You and some other guys are really being asses to BlakeyRat. I think he's probably solving real-world problems since he's being employed as a software developer.
Computer Science is not about teaching "programming". Computer science is the systematic study of the algorithms of information. Calculus is the language of algorithms. Calculus is the foundation on which the study of computer science is based.
UTTER. BULLSHIT.
As someone who has fairly recently completed a 4-year program in computer science (which, incidentally, also did require calculus) and is now a CS Ph.D. candidate, that statement is totally false. Calculus IS NOT in any way the foundation of computer science or any of its subfields. This is not to say that math in general is not relevant to computer science; it is crucial. However, the types of math relevant to computer science are all discrete. I took multivariable calculus in college as I was required to do and then never used it again.
If you want to pick a field of math to hold up as the "foundation on which the study of computer science is based", try the theory of computation. That's where we get Turing Machines from.
---linuxrocks123
PJ has a strong disgust for Psystar due to her irrational admiration for Apple and has been cheering for Psystar to lose this case since the beginning. Also, because she's a little paranoid and prone to conspiracy theories, she thinks Microsoft is behind Psystar. I've found this highly annoying, so I'm glad that now there's now another company Apple (seemingly, since they're still around and haven't sued) can't touch which is doing exactly the same thing. I think her reaction when she discovers their existence will be, at the least, very entertaining to watch.
You missed that the provision is actually against circumventing a restricting device WHICH PROTECTS ACCESS TO COPYRIGHTED CONTENT. The DMCA does not apply here.
Well, if you're going to convince people to apologize for their "sexist" behavior, you will first have to convince them that it is in fact sexist. I, for one, am not convinced, am mentally cheerleading Mark Shuttleworth for not apologizing, and hope he doesn't cave. It's just as possible for the party refusing to apologize to be right as it is for the party demanding the apology, and FOSS feminists seem to get offended far too easily.
I'm not saying there aren't individuals in the community who aren't sexist -- I'm sure at least a few probably are -- but it's certainly not institutionalized. Women are allowed to code, and no one is stopping them from contributing code to projects. Some do regularly contribute code. The sexists, however many exist, have lost.
What the groups like Debian Women seem to be about is chainging the community structure so that no one is/allowed/ to say things they deem "sexist" on mailing lists and whatnot. This is just censorship: I probably don't agree with their definition of sexism, and sexist trolls aren't different from any other trolls and don't need to be handled specially. Their reactions to legitimate software packages like hot-babe solidified my view that Debian Women and groups like it are a destructive force in the FOSS community, albeit a relatively minor and impotent one.
I am firmly of the belief that people do not have the right not to be offended. Moreover, I think that being offended by random strangers on the Internet -- in a FOSS community or any other one -- is basically par for the course when you choose to go on the Internet and that that is not going to change any time soon. It's debatable whether it should -- reading trolls can be fun. I'm upset if someone I care about offends me, but it's common to never even have met collaborators you work with on OSS projects, so I don't see any reason why people can't just ignore it and move on if they're offended by someone's tone on a mailing list -- be it because they think the person is sexist or for any other reason. In short, Internet communities have always been offensive, but it's only words and most people can ignore them. It's only some subset of the geek feminist crowd that apparently has a problem with this.
I've had people -- family members, whom I love -- say and do things to me that I think were manifestly unfair, hurtful, wrong; whatever, you name it. I've talked to them about and they disagree, so they won't apologize for it. And yeah, it really, really pisses me off, and the resulting resentment is damaging to our relationship.
But you know what? THAT HAPPENS TO EVERYONE. I'm male, and I know exactly what you mean, because it has nothing to do with "sexism". Having people offend you and then refuse to apologize or even accept they did anything wrong is maddeningly frustrating. It's frustrating for men, women, whites, Hispanics, blacks; everyone. People sometimes disagree that they wronged you, and they won't apologize if they do. This is part of the human condition.
So, I'm going to have to say that the world is not going to change here and that you just need to accept this fact of life. It's not sexism, just a symptom of the fact that people suck.
Frasier: upper middle-class radio personality lives in a three-bedroom apartment in Seattle with his father and home healthcare worker. Seinfield: middle-class single comedian lives alone in a medium-size one-bedroom apartment. You do have to ignore Kramer...
