I frequently set people up with Linux Mint when they bring a computer into my shop with no windows sticker, an illegal copy of windows, and a bad enough infection that it requires re-installation. I won't remove an illegal copy of windows just cause it's illegal(only tell them that it's illegal and ask them if they wish to purchase a license), but I will not reinstall an illegal copy if it comes to that.
Sure, some of them have the money to get a new windows license with their repair, but in this area a lot of people just don't have that sort of money, and they jump at getting their PC up and running for $100 less. Once I put the install CD in, it takes about 30 minutes to run through, reboots, and everything works. Immediately. There is zero configuration required. The people I give it back to, who are not terribly tech savy, have all said they have really enjoyed it, found it easy to get around in and do what they need. They have no trouble figuring out the software manager, connecting to the internet, or setting up their e-mail. I have had one person who could not use his printer anymore, but chose to buy a $35 used printer rather than a $100 operating system license.
The only configuration I have to do on these systems is making sure that LibreOffice saves its documents in MS 2003 format by default, so they don't have to fight with compatibility when they send e-mails. Hardly "A day or longer"
We aren't really genetically identical to prehistoric humans though. As a quick example: I can digest lactose as an adult. This amazing feat arose in our species during the neolithic. It has occurred due to one of two completely unrelated mutations, in separate parts of the world. For 95% of our history, we as a species could not do this, and today a little over 50% of you still cannot.
Overall gene distribution patterns have changed radically, new mutations have popped up and become widespread. We may have been the same species 150,000 years ago, but we, taken as a whole, were not genetically identical.
The average person ranges from 60-100 bpm resting, so lets call it 80. That drops us to 35.
You know what the historical average life expectancy for our species is? Take a guess, just throw something out there. Go on.
25-30. This life expectancy, as a species, of roughly 30 years held until a century ago. The only reason we don't fall on this scale today has been the improvements in our medical care. You can't be skeptical of a theory just because you don't know very much about history.
You seriously believe drugs are more important than human rights? And that the solution to the deficit is cutting public services like schools and medicare? Are you stupid, or just a psychopath?
Mental retardation is overwhelmingly caused by fragile X syndrome or down syndrome, which are 100% genetic. They make up the majority of the developmentally delayed community.
Haven't we proven enough of our theories about this world that we know for certain things are stable to a known degree?
Not to be contrarian, but we haven't proven any of our theories at all.
First, you do not know what is occurring in every place in the universe. No number of experiments will ever prove a theory to be true because you cannot perform the test at every conceivable place in the universe. This is why Francis Bacon stated that the proper scientific method should be falsification. You only have to find one place where a theory comes up short to prove it wrong, but time constraints say that you can never prove that it is right. This is what modern science is based upon.
More importantly to his post, however, is the fact that we have no deductive reason to assume that the future will replicate the past. The GP says
Pointing out that it's worked before is just begging the question
This is not "fancy footwork," it is a many centuries old philosophical problem brought up by David Hume. You cannot state "X happened in the past, therefor it will happen in the future" without using "X happened in the past" as your reason for believing "X will continue to happen."
Essentially, you cannot prove induction correct without being inductive. "The ice I've touched has been cold, therefor all ice is cold" is not deductive reasoning.
This is the sort of thinking that science employs, however. Now, his point is not that science is not useful, nor is it that science is wrong. He is simply stating that inductive thinking is programmed into us, and that there is no good deductive logic which led us to it. You see neither causality nor time, these concepts exist inside of you -- i.e. Science is a byproduct of being an ape, not a byproduct of logic itself.
Bottom pouring percolators are very rare at home let alone ones with 2 to 3 head/feet 2 to 3 feet of water will not make a large enough pressure difference to be significant. It would likely result in just enough pressure to increase the temperature roughly 1C, which, at normal altitudes, would still be less than 101C (roughly 100.97C). I would not call 1C "significant," would you?
In 1990 I had a 20GB HDD, and I partitioned it in two.
Liar.
You people are all completely insane. Never mind that in 1990, unless you were using a high end unix workstation (which would make two partitions idiocy) you would have been running an operating system with a 2.1GB partition size limit, as FAT16 file systems only came around 3 years earlier (1987). Perhaps you meant a 2 GB drive, though in 1990 that too would be extraordinarily large.
In 1998 I bought a computer with a 10GB hard drive, and it was considered to be gigantic at the time.
I would direct you to this graph of computer drive size (max) scaled by year. Note that drive sizes did not pass 10GB until well after 1995.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png
Perhaps this is why people don't find it disgraceful to make a linux operating system that has a 1.2GHz CPU as a minimum requirement, you're all crazy and can't remember how long ago these things were made.
These wal-mart computer would have been monster stations just 5-6 years ago (remember back in 99-00 when the big 1GHZ limit was broken? Yeah, I didn't think so.) and now you're all talking about how nice it is that it can almost run linux well...
I have linux running on a 250Mhz PDA, what the hell is wrong with people that they would use a product that barely runs on these?
