Well, unless you mean to tell us that OS X is bullet proof, and that nothing can cross its security (in which case I'll readily dismiss you as another lunatic), I don't what the point is. I still feel the same attitude around. I'm typing this on a mac, partly because of the influence some of my mac owning friends had over me (or, rather the influence their computers had over me), yet all I see from them is that same attitude. Truth be told, I am, for the time being, content with the results of security by obscurity (neither this laptop nor my linux box are likely targets), but I know for a fact that neither OS is bullet proof, and that the biggest reason no one bothers cracking them is because that wouldn't really get them much attention, or results.
Still, I'm afraid to tell you that Windows's theoretical security model is much more robust than the base Unix system (ACLs versus the muchs simpler owner/group/all permissions), and that the 2 great big problems with windows security are 1. user attitude and 2. bad implementation. I'd consider the former much more grievous than the latter, and I do blame it on Microsoft, for having worked to ensure that everyone still works as administrator at the close of 2005. OS X does promote quite the opposite, the more traditional NIX way (can't really vouch for prior versions) of working as a non-admin user, but that's not really the only thing that matters, is it?
I started off by programming lego robots with quickbasic (in those times, we had an ISA interface board for the 4.5V motors, and issued direct hardware commands for the stuff. I only fully understood that many years later, though). Then I hopped to pascal. Next came Mathematica, and then C. php came next. All of these were done at school/university in some fashion. After this I started self-learning python, perl, bash, sed, awk, and all those mini-languages that those powerful linux tools use. I also did Java and C# at some point in between, but both of those left a sour taste.
If you want my opinion, one of the interpreted languages (python, perl or shell) is best. If you use linux, or are planning on it, I'd reccomend bash, on the basis that it's very very easy to use it to create productive things. On the other hand, I never really felt the desire to take it beyond the one-liner state, at which it is emminently useful. I can, and do, debug (at an elementary level) other people's shell scripts, so even basic knowledge is quite useful.
for a more robust language, either python or perl would do. Which one depends on your personality. Amongst other things, it involves how orderly you are.
If you are quite orderly, either will do. Just get disciplined in the ways of writing pretty code and go on ahead. If you are unorderly but see it as flaw, take up python. It'll make you become orderly. Or take up perl, and you'll learn soon enough how your unorderliness will bite your arse. If you are unorderly and like it, do perl. And pray to $DEITY that your own messiness doesn't bite you before you get a grip on programming.
All in all, I'd leave C/C++ for later. When you grasp the basic concepts of programming, and understand high-level data structures that python/perl take for granted, you'll be in a fine state to start working downwards and understanding how those structures are built. Personally, I don't like Java or C#, irrespectively of the extensive frameworks they provide (which, make no mistake, are quite useful).
Also known as "Don't use one of the major new features". Given that, since the other really major (in MS's marketing) feature is a new GUI, that I haven't really seen do that much. Why upgrade exactly?
Calm down!
What he said is that studies regarding open source versus proprietary software aren't particularly easy to interpret, and that p2p/piracy/DRM relating to sales drops studies aren't any better.
I'm portuguese. I have healthcare. I don't have any sort of access to video over the internet, unless you mean bittorrent and friends. What was your point, exactly?
Oh, and "easy to make video content", easily distributed over the internet is only a hairsbreadth away. Look at how podcasting is becoming increasingly common. The people who have an interest in "easy to make video content" don't have an interest in having their content protected from the evil pirates. They're the ones who wanted easily spread.
In short: You overvalue video. And I still can't read a point into your post.
Since you know for a fact that no system can be consistent and complete at the same time, given enough complexity, there are two ways of making law: you make sure all criminals go to jail, and send quite a few innocents to jail as well, or you make sure no innocents go to jail, and let some criminals go free.
Usually lawmakers are expected to do the latter. The way there are laws about collecting evidence, so that it becomes harder to plant some, for example. All those chaps who get away on a technicality do so because the technicality's in place to keep the good guys out of jail.
Now, you're suggesting we take the other path. Are you sure you want to go there?
