Yes, it is true that if people wanted to, we could move X11 into the kernel, in analogy to what NT did. We have moved the NFS server into the kernel for the same reason. X11 is probably leaner than the NT graphics subsystem that got moved into the kernel, so this wouldn't be a big deal. However, we really don't need the maintenance nightmare. Keeping X11 in user mode is a sensible choice, even if it costs some performance.
I don't think the original poster is talking necessarily about moving the whole of X11 into kernel space. I think rather what s/he is talking about is moving the graphic sybsystem into kernel space and letting whatever else draw to that.
Example that I like to use: Darwin/OS X. The kernel contains the framebuffer driver, and provides a CoreGraphics API to applications. XFree86 has even been modified to use this interface on Darwin, with the benefit that it doesn't have to maintain its own drivers, it doesn't have to run as a privileged user, and, quite frankly, it won't blow shit up like it tends to on Linux.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Put the low-level stuff like video *drivers* into the kernel, then export a standard API that people can use. Let Berlin or XFree or an SVGALib wrapper or whatever use those calls on different virtual terminals, and switch between them. Have the kernel keep track of who's doing what, and ignore whoever isn't front and centre.
It would certainly remove the mess, but it wouldn't help the 'other' distros that weren't the ones that got the driver support (i.e. someone writes Radeon driver for Linux kernel, under GPL, someone else has to write one for *BSD).
att was about as much help as, well, dead flash light batteries when the power goes out.
You really should pick more emphatic and vivid similies. Try 'as much help as Dell US tech support' or 'as much help as Microsoft in an ethics dilemma' next time. Hope this helps.
You mean like most other non-xml config files in/etc, like say hosts, DNS zone files, named.conf, passwd/shadow, hosts.allow/deny, sendmail.mc or resolv.conf (etc. etc.)? These have standard layouts, text-based, can be edited by hand and can be easily parsed.
Ever handled a 500-entry named.conf? Ever found that you only have 499 } characters in the document?
The beauty of XML, as I see it, is not only that it can be easily parsed by any XML parser, but that it can be easily *validated*. I was playing around with XML parsing for the conf files of an IRC bot that a friend is writing, and here's what I found.
The format of the file he has now is user:hostname:somethingelse[:optionalpassword], which is fine, but it's overly terse for no good reason, and if you put the wrong data in the wrong place, the program will choke and die without a good reason - or the program will work fine and behave oddly - or it will work fine period and ignore the mistake. There's no way of knowing how it will behave. Named for example will give no outward indication whien you load it up that the conf file is malformed, but will gladly completely forget about all domains after the error silently.
With XML, on the other hand, mistakes can be detected. When I typo'ed something in my bot's XML file (I forgot what value I'd used) and then tried to run the test program, it errored out, not just saying 'problem parsing the file', but told me what line, what the problem was, and why it was a problem, even including the relevant lines and context and highlighting the error. This is one libxml2 function that I run, and it parsed through the whole file and told me what was wrong. If I'd had a DTD, it could have (as I understand it) told me if I was missing tags or had invalid tags in the file as well.
However, if I want to parse out hosts, bind zone files, named.conf, passwd, shadow, hosts.allow/deny, sendmail.mc (icky) and resolv.conf, I have to write special cases for every one of them, because there's no standard way to form a proper document tree. Apache's conf file is another good example - it's always always always 'Variable value' or 'Variable "Value string"', except when it's not. Special cases are a nightmare.
There are a lot of places where XML just plain doesn't make sense - resolv.conf for example, practically takes less time to write by hand than it would to parse by code, and there are so few possibilities. Other options, however, such as named.conf, could benefit.
In my personal case, however, it's all irrelevant, because I'm moving all my services to use LDAP, which is something no one ever considers, but should. Still...
On the one hand, I'm inclined to agree with you, but I've been thinking about something lately...
Capitalism relies on the model to work. Every business transaction is a legal agreement, and it's all part of one big game. We're all small fish, but when you get higher up and you're dealing with the larger purchases, you can bargain, you can banter, rub shoulders and network, so that you can get the product for cheaper or before your competitors. I'm not at that point in my life, where I can play the game actively, I'm still a level 3 merchant in a level 40 merchant's world, but I still recognize the importance of playing the game, and playing by the rules that are set down.