First, I would like to say that "high school biology courses" does not count as studying biology. Not in any stretch of the imagination. You also, I would wager, did not take the math courses aimed at biology students (yes, calculus for biology majors and calculus for computer science/engineering are two different courses, one deals with how to think about problems like this, the others deal mainly with Newtonian physics). Taking a couple beginning level courses does not a study of anything make. I doubt you had enough "electives" (or whatever they chose to call them at your campus) to allow you to get into any higher level courses... and given your long winded direction-less babble about marine biology in high school, I would say that is a fair doubt.
Define "foreign".
Not native, in this case not naturally occurring in corn.
...Corn is not naturally occurring! They bred it out of grass, the whole plant is a "natural abomination." There is nothing "naturally occurring" in it.
Even corn itself is a splicing of several different plants (grasses), that's how hybrids work. One plant (of similar genetic lineage) happens to be resistant to bugs, so we cross breed what we have with that plant. One happens to have big seeds, while another has sweet seeds, so we try to cross them.
Now, in many cases where we might do that, the food part of the plant may get smaller. It may end up bitter. It may produce versions of "corn" that do not mature the same way, causing the plants to be genetically viable (able to reproduce) but unpalatable (ever eaten a yucca seed?)
So, if we take the gene that makes one plant resistant to bugs, insert it without changing any of the rest of the plant, then eat it, what exactly is the difference? OH NO! IT WAS SCIENCE! WE'LL ALL DIE! What is with this new trend in western culture to fear things simply because science gave them to us.
Idiots.
I'm so tired of people who have no understanding of genetics, agriculture, or anything else relevant to a topic talking about how "dangerous" these things might be to ingest. If they don't cause problems fairly early (within, say three years) they really aren't statistically likely to. Yes, we may find it to be carcinogenic in extremely high doses, but most things we eat now are as well (apples?... normal corn?). There is no logical argument against any of this, it's all poorly educated lunk-heads eagerly running away with the "it's bad cause it's not natural" crap that marketing firms have been shoving down your throats.
You're all just like the people who complained about irradiated beef (as if somehow running doses of microwaves through the food made the proteins in the dead cow mutate in dangerous ways), and I assume most of you worried about this are the same people because you are the same sort "lets not bother to think about it and just be afraid because it's different" morons. The same folks who decided not to vaccinate your children because a poorly done study claimed a correlation between a vaccination and autism (a correlation that was not, in fact, there).
No please, don't bother to educate yourselves on this, just go right on with your "OH NO! SOMETHING MIGHT POSSIBLY MAYBE GO WRONG!"
Yes, there is a danger of cross pollinating corn and weeds, given that we bred it out of weeds to begin with... if you happen to grow corn in the Balsas River valley in Mexico... but somehow I don't think that is really their target customer. You see, you can't really cross pollinate corn and a potato, no matter how much you might want to. That's sort of the line for new species, i.e. offspring capable of reproducing can no longer be made between the two lifeforms. For more on this fascinating topic, see Mules.
Corn will only cross pollinate corn and certain types of grass in Mexico and Guatemala... and even then it's only a possibility. It's not randomly going to cross pollinate with t
I know this is really old, but I want to take a minute to look at how utterly retarded this comment is:
I don't say that because I'm some BSD hater, actually, I love BSD. I even have openbsd on some sparcstation lx at home. (sun4m iirc). The last full install I did was 4.10 forever ago, and I never touched 5. So about 4 months ago I say 'im gonna throw the newest bsd on my comp get busy'. Put 6 something on there. I got everything set up like I like it, and went go get x setup so I could game.
First, OpenBSD has never achieved a version 4.10, it just now reached 4.1 this year. Neither has NetBSD, which is currently at 3.1
In fact, the only BSD to reach 4.10 was FreeBSD, which is strange because they first added support for Sparc64 in their 5.x branch. 4.x never got anything more than i386 and Alpha support.
Next, there are ways to get full driver support that use the drivers from Sun, they just don't come in default installs since they can't legally distribute them. I have two Elite3d accelerators that work beautifully.
Now, lets ignore all that and look at the rest here. A Sparcstation LX? First, all Sparcstations used v8 Sparc CPUs (32-bit, regular sparc). That's a lunchbox model, so yes, it used a Sun4m (microSparc). FreeBSD still does not run on SPARC computers and it never will. It will only run on Ultrasparc derivatives, it only works on 64-bit CPUs.
This leaves us with knowledge about two things: 1) You did not run FreeBSD, the only BSD to reach any 4.10, 5.x, or 6.x versions, 2) You have no idea what you are doing, nor any idea what you are running, 3) Your opinion and any information you try to add to anything in the future is worthless because you can't even keep your version numbers straight.
Both situations, the licensing and the patents, are of Sun's make, and to believe in that many coincidences feels like a really long stretch
Wait, what? To believe in two things happening coincidentally is a long stretch? In what world, exactly? Honestly, that was the dumbest thing you could have said about this situation. Pull in at least 5 examples if you want to claim "too many coincidences."
Sun can choose GPLv2 if they want. In fact, I think there's a good chance they'll do precisely that, just so they can use the drivers.
