I agree that everyone should learn basic statistics. I think as Computer Scientists, we start to think that discrete math is all the math you'll ever need. But at least we know there are such things as continuous models. If you take away Calculus, students will never learn to make the jump from discrete to continuous. I think that is an essential tool. Even if you cannot remember how to do it years later, it is at least a known unknown.
I've never heard a more idiotic comment that was hoping so badly to sound intelligent. You obviously don't live in New York. I do. The impact of 9/11 was decidedly not small. Have you even read Machiavelli? Have you even read Bruce Schneier's blog?
But I don't get why this is news. A questionably accidental omission to a list that contains other references to evolution, just not evolutionary biology. The mistake is being corrected.
Actually, that's just going in circles, because the original source for the $2 billion estimate is TechCrunch. His estimate was based on the Comscore data which said that Grouper had 542,000 unique visitors in July while YouTube had 16 million. So he was doing basically the same math as the parent - YouTube had about 32 times more visitors, multiply 32 by $65million, you get just over $2 billion.
If we are talking about special protection, there must first be talk about how to define "the press". Who counts as a member of the press? And why should these people be treated differently than the rest of us? What kind of protection should they get? If you say they should never have to reveal their source, than reporters can fabricate stories with blatant disregard for facts. A reporter should try to only use anonymous sources when it is an absolute necessity. If the reporter knows his bluff can be called, it may actually be better for truth in reporting. Why is it a tragedy for reporters to have to jump through hoops to get their story? Whoever said reporting should be easy?
I don't see the current state of affairs as an erosion of press freedom. They are just as free as they ever were. Freedom never implies freedom from consequences. "The press" must deal with the consequences of their words just like the rest of us.
But none of that makes sense from a business point of view. Microsoft's strategy is to leverage their proprietary advantage. They have their own way of doing things. They think they can design something better. Also, they make money that way because they cannot easily be copied.
So while all of what you say would make you happy and many current *nix users happy in the short-term, that's not going to make Microsoft shareholders happy, and it might actually be a bad thing in the long-term.
I personally like the idea that they aren't trying to copy Unix. They are doing something original. They are offering an alternative. I know Microsoft is inherently evil, but you've got to at least give them this much.
I agree 100%. I will eat roadkill the day MS allows the general public to view source code to a core product. I might add that looking at code in the absence of documentation is a really BAD thing. Documentation is the contract with the client regarding how functionality SHOULD behave. Code reveals the way functionality actually DOES behave, and ought not be interpreted as a contract for an obvious reason - you won't be able to ever change your code if your code is your contract.
There are also obvious logical problems with interpreting codes as a contract. The definition of a bug is when actual behavior differs from contractual (i.e. documented or generally expected) behavior. So I suppose the upside of using code as contract is that you'll never have bugs.
Do you really think the Chinese government's space program is all about peace and love?
I don't agree that we should be putting nukes in space, but we must research the technology to preclude others from doing so. People may hate me for saying this, but if there is a nation that is going to have this capability, I'd rather it were this one. I'm not naive enough to believe the no other nation has such ambitions.
While idealists sit around extolling peace, pragmatists are busy preparing for war.
This is your computer.
This is your computer on drugs. Any questions?
Re:Internal conflict is what I worry about...
on
In the Year 2020
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· Score: 1
How is this post insightful?????
What's so bad about a weak dollar? Take an economics course (or just do a dumb search)!
An what do you mean by saying "public opinion [is] low (both nationally and internationally)"?? Didn't George Bush just get reelected? Do you mean to say that opinion of America is low? I don't think you can seriously mean that Americans are down on their own country.
You also seem to believe that every other nation but your own is benevolent and altruistic. Have you considered that other countries have their own selfish motives for doing things?
A five-year-old could have posted something more "insightful" (don't mean to insult five-year-olds).
Like I said, the question needs work. You're right - that statement about "structured output" is not very good.
My emphasis was on STANDARDIZED formats. Yes, I realize that current config files have structure. However, it's not a straw man argument because I wasn't just talking about config files. I was talking about the bigger picture, which I think you missed.