You (and I speak in the general sense here) agree to take part in the capitalist system by enjoying the fruits of said system. You drink your lattes at Starbucks and then complain how overpriced they are, because that's part of the game. You drive your Honda Civic because you need to get from point A to point B. We live in a capitalist world, and almost by necessity, we have to play the game.
Take that metaphor entirely away, and think about games, football (soccer) for example, the game relies on the rules. If one person decided that they were allowed to pick up the ball and run with it, and while doing so could defend themselves with a hockey stick, then the game would cease to be fun for anyone else, thus negating the point of the game. It's cheating.
I don't think downloading music is 'wrong' for the same reason I don't think l33t w4r3z trading is wrong - 99% of the time, it is victimless. Whether I can download 3DSMax or not has literally no bearing on whether or not I make the purchase, because it costs so much I just plain can't afford it anyway (educational discounts notwithstanding), so I don't see me pirating it as a victimful crime (not that I'd ever pirate it, I'm no good at that stuff).
So why is downloading wrong? Not because Britney Spears or Sony Pictures Classics or EA Sports or Microsoft 'lose money' (in realty, they're just not gaining that money). It's wrong because you're playing the game but ignoring the rules, and once you decide to pick up the ball and start running with it, someone else might decide that if you're going to do that, they're going to try and tackle you, and then someone else might decide to put on a bunch of padding and spandex and go around slapping his friends' asses, and then the whole game devolves into a pathetic show of testosterone and people's knees start facing the wrong way. In our case, the RIAA decides to start manipulating the judges (the government) to try to prevent that.
If you're going to play the game, play the game by the established rules, and then everyone can play; if you make your own rules, then other people will do the same, and it all devolves.
i'm not sure what i'm getting at (especially with that last one...)
I think what you're getting at is something along the lines of 'Legal Issues Don't Bother American Criminals'. This is music, not heroin, if it bothered people, they'd stop, simple as that. Stating the obvious is a waste of time. At least, that's what I got.
This is usually classified as pneumonia, which is an inflammation of tlung tissues, caused by viruses, bacteria, or irritation by other causes.
As far as this goes, though, They don't know what it is, so they're throwing everything at it, and hoping something will do some good. Not the most medically sound procedure there is, but when nothing works, try anything.
The only definitive info I have is that my cellphone gets literally no reception when it's on the right side of my keyboard (15cm from where my roommate's open PC is) but I get full signal if it's on the left side. The amount of EM interferance from the average PC is staggering when you think about it, and it can easily disrupt all kinds of electronics.
(Hint: Economies flourish in a stable and peaceful world)
Economies stagnate in a stable system. Capitalism requires change in order to survive, and the one sure-fire way to crank up the economy is a war.
The problem for GW is that wars nowadays aren't what they used to be - they're really not much more than skirmishes. An involved war would churn up the war machine and provide jobs and economic stimulus. Attacking Iraq would only make use of the people and equipment we already have, which doesn't really help anyone except Lockheed-Martin, who will have to replace that which was used up.
Study the history of capitalism and read some of what Marx and Keynes have to say on the subject. Capitalism progresses in fits and starts, with recession between them. A burst of production and growth, such as the dot-com boost, will be followed by an economic crumple-zone where everything will fold up, and then we'll have another boom, and another bust, and so on. This is a bust, but the current CNN ten-second-summary economists and pseudo-intellectuals who haven't lived through the whole cycle yet don't understand that it's a natural part of capitalism's inherantly unstable process.
Funny, you know, I pointed out that I was talking about Windows Explorer, and not Internet Explorer, but I suppose I should have made that clear. Oh well.
It seems like this autocomplete thing is more about ranking... I wonder if they'll fix what I consider to be the bigest problem with autocomplete - Mozilla will pick one site from which to return URLs.
Example: If I start typing in 'http://s' for example, it will gladly show me a list of 20 URLs from slashdot.org, but not a single one for stickdeath. Why doesn't it do like (Windows) Explorer-style autocomplete - when I type in the above, provide me with domains from which to choose. When and if I pick Slashdot, then it should provide links from slashdot only, but why on earth does it assume that by typing a few letters, that it should automatically complete 10 documents from the same website, but none from any others?