I know this has been touched on before, though I haven't seen it in this thread, but... drivers don't really work that way. Even assuming that Sun needed the underlying device IDs, chip access information, etc, they can't just copy and paste drivers, they will have to substantially rewrite any drivers to make them work in Solaris.
In fact, if they were to really want to go after drivers they would be a lot more likely to go after drivers from Free/Net/OpenBSD, first because they underlying systems are far more similar (read: less changes would be needed to the code to make it work), secondly they wouldn't need to relicense to do it, they could just pull them in.
Yeah, I know, a lot of people complain about drivers in BSD systems too. I personally have never run across any hardware that didn't work in FreeBSD unless it was rather new (read: brand new sound cards, which tend to be covered by OSS anyway). All the BSDs are worlds ahead in driver support over out of the box Solaris, if stealing drivers was really something they were honestly worried about they would have been taking them from these projects for the past 10 years. They haven't done this, so it follows that this is a bogus belief for any of you to hold.
Uh-oh, I guess that Linus didn't think that far ahead... who was it that was claiming he thought things through before rambling about them? He's a "software engineer" he should know better...
I don't see what was so hard to understand about that episode. He wasn't blowing up unreasonably. The guy found out that his code had been mistakenly posted online, then posted his findings to a huge number of people. It wasn't necessary, it was rude, and it was shameful. It would be like me putting some mistake you might make on CNN. You might get pretty pissed about that, eh?
People are too stupid to understand how this mistake can happen. Here's how it works:
I want to rewrite some GPL software in a non-GPL license because I think GPL leads to brain tumors.
I want to write something, say, BSD, and have it work interchangeably. Well, if I take the code they have, and slowly replace the code in the files with code of my own devising, I can do that. If I make a release, I'll have to dual license everything, my code will have to be dual BSD/GPL, while the rest is just GPL. Now, if I keep working until all original GPL code is removed, then I no longer need the GPL license, nor do I need to attribute anything to the person who wrote the original code (though I might to be nice, I would not need to). Now, if I were in the habit of releasing just the new code I wrote, and removing all GPL code prior to posting it on the internet, again I would have clean code.
If I happened to accidentally leave a few lines in, however, it would be an honest mistake, not "stealing code." If someone took my mistake, my accidental inclusion of their code, then told dozens of people I had stolen it without asking me about it first, I would be pretty pissed off too, and most of my close friends would likewise be rather irritated that someone would treat me that way. If I didn't say anything about how shitty it was for them to do it, one of them would be likely to do it for me.
Those wifi guys were assholes, this wasn't like that PearPC/CherryOS crap, it was an honest mistake in a standard-practice rewrite of non-compatible code. Theo was just trying to make them realize that fact... but I guess they had the same reading comprehension issues that you do?
Thank goodness for cygwin and the free-licenses of Borland software then. Changing your operating system just to use one or two tools is lunacy.
Even that aside, there are many options that all use gcc that aren't Linux... FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, OS/2, QNX, Solaris (has been free to use non-commercially for ages), HURD, hell, cygwin has been around since 95. Switching to Linux to use a free compiler set is, stupidity aside, just laziness.
Yeah, but you get mostly results like this:
"VB will fail to become the new COBOL, and Java will take that role"
The fact that Microsoft says "it's the new Cobol" and only Microsoft makes the claim is not really important in any sense. Many technical journalists referred to Java as "the new Cobol"
Unlike Unix 1.0, Linux is mostly written in C, not assembler, meaning it is much more portable.
Wow, I love when people rewrite history. Unix, in it's various forms, was mostly C by 1991. Yes, it was ASM when it was written as C was created for Unix after it existed. They did move Unix to C as it became a viable language. I would say the same thing about TCP/IP, etc. Trying to use examples of things that didn't exist at the time Unix was made, but did exist when Linux was made (and had to be tacked on later) is a bad argument technique, and I hope you never touch a keyboard again, I really really do.
Linux, written 20 years after C came into existance, was a project that had the sole purpose of teaching Torvalds how to use ASM on 386 computers. It was written entirely in ASM and had to be backported to C later by other people. Linux was never meant to be portable, other people just decided they would rather hack Linux onto other archs than help the HURD folks finish up their project.... sort of like now?
That aside, even, all the other "features" you attribute to linux were tacked on after the fact as well. Linus did not sit down and say "Now, I'm going to teach myself ASM, wouldn't it be cool if I gave this thing access to an X server?" Linux was, when it was written, before other people started tacking on their own ideas, a poor re-implementation of the Unix kernel from 20-30 years earlier. And really, that's ok. Why do you people keep trying to write it's history away, hmm? You should all be saying "Wow, if something as simple and stupid as that can turn into what it is today, imagine what we as a community could do it we started with something more planned out to begin with!"
But I guess that goes back to the HURD again, which none of you raving lunatics give two shits about. Oh well...
We also know that the diets eaten by primitive humans were generally closer to the atkins diet than anything we eat today. These people were hunter-gatherers and had access primarily to some green vegetables relatively low in carbohydrates, and to meat, as well as nuts and some seasonal fruits.... We also know that they consistently died before age 30?