You've spent time mastering skills that you will only ever put to use in the unlikeliest of events, while others master skills relevant to their chosen professions and thereby take better part in the gains from trade. What a pity for you.
You show your ignorance of Latin. Latin is a quite flexible language.
Due to noun declensions, you can write the words in a Latin sentence in whatever order you want. This allows for the composition of great poetry that actually scans correctly (unlike English "poetry"). It also lets you hold important clarifications in a sentence until the very end, letting you create suspense and surprise within sentences. It's a truly beautiful and astounding language, is the basis for the languages of most of Europe, and is the language of the past 1000 years of the world's great literature.
Sure, people usually speak one of its derivatives now rather than using it directly, but I'd call still call Latin a success by any measure.
The "children would starve to death" thing is really melodramatic, and it makes you sound unbelievable. No one's starving to death in the U.S. except homeless people, and then only (really) mentally ill homeless people who either can't find the soup kitchens or believe that the aliens who implanted the radioactive jelly beans in his butt are running them. Yes, it might be a hardship. Perhaps jurors should be better paid. But this is not a life-or-death situation, except perhaps for the guy on trial.
> Some retards in comp sci decided that BREAKING A SCIENTIFIC STANDARD was a good idea, instead of doing the correct thing, which would have been to create new unit prefixes for their little scientific subdomain.
Mweee hee hee hee mwa ha ha we're so evil! (/me leans back in his big chair with pointy edges and guns down unicorns with an AK-47).
Seriously, man, it's not like other sciences don't bend language when it suits them. Biologists have bastardized Latin so much it's not even cute when they do it anymore. Chemistry's little equation system is a serious mindscrew to everyone that sees it for the first time. Oh, and I guess someone needs to tell group theorists that, you know, "+" always always ALWAYS means algebraic addition, right?
It's usually obvious from the context whether it's 1024 or 1000, so this really isn't a problem or a big deal.
Nontechnical users are technically incompetent and therefore make incompetent technical purchasing decisions.
The goal of Linux isn't market share per se; it's to create a good OS. Therefore, when ranting numbskulls suggest making crap changes to the operating system, the developers generally just ignore those ranting numbskulls. That might result in market share being low in the short-term, but it also results in a better system for anyone who does use it, and we'd rather be correct than popular.
Linux market share isn't where it is because it still has a CLI you can optionally use for various tasks (OS X and Windows have that too...), or because it doesn't have Photoshop (it does, through WINE), or because Ubuntu is hard to pronounce, or because of a lack of games/drivers/programs-that-make-little-animated-cats-jump-across-your-title-bars. Linux market share is where it is (at or close to that of your beloved OS X, btw.) because it wasn't here first. People know Windows, and the average, stupid person hates learning, so they keep using what they know. First-time computer buyers won't use Linux unless a helpful friend or family member steers them toward it, because it's not preinstalled unless you know where to look, and first-time computer buyers don't know where to look. Addressing your and others' blinkered, ignorant complaints wouldn't accomplish anything except, at best, wasting developer time and degrading the system until someone patches the stupidity back out.
But, while we're waiting for Linux world domination (which I'm guessing will start in offices, since office IT managers are typically more competent than home users), Linux is now popular enough that problems with new printers and wireless cards are quickly becoming a thing of the past, so I don't really have any personal motivation to see its market share increase further. We just needed to get big enough to make it an economic loss for hardware manufacturers to ignore us, and we needed to get there without accepting non-free device drivers. We have succeeded in both of those aims:)
lol wow, I haven't talked with someone as blinkered as you for a while...
"push start,go to programs/choose accessories(it is at the top dad)/ choose system tools/choose system info."
(really more like)
"Push start... yeah, bottom left hand corner. Now go to Programs... yeah, the menu is supposed to come out like that. Okay, go to Accessories... it should be near the top, yes, I'm sure it's there... did you find it? Okay, good. Now go to System Tools... yeah, another menu is going to come out. Okay, choose System Info. Do you see the box that it popped up? Okay, read that out for me... you can skip the title bar..."
etc., etc., etc., until you start crying blood
versus
"Type 'lspci -vvv'"
(really more like)
"Type 'lspci -vvv', followed by enter,... yes, all lower case... yeah, put a space after the 'i'... and read (or email) me what it says."