Well, his good deed put his honesty in doubt. And if his honesty is in doubt, and he's publishing big results, his results are in doubt. Therefore, he was put aside. Simple, if a bit heartless -- but then you have to keep in mind the purity of ethics expected from a researcher.
Ah! But that only happened (again) after apple introduced the 17" powerbooks (or so it seems).
In general, however, notebooks are really starting to catch up to desktops except on the high-end. If you have the choice of two moslty similar computers at mostly similar prices, and only one is portable, which one do you buy? This way, you have ONE machine (cheaper) that's pretty decent, rather than two machines, at least one of which (the very small notebook) can't possibly be particularly powerful. For most people, that's an advantage. Me? I'm hopefully going to buy the 12" iBook tomorrow:-)
well, try and get some technical know how please. WAV/CD/Whatever audio IS compressed. Except that the compression method is essentially "all bits that fall outside the bitrate are clipped".
Whatever masters they generate your CDs from, they're most likely at a higher bit/sample rate than your average CD. Either you just "compress" by clipping to your desired data rate, without any funky stuff, or you use a more effective compression method, and make mp3s out of the masters. If you ask me, I'd vote for the mp3s as being better quality. Kind of like the way mpeg 4 compresses better than mpeg 2 for the same quality (if both are derived from the same source, as opposed to generating a divx (mpeg 4) file from a DVD (mepg 2)).
Er, I think he means that any retaliation (fair or not) would be seen in the light of the lawsuit, independently of its merits. Which is a bad thing.
IF the courts decide in favor of AMD, then sure. Until then, this is something on trial, and shouldn't be acted upon by the authorities -- even if we'd like them to!
Well, not to say I think this is all that great, but how many of those points would have the exact same response relative to him or a "regular" sports star?
1? 2? all? I mean, tony hawk is definitely one of the all time best skaters in the world, yet he has all the hawk gear. Matt Hoffman has his own brand of bikes (Hoffman Bikes) because no bike on the market suited his needs (granted, I doubt this applies to clothing). Tennis players are given big sponsorships just on the hope that some sad bastard will think that he's Agassi just because his racket is just like the pro's. Ditto for whatever other sport you name; sponsors aren't on it for the goodness of their corporate hearts!
So, will all olympic medalists please start producing something palpable, in the case we have a recession?
Oh, and a 43 old gamer, if sad, is probably a lot more feasible than a 43 year old . Except, eventually, that I doubt anyone would sponsor one...
there is a great big difference between leds and fans and fans with leds and UV-reactive everything that lights up to the beat of whatever music you're playing and a somewhat discrete (in comparison) engraving of an animal on the top plate. It doesn't interfere with anything, it makes the computer a tad more personal. And the actual engraving is beautiful (at least in my opinion --but I'm a vi person...)
Well, AFAIK, the HTT thing only allows for the processor to sort of split execution units (FPU, ALU, etc) so that one can work on one thread, the other on another one. If an application resorts heavily to one of those units -- and my somewhat uninformed feeling is that software like SQL probably works mostly on the ALU, it, can't possibly GAIN performance. On the other hand, I can see the effort of thrying to pigeonhole the idle threads on the wrong execution unit (will it even try that?) completely borking performance. So yeah, no surprises here.
Except ubuntu didn't give $2M to the cause, Red Hat did. That counts for something. And I do find it fair that the chap who gave $2M gets his name on the computer, rather than his direct competitor -- which is what Ubuntu is rapidly growing into.
"Modern" Java applications run on top of swing, which is meant to be a platform independent, consistent-looking interface (consistent look for all java apps no matter where they run, rather than consistent with the platform). That means menus where they want them, rather than where the OS wants them. OSX, however, follows some simple but effective rules for interface design, including good understanding of Fitts's Law. This means that that menu bar up there, as weird as it might look for users of other operating systems, is acutally placed at the best possible spot. It has nothing to do with "limited pixels" or any such ideas. Incidentally, nobody else copied them because they patented the design (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong), rather than because their design was poor. By the time the patent expired (a few years ago), most people were already used to the windows model (or whatever you want to call it), and actually changing the interface would have the effect of people going "different! bad!" and not accepting a change that would work for their own benefit.