No offense obviously, but the brain in particular runs more efficiently on ketones than it does on glucose.
Why are you stupid?
No, really, why are you a stupid, biologically illiterate oaf?
"Ketone bodies, from the breakdown of fatty acids to acetyl groups, are also produced during this state, and are burned throughout the body. Excess ketone bodies are excreted in the breath and urine. The brain has a residual need for glucose because ketones can only provide energy when used during aerobic respiration in mitochondria. In the long thin neurons, much of the metabolically active cellular membrane must derive its energy from glucose via anaerobic respiration without the assistance of mitochondria."
Yes, that's right, parts of the brain are incapable of making use of ketones for energy (but who needs cellular membranes, right?).
Ever hear of ketosis? No, I don't mean the bull-shit "ketosis" that retards trying to push low-carb diets talk about, I'm talking about real ketosis, the time when your body ends up with a large overabundance of ketones and you end up "drunk" all day long. Then, after that, you end up in a ketone induced coma. Then you die.
The atkins diet has been changed three or four times because the original "Atkins" crap was pretty much globally recognized as being dangerous.
Yes, there are a lot of retards who say things like "A lot of people mistakenly think Ketoacidosis when they hear ketosis, but it's a completely different thing."
No it isn't you jerks, Ketoacidosis is just another name for Ketosis (interestingly ketosis was referred to as the danger condition by medical professionals 20-40 years ago, it changed to "a natural body process" with a different name for the condition around the time of these low-card diets).
"Ketosis occurs when there is not enough insulin in the body to metabolize glucose and provide energy to the cells of the body. The blood fluids become increasingly acidic until the starving body cells malfunction, causing staggering, slurred speech, disorientation and poor judgement. Eventually, the victim of ketosis may have seizures, go into a deep coma and die if untreated." http://www2.jsonline.com/alive/column/aug99/howard s83099.asp
See, here's the way it works. Ketones are emergency power for some cells in your body, i.e. if you are starving you'll have enough energy to go kill something, but that's about it.
Outside of that single use, ketones are a giant danger to your nervous system. If you don't drink large amounts of water to wash them out of your system you end up staggering around like a drunken hobo. Atkins guy, try laying off the water intake for a couple days then see how you feel. At that point, come back and tell us how well the brain runs on ketones.
The fact that you can function at all is due to the fact that you keep washing the toxin out of your body in your urine, if you didn't your blood would end up too acidic for you to live... and, well, you wouldn't any longer.
All the text files caused a major bottle-neck in Unix around 88-92, however. Parsing the passwd file if you had a couple hundred users was a giant instant sludge-fest every time a person logged on.
I can afford a computer, or I can afford Vista... but not both >.
1.8ghz CPU, 1 GB memory, sound card, 80 GB drive, 128MB video, case, etc: $250 (at most, more likely $200)
Windows Vista Ultimate Edition: $260 download direct from microsoft.
Wait, what? o.O
Mind you, Linux hacks me off as much as the next guy (poor kernel design in my opinion, but that's neither here nor there) but paying more for the OS than I would for the hardware... almost 50% more in some cases (I've seen it in stores here for $350)... that's just crazy talk.
I'm upset because I am responsible for users running Windows, and although I have set policy forbidding the usage of IE, I can't enforce it because of Microsoft tying the browser to the OS.
You can still remove I.E. the program while leaving the I.E. rendering engine installed for patching (through I.E. tabs in mozilla or whatnot) without having any real downside effects (programs depending on I.E. still run as they don't use iexplore.exe)
I've been doing this for years with XPlite, but you can just as easily just delete the cached exe file, the sources exe (iexplore.ex_ or whatever the backup is) and then the Programs Files/Internet Explorer/iexplore.exe crap.
That doesn't stop things from being able to abuse the i.e. engine once installed, but it stops your users from using Internet Explorer permanently, which stops most crap that would use the i.e. engine from getting in to begin with.
Yeah, your data is outdated. China is topping out that list 3x over right now. If we cut China down the middle to make two countries the US would still only come in at #3.
Didn't an Alpha port of some sort exist of SunOS back around the time the PowerPC one did? I seem to remember m86k, PPC, Alpha, x86, and Sparc at the time for a short run, but I can't seem to find anything about even the PowerPC port anymore now that people are working on porting OpenSolaris (not that I spent more than 30 seconds looking)... sometime around Solaris 2.5.x... something else too... I vaguely remember 6 supported platforms...
And that really isn't the best way to go about looking at it... "If it wasn't linux it must have been Tru64/whatever"... NetBSD has had support for Alpha since very early 1995, probably 8 months before Linux supported it (netBSD support in binary form started Feb 95, earliest reference for Linux I can find is Nov 95, but that's just going by the axp-linux mailing list archives), OpenBSD has had support for it since 96, and FreeBSD has supported it since version 3.something... sometime late 98/early 99 I guess?
So there are at least 5 possibilities in there for things he might have been on, possibly more...
Slashdot Mirror
Some little brats do that every Saturday to my office building. Seems to be just as popular a game as it ever was.
