All i can tell you is that kde sucks big hairy mokey balls ina networked (read Xwindow) envorinment.
???
I've been using KDE since the mid-90s, and I've only had networked environments (yes, including "Xwindow") and I haven't had significant problems, let alone "suck big hairy mokey[sic] balls". In fact since I've been using X11 from the beginning (and before that SunView) you could say that I do want to use "Xwindow powers". I only got a Mac when Apple switched to Unix, so I could continue to use the X11 applications I've been using since '88 or so.
Anyone who says C is assembly has obviously never used assembly.
There are some applications where you need predictability. Any "magic behind the scenes" is unacceptable. For those cases there is nothing better than C.
As the grand-poster said, there is a generation of programmers who know and love C, and we are not dead yet. For us, C is a very pleasant language, obviously designed by (a very small group of) smart people for smart people without the usual "design by committee" compromises. If you just need to dash off a quick little program there's nothing better. Beauty in simplicity.
We're not trying to transport "illegal" files across the border; we simply want to not have to disclose our personal efects (laptops, diaries, books, manifestos scribbled on toilet paper,...) to the authorities without a specific court order.
On re-reading, I should clarify -- by "platform" I mean hardware -- "the phone" -- and by application (really bad choice of word) I meant software. (Wish I could just go back and edit that comment!)
Those are valid and good points, but my belief is that security should be up to the application and not the platform -- and yours is the opposite. We'll just have to agree to disagree. (I also have a very dim view of the belief that Apple-signage of apps is the panacea.)
I forget who it was that said, "When you keep people from doing stupid things, you also keep them from doing smart things."
"But everyone else is doing it!" is a crappy excuse. There is no technical reason to require apps to be signed by the manufacturer.
The right way to design a smart phone would be to separate the "radio bits" from the "computing platform bits". Apps running on the platform can only control the usual high-level features like "place a call", or register for callbacks like "incoming call"; it can't change legally-mandated elements like frequencies, phone identity, etc. You know, just like if it were a program running on a machine with a modem attached to the phone network.
But that would take away their ability to nickel-and-dime you to death.
[A program] isn't exactly a value; more of a definition, wouldn't you say?
No, I wouldn't. You're conflating an encoding with an algorithm.
You're misusing the language. You do not seem to know the technical meanings of the words "encoding", "value", "definition", and (most crucially) "information."
The pseudo-TeX I wrote is a representation of the value, not the definition. The definition is "the ratio of the of a circle's circumference to its diameter". The value of \pi expressed in base-10 is 3.141592653... . Another way to express the value of \pi 11.001001000011111101101010... . Yet another way (seen earlier in this thread) is ln(-1)/sqrt(-1). (And that last one's only 120 bits!)
Re:Unknown value?
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"infinite amount of information"? Only if you're the sort of person who calls any bigger-than-linear increase "exponential". Words have meanings, and scientific/mathematical words have very precise meanings.
Here's a complete representation of the value of \pi:
4\sigma_{k=1}^\infinity\frac{(-1)^{k+1}}{2k-1}
That's only 368 bits of information, and I'm sure there are more compact encodings of the value.
The transition will be difficult. The digital immigrants with extensive investigative experience and the digital natives who are novices in their profession will have to cooperate and exchange their knowledge and wisdom,
You may be an optimist.
Another viewpoint: some say that scientists aren't converted over to new theories; the new theory takes over when all the adherents of the old have died.
Mach, for example, was one of the great scientists of his generation, but refused to accept the newfangled new physics of atoms and quanta and relativity. Young scientists in his sphere of influence apparently were terrorized if they wanted to work in those areas.
I can see the same sort of thing applying here. If the shift is as large as geeks think it is,
we may just have to stick it out till that group passes on.
Yes, we need a new Good Internet that the FBI, SS, RIAA, etc. will make safe and legal for everyone.
The rest of us will stay on this one (to be renamed Evilnet).
Jury is an outrageous abuse of both democracy and legal system. It is basically a competition between lawyers who will manipulate better the ignorant randomly selected civilians.
Only because some citizens do everything possible to not get on a jury. As the old joke goes, juries are made up of people too stupid to get out of jury duty. (How many times have you done your civic duty and served on a jury?)
If we picked our government at random from the citizens things wouldn't be as fucked up as they are today.
One of the tricks they used to get fast performance was to serialize internal data structures to disk,
Exactly the sort of thing that I would fire -- no, let's say re-educate and rehabilitate -- someone for.
This "baling wire and duct tape" attitude is what makes people hold them in contempt.
In almost all IT shops with open source operating systems, it is child's play to modify an OS routine and compile it to run innocuously on an IT-managed server.