Well, a crazy hippie who wrote gcc (I won't argue that he wrote emacs -- I'm a vim person). That gives the hippie a bit of leeway, as far as I'm concerned;-)
Building the processor costs x money/chip. Creating a disk image and copying it to each computer costs, perhaps, x/1000 money / computer. So your point about getting the processor for free is moot. I mean, we're not talking about the "0$ dollar" laptop, we're talking about the "100$ laptop". Those 100$ have to go somewhere. If you can make that somewhere NOT be the operating system, that means you can afford to make the machine itself better. So much for your comment regarding the free (or not) processors.
Regarding the "open source processor", well, open source software is pretty mature. Sure, possibly not as easy to work with, or as pretty as **some** proprietary software, but mature nonetheless. It works quite well, especially if you give it a well known hardware configuration (does this ring a bell?). The concept of open source hardware is quite young, untested, and not available in large scale. Just the same as there is a difference between not eating pork because it's against your religion or killing people in the name of your god, there's keeping to your principles while making small sacrifices (if you want to call a red hat-based solution a sacrifice versus OSX), and having to jump through hoops and delay the whole process for years because of those principles. As in everything, you have to reach some sort of compromise.
Well, by definition you can't possibly have freely distributable.debs or.rpms for commercial software unless the vendor allows it. In id's case, they don't (and have repeatedly asked distros NOT to distribute the Doom 3 installer). In nvidia's case, they do allow it, and installation of my graphics card's drivers was smooth because of it. That doesn't invalidate that the "Package Search UI" model -- which is a gross oversimplification of the apt system, that resolves dependencies and installs them correctly by default -- is quite good.
Slashdot Mirror
but no news headlines
Well, unless you mean to tell us that OS X is bullet proof, and that nothing can cross its security (in which case I'll readily dismiss you as another lunatic), I don't what the point is. I still feel the same attitude around. I'm typing this on a mac, partly because of the influence some of my mac owning friends had over me (or, rather the influence their computers had over me), yet all I see from them is that same attitude. Truth be told, I am, for the time being, content with the results of security by obscurity (neither this laptop nor my linux box are likely targets), but I know for a fact that neither OS is bullet proof, and that the biggest reason no one bothers cracking them is because that wouldn't really get them much attention, or results.
Still, I'm afraid to tell you that Windows's theoretical security model is much more robust than the base Unix system (ACLs versus the muchs simpler owner/group/all permissions), and that the 2 great big problems with windows security are 1. user attitude and 2. bad implementation. I'd consider the former much more grievous than the latter, and I do blame it on Microsoft, for having worked to ensure that everyone still works as administrator at the close of 2005. OS X does promote quite the opposite, the more traditional NIX way (can't really vouch for prior versions) of working as a non-admin user, but that's not really the only thing that matters, is it?
I started off by programming lego robots with quickbasic (in those times, we had an ISA interface board for the 4.5V motors, and issued direct hardware commands for the stuff. I only fully understood that many years later, though). Then I hopped to pascal. Next came Mathematica, and then C. php came next. All of these were done at school/university in some fashion. After this I started self-learning python, perl, bash, sed, awk, and all those mini-languages that those powerful linux tools use. I also did Java and C# at some point in between, but both of those left a sour taste.
If you want my opinion, one of the interpreted languages (python, perl or shell) is best. If you use linux, or are planning on it, I'd reccomend bash, on the basis that it's very very easy to use it to create productive things. On the other hand, I never really felt the desire to take it beyond the one-liner state, at which it is emminently useful. I can, and do, debug (at an elementary level) other people's shell scripts, so even basic knowledge is quite useful.
for a more robust language, either python or perl would do. Which one depends on your personality. Amongst other things, it involves how orderly you are.
If you are quite orderly, either will do. Just get disciplined in the ways of writing pretty code and go on ahead. If you are unorderly but see it as flaw, take up python. It'll make you become orderly. Or take up perl, and you'll learn soon enough how your unorderliness will bite your arse. If you are unorderly and like it, do perl. And pray to $DEITY that your own messiness doesn't bite you before you get a grip on programming.