Okay, X config files are pretty good. What about all the other config files? What about output produced by ps, ls, etc? One of the things that's extremely valuable in UNIX is a programs are reusable, and not special purpose like in Windows. If something is in an hard-to-access format, however, that's going to limit how I can use it.
Imagine for a second that XML was the universal format used in UNIX. Imagine what kinds of programs you could write. Imagine how easy it would be to format the display of information produced by a command-line program, and, at the same time, how easy it would be to write a GUI app that used that same command-line program as a back-end. Imagine how easily your app could read and write config files, without ever worrying that you would break formatting rules. Imagine a shell that understood XML natively, and what you could do in that shell. Imagine everything you could do from the command line, you could do from a GUI (even though you may not want to). Imagine how stark the comparison between Windows and Unix would be then.
I think you are grossly underestimating the value of XML. Why are there such things as XPath, XSLT, XML Schema, etc? Information model, information model, information model.
Thanks for pointing out, though, a problematic statement in my question.
Well, the things you mention do have something to do with language, so I see your point now. C isn't type safe. I believe that's your point. Why not make it, then?
However, I don't agree it's as simple as you think it is. I didn't know that sockets were garbage collected. I suspect (as my first guess) this is because a socket may have to stay around longer even after all the processes that were using it are gone. Reference counting works fine, and is pretty fast for things that can be destroyed as soon as they are no longer in use by any process. Now, I know that garbage collected systems can have very good amortized performance. However, in the kernel, it may simply be unacceptable to occasionally pay the price of walking through memory to collect garbage. The assumptions that work well at the application level might break down in the kernel. Remember that many complex algorithms simly aren't used in kernel development because of the fact that they are complex. The kernel must operate in all sorts of adverse conditions, like when there is very little memory, and might have all sorts of timing constraints on it, like when its running an embedded system.
By the way, what do you mean by: An OO operating system doesn't need memory protection
I think you mean that memory protection is simpler in a type safe language. Memory protection is always going to be a very real problem for an OS. I wonder if you know anything about concurrency. There isn't any language that can automatically solve the problems that the OS developers must solve.
There are lots of smart people that do kernel development, I think you should give them a little credit. They don't just do things because "that's the way it's always been."
Unix suffers today from a proliferation of file and output formats that makes integration between the CLI/config files and the GUI awkward at best. For example, a common idiom for Unix GUI tools is to parse output from a CLI program and present it visually. This would be greatly simplified and much smoother if those programs produced structured output rather than raw text. The same holds for programs that read configuration files, like resolv.conf. Do you think UNIX would benefit from standardization of formats that coalesce around XML? What do you think of the idea of developing schemas for OS objects? What about schemas for common application-level objects - the idea behind WinFS?
I realize the question needs work, but I hope you get the idea.
This is very similar to the another post about OO. Clearly you don't understand OO. There's nothing stopping a C programmer from using OOAD. Language is only incidental. Now I understand that OO languages make OOAD easier, but there's nothing stopping you from using those languages on any platform. If you like Java, well you can develop Java ON UNIX. What exactly is your point about C? C is closer to the metal than most OO languages, which is why OS developers write in C, and many libraries are presented directly to C. But you don't understand the way languages work if you're asking the question, "why C?". Ultimately everything comes down to machine-level instructions, so language is almost completely irrelevant to the OS.
Perhaps you mean to ask, "Does the rise of virtual execution environments like Java's or.NET's diminish the importance of the OS?"
I have to agree that this question does not make sense. It indicates a total lack of understanding of what OO means. I would argue that much of Unix actually is object-oriented. Think, for example, about the concept in Unix of presenting many types of IO devices as files. This achieves encapsulation, polymorphism, and a very high degree of abstraction by hiding implementation details, and presenting a very clean, intuitive inteface to programmers. There are many different types (you might say "classes") of files - pipes, sockets, regular, etc. - all of which can be passed into read and write calls.
I'm sure I and others could go on all day about the OO aspects of Unix.
Slashdot Mirror
At least this makes up for some of the islands reportedly lost to global warming: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,341669, 00.html.