I frequently set people up with Linux Mint when they bring a computer into my shop with no windows sticker, an illegal copy of windows, and a bad enough infection that it requires re-installation. I won't remove an illegal copy of windows just cause it's illegal(only tell them that it's illegal and ask them if they wish to purchase a license), but I will not reinstall an illegal copy if it comes to that.
Sure, some of them have the money to get a new windows license with their repair, but in this area a lot of people just don't have that sort of money, and they jump at getting their PC up and running for $100 less. Once I put the install CD in, it takes about 30 minutes to run through, reboots, and everything works. Immediately. There is zero configuration required. The people I give it back to, who are not terribly tech savy, have all said they have really enjoyed it, found it easy to get around in and do what they need. They have no trouble figuring out the software manager, connecting to the internet, or setting up their e-mail. I have had one person who could not use his printer anymore, but chose to buy a $35 used printer rather than a $100 operating system license.
The only configuration I have to do on these systems is making sure that LibreOffice saves its documents in MS 2003 format by default, so they don't have to fight with compatibility when they send e-mails. Hardly "A day or longer"
We aren't really genetically identical to prehistoric humans though. As a quick example: I can digest lactose as an adult. This amazing feat arose in our species during the neolithic. It has occurred due to one of two completely unrelated mutations, in separate parts of the world. For 95% of our history, we as a species could not do this, and today a little over 50% of you still cannot.
Overall gene distribution patterns have changed radically, new mutations have popped up and become widespread. We may have been the same species 150,000 years ago, but we, taken as a whole, were not genetically identical.
The average person ranges from 60-100 bpm resting, so lets call it 80. That drops us to 35.
You know what the historical average life expectancy for our species is? Take a guess, just throw something out there. Go on.
25-30. This life expectancy, as a species, of roughly 30 years held until a century ago. The only reason we don't fall on this scale today has been the improvements in our medical care. You can't be skeptical of a theory just because you don't know very much about history.
You seriously believe drugs are more important than human rights? And that the solution to the deficit is cutting public services like schools and medicare? Are you stupid, or just a psychopath?
Mental retardation is seldom genetic.
Mental retardation is overwhelmingly caused by fragile X syndrome or down syndrome, which are 100% genetic. They make up the majority of the developmentally delayed community.
Haven't we proven enough of our theories about this world that we know for certain things are stable to a known degree?
Not to be contrarian, but we haven't proven any of our theories at all.
First, you do not know what is occurring in every place in the universe. No number of experiments will ever prove a theory to be true because you cannot perform the test at every conceivable place in the universe. This is why Francis Bacon stated that the proper scientific method should be falsification. You only have to find one place where a theory comes up short to prove it wrong, but time constraints say that you can never prove that it is right. This is what modern science is based upon.
More importantly to his post, however, is the fact that we have no deductive reason to assume that the future will replicate the past. The GP says
Pointing out that it's worked before is just begging the question
He is referring to the problem of induction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
This is not "fancy footwork," it is a many centuries old philosophical problem brought up by David Hume. You cannot state "X happened in the past, therefor it will happen in the future" without using "X happened in the past" as your reason for believing "X will continue to happen."
Essentially, you cannot prove induction correct without being inductive. "The ice I've touched has been cold, therefor all ice is cold" is not deductive reasoning.
This is, for all intents and purposes, a genuine criticism of the scientific method. "All ice I've ever touched is cold" may be true, but "All ice is cold" is completely false. http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/03/turing-water-into-very-hot-ice-very-very-quickly.ars http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKN1621607620070516
This is the sort of thinking that science employs, however. Now, his point is not that science is not useful, nor is it that science is wrong. He is simply stating that inductive thinking is programmed into us, and that there is no good deductive logic which led us to it. You see neither causality nor time, these concepts exist inside of you -- i.e. Science is a byproduct of being an ape, not a byproduct of logic itself.
In 1990 I had a 20GB HDD, and I partitioned it in two. Liar. You people are all completely insane. Never mind that in 1990, unless you were using a high end unix workstation (which would make two partitions idiocy) you would have been running an operating system with a 2.1GB partition size limit, as FAT16 file systems only came around 3 years earlier (1987). Perhaps you meant a 2 GB drive, though in 1990 that too would be extraordinarily large. In 1998 I bought a computer with a 10GB hard drive, and it was considered to be gigantic at the time. I would direct you to this graph of computer drive size (max) scaled by year. Note that drive sizes did not pass 10GB until well after 1995. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png Perhaps this is why people don't find it disgraceful to make a linux operating system that has a 1.2GHz CPU as a minimum requirement, you're all crazy and can't remember how long ago these things were made. These wal-mart computer would have been monster stations just 5-6 years ago (remember back in 99-00 when the big 1GHZ limit was broken? Yeah, I didn't think so.) and now you're all talking about how nice it is that it can almost run linux well... I have linux running on a 250Mhz PDA, what the hell is wrong with people that they would use a product that barely runs on these?