All in all, I'd leave C/C++ for later. When you grasp the basic concepts of programming, and understand high-level data structures that python/perl take for granted, you'll be in a fine state to start working downwards and understanding how those structures are built. Personally, I don't like Java or C#, irrespectively of the extensive frameworks they provide (which, make no mistake, are quite useful).
Yes they do -- some of them. 12" iBooks and powerbooks don't have them. 15-17" powerbooks (and possibly 14" iBooks) do.
Objective C would be a wonder then. Strict superset of C (unlike C++), and its OO layer grabs a lot fro smalltalk, from what I've heard.
Also known as "Don't use one of the major new features". Given that, since the other really major (in MS's marketing) feature is a new GUI, that I haven't really seen do that much. Why upgrade exactly?
Calm down! What he said is that studies regarding open source versus proprietary software aren't particularly easy to interpret, and that p2p/piracy/DRM relating to sales drops studies aren't any better.
I'm portuguese. I have healthcare. I don't have any sort of access to video over the internet, unless you mean bittorrent and friends. What was your point, exactly?
Oh, and "easy to make video content", easily distributed over the internet is only a hairsbreadth away. Look at how podcasting is becoming increasingly common. The people who have an interest in "easy to make video content" don't have an interest in having their content protected from the evil pirates. They're the ones who wanted easily spread.
In short: You overvalue video. And I still can't read a point into your post.
Since you know for a fact that no system can be consistent and complete at the same time, given enough complexity, there are two ways of making law: you make sure all criminals go to jail, and send quite a few innocents to jail as well, or you make sure no innocents go to jail, and let some criminals go free. Usually lawmakers are expected to do the latter. The way there are laws about collecting evidence, so that it becomes harder to plant some, for example. All those chaps who get away on a technicality do so because the technicality's in place to keep the good guys out of jail. Now, you're suggesting we take the other path. Are you sure you want to go there?
dual core? That'd be a step back. They already have what amounts to 20 cores or whatever amount of pipes they have these days!
Well, his good deed put his honesty in doubt. And if his honesty is in doubt, and he's publishing big results, his results are in doubt. Therefore, he was put aside. Simple, if a bit heartless -- but then you have to keep in mind the purity of ethics expected from a researcher.
Ah! But that only happened (again) after apple introduced the 17" powerbooks (or so it seems).
:-)
In general, however, notebooks are really starting to catch up to desktops except on the high-end. If you have the choice of two moslty similar computers at mostly similar prices, and only one is portable, which one do you buy? This way, you have ONE machine (cheaper) that's pretty decent, rather than two machines, at least one of which (the very small notebook) can't possibly be particularly powerful. For most people, that's an advantage. Me? I'm hopefully going to buy the 12" iBook tomorrow
well, try and get some technical know how please. WAV/CD/Whatever audio IS compressed. Except that the compression method is essentially "all bits that fall outside the bitrate are clipped".
Whatever masters they generate your CDs from, they're most likely at a higher bit/sample rate than your average CD. Either you just "compress" by clipping to your desired data rate, without any funky stuff, or you use a more effective compression method, and make mp3s out of the masters. If you ask me, I'd vote for the mp3s as being better quality. Kind of like the way mpeg 4 compresses better than mpeg 2 for the same quality (if both are derived from the same source, as opposed to generating a divx (mpeg 4) file from a DVD (mepg 2)).
Er, I think he means that any retaliation (fair or not) would be seen in the light of the lawsuit, independently of its merits. Which is a bad thing.
IF the courts decide in favor of AMD, then sure. Until then, this is something on trial, and shouldn't be acted upon by the authorities -- even if we'd like them to!
Well, not to say I think this is all that great, but how many of those points would have the exact same response relative to him or a "regular" sports star?
1? 2? all? I mean, tony hawk is definitely one of the all time best skaters in the world, yet he has all the hawk gear. Matt Hoffman has his own brand of bikes (Hoffman Bikes) because no bike on the market suited his needs (granted, I doubt this applies to clothing). Tennis players are given big sponsorships just on the hope that some sad bastard will think that he's Agassi just because his racket is just like the pro's. Ditto for whatever other sport you name; sponsors aren't on it for the goodness of their corporate hearts!
