you data, you'll give it back to me? People who think this
is the pinnacle of freedom aren't really worth listening to."
For those of you wanting to make a proverbial killing of this 'phenomenon' I refer you to a vital dictionary of terms.
I would love to use Opera; after showing such great promise, Firefox has become a great disappointment where performance is concerned. That said I'll probably stick with it and hope for a leaner version (Swiftfox is far from swift enough) as I find it difficult to trust a browser which cannot be rigorously security audited by those that wish to (whether for personal or professional reasons). That said, the great majority of a browser's attack surface can be determined without needing to look at a line of code.
If you believe it's just the Bush administration that's created these problems, then you're the one who needs to stop believing the "popular press".
I most certainly don't believe the problems were soley created by the Bush administration. There has been something of a legacy of similar tactics by American governments since Nixon.
'Policing the world' - primarily to the ends of geo-strategic and economic gain - has been a self-appointed project since America's involvement in WWII.
Agreed. Beyond pissing off the government, you're also encouraging desperate retaliation from other groups (eg terrorism).
Terrorism follows fast in the footsteps of trade embargos and economic sanctions: a fast and reliable way to incite hatred in anyone is to restrict their growth. The one reason some countries are so angry at America is precisely because of it's embargos: the assumption that it has the right to police and punish them economically or otherwise.
The popular press will tell you terrorism is an expression of "a hatred of freedom". It couldn't be farther from the truth: terrorism is so often just a desperate and sadistic act designed as a message: "We want our freedom back - leave us the fuck alone."
The Bush administration has created enough trouble for Americans and people elsewhere - I doubt the angst many countries feel toward America could be greater right now. More embargos would be foolish - and nothing short of dangerous for the American people.
Date Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:54:47 +0200
From Ingo Molnar
Subject Re: [ANNOUNCE/RFC] Really Fair Scheduler
Digg This
* Roman Zippel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm glad to announce a working prototype of the basic algorithm I
> already suggested last time. As I already tried to explain previously
> CFS has a considerable algorithmic and computational complexity. [...]
hey, thanks for working on this, it's appreciated! In terms of merging
your stuff, your patch looks a bit large and because you did not tell us
that you were coding in this area, you probably missed Peter Zijlstra's
excellent CFS work:
http://programming.kicks-ass.net/kernel-patches/sc hed-cfs/
The following portion of Peter's series does much of the core math
changes of what your patch provides (and which makes up for most of the
conceptual delta in your patch), on a step by step basis:
sched-update_weight_inv.patch
sched-se_load.patch
sched-se_load-2.patch
sched-64-wait_runtime.patch
sched-scaled-limit.patch
sched-wait_runtime-scale.patch
sched-calc_delta.patch
So the most intrusive (math) aspects of your patch have been implemented
already for CFS (almost a month ago), in a finegrained way.
Peter's patches change the CFS calculations gradually over from
'normalized' to 'non-normalized' wait-runtime, to avoid the
normalizing/denormalizing overhead and rounding error. Turn off sleeper
fairness, remove the limit code and we should arrive to something quite
close to the core math in your patch, with similar rounding properties
and similar overhead/complexity. (there are some other small details in
the math but this is the biggest item by far.) I find Peter's series
very understandable and he outlined the math arguments in his replies to
your review mails. (would be glad to re-open those discussions though if
you still think there are disagreements.)
Peter's work fully solves the rounding corner-cases you described as:
> This model is far more accurate than CFS is and doesn't add an error
> over time, thus there are no more underflow/overflow anymore within
> the described limits.
( your characterisation errs in that it makes it appear to be a common
problem, while in practice it's only a corner-case limited to extreme
negative nice levels and even there it needs a very high rate of
scheduling and an artificially constructed workload: several hundreds
of thousand of context switches per second with a yield-ing loop to be
even measurable with unmodified CFS. So this is not a 2.6.23 issue at
all - unless there's some testcase that proves the opposite. )
with Peter's queue there are no underflows/overflows either anymore in
any synthetic corner-case we could come up with. Peter's queue works
well but it's 2.6.24 material.