I can't think of how many times my college roommates and I used to IM each other when we were all within shouting distance of each other.
A friend of mine actually communicates around his apartment to his roommates via his computer's microphone/headset thingie. Pretty sad. Saves yelling.
--Dan
Re:Eugenics vs. Genetic Engineering
on
Speeding up Evolution
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It depends on an arbitrary vision of what constitutes "superiority", and led to some truly barbaric practices, both in Germany and in the United States. I do not know how well the theory was received in other countries. I am, however, truly grateful that it is no longer accepted.
Eugenics was adopted in most major Western nations. The United States more or less led the way, Britain, Canada, several other countries soon followed. What's interesting to note here is that Germany actually came into the game extremely late compared to the rest of the Western world, and that the Eugenics laws in Germany were formed and passed before the instatement of the Nazi party. The Nazis just happened to take it up with a vengance.
A little history for the crowd: Eugenics rose from the ideas of Social Darwinism, which of course rose from Darwin's ideas of evolution, though Darwin was rather appalled by Social Darwinism and never supported it at all. Social Darwinism took the ideas of evolution and applied them to society. The idea was that society, like nature, would become increasingly better over time, by nature of evolution. Those who fit in well with society and contributed would help advance society, and those who were a drag on society would fall by the wayside, and the ideas taken on by society would evolve and become better, closer and closer to perfect. This caused great hope amongst the people - don't worry, there's nothing bad around the corner, because society will continue to get better indefinitely. Talk about cheery ideas.
Then someone had the bright idea of meddling. We cull our herds, we cull our crops. We breed the best with the best to make even better, don't we? Why shouldn't we do that to humanity? We'll take the best and brightest and encourage them to reproduce, often, and we'll... well, we'll cull the sick and useless from the herds so they don't taint the stock. And so they did. Eugenics laws involving sterilization of the sick, the feeble-minded, the low of society, were passed, and how. Leilani Muir is a perfect example. An Albertan girl, 'feeble minded', she was sterilized. Today, her IQ is measured at around the 90's, I believe, and she's perfectly capable of functioning in society. They didn't care. It was for the glory of society.
Eugenics laws were gleefully adopted by everyone... Then World War II came. The Nazis came, and they took Eugenics to the logical extreme, and the world watched in horror at what lay at the end of the path they all had decided to travel down. Laws were thrown out, lawsuits were filed, and everything went to shit. People realized that ideal society was something we'd have to work towards, that there was no free ride. Supposedly. Some governments, including some in Canada, took as late as the 1970s to repeal their Eugenics laws, even though they weren't being used. Sad, but at least it happened.
So, for anyone who thinks that racial superiority and the like was born with the Nazis, think again. Canadians, Americans, Britons, we're guilty, because we started it. The Nazis took it to the extreme all at once, but I fear that if they hadn't been so quick about it, that might've been the way the rest of our societies went.
Let's add to this the Avro Arrow. If it hadn't been cancelled because of political manouvering, budget overruns, and generally being mismanaged, it would still be in use today, and even the test model would be superior to many fighters in use today. I can't imagine how they would have been improved upon in that timespan either.
I just find it depressing that, as good as the ideas embodied in Unix were 30 years ago, they haven't been dramatically surpassed, perhaps two or three times, over a time span in which hardware performance has offered four or five *orders of magnitude* increase in power.
The GUI probably counts as one...
I think Access Control Lists are worth it too, for what it's worth. For that matter, database-style file systems, even at the BeOS level, and even HFS (well, HFS+) are at least somewhat more advanced than typical UNIX filesystems.
Still, after 30-years, it's still holding tight, I'd take that to mean it was a good and future-proof design, not that we've failed to innovate. Innovations have been made, but in networking, data processing, circuit and chip design, and algorythms. Unix has been a strong platform for all of these.
No, Canada has some much faster networks. CA*Net 3 was sold to Bellnexxia a while ago, after CA*Net 4 was built.