Which is shorter? Right, the CLI way.
I usually don't even bother trying to help people do GUI stuff over the phone or email now. We set up VNC -- or, theoretically, Remote Desktop, except that all the people I support are on Linux now -- or they wait until I can physically get to them. It's just too painfully slow to work any other way.
And then your talk about the registry just cracks me up. You only have to have these regfile fixes because Windows sucks so much it will randomly corrupt its centralized, labyrinthian configuration data! Text config files are so much easier to understand and if there's an actual problem you have to diagnose (versus Windows just shitting itself in a predictable way), it's much easier to ask someone to read out a text config file -- or even edit it -- than it is to ask them to open regedit and futz around. I'll admit that both of them suck -- tech support works best on-site, and passably with remote access of some sort, but phone and email-based methods royally suck ass.
It sounds like you sell Windows support, so it doesn't surprise me you'd be fearful of a better system taking away your business, and I guess you've made up a nice little fairy tale about why the other system isn't really better. I've already established Linux has GUI config tools anyway. The ones in Ubuntu even suck a little less than the Windows ones, though that's kind of like a spitting contest between dehydrated people. CLI is just better for system configuration, as it's better for so many other things. It's a shame you don't get that; it would make your life easier.
Oh, and lol @ the 2% thing. Linux is probably already above 2%, though it's hard to measure. 3 months ago, the anti-Linux ranters would be talking about how "Linux will NEVER EVER BREAK 1% MARKET SHARE until it !". Now, even the totally skewed HitsLink stats have Linux over 1%, so you've all started bumping your SMALL_NUMBER to 2%. Awesome:)
I can't tell if you're trolling... are you actually holding up the Windows Registry as a paragon of UI design?
I want to help someone out. I need to know about their hardware.
Linux: "Open up a terminal and type 'lspci -vvv', then post the output here." Windows: "Open up Device Manager and, uh... post a screenshot after clicking all this crap?"
Which is easier for you to describe? Which is more likely to result in you getting the information you need? Hell, which is easier for/the user to do/?
Again, it's not that Linux GUI system config tools suck; it's that they all suck, because it's fundamentally the wrong way to solve the problem.
That's a good point, but I consider the ability to easily communicate shell-based directions to be a legitimate shell advantage. After all, what you're basically doing when you say that is giving the user a script -- even if it's a script written with the human as a preprocessor since you didn't have enough info to actually write it out yourself:)
"Remove Bash. That's right, no Bash, no Korn, no Bourne, no shells of ANY kind. Do that with a fresh install and see if it will run six months, with allowing updates, without any access to CLI."
That's an absurd thing to say and betrays your ignorance here. The shell is an integral part of a Unix system. If you remove/bin/sh, the system will not even boot. Any Unix system will be this way, including OS X, because this specific interpreted language is part of what makes Unix Unix.
As far as not using the shell for day-to-day tasks, you can do that with Linux now. Ubuntu has all those point-and-click controls you love, and you're free to use them instead of the shell if you like. You'll get things done more slowly, because GUI configs suck, but that's your choice.
What may make you believe it's impossible to go without using a shell in Linux is the fact that Linux people tend to suggest typing shell commands when people ask how to fix problems on a forum. This is because the shell is the best, fastest way to fix problems in Linux, even when other options are available, and we won't suggest an inferior solution unless pressed for it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, calculus is not used in complexity proofs.
---linuxrocks123
You and some other guys are really being asses to BlakeyRat. I think he's probably solving real-world problems since he's being employed as a software developer.
---linuxrocks123
Computer Science is not about teaching "programming". Computer science is the systematic study of the algorithms of information. Calculus is the language of algorithms. Calculus is the foundation on which the study of computer science is based. UTTER. BULLSHIT. As someone who has fairly recently completed a 4-year program in computer science (which, incidentally, also did require calculus) and is now a CS Ph.D. candidate, that statement is totally false. Calculus IS NOT in any way the foundation of computer science or any of its subfields. This is not to say that math in general is not relevant to computer science; it is crucial. However, the types of math relevant to computer science are all discrete. I took multivariable calculus in college as I was required to do and then never used it again. If you want to pick a field of math to hold up as the "foundation on which the study of computer science is based", try the theory of computation. That's where we get Turing Machines from. ---linuxrocks123
PJ has a strong disgust for Psystar due to her irrational admiration for Apple and has been cheering for Psystar to lose this case since the beginning. Also, because she's a little paranoid and prone to conspiracy theories, she thinks Microsoft is behind Psystar. I've found this highly annoying, so I'm glad that now there's now another company Apple (seemingly, since they're still around and haven't sued) can't touch which is doing exactly the same thing. I think her reaction when she discovers their existence will be, at the least, very entertaining to watch.