What a ridiculous strawman. Any company where it's child's play for an unauthorized person to install a new OS (free or not) on a production machine needs to fire all their IT people.
Why do you trust disgruntled employees in software companies to not similarly sabotage your operation?
The only people getting rich off all these insane scams are the recording company executives with their multimillion dollar golden parachutes. The 5 cent royalty that crime-gangs like the RIAA allow the actual artists to have isn't providing significant income to anyone except a few big names.
Or were you implying that Christians involved with trying to affect science curriculum would murder the science teachers if they thought they could get away with it?
That's not hard to believe -- Christians already seem to think that murdering physicians who perform abortions is OK. (And surely it's a lot worse to warp someone's mind with this science, because they will then warp many more minds.)
"Every maker of pictures will go to the fire, where a being will be set upon him to torment him in hell for each picture he made."
Ok, so why is it that (some?) Muslims feel God is powerless or cannot be trusted to do the things he's supposed to, and they have to take it upon themselves to do the "set upon him and torment him" business? I'm sure one of your holy books has stuff like "vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord". There wouldn't be any religious intolerance, oppression and violence if you religious people didn't believe that you were better than those other people over there.
... you're assuming that all religion is irrational and imaginary. If you assume that most people are irrational and live in fantasy land, you've lost your means to communicate with others.
Non sequitur. Children are irrational and often live in a fantasy land, but we communicate with them all the time.
Of course all religion is irrational and imaginary. That's what faith means -- to believe something even though your rational thoughts say otherwise.
The biggest effect these lowest level ineffective gratuitous "security" measures have is to annoy everyone and make lots of money for the security companies. Good security is a matter of quality, not quantity.
Let me give you an example: I work downtown in a building of 10 floors, surrounded by buildings of around 50 floors. There are only offices in this building, all very boring and white collar. We already have card-readers on the doors on each floor. You also have to swipe your card in the elevator or it won't take you to your floor. And last month they added BART-style card-reading barricades downstairs. All this expensive security for what? So that you forget your card, you can wait downstairs while someone from your floor can come escort you up to your floor, where you get your temporary day badge.
Exactly what benefit does all that extra security have? If I wanted to steal corporate secrets I wouldn't be doing it by trying to sneak into the building.
But it's the war on terra!9/11 changed everything!!!
In my dealings with people I expect people to be truthful, even when they have a vested interest. If someone does lie it lowers my estimation of them, significantly. They don't have to volunteer information, but no lying. I think most people are that way. Why, then, should a company be allowed to lie?
Just adding an executable doesn't make a system bloated: the mere presence of the extra xeyes executable doesn't slow anything down. It's bloat when it gets in the way even when you don't use it, with no way to disable it.
(And if you're obsessive enough to care about extra crap in the kernel that you don't use, you're free to compile your own kernel. Oh wait, you can't do that on proprietary systems.)
I guess the moral is that if you treat your employees with respect and treat them well (with good pay, good benefits, etc.) then unions aren't really required.
In other news, if we treat each other well and with respect, police forces and armies aren't really required.
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Son, I've been writing C for 25 years (and getting paid for it), no way I'm going to switch to your "whitespace is significant" toy language now!
If I want to use a VHLL, I'll take Unicon (and yes, bash (or ksh)) over Python/Ruby/PHP (or whatever today's HOT!!! language is).
In other words, "Your Favourite Programming Language Sucks(tm)".
???
I've been using KDE since the mid-90s, and I've only had networked environments (yes, including "Xwindow") and I haven't had significant problems, let alone "suck big hairy mokey[sic] balls". In fact since I've been using X11 from the beginning (and before that SunView) you could say that I do want to use "Xwindow powers". I only got a Mac when Apple switched to Unix, so I could continue to use the X11 applications I've been using since '88 or so.
Anyone who says C is assembly has obviously never used assembly.
There are some applications where you need predictability. Any "magic behind the scenes" is unacceptable. For those cases there is nothing better than C.
As the grand-poster said, there is a generation of programmers who know and love C, and we are not dead yet. For us, C is a very pleasant language, obviously designed by (a very small group of) smart people for smart people without the usual "design by committee" compromises. If you just need to dash off a quick little program there's nothing better. Beauty in simplicity.
You're trying to solve the wrong problem.
We're not trying to transport "illegal" files across the border; we simply want to not have to disclose our personal efects (laptops, diaries, books, manifestos scribbled on toilet paper, ...) to the authorities without a specific court order.
On re-reading, I should clarify -- by "platform" I mean hardware -- "the phone" -- and by application (really bad choice of word) I meant software. (Wish I could just go back and edit that comment!)