Non-normalized wait-runtime is simply a different unit (resulting in
slightly higher context-switch performance), the principle and the end
result does not change.
All in one, we dont disagree, this is an incremental improvement we are
thinking about for 2.6.24. We do disagree with this being positioned as
something fundamentally different though - it's just the same thing
mathematically, expressed without a "/weight" divisor, resulting in no
change in scheduling behavior. (except for a small shift of CPU
utilization for a synthetic corner-case)
And if we handled that fundamental aspect via Peter's queue, all the
remaining changes you did can be done (and considered and merged)
evolutionarily instead of revolutionarily, ontop of CFS - this should
cut down on the size and the impact of your changes significantly!
So if you'd like to work with us on this and get items that make sense
merged (which we'd very much like to see happen), could you please
re-shape the rest of your changes and ideas (such as whether to use
ready-queueing or a runqueue concept, which does look interesting) ontop
of Peter's queue, and please do it as a finegrained, reviewable,
mergable series of patches, like Peter did. Thanks!
Ingo
The pattern of Microsoft's development and distribution strategies has historically been to create a sickness - in the form of a defective technology - and present itself as the only cure. One of the best examples of this perhaps might be MS getting into the antivirus business.
That said, if Microsoft were to release code under an OSI approved license, it would be foolish to choose not to use it on ideological grounds alone.
Forget revolution, insurrection is where it's at. The more open code the better.
America is certainly a fairly big country but it's far from being a lone influence of the world's technological development and trends.
Per-distro comparisons?
on
Hardening Linux
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In this regard I'm very impressed with the work the Ubuntu developers have done: a netstat -tupa post-install reveals a very small attack-surface where ports are concerned. That said, it would certainly be interesting to see a per-distro comparison at some point.
Anyone know of such a project - even if just comparing a few top-tier distributions?
Perhaps the difference here is semantic, but I think it is absurd to invest in the idea of us "playing a role" in The Universe let alone somehow acting as its primary sensory apparatus. It smacks of a homo-centric romanticism born of the ancient human fear of insignificance. Any thinking creature will probably have this fear at some point. It cannot, however, be escaped that our experience itself is already part of the Universe; both 'it' and one of its many effects. The value is in this experience, our experience.
The most beautiful thing about the universe is the experience of beauty itself - that's what the author is afraid of 'ending'. The art is just a vehicle to aid the production of rich experiences that give pleasure and/or provide basis for insight. That makes these experiences - and the art we use as symbolic containers for them - no less significant. However, they are not important to a thing called The Universe. Instead, they actively produce it.
The Universe is a concept. Our experience of the universe is conceptual and absolutely mediated. As conceptual tools like Maths, Chemistry or Poetry develop the Universe Concept develops. That's what we're developing, that's the work. In other words, our experience of the Universe is ineluctably intertwined with what we think 'it' is. There is no The Universe without this experience and it's not possible to prove otherwise. When you die, you will not be experiencing this 'Universe'.
To believe that we're the eyes and ears of The World, let alone have "a role", or that our art is innately, platonically important to it, is vain stupidity born of a primary mortal fear of absolute pointlessness. There is no job, there is nothing to 'do', no noble charter. I realise that might be terrifying for some people, the author included.
It's not just a tragedy for us, but also one for nature. Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty; no one to marvel at a sunset, revel in a view, or thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach.
.. and why should this 'nature' care about our flattering gaze? How ridiculous.
We are no less nature than a rock, orchid, river-in-valley scene. Strawberry cheesecake, RFID card readers, Teletubbies, pulp-fiction and compiler flags are as much a part of 'nature' as anything else. It's the 21st century and people are still hung up on these bizarre Cartesian dichotomies of humans and human life somehow being separate from this mythical 'nature'.