CA*Net 4, on the other hand, has a series of point-to-point 10 gigabit fibre links. The big thing about this network is that it places routing control and allocation of bandwidth in the hands of the end-users.
For a neat traffic map, check out http://205.189.33.72/stats/CAnet4map/CAnet4mapl3.h tm - but be warned, there are a *lot* of files. On high latency connections, you may want to enable pipelining in Mozilla before accessing it.
What makes a copy of XP Pro worth $299? Nothing. The box and the disks themselves are probably only worth a few bucks. And people know that MS runs 85% margins on these things, but still continues to buy them. And when so much of the economy is based on sales of intangibles....
What makes a copy of XP Pro worth $299 (theoretically) is the tangible costs of making it. As easy as it is to think about XP Pro just being spun out of whole cloth, it cost a LOT to make. Programmer time, electricity (servers and workstatiosn don't come cheap), management, employee perks (doesn't MS give out free sodas, etc?), test hardware, interaction time with developers (MSDN/beta test downloads, hardware drivers - so NVidia can bundle drivers with XP), technical writing, UI design, graphic designers... the list goes on and on.
XP Pro has no direct tangible costs (if I had the machinery, I could make each box for less than a buck each), but you have to take the costs of a project like XP (including overhead like employee perks, utilities, etc.), and divide it by the expected return in the short and long runs, by doing market research to see how many people will upgrade, how many new computers are expected to be sold in the future based on current trends and projections, how many people won't pay for licenses because the frigging Mac Business Unit's products let people buy Macs instead and still participate in the corporate farce, and on and on.
That being said, Windows seems to stay the same price rather consistantly... though inflation seems to lower the cost a little...
When I was younger than I am now, I once heard it said that video games cost well over ten thousand dollars each to develop (this was back in the SNES days) - a figure which always cut down those older than me who insisted that games were overpriced because they only cost a few dollars to manufacture. The same holds true today.
No one complains that a car is too expensive, even though car companies really only put a few hundred dollars of steel (at the prices they pay) and a bunch of plastics and electronics. In fact, if you bought these raw materials at prices Ford or BWM pay, everyone could be driving a Beamer or an F350. But how many of us have or have access to auto manufacturing plants? I thought so. BMW, on the other hand, had to pay to design and build one.
Oh god, I'm starting to sound like an ECON1103 lecture. Someone shoot me.
A friend of mine has an Inspiron... 4000, I think. Almost every time it gets knocked (falls half a foot) the case gets dislodged. He's had to have the repair guy over several times (hooray for on-site service) just to fix what should be minor issues - though the guy always tells my friend that the case is 'supposed to be like that'. It's not supposed to, they just designed it poorly. Every time I use his backspace key too, it makes a rather annoying sound, since the keyboard is not, and refuses to stay, properly fastened down.
Dell once rocked, but they've gone increasingly downhill. Desktops are fine, but I don't trust the Inspirons (based on his) any more than I trust Vaio laptops based on his old one (on which several keys stop working, the battery refuses to charge, the hard drive makes funny noises, etc). Still, the Inspiron is a great deal, and the Vaio is a simply beautiful piece of work. Too bad.
I think it's probably more along the lines of politesse - it's more polite to promote the good than insult the bad - a trend less than common here on Slashdot.
The point he's making isn't 'I Use OS X because other stuff sucks' (which also implies that OS X's only redeeming quality is that it's the least bad), it's 'Use OS X because OS X is good'. This 'positive' approach is much more 'journalistic', or 'dignified' - traits, again, not often found on slashdot.
I have the balls to stand up to Microsoft, but I'd rather focus on the good than the bad. Unfortunately, I can't find as much good to speak of as bad for most products nowadays. Macs seem to be the only exception I can find. Dommage.
Slashdot Mirror
Delicious pudding. Mmm...
--Dan
Different agencies and ministers connected with children all wanted to ban it. Result? Top seller in Norway that year...
It was the top seller in Canada too, which had very little to do with the people who wanted to ban it. It was just a good (read: popular) game.
--Dan
So answer the question that no one seems to answer - did the US version end with a 'To Be Continued'?