---linuxrocks123
No, what I mean to say is that what PearC is doing is legal under German law.
---linuxrocks123
I agree; PJ is annoying. Someone needs show her this and make her shit bricks: https://phonemasters.de/en/PearC-Starter
PearC is doing EXACTLY what Psystar is doing, but in Germany, so Apple can't do anything to stop them! Kind of awesome :D
---linuxrocks123
You missed that the provision is actually against circumventing a restricting device WHICH PROTECTS ACCESS TO COPYRIGHTED CONTENT. The DMCA does not apply here.
Well, if you're going to convince people to apologize for their "sexist" behavior, you will first have to convince them that it is in fact sexist. I, for one, am not convinced, am mentally cheerleading Mark Shuttleworth for not apologizing, and hope he doesn't cave. It's just as possible for the party refusing to apologize to be right as it is for the party demanding the apology, and FOSS feminists seem to get offended far too easily.
I'm not saying there aren't individuals in the community who aren't sexist -- I'm sure at least a few probably are -- but it's certainly not institutionalized. Women are allowed to code, and no one is stopping them from contributing code to projects. Some do regularly contribute code. The sexists, however many exist, have lost.
What the groups like Debian Women seem to be about is chainging the community structure so that no one is /allowed/ to say things they deem "sexist" on mailing lists and whatnot. This is just censorship: I probably don't agree with their definition of sexism, and sexist trolls aren't different from any other trolls and don't need to be handled specially. Their reactions to legitimate software packages like hot-babe solidified my view that Debian Women and groups like it are a destructive force in the FOSS community, albeit a relatively minor and impotent one.
I am firmly of the belief that people do not have the right not to be offended. Moreover, I think that being offended by random strangers on the Internet -- in a FOSS community or any other one -- is basically par for the course when you choose to go on the Internet and that that is not going to change any time soon. It's debatable whether it should -- reading trolls can be fun. I'm upset if someone I care about offends me, but it's common to never even have met collaborators you work with on OSS projects, so I don't see any reason why people can't just ignore it and move on if they're offended by someone's tone on a mailing list -- be it because they think the person is sexist or for any other reason. In short, Internet communities have always been offensive, but it's only words and most people can ignore them. It's only some subset of the geek feminist crowd that apparently has a problem with this.
I've had people -- family members, whom I love -- say and do things to me that I think were manifestly unfair, hurtful, wrong; whatever, you name it. I've talked to them about and they disagree, so they won't apologize for it. And yeah, it really, really pisses me off, and the resulting resentment is damaging to our relationship.
But you know what? THAT HAPPENS TO EVERYONE. I'm male, and I know exactly what you mean, because it has nothing to do with "sexism". Having people offend you and then refuse to apologize or even accept they did anything wrong is maddeningly frustrating. It's frustrating for men, women, whites, Hispanics, blacks; everyone. People sometimes disagree that they wronged you, and they won't apologize if they do. This is part of the human condition.
So, I'm going to have to say that the world is not going to change here and that you just need to accept this fact of life. It's not sexism, just a symptom of the fact that people suck.
Frasier: upper middle-class radio personality lives in a three-bedroom apartment in Seattle with his father and home healthcare worker.
Seinfield: middle-class single comedian lives alone in a medium-size one-bedroom apartment. You do have to ignore Kramer...
I'm sure I could think of others.
Binary drivers are a pragmatic problem. They disrupt kernel quality control.
---linuxrocks123
You've spent time mastering skills that you will only ever put to use in the unlikeliest of events, while others master skills relevant to their chosen professions and thereby take better part in the gains from trade. What a pity for you.
---linuxrocks123
You show your ignorance of Latin. Latin is a quite flexible language.