With every reinforcement of human life being separate from 'nature' we're stepping away from the brutal reality that we are inextricably a part of it. No amount of HVAC, terraforming, space-travel, avatarial projection can veer us from this primary condition. As long as we invest in the fiction of us being less-nature-than-nature we'll continue to produce environments that work against us; that reduce the options for our descendents and other feeling creatures. We're a part of nature. Get over it.
Go to Dell's UK site and do a search for Ubuntu. No products offered.
So, let me get this straight: having heard of hearing of Dell's plans to sell laptops with Ubuntu in the U.K - announced 24 hours ago - you've been to their website to look for said laptop, not found it and went on to configure and buy a Toshiba with Windows on it instead. Shortly afterward you came here to angrily inform us that the offering is nothing but hot air - an attempt to get free publicity and take advantage of lower margins on software from Microsoft Holland's Dutch CEO.
You're clearly a person of great principle with very little free-time on your hands. Are you what they call a power consumer?
"if it's so good, why would you give it away for free"?"
1. So you can leverage the competitive advantage of selling service and support instead of service, support and and the artifice of a digital copy of the software itself.
2. By making it as Free as possible you lower the entry barrier to a vast international body of security researchers and software developers to both audit and improve the codebase of software they are dependent on.
Note: You no longer need whiz-bang-boom scripts like Automatix to install the proprietary codecs easily in Ubuntu.
Since Ubuntu 7.04 you simply click on a media file and if you don't have the necessary codecs Ubuntu will download and install it for you. You merely need to click a button. Short of having them onboard already (not that Windows or OS/X do) it couldn't be easier.
The only pitfalls are that you need to be online at the time and that in America it's not entirely legal to redistribute some of these codecs... to a Linux system or otherwise. Perhaps Canonical will arrange for some client-side interface between the non-free repos and PayPal. This may resolve the problem for those people that live in America and feel they need playback support for this sort of content.
Slashdot Mirror
Public money shouldn't be spent on teaching software the students can't afford themselves. To complete studies using proprietary software students are inadvertently taught both: how to use the specific software in question and how to steal it so they can do their homework.
Instead of yielding to the idea of teaching 'Industry Standard Software' (as the vendors like to hear us chime), teach students portable design concepts and approaches to using the computer to extend themselves. It's better to cover a few different tools than become dependent on one software's particular metaphors and usability model.
Most students of design are these days entirely dependent on Adobe products, the schools they go to are veritable extensions of the given company's marketing division. Kids come out of school with the same combinations of key presses and clicks as 100's of 1000's of others and have few tools for thinking outside of the workflow and plugin menu of the sole software they're taught on.
In essence, teaching kids to use just one image editor, HTML editor or vector drawing program is to teach them to mistake the tool for the purpose.
Why doesn't Apple just copy the way Ubuntu does it and get with the 2000's?
Pride is what it is. That damned pride!
Making a ZIP or even ISO (like DMG) with all the libraries statically linked in on Linux is fairly easy and there are already projects which offer this. Why aren't they popular? Perhaps people that try Linux actually find they prefer a system of centralised, security-audited, version-controlled software-management, one that removes the need to go to trawl around websites to find and download software. Having used Debian systems for many years, the 'old' way of aquiring and managing software seems unncessarily backward and time-consuming. I simply don't have the time or interest to upgrade all the software on my system piece by piece, site by site. Yuk. Who would prefer this after using the apt-get update && apt-get upgrade AKA 'drink-beer-instead' method.
Secondly people that believe that libraries and config files on Linux are "scattered all over the filesystem" only point out their lack of understanding - or willingness to understand - why a Linux filesystem is structured as it is. The next time you're on a Linux machine, I thoroughly reccommend giving yourself a little education on the topic by typing the following command into a terminal:
man hier
Ive tested on 3 Ubuntu laptops here and found no problem. Here's a little script to test yourselves (can't remember where i found the greppable bit - perhaps a Planet Ubuntu author).