So, will all olympic medalists please start producing something palpable, in the case we have a recession?
Oh, and a 43 old gamer, if sad, is probably a lot more feasible than a 43 year old . Except, eventually, that I doubt anyone would sponsor one...
Well, that's all very pretty.
But his ping would suck
there is a great big difference between leds and fans and fans with leds and UV-reactive everything that lights up to the beat of whatever music you're playing and a somewhat discrete (in comparison) engraving of an animal on the top plate. It doesn't interfere with anything, it makes the computer a tad more personal. And the actual engraving is beautiful (at least in my opinion --but I'm a vi person...)
Well, since "duplicate" boils into "dupe", I'd have to say that short for triplicate would be "tripe".
Well, AFAIK, the HTT thing only allows for the processor to sort of split execution units (FPU, ALU, etc) so that one can work on one thread, the other on another one. If an application resorts heavily to one of those units -- and my somewhat uninformed feeling is that software like SQL probably works mostly on the ALU, it, can't possibly GAIN performance. On the other hand, I can see the effort of thrying to pigeonhole the idle threads on the wrong execution unit (will it even try that?) completely borking performance. So yeah, no surprises here.
Except ubuntu didn't give $2M to the cause, Red Hat did. That counts for something. And I do find it fair that the chap who gave $2M gets his name on the computer, rather than his direct competitor -- which is what Ubuntu is rapidly growing into.
"Modern" Java applications run on top of swing, which is meant to be a platform independent, consistent-looking interface (consistent look for all java apps no matter where they run, rather than consistent with the platform). That means menus where they want them, rather than where the OS wants them. OSX, however, follows some simple but effective rules for interface design, including good understanding of Fitts's Law. This means that that menu bar up there, as weird as it might look for users of other operating systems, is acutally placed at the best possible spot. It has nothing to do with "limited pixels" or any such ideas. Incidentally, nobody else copied them because they patented the design (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong), rather than because their design was poor. By the time the patent expired (a few years ago), most people were already used to the windows model (or whatever you want to call it), and actually changing the interface would have the effect of people going "different! bad!" and not accepting a change that would work for their own benefit.
Well, a crazy hippie who wrote gcc (I won't argue that he wrote emacs -- I'm a vim person). That gives the hippie a bit of leeway, as far as I'm concerned ;-)
Building the processor costs x money/chip. Creating a disk image and copying it to each computer costs, perhaps, x/1000 money / computer. So your point about getting the processor for free is moot. I mean, we're not talking about the "0$ dollar" laptop, we're talking about the "100$ laptop". Those 100$ have to go somewhere. If you can make that somewhere NOT be the operating system, that means you can afford to make the machine itself better. So much for your comment regarding the free (or not) processors. Regarding the "open source processor", well, open source software is pretty mature. Sure, possibly not as easy to work with, or as pretty as **some** proprietary software, but mature nonetheless. It works quite well, especially if you give it a well known hardware configuration (does this ring a bell?). The concept of open source hardware is quite young, untested, and not available in large scale. Just the same as there is a difference between not eating pork because it's against your religion or killing people in the name of your god, there's keeping to your principles while making small sacrifices (if you want to call a red hat-based solution a sacrifice versus OSX), and having to jump through hoops and delay the whole process for years because of those principles. As in everything, you have to reach some sort of compromise.
Except that in 1984, GB was politically subordinated to the US. Which they aren't Wait a sec... Disregard that last comment.
Well, by definition you can't possibly have freely distributable .debs or .rpms for commercial software unless the vendor allows it. In id's case, they don't (and have repeatedly asked distros NOT to distribute the Doom 3 installer). In nvidia's case, they do allow it, and installation of my graphics card's drivers was smooth because of it. That doesn't invalidate that the "Package Search UI" model -- which is a gross oversimplification of the apt system, that resolves dependencies and installs them correctly by default -- is quite good.