First, I would like to say that "high school biology courses" does not count as studying biology. Not in any stretch of the imagination. You also, I would wager, did not take the math courses aimed at biology students (yes, calculus for biology majors and calculus for computer science/engineering are two different courses, one deals with how to think about problems like this, the others deal mainly with Newtonian physics). Taking a couple beginning level courses does not a study of anything make. I doubt you had enough "electives" (or whatever they chose to call them at your campus) to allow you to get into any higher level courses... and given your long winded direction-less babble about marine biology in high school, I would say that is a fair doubt.
...Corn is not naturally occurring! They bred it out of grass, the whole plant is a "natural abomination." There is nothing "naturally occurring" in it.
... but somehow I don't think that is really their target customer. You see, you can't really cross pollinate corn and a potato, no matter how much you might want to. That's sort of the line for new species, i.e. offspring capable of reproducing can no longer be made between the two lifeforms. For more on this fascinating topic, see Mules.
Define "foreign".
Not native, in this case not naturally occurring in corn.
Even corn itself is a splicing of several different plants (grasses), that's how hybrids work. One plant (of similar genetic lineage) happens to be resistant to bugs, so we cross breed what we have with that plant. One happens to have big seeds, while another has sweet seeds, so we try to cross them.
Now, in many cases where we might do that, the food part of the plant may get smaller. It may end up bitter. It may produce versions of "corn" that do not mature the same way, causing the plants to be genetically viable (able to reproduce) but unpalatable (ever eaten a yucca seed?)
So, if we take the gene that makes one plant resistant to bugs, insert it without changing any of the rest of the plant, then eat it, what exactly is the difference? OH NO! IT WAS SCIENCE! WE'LL ALL DIE! What is with this new trend in western culture to fear things simply because science gave them to us.
Idiots.
I'm so tired of people who have no understanding of genetics, agriculture, or anything else relevant to a topic talking about how "dangerous" these things might be to ingest. If they don't cause problems fairly early (within, say three years) they really aren't statistically likely to. Yes, we may find it to be carcinogenic in extremely high doses, but most things we eat now are as well (apples?... normal corn?). There is no logical argument against any of this, it's all poorly educated lunk-heads eagerly running away with the "it's bad cause it's not natural" crap that marketing firms have been shoving down your throats.
You're all just like the people who complained about irradiated beef (as if somehow running doses of microwaves through the food made the proteins in the dead cow mutate in dangerous ways), and I assume most of you worried about this are the same people because you are the same sort "lets not bother to think about it and just be afraid because it's different" morons. The same folks who decided not to vaccinate your children because a poorly done study claimed a correlation between a vaccination and autism (a correlation that was not, in fact, there).
No please, don't bother to educate yourselves on this, just go right on with your "OH NO! SOMETHING MIGHT POSSIBLY MAYBE GO WRONG!"
Yes, there is a danger of cross pollinating corn and weeds, given that we bred it out of weeds to begin with... if you happen to grow corn in the Balsas River valley in Mexico
Corn will only cross pollinate corn and certain types of grass in Mexico and Guatemala... and even then it's only a possibility. It's not randomly going to cross pollinate with t
I know this is really old, but I want to take a minute to look at how utterly retarded this comment is:
I don't say that because I'm some BSD hater, actually, I love BSD. I even have openbsd on some sparcstation lx at home. (sun4m iirc). The last full install I did was 4.10 forever ago, and I never touched 5. So about 4 months ago I say 'im gonna throw the newest bsd on my comp get busy'. Put 6 something on there. I got everything set up like I like it, and went go get x setup so I could game.
First, OpenBSD has never achieved a version 4.10, it just now reached 4.1 this year. Neither has NetBSD, which is currently at 3.1
In fact, the only BSD to reach 4.10 was FreeBSD, which is strange because they first added support for Sparc64 in their 5.x branch. 4.x never got anything more than i386 and Alpha support.
Next, there are ways to get full driver support that use the drivers from Sun, they just don't come in default installs since they can't legally distribute them. I have two Elite3d accelerators that work beautifully.
Now, lets ignore all that and look at the rest here. A Sparcstation LX? First, all Sparcstations used v8 Sparc CPUs (32-bit, regular sparc). That's a lunchbox model, so yes, it used a Sun4m (microSparc). FreeBSD still does not run on SPARC computers and it never will. It will only run on Ultrasparc derivatives, it only works on 64-bit CPUs.
This leaves us with knowledge about two things: 1) You did not run FreeBSD, the only BSD to reach any 4.10, 5.x, or 6.x versions, 2) You have no idea what you are doing, nor any idea what you are running, 3) Your opinion and any information you try to add to anything in the future is worthless because you can't even keep your version numbers straight.
Both situations, the licensing and the patents, are of Sun's make, and to believe in that many coincidences feels like a really long stretch
Wait, what? To believe in two things happening coincidentally is a long stretch? In what world, exactly? Honestly, that was the dumbest thing you could have said about this situation. Pull in at least 5 examples if you want to claim "too many coincidences."
Sun can choose GPLv2 if they want. In fact, I think there's a good chance they'll do precisely that, just so they can use the drivers.