/dev/sda with your own drive. Not sure which? sudo fdisk -l. You'll need smartmontools (sudo apt-get install smartmontools).
/dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count` " | " `date` >> load_count
Run this every hour and compare differences in the load count (the last value in the output written to the file 'load_count' in the current directory).. Replace
echo `sudo smartctl -a
If the difference in this count is more than 90 from one hour to the next you may be in trouble if there is anything to this wear and tear fear.
I've used 3DSMax and Blender extensively though learnt to be proficient in Maya.
Blender's interface is difficult at first but once learnt I found it more efficient for many tasks - especially rapid mesh-modeling. Moreso, I found Blender's interface much easier on the hands over long periods of working, namely because it prioritises keyboard useage over mouse, has one-key accessible menus (3DSMax has terrible problems here) and distributes mouse input over all three buttons. RSI is a real problem in 3D modeling/animation related work and it's here I think Blender has the one-up. Blender's many keyboard shortcuts need to be learnt for Blender to realise it's real capacity as a tool.
How is Apple's iPhone 'open' exactly?
Dell needs to take these things in steed. If Mossberg's criticisms are valid - which they seem to be - then Dell isn't far off from having a system perfectly reccomendable to 'non-techies'. Perhaps then Dell can compete with those preinstalled Ubuntu laptops non-techies do seem to find great out-of-the-box.
Perhaps then community centres and schools might stop thinking it's made by insensitive wankers.
I also have to ask, if they haven't been listening to a prolifera of feature requests/UI changes on the mailing lists why should we believe they're going to listen to them on a blog?
Perhaps IT staff aren't keen on implementing it because they don't buy into The Silliness. Call it "Capitalism Meets Social Engineering 2.0" and perhaps the guys in suits with MacBooks and artistic mohawks might have takers in IT.
As Mark Pilgrim so eloquently put it: For those of you wanting to make a proverbial killing of this 'phenomenon' I refer you to a vital dictionary of terms.
I would love to use Opera; after showing such great promise, Firefox has become a great disappointment where performance is concerned. That said I'll probably stick with it and hope for a leaner version (Swiftfox is far from swift enough) as I find it difficult to trust a browser which cannot be rigorously security audited by those that wish to (whether for personal or professional reasons). That said, the great majority of a browser's attack surface can be determined without needing to look at a line of code.
'Policing the world' - primarily to the ends of geo-strategic and economic gain - has been a self-appointed project since America's involvement in WWII.
Agreed. Beyond pissing off the government, you're also encouraging desperate retaliation from other groups (eg terrorism).
Terrorism follows fast in the footsteps of trade embargos and economic sanctions: a fast and reliable way to incite hatred in anyone is to restrict their growth. The one reason some countries are so angry at America is precisely because of it's embargos: the assumption that it has the right to police and punish them economically or otherwise.
The popular press will tell you terrorism is an expression of "a hatred of freedom". It couldn't be farther from the truth: terrorism is so often just a desperate and sadistic act designed as a message: "We want our freedom back - leave us the fuck alone."
The Bush administration has created enough trouble for Americans and people elsewhere - I doubt the angst many countries feel toward America could be greater right now. More embargos would be foolish - and nothing short of dangerous for the American people.
You probably want to wait until late October for the 'Phase 2' Moko as it offers a fair bit more than the current iteration. Like:
* 802.11 b/g WiFi
* Samsung 2442 SoC
* SMedia 3362 Graphics Accelerator
* 2 3D Accelerometers
* 256MB Flash
* 1700mAh Battery
* Faster CPU - S3C2442/400
* LEDs illuminating the two buttons.
First you buy the iPhone and then you pay more to unlock it? Is that how much 'freedom' costs?
Next thing we know Apple will buy-out the company and start selling unlocked iPhones at a premium..
At the risk of sounding trollish, the pro-consumer OpenMoko looks very appealing in light of Apple's good-looking but artificially tied-down device.