Those are valid and good points, but my belief is that security should be up to the application and not the platform -- and yours is the opposite. We'll just have to agree to disagree. (I also have a very dim view of the belief that Apple-signage of apps is the panacea.)
I forget who it was that said, "When you keep people from doing stupid things, you also keep them from doing smart things."
"But everyone else is doing it!" is a crappy excuse. There is no technical reason to require apps to be signed by the manufacturer.
The right way to design a smart phone would be to separate the "radio bits" from the "computing platform bits". Apps running on the platform can only control the usual high-level features like "place a call", or register for callbacks like "incoming call"; it can't change legally-mandated elements like frequencies, phone identity, etc. You know, just like if it were a program running on a machine with a modem attached to the phone network.
But that would take away their ability to nickel-and-dime you to death.
No, I wouldn't. You're conflating an encoding with an algorithm.
You're misusing the language. You do not seem to know the technical meanings of the words "encoding", "value", "definition", and (most crucially) "information."
The pseudo-TeX I wrote is a representation of the value, not the definition. The definition is "the ratio of the of a circle's circumference to its diameter". The value of \pi expressed in base-10 is 3.141592653... . Another way to express the value of \pi 11.001001000011111101101010... . Yet another way (seen earlier in this thread) is ln(-1)/sqrt(-1). (And that last one's only 120 bits!)
"infinite amount of information"? Only if you're the sort of person who calls any bigger-than-linear increase "exponential". Words have meanings, and scientific/mathematical words have very precise meanings.
Here's a complete representation of the value of \pi:
That's only 368 bits of information, and I'm sure there are more compact encodings of the value.
You're a crackpot!
You may be an optimist.
Another viewpoint: some say that scientists aren't converted over to new theories; the new theory takes over when all the adherents of the old have died. Mach, for example, was one of the great scientists of his generation, but refused to accept the newfangled new physics of atoms and quanta and relativity. Young scientists in his sphere of influence apparently were terrorized if they wanted to work in those areas.
I can see the same sort of thing applying here. If the shift is as large as geeks think it is, we may just have to stick it out till that group passes on.
Yes, we need a new Good Internet that the FBI, SS, RIAA, etc. will make safe and legal for everyone. The rest of us will stay on this one (to be renamed Evilnet).
Only because some citizens do everything possible to not get on a jury. As the old joke goes, juries are made up of people too stupid to get out of jury duty. (How many times have you done your civic duty and served on a jury?)
If we picked our government at random from the citizens things wouldn't be as fucked up as they are today.
What a ridiculous strawman. Any company where it's child's play for an unauthorized person to install a new OS (free or not) on a production machine needs to fire all their IT people.
Why do you trust disgruntled employees in software companies to not similarly sabotage your operation?
The only people getting rich off all these insane scams are the recording company executives with their multimillion dollar golden parachutes. The 5 cent royalty that crime-gangs like the RIAA allow the actual artists to have isn't providing significant income to anyone except a few big names.
Non sequitur. Children are irrational and often live in a fantasy land, but we communicate with them all the time.
Of course all religion is irrational and imaginary. That's what faith means -- to believe something even though your rational thoughts say otherwise.
The biggest effect these lowest level ineffective gratuitous "security" measures have is to annoy everyone and make lots of money for the security companies. Good security is a matter of quality, not quantity.
Let me give you an example: I work downtown in a building of 10 floors, surrounded by buildings of around 50 floors. There are only offices in this building, all very boring and white collar. We already have card-readers on the doors on each floor. You also have to swipe your card in the elevator or it won't take you to your floor. And last month they added BART-style card-reading barricades downstairs. All this expensive security for what? So that you forget your card, you can wait downstairs while someone from your floor can come escort you up to your floor, where you get your temporary day badge.
Exactly what benefit does all that extra security have? If I wanted to steal corporate secrets I wouldn't be doing it by trying to sneak into the building.
But it's the war on terra! 9/11 changed everything!!!
In my dealings with people I expect people to be truthful, even when they have a vested interest. If someone does lie it lowers my estimation of them, significantly. They don't have to volunteer information, but no lying. I think most people are that way. Why, then, should a company be allowed to lie?
Maybe Zoomr?
Just adding an executable doesn't make a system bloated: the mere presence of the extra xeyes executable doesn't slow anything down. It's bloat when it gets in the way even when you don't use it, with no way to disable it.
(And if you're obsessive enough to care about extra crap in the kernel that you don't use, you're free to compile your own kernel. Oh wait, you can't do that on proprietary systems.)