I agree that everyone should learn basic statistics. I think as Computer Scientists, we start to think that discrete math is all the math you'll ever need. But at least we know there are such things as continuous models. If you take away Calculus, students will never learn to make the jump from discrete to continuous. I think that is an essential tool. Even if you cannot remember how to do it years later, it is at least a known unknown.
I've never heard a more idiotic comment that was hoping so badly to sound intelligent. You obviously don't live in New York. I do. The impact of 9/11 was decidedly not small. Have you even read Machiavelli? Have you even read Bruce Schneier's blog?
But I don't get why this is news. A questionably accidental omission to a list that contains other references to evolution, just not evolutionary biology. The mistake is being corrected.
Stop the presses.
Actually, that's just going in circles, because the original source for the $2 billion estimate is TechCrunch. His estimate was based on the Comscore data which said that Grouper had 542,000 unique visitors in July while YouTube had 16 million. So he was doing basically the same math as the parent - YouTube had about 32 times more visitors, multiply 32 by $65million, you get just over $2 billion.
Let me save you the click: .
If we are talking about special protection, there must first be talk about how to define "the press". Who counts as a member of the press? And why should these people be treated differently than the rest of us? What kind of protection should they get? If you say they should never have to reveal their source, than reporters can fabricate stories with blatant disregard for facts. A reporter should try to only use anonymous sources when it is an absolute necessity. If the reporter knows his bluff can be called, it may actually be better for truth in reporting. Why is it a tragedy for reporters to have to jump through hoops to get their story? Whoever said reporting should be easy? I don't see the current state of affairs as an erosion of press freedom. They are just as free as they ever were. Freedom never implies freedom from consequences. "The press" must deal with the consequences of their words just like the rest of us.
To accelerate the deployment of Linux for enterprise computing through:
But none of that makes sense from a business point of view. Microsoft's strategy is to leverage their proprietary advantage. They have their own way of doing things. They think they can design something better. Also, they make money that way because they cannot easily be copied.
So while all of what you say would make you happy and many current *nix users happy in the short-term, that's not going to make Microsoft shareholders happy, and it might actually be a bad thing in the long-term.
I personally like the idea that they aren't trying to copy Unix. They are doing something original. They are offering an alternative. I know Microsoft is inherently evil, but you've got to at least give them this much.
I agree 100%. I will eat roadkill the day MS allows the general public to view source code to a core product. I might add that looking at code in the absence of documentation is a really BAD thing. Documentation is the contract with the client regarding how functionality SHOULD behave. Code reveals the way functionality actually DOES behave, and ought not be interpreted as a contract for an obvious reason - you won't be able to ever change your code if your code is your contract. There are also obvious logical problems with interpreting codes as a contract. The definition of a bug is when actual behavior differs from contractual (i.e. documented or generally expected) behavior. So I suppose the upside of using code as contract is that you'll never have bugs.
Do you really think the Chinese government's space program is all about peace and love?
I don't agree that we should be putting nukes in space, but we must research the technology to preclude others from doing so. People may hate me for saying this, but if there is a nation that is going to have this capability, I'd rather it were this one. I'm not naive enough to believe the no other nation has such ambitions.
While idealists sit around extolling peace, pragmatists are busy preparing for war.
How is this post insightful?????
What's so bad about a weak dollar? Take an economics course (or just do a dumb search)!
An what do you mean by saying "public opinion [is] low (both nationally and internationally)"?? Didn't George Bush just get reelected? Do you mean to say that opinion of America is low? I don't think you can seriously mean that Americans are down on their own country.
You also seem to believe that every other nation but your own is benevolent and altruistic. Have you considered that other countries have their own selfish motives for doing things?
A five-year-old could have posted something more "insightful" (don't mean to insult five-year-olds).
an American with PhD's in Math and Physics? Stupid American. -South Park
You will always be lost in your ignorance.
Like I said, the question needs work. You're right - that statement about "structured output" is not very good.