--Dan
Yes, it is true that if people wanted to, we could move X11 into the kernel, in analogy to what NT did. We have moved the NFS server into the kernel for the same reason. X11 is probably leaner than the NT graphics subsystem that got moved into the kernel, so this wouldn't be a big deal. However, we really don't need the maintenance nightmare. Keeping X11 in user mode is a sensible choice, even if it costs some performance.
I don't think the original poster is talking necessarily about moving the whole of X11 into kernel space. I think rather what s/he is talking about is moving the graphic sybsystem into kernel space and letting whatever else draw to that.
Example that I like to use: Darwin/OS X. The kernel contains the framebuffer driver, and provides a CoreGraphics API to applications. XFree86 has even been modified to use this interface on Darwin, with the benefit that it doesn't have to maintain its own drivers, it doesn't have to run as a privileged user, and, quite frankly, it won't blow shit up like it tends to on Linux.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Put the low-level stuff like video *drivers* into the kernel, then export a standard API that people can use. Let Berlin or XFree or an SVGALib wrapper or whatever use those calls on different virtual terminals, and switch between them. Have the kernel keep track of who's doing what, and ignore whoever isn't front and centre.
It would certainly remove the mess, but it wouldn't help the 'other' distros that weren't the ones that got the driver support (i.e. someone writes Radeon driver for Linux kernel, under GPL, someone else has to write one for *BSD).
--Dan
Unless there's some sort of reverse-censorship software out there now. In which case, that would definitely be a good Slashdot story.
IE keeps throwing porn ads in my face, does that count?
Hey, there's a cool one...
--Dan
att was about as much help as, well, dead flash light batteries when the power goes out.
You really should pick more emphatic and vivid similies. Try 'as much help as Dell US tech support' or 'as much help as Microsoft in an ethics dilemma' next time. Hope this helps.
--Dan
You mean like most other non-xml config files in /etc, like say hosts, DNS zone files, named.conf, passwd/shadow, hosts.allow/deny, sendmail.mc or resolv.conf (etc. etc.)? These have standard layouts, text-based, can be edited by hand and can be easily parsed.
Ever handled a 500-entry named.conf? Ever found that you only have 499 } characters in the document?
The beauty of XML, as I see it, is not only that it can be easily parsed by any XML parser, but that it can be easily *validated*. I was playing around with XML parsing for the conf files of an IRC bot that a friend is writing, and here's what I found.
The format of the file he has now is user:hostname:somethingelse[:optionalpassword], which is fine, but it's overly terse for no good reason, and if you put the wrong data in the wrong place, the program will choke and die without a good reason - or the program will work fine and behave oddly - or it will work fine period and ignore the mistake. There's no way of knowing how it will behave. Named for example will give no outward indication whien you load it up that the conf file is malformed, but will gladly completely forget about all domains after the error silently.
With XML, on the other hand, mistakes can be detected. When I typo'ed something in my bot's XML file (I forgot what value I'd used) and then tried to run the test program, it errored out, not just saying 'problem parsing the file', but told me what line, what the problem was, and why it was a problem, even including the relevant lines and context and highlighting the error. This is one libxml2 function that I run, and it parsed through the whole file and told me what was wrong. If I'd had a DTD, it could have (as I understand it) told me if I was missing tags or had invalid tags in the file as well.
However, if I want to parse out hosts, bind zone files, named.conf, passwd, shadow, hosts.allow/deny, sendmail.mc (icky) and resolv.conf, I have to write special cases for every one of them, because there's no standard way to form a proper document tree. Apache's conf file is another good example - it's always always always 'Variable value' or 'Variable "Value string"', except when it's not. Special cases are a nightmare.
There are a lot of places where XML just plain doesn't make sense - resolv.conf for example, practically takes less time to write by hand than it would to parse by code, and there are so few possibilities. Other options, however, such as named.conf, could benefit.
In my personal case, however, it's all irrelevant, because I'm moving all my services to use LDAP, which is something no one ever considers, but should. Still...
--Dan
On the one hand, I'm inclined to agree with you, but I've been thinking about something lately...