The pattern of Microsoft's development and distribution strategies has historically been to create a sickness - in the form of a defective technology - and present itself as the only cure. One of the best examples of this perhaps might be MS getting into the antivirus business.
That said, if Microsoft were to release code under an OSI approved license, it would be foolish to choose not to use it on ideological grounds alone.
Forget revolution, insurrection is where it's at. The more open code the better.
As a guide,Europe has more internet users than the entire population of America itself. Oh, and then there's the other billion or so internet users in those other countries.
America is certainly a fairly big country but it's far from being a lone influence of the world's technological development and trends.
In this regard I'm very impressed with the work the Ubuntu developers have done: a netstat -tupa post-install reveals a very small attack-surface where ports are concerned. That said, it would certainly be interesting to see a per-distro comparison at some point.
Anyone know of such a project - even if just comparing a few top-tier distributions?
Perhaps the difference here is semantic, but I think it is absurd to invest in the idea of us "playing a role" in The Universe let alone somehow acting as its primary sensory apparatus. It smacks of a homo-centric romanticism born of the ancient human fear of insignificance. Any thinking creature will probably have this fear at some point. It cannot, however, be escaped that our experience itself is already part of the Universe; both 'it' and one of its many effects. The value is in this experience, our experience.
The most beautiful thing about the universe is the experience of beauty itself - that's what the author is afraid of 'ending'. The art is just a vehicle to aid the production of rich experiences that give pleasure and/or provide basis for insight. That makes these experiences - and the art we use as symbolic containers for them - no less significant. However, they are not important to a thing called The Universe. Instead, they actively produce it.
The Universe is a concept. Our experience of the universe is conceptual and absolutely mediated. As conceptual tools like Maths, Chemistry or Poetry develop the Universe Concept develops. That's what we're developing, that's the work. In other words, our experience of the Universe is ineluctably intertwined with what we think 'it' is. There is no The Universe without this experience and it's not possible to prove otherwise. When you die, you will not be experiencing this 'Universe'.
To believe that we're the eyes and ears of The World, let alone have "a role", or that our art is innately, platonically important to it, is vain stupidity born of a primary mortal fear of absolute pointlessness. There is no job, there is nothing to 'do', no noble charter. I realise that might be terrifying for some people, the author included.
We are no less nature than a rock, orchid, river-in-valley scene. Strawberry cheesecake, RFID card readers, Teletubbies, pulp-fiction and compiler flags are as much a part of 'nature' as anything else. It's the 21st century and people are still hung up on these bizarre Cartesian dichotomies of humans and human life somehow being separate from this mythical 'nature'.
With every reinforcement of human life being separate from 'nature' we're stepping away from the brutal reality that we are inextricably a part of it. No amount of HVAC, terraforming, space-travel, avatarial projection can veer us from this primary condition. As long as we invest in the fiction of us being less-nature-than-nature we'll continue to produce environments that work against us; that reduce the options for our descendents and other feeling creatures. We're a part of nature. Get over it.
You're clearly a person of great principle with very little free-time on your hands. Are you what they call a power consumer?
Let's hope they can de-complexify SUSE's YAST. Few things could make Linux look more complex to fresh eyes.
2. By making it as Free as possible you lower the entry barrier to a vast international body of security researchers and software developers to both audit and improve the codebase of software they are dependent on.
Note: You no longer need whiz-bang-boom scripts like Automatix to install the proprietary codecs easily in Ubuntu.
... to a Linux system or otherwise. Perhaps Canonical will arrange for some client-side interface between the non-free repos and PayPal. This may resolve the problem for those people that live in America and feel they need playback support for this sort of content.
Since Ubuntu 7.04 you simply click on a media file and if you don't have the necessary codecs Ubuntu will download and install it for you. You merely need to click a button. Short of having them onboard already (not that Windows or OS/X do) it couldn't be easier.
The only pitfalls are that you need to be online at the time and that in America it's not entirely legal to redistribute some of these codecs