My emphasis was on STANDARDIZED formats. Yes, I realize that current config files have structure. However, it's not a straw man argument because I wasn't just talking about config files. I was talking about the bigger picture, which I think you missed.
Okay, X config files are pretty good. What about all the other config files? What about output produced by ps, ls, etc? One of the things that's extremely valuable in UNIX is a programs are reusable, and not special purpose like in Windows. If something is in an hard-to-access format, however, that's going to limit how I can use it.
Imagine for a second that XML was the universal format used in UNIX. Imagine what kinds of programs you could write. Imagine how easy it would be to format the display of information produced by a command-line program, and, at the same time, how easy it would be to write a GUI app that used that same command-line program as a back-end. Imagine how easily your app could read and write config files, without ever worrying that you would break formatting rules. Imagine a shell that understood XML natively, and what you could do in that shell. Imagine everything you could do from the command line, you could do from a GUI (even though you may not want to). Imagine how stark the comparison between Windows and Unix would be then.
I think you are grossly underestimating the value of XML. Why are there such things as XPath, XSLT, XML Schema, etc? Information model, information model, information model.
Thanks for pointing out, though, a problematic statement in my question.
Well, the things you mention do have something to do with language, so I see your point now. C isn't type safe. I believe that's your point. Why not make it, then?
However, I don't agree it's as simple as you think it is. I didn't know that sockets were garbage collected. I suspect (as my first guess) this is because a socket may have to stay around longer even after all the processes that were using it are gone. Reference counting works fine, and is pretty fast for things that can be destroyed as soon as they are no longer in use by any process. Now, I know that garbage collected systems can have very good amortized performance. However, in the kernel, it may simply be unacceptable to occasionally pay the price of walking through memory to collect garbage. The assumptions that work well at the application level might break down in the kernel. Remember that many complex algorithms simly aren't used in kernel development because of the fact that they are complex. The kernel must operate in all sorts of adverse conditions, like when there is very little memory, and might have all sorts of timing constraints on it, like when its running an embedded system.
By the way, what do you mean by:
An OO operating system doesn't need memory protection
I think you mean that memory protection is simpler in a type safe language. Memory protection is always going to be a very real problem for an OS. I wonder if you know anything about concurrency. There isn't any language that can automatically solve the problems that the OS developers must solve.
There are lots of smart people that do kernel development, I think you should give them a little credit. They don't just do things because "that's the way it's always been."
Unix suffers today from a proliferation of file and output formats that makes integration between the CLI/config files and the GUI awkward at best. For example, a common idiom for Unix GUI tools is to parse output from a CLI program and present it visually. This would be greatly simplified and much smoother if those programs produced structured output rather than raw text. The same holds for programs that read configuration files, like resolv.conf. Do you think UNIX would benefit from standardization of formats that coalesce around XML? What do you think of the idea of developing schemas for OS objects? What about schemas for common application-level objects - the idea behind WinFS?
I realize the question needs work, but I hope you get the idea.
This is very similar to the another post about OO. Clearly you don't understand OO. There's nothing stopping a C programmer from using OOAD. Language is only incidental. Now I understand that OO languages make OOAD easier, but there's nothing stopping you from using those languages on any platform. If you like Java, well you can develop Java ON UNIX. What exactly is your point about C? C is closer to the metal than most OO languages, which is why OS developers write in C, and many libraries are presented directly to C. But you don't understand the way languages work if you're asking the question, "why C?". Ultimately everything comes down to machine-level instructions, so language is almost completely irrelevant to the OS. Perhaps you mean to ask, "Does the rise of virtual execution environments like Java's or .NET's diminish the importance of the OS?"
I have to agree that this question does not make sense. It indicates a total lack of understanding of what OO means. I would argue that much of Unix actually is object-oriented. Think, for example, about the concept in Unix of presenting many types of IO devices as files. This achieves encapsulation, polymorphism, and a very high degree of abstraction by hiding implementation details, and presenting a very clean, intuitive inteface to programmers. There are many different types (you might say "classes") of files - pipes, sockets, regular, etc. - all of which can be passed into read and write calls. I'm sure I and others could go on all day about the OO aspects of Unix.