Capitalism relies on the model to work. Every business transaction is a legal agreement, and it's all part of one big game. We're all small fish, but when you get higher up and you're dealing with the larger purchases, you can bargain, you can banter, rub shoulders and network, so that you can get the product for cheaper or before your competitors. I'm not at that point in my life, where I can play the game actively, I'm still a level 3 merchant in a level 40 merchant's world, but I still recognize the importance of playing the game, and playing by the rules that are set down.
You (and I speak in the general sense here) agree to take part in the capitalist system by enjoying the fruits of said system. You drink your lattes at Starbucks and then complain how overpriced they are, because that's part of the game. You drive your Honda Civic because you need to get from point A to point B. We live in a capitalist world, and almost by necessity, we have to play the game.
Take that metaphor entirely away, and think about games, football (soccer) for example, the game relies on the rules. If one person decided that they were allowed to pick up the ball and run with it, and while doing so could defend themselves with a hockey stick, then the game would cease to be fun for anyone else, thus negating the point of the game. It's cheating.
I don't think downloading music is 'wrong' for the same reason I don't think l33t w4r3z trading is wrong - 99% of the time, it is victimless. Whether I can download 3DSMax or not has literally no bearing on whether or not I make the purchase, because it costs so much I just plain can't afford it anyway (educational discounts notwithstanding), so I don't see me pirating it as a victimful crime (not that I'd ever pirate it, I'm no good at that stuff).
So why is downloading wrong? Not because Britney Spears or Sony Pictures Classics or EA Sports or Microsoft 'lose money' (in realty, they're just not gaining that money). It's wrong because you're playing the game but ignoring the rules, and once you decide to pick up the ball and start running with it, someone else might decide that if you're going to do that, they're going to try and tackle you, and then someone else might decide to put on a bunch of padding and spandex and go around slapping his friends' asses, and then the whole game devolves into a pathetic show of testosterone and people's knees start facing the wrong way. In our case, the RIAA decides to start manipulating the judges (the government) to try to prevent that.
If you're going to play the game, play the game by the established rules, and then everyone can play; if you make your own rules, then other people will do the same, and it all devolves.
--Dan
i'm not sure what i'm getting at (especially with that last one...)
I think what you're getting at is something along the lines of 'Legal Issues Don't Bother American Criminals'. This is music, not heroin, if it bothered people, they'd stop, simple as that. Stating the obvious is a waste of time. At least, that's what I got.
--Dan
This is usually classified as pneumonia, which is an inflammation of tlung tissues, caused by viruses, bacteria, or irritation by other causes.
As far as this goes, though, They don't know what it is, so they're throwing everything at it, and hoping something will do some good. Not the most medically sound procedure there is, but when nothing works, try anything.
--Dan
The CBC has a story on the cases in Canada as well.
--Dan
The only definitive info I have is that my cellphone gets literally no reception when it's on the right side of my keyboard (15cm from where my roommate's open PC is) but I get full signal if it's on the left side. The amount of EM interferance from the average PC is staggering when you think about it, and it can easily disrupt all kinds of electronics.
--Dan
(Hint: Economies flourish in a stable and peaceful world)
Economies stagnate in a stable system. Capitalism requires change in order to survive, and the one sure-fire way to crank up the economy is a war.
The problem for GW is that wars nowadays aren't what they used to be - they're really not much more than skirmishes. An involved war would churn up the war machine and provide jobs and economic stimulus. Attacking Iraq would only make use of the people and equipment we already have, which doesn't really help anyone except Lockheed-Martin, who will have to replace that which was used up.
Study the history of capitalism and read some of what Marx and Keynes have to say on the subject. Capitalism progresses in fits and starts, with recession between them. A burst of production and growth, such as the dot-com boost, will be followed by an economic crumple-zone where everything will fold up, and then we'll have another boom, and another bust, and so on. This is a bust, but the current CNN ten-second-summary economists and pseudo-intellectuals who haven't lived through the whole cycle yet don't understand that it's a natural part of capitalism's inherantly unstable process.
--Dan
Funny, you know, I pointed out that I was talking about Windows Explorer, and not Internet Explorer, but I suppose I should have made that clear. Oh well.
--Dan
It seems like this autocomplete thing is more about ranking... I wonder if they'll fix what I consider to be the bigest problem with autocomplete - Mozilla will pick one site from which to return URLs.