I know this has been touched on before, though I haven't seen it in this thread, but... drivers don't really work that way. Even assuming that Sun needed the underlying device IDs, chip access information, etc, they can't just copy and paste drivers, they will have to substantially rewrite any drivers to make them work in Solaris.
In fact, if they were to really want to go after drivers they would be a lot more likely to go after drivers from Free/Net/OpenBSD, first because they underlying systems are far more similar (read: less changes would be needed to the code to make it work), secondly they wouldn't need to relicense to do it, they could just pull them in.
Yeah, I know, a lot of people complain about drivers in BSD systems too. I personally have never run across any hardware that didn't work in FreeBSD unless it was rather new (read: brand new sound cards, which tend to be covered by OSS anyway). All the BSDs are worlds ahead in driver support over out of the box Solaris, if stealing drivers was really something they were honestly worried about they would have been taking them from these projects for the past 10 years. They haven't done this, so it follows that this is a bogus belief for any of you to hold.
Uh-oh, I guess that Linus didn't think that far ahead... who was it that was claiming he thought things through before rambling about them? He's a "software engineer" he should know better...
I don't see what was so hard to understand about that episode. He wasn't blowing up unreasonably. The guy found out that his code had been mistakenly posted online, then posted his findings to a huge number of people. It wasn't necessary, it was rude, and it was shameful. It would be like me putting some mistake you might make on CNN. You might get pretty pissed about that, eh?
People are too stupid to understand how this mistake can happen. Here's how it works:
I want to rewrite some GPL software in a non-GPL license because I think GPL leads to brain tumors.
I want to write something, say, BSD, and have it work interchangeably. Well, if I take the code they have, and slowly replace the code in the files with code of my own devising, I can do that. If I make a release, I'll have to dual license everything, my code will have to be dual BSD/GPL, while the rest is just GPL. Now, if I keep working until all original GPL code is removed, then I no longer need the GPL license, nor do I need to attribute anything to the person who wrote the original code (though I might to be nice, I would not need to). Now, if I were in the habit of releasing just the new code I wrote, and removing all GPL code prior to posting it on the internet, again I would have clean code.
If I happened to accidentally leave a few lines in, however, it would be an honest mistake, not "stealing code." If someone took my mistake, my accidental inclusion of their code, then told dozens of people I had stolen it without asking me about it first, I would be pretty pissed off too, and most of my close friends would likewise be rather irritated that someone would treat me that way. If I didn't say anything about how shitty it was for them to do it, one of them would be likely to do it for me.
Those wifi guys were assholes, this wasn't like that PearPC/CherryOS crap, it was an honest mistake in a standard-practice rewrite of non-compatible code. Theo was just trying to make them realize that fact... but I guess they had the same reading comprehension issues that you do?
Thank goodness for cygwin and the free-licenses of Borland software then. Changing your operating system just to use one or two tools is lunacy.
Even that aside, there are many options that all use gcc that aren't Linux... FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, OS/2, QNX, Solaris (has been free to use non-commercially for ages), HURD, hell, cygwin has been around since 95. Switching to Linux to use a free compiler set is, stupidity aside, just laziness.
Yeah, but you get mostly results like this: "VB will fail to become the new COBOL, and Java will take that role" The fact that Microsoft says "it's the new Cobol" and only Microsoft makes the claim is not really important in any sense. Many technical journalists referred to Java as "the new Cobol"
Unlike Unix 1.0, Linux is mostly written in C, not assembler, meaning it is much more portable.
... sort of like now?
Wow, I love when people rewrite history. Unix, in it's various forms, was mostly C by 1991. Yes, it was ASM when it was written as C was created for Unix after it existed. They did move Unix to C as it became a viable language. I would say the same thing about TCP/IP, etc. Trying to use examples of things that didn't exist at the time Unix was made, but did exist when Linux was made (and had to be tacked on later) is a bad argument technique, and I hope you never touch a keyboard again, I really really do.
Linux, written 20 years after C came into existance, was a project that had the sole purpose of teaching Torvalds how to use ASM on 386 computers. It was written entirely in ASM and had to be backported to C later by other people. Linux was never meant to be portable, other people just decided they would rather hack Linux onto other archs than help the HURD folks finish up their project.
That aside, even, all the other "features" you attribute to linux were tacked on after the fact as well. Linus did not sit down and say "Now, I'm going to teach myself ASM, wouldn't it be cool if I gave this thing access to an X server?" Linux was, when it was written, before other people started tacking on their own ideas, a poor re-implementation of the Unix kernel from 20-30 years earlier. And really, that's ok. Why do you people keep trying to write it's history away, hmm? You should all be saying "Wow, if something as simple and stupid as that can turn into what it is today, imagine what we as a community could do it we started with something more planned out to begin with!"
But I guess that goes back to the HURD again, which none of you raving lunatics give two shits about. Oh well...
We also know that the diets eaten by primitive humans were generally closer to the atkins diet than anything we eat today. These people were hunter-gatherers and had access primarily to some green vegetables relatively low in carbohydrates, and to meat, as well as nuts and some seasonal fruits. ... We also know that they consistently died before age 30?