Due to noun declensions, you can write the words in a Latin sentence in whatever order you want. This allows for the composition of great poetry that actually scans correctly (unlike English "poetry"). It also lets you hold important clarifications in a sentence until the very end, letting you create suspense and surprise within sentences. It's a truly beautiful and astounding language, is the basis for the languages of most of Europe, and is the language of the past 1000 years of the world's great literature.
Sure, people usually speak one of its derivatives now rather than using it directly, but I'd call still call Latin a success by any measure.
---linuxrocks123
The "children would starve to death" thing is really melodramatic, and it makes you sound unbelievable. No one's starving to death in the U.S. except homeless people, and then only (really) mentally ill homeless people who either can't find the soup kitchens or believe that the aliens who implanted the radioactive jelly beans in his butt are running them. Yes, it might be a hardship. Perhaps jurors should be better paid. But this is not a life-or-death situation, except perhaps for the guy on trial.
bzip is a lossless compression algorithm.
And professional photographers, with their asinine practice of archiving RAW files, are some of the most pitiful wasters of disk space on the planet.
---linuxrocks123
> Some retards in comp sci decided that BREAKING A SCIENTIFIC STANDARD was a good idea, instead of doing the correct thing, which would have been to create new unit prefixes for their little scientific subdomain.
Mweee hee hee hee mwa ha ha we're so evil! (/me leans back in his big chair with pointy edges and guns down unicorns with an AK-47).
Seriously, man, it's not like other sciences don't bend language when it suits them. Biologists have bastardized Latin so much it's not even cute when they do it anymore. Chemistry's little equation system is a serious mindscrew to everyone that sees it for the first time. Oh, and I guess someone needs to tell group theorists that, you know, "+" always always ALWAYS means algebraic addition, right?
It's usually obvious from the context whether it's 1024 or 1000, so this really isn't a problem or a big deal.
---linuxrocks123
*sigh*, the persistence of belief in this dated misinformation is more than annoying.
Please see http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=36623
Nontechnical users are technically incompetent and therefore make incompetent technical purchasing decisions.
The goal of Linux isn't market share per se; it's to create a good OS. Therefore, when ranting numbskulls suggest making crap changes to the operating system, the developers generally just ignore those ranting numbskulls. That might result in market share being low in the short-term, but it also results in a better system for anyone who does use it, and we'd rather be correct than popular.
Linux market share isn't where it is because it still has a CLI you can optionally use for various tasks (OS X and Windows have that too...), or because it doesn't have Photoshop (it does, through WINE), or because Ubuntu is hard to pronounce, or because of a lack of games/drivers/programs-that-make-little-animated-cats-jump-across-your-title-bars. Linux market share is where it is (at or close to that of your beloved OS X, btw.) because it wasn't here first. People know Windows, and the average, stupid person hates learning, so they keep using what they know. First-time computer buyers won't use Linux unless a helpful friend or family member steers them toward it, because it's not preinstalled unless you know where to look, and first-time computer buyers don't know where to look. Addressing your and others' blinkered, ignorant complaints wouldn't accomplish anything except, at best, wasting developer time and degrading the system until someone patches the stupidity back out.
But, while we're waiting for Linux world domination (which I'm guessing will start in offices, since office IT managers are typically more competent than home users), Linux is now popular enough that problems with new printers and wireless cards are quickly becoming a thing of the past, so I don't really have any personal motivation to see its market share increase further. We just needed to get big enough to make it an economic loss for hardware manufacturers to ignore us, and we needed to get there without accepting non-free device drivers. We have succeeded in both of those aims :)
*sigh*, HTML tags...
"Linux will NEVER EVER BREAK 1% MARKET SHARE until it !"
should be
"Linux will NEVER EVER BREAK 1% MARKET SHARE until it [fixes whatever random, stupid complaint I have about it because I'm an opinionated dolt]!"
lol wow, I haven't talked with someone as blinkered as you for a while...
"push start,go to programs/choose accessories(it is at the top dad)/ choose system tools/choose system info."
(really more like)
"Push start ... yeah, bottom left hand corner. Now go to Programs ... yeah, the menu is supposed to come out like that. Okay, go to Accessories ... it should be near the top, yes, I'm sure it's there ... did you find it? Okay, good. Now go to System Tools ... yeah, another menu is going to come out