Example: If I start typing in 'http://s' for example, it will gladly show me a list of 20 URLs from slashdot.org, but not a single one for stickdeath. Why doesn't it do like (Windows) Explorer-style autocomplete - when I type in the above, provide me with domains from which to choose. When and if I pick Slashdot, then it should provide links from slashdot only, but why on earth does it assume that by typing a few letters, that it should automatically complete 10 documents from the same website, but none from any others?
--Dan
I can't think of how many times my college roommates and I used to IM each other when we were all within shouting distance of each other.
A friend of mine actually communicates around his apartment to his roommates via his computer's microphone/headset thingie. Pretty sad. Saves yelling.
--Dan
It depends on an arbitrary vision of what constitutes "superiority", and led to some truly barbaric practices, both in Germany and in the United States. I do not know how well the theory was received in other countries. I am, however, truly grateful that it is no longer accepted.
Eugenics was adopted in most major Western nations. The United States more or less led the way, Britain, Canada, several other countries soon followed. What's interesting to note here is that Germany actually came into the game extremely late compared to the rest of the Western world, and that the Eugenics laws in Germany were formed and passed before the instatement of the Nazi party. The Nazis just happened to take it up with a vengance.
A little history for the crowd: Eugenics rose from the ideas of Social Darwinism, which of course rose from Darwin's ideas of evolution, though Darwin was rather appalled by Social Darwinism and never supported it at all. Social Darwinism took the ideas of evolution and applied them to society. The idea was that society, like nature, would become increasingly better over time, by nature of evolution. Those who fit in well with society and contributed would help advance society, and those who were a drag on society would fall by the wayside, and the ideas taken on by society would evolve and become better, closer and closer to perfect. This caused great hope amongst the people - don't worry, there's nothing bad around the corner, because society will continue to get better indefinitely. Talk about cheery ideas.
Then someone had the bright idea of meddling. We cull our herds, we cull our crops. We breed the best with the best to make even better, don't we? Why shouldn't we do that to humanity? We'll take the best and brightest and encourage them to reproduce, often, and we'll... well, we'll cull the sick and useless from the herds so they don't taint the stock. And so they did. Eugenics laws involving sterilization of the sick, the feeble-minded, the low of society, were passed, and how. Leilani Muir is a perfect example. An Albertan girl, 'feeble minded', she was sterilized. Today, her IQ is measured at around the 90's, I believe, and she's perfectly capable of functioning in society. They didn't care. It was for the glory of society.
Eugenics laws were gleefully adopted by everyone... Then World War II came. The Nazis came, and they took Eugenics to the logical extreme, and the world watched in horror at what lay at the end of the path they all had decided to travel down. Laws were thrown out, lawsuits were filed, and everything went to shit. People realized that ideal society was something we'd have to work towards, that there was no free ride. Supposedly. Some governments, including some in Canada, took as late as the 1970s to repeal their Eugenics laws, even though they weren't being used. Sad, but at least it happened.
So, for anyone who thinks that racial superiority and the like was born with the Nazis, think again. Canadians, Americans, Britons, we're guilty, because we started it. The Nazis took it to the extreme all at once, but I fear that if they hadn't been so quick about it, that might've been the way the rest of our societies went.
Frightening.
--Dan
Let's add to this the Avro Arrow. If it hadn't been cancelled because of political manouvering, budget overruns, and generally being mismanaged, it would still be in use today, and even the test model would be superior to many fighters in use today. I can't imagine how they would have been improved upon in that timespan either.
Curse you Diefenbaker! Curse you!
--Dan
I just find it depressing that, as good as the ideas embodied in Unix were 30 years ago, they haven't been dramatically surpassed, perhaps two or three times, over a time span in which hardware performance has offered four or five *orders of magnitude* increase in power.
The GUI probably counts as one...
I think Access Control Lists are worth it too, for what it's worth. For that matter, database-style file systems, even at the BeOS level, and even HFS (well, HFS+) are at least somewhat more advanced than typical UNIX filesystems.
Still, after 30-years, it's still holding tight, I'd take that to mean it was a good and future-proof design, not that we've failed to innovate. Innovations have been made, but in networking, data processing, circuit and chip design, and algorythms. Unix has been a strong platform for all of these.