No offense obviously, but the brain in particular runs more efficiently on ketones than it does on glucose.
d s83099.asp
Why are you stupid?
No, really, why are you a stupid, biologically illiterate oaf?
"Ketone bodies, from the breakdown of fatty acids to acetyl groups, are also produced during this state, and are burned throughout the body. Excess ketone bodies are excreted in the breath and urine. The brain has a residual need for glucose because ketones can only provide energy when used during aerobic respiration in mitochondria. In the long thin neurons, much of the metabolically active cellular membrane must derive its energy from glucose via anaerobic respiration without the assistance of mitochondria."
Yes, that's right, parts of the brain are incapable of making use of ketones for energy (but who needs cellular membranes, right?).
Ever hear of ketosis? No, I don't mean the bull-shit "ketosis" that retards trying to push low-carb diets talk about, I'm talking about real ketosis, the time when your body ends up with a large overabundance of ketones and you end up "drunk" all day long. Then, after that, you end up in a ketone induced coma. Then you die.
The atkins diet has been changed three or four times because the original "Atkins" crap was pretty much globally recognized as being dangerous.
Yes, there are a lot of retards who say things like "A lot of people mistakenly think Ketoacidosis when they hear ketosis, but it's a completely different thing."
No it isn't you jerks, Ketoacidosis is just another name for Ketosis (interestingly ketosis was referred to as the danger condition by medical professionals 20-40 years ago, it changed to "a natural body process" with a different name for the condition around the time of these low-card diets).
"Ketosis occurs when there is not enough insulin in the body to metabolize glucose and provide energy to the cells of the body. The blood fluids become increasingly acidic until the starving body cells malfunction, causing staggering, slurred speech, disorientation and poor judgement. Eventually, the victim of ketosis may have seizures, go into a deep coma and die if untreated." http://www2.jsonline.com/alive/column/aug99/howar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketoacidosis
See, here's the way it works. Ketones are emergency power for some cells in your body, i.e. if you are starving you'll have enough energy to go kill something, but that's about it.
Outside of that single use, ketones are a giant danger to your nervous system. If you don't drink large amounts of water to wash them out of your system you end up staggering around like a drunken hobo. Atkins guy, try laying off the water intake for a couple days then see how you feel. At that point, come back and tell us how well the brain runs on ketones.
The fact that you can function at all is due to the fact that you keep washing the toxin out of your body in your urine, if you didn't your blood would end up too acidic for you to live... and, well, you wouldn't any longer.
Ketones are better than glucose my ass...
You mean that Microsoft went out of their way to make their own products compatible? Oh happy day!
All the text files caused a major bottle-neck in Unix around 88-92, however. Parsing the passwd file if you had a couple hundred users was a giant instant sludge-fest every time a person logged on.
I can afford a computer, or I can afford Vista... but not both >. 1.8ghz CPU, 1 GB memory, sound card, 80 GB drive, 128MB video, case, etc: $250 (at most, more likely $200) Windows Vista Ultimate Edition: $260 download direct from microsoft. Wait, what? o.O Mind you, Linux hacks me off as much as the next guy (poor kernel design in my opinion, but that's neither here nor there) but paying more for the OS than I would for the hardware... almost 50% more in some cases (I've seen it in stores here for $350)... that's just crazy talk.
I'm upset because I am responsible for users running Windows, and although I have set policy forbidding the usage of IE, I can't enforce it because of Microsoft tying the browser to the OS.
You can still remove I.E. the program while leaving the I.E. rendering engine installed for patching (through I.E. tabs in mozilla or whatnot) without having any real downside effects (programs depending on I.E. still run as they don't use iexplore.exe) I've been doing this for years with XPlite, but you can just as easily just delete the cached exe file, the sources exe (iexplore.ex_ or whatever the backup is) and then the Programs Files/Internet Explorer/iexplore.exe crap. That doesn't stop things from being able to abuse the i.e. engine once installed, but it stops your users from using Internet Explorer permanently, which stops most crap that would use the i.e. engine from getting in to begin with.
well... so says some discovery/nation geographics/nova/whatever show that was on about 6 months ago...
Yeah, your data is outdated. China is topping out that list 3x over right now. If we cut China down the middle to make two countries the US would still only come in at #3.
Didn't an Alpha port of some sort exist of SunOS back around the time the PowerPC one did? I seem to remember m86k, PPC, Alpha, x86, and Sparc at the time for a short run, but I can't seem to find anything about even the PowerPC port anymore now that people are working on porting OpenSolaris (not that I spent more than 30 seconds looking)... sometime around Solaris 2.5.x... something else too... I vaguely remember 6 supported platforms... And that really isn't the best way to go about looking at it... "If it wasn't linux it must have been Tru64/whatever"... NetBSD has had support for Alpha since very early 1995, probably 8 months before Linux supported it (netBSD support in binary form started Feb 95, earliest reference for Linux I can find is Nov 95, but that's just going by the axp-linux mailing list archives), OpenBSD has had support for it since 96, and FreeBSD has supported it since version 3.something... sometime late 98/early 99 I guess? So there are at least 5 possibilities in there for things he might have been on, possibly more...