--Dan
That reminds me, I still have some, er, borrowed literature I need to leave somewhere... Heh, oops. Stupid midterms.
--Dan
No, Canada has some much faster networks. CA*Net 3 was sold to Bellnexxia a while ago, after CA*Net 4 was built.
h tm - but be warned, there are a *lot* of files. On high latency connections, you may want to enable pipelining in Mozilla before accessing it.
CA*Net 4, on the other hand, has a series of point-to-point 10 gigabit fibre links. The big thing about this network is that it places routing control and allocation of bandwidth in the hands of the end-users.
For a neat traffic map, check out http://205.189.33.72/stats/CAnet4map/CAnet4mapl3.
--Dan
Yeah, but the latency's a bitch.
--Dan
What makes a copy of XP Pro worth $299? Nothing. The box and the disks themselves are probably only worth a few bucks. And people know that MS runs 85% margins on these things, but still continues to buy them. And when so much of the economy is based on sales of intangibles....
What makes a copy of XP Pro worth $299 (theoretically) is the tangible costs of making it. As easy as it is to think about XP Pro just being spun out of whole cloth, it cost a LOT to make. Programmer time, electricity (servers and workstatiosn don't come cheap), management, employee perks (doesn't MS give out free sodas, etc?), test hardware, interaction time with developers (MSDN/beta test downloads, hardware drivers - so NVidia can bundle drivers with XP), technical writing, UI design, graphic designers... the list goes on and on.
XP Pro has no direct tangible costs (if I had the machinery, I could make each box for less than a buck each), but you have to take the costs of a project like XP (including overhead like employee perks, utilities, etc.), and divide it by the expected return in the short and long runs, by doing market research to see how many people will upgrade, how many new computers are expected to be sold in the future based on current trends and projections, how many people won't pay for licenses because the frigging Mac Business Unit's products let people buy Macs instead and still participate in the corporate farce, and on and on.
That being said, Windows seems to stay the same price rather consistantly... though inflation seems to lower the cost a little...
When I was younger than I am now, I once heard it said that video games cost well over ten thousand dollars each to develop (this was back in the SNES days) - a figure which always cut down those older than me who insisted that games were overpriced because they only cost a few dollars to manufacture. The same holds true today.
No one complains that a car is too expensive, even though car companies really only put a few hundred dollars of steel (at the prices they pay) and a bunch of plastics and electronics. In fact, if you bought these raw materials at prices Ford or BWM pay, everyone could be driving a Beamer or an F350. But how many of us have or have access to auto manufacturing plants? I thought so. BMW, on the other hand, had to pay to design and build one.
Oh god, I'm starting to sound like an ECON1103 lecture. Someone shoot me.
--Dan
A friend of mine has an Inspiron... 4000, I think. Almost every time it gets knocked (falls half a foot) the case gets dislodged. He's had to have the repair guy over several times (hooray for on-site service) just to fix what should be minor issues - though the guy always tells my friend that the case is 'supposed to be like that'. It's not supposed to, they just designed it poorly. Every time I use his backspace key too, it makes a rather annoying sound, since the keyboard is not, and refuses to stay, properly fastened down.
Dell once rocked, but they've gone increasingly downhill. Desktops are fine, but I don't trust the Inspirons (based on his) any more than I trust Vaio laptops based on his old one (on which several keys stop working, the battery refuses to charge, the hard drive makes funny noises, etc). Still, the Inspiron is a great deal, and the Vaio is a simply beautiful piece of work. Too bad.
--Dan
I think it's probably more along the lines of politesse - it's more polite to promote the good than insult the bad - a trend less than common here on Slashdot.
The point he's making isn't 'I Use OS X because other stuff sucks' (which also implies that OS X's only redeeming quality is that it's the least bad), it's 'Use OS X because OS X is good'. This 'positive' approach is much more 'journalistic', or 'dignified' - traits, again, not often found on slashdot.
I have the balls to stand up to Microsoft, but I'd rather focus on the good than the bad. Unfortunately, I can't find as much good to speak of as bad for most products nowadays. Macs seem to be the only exception I can find. Dommage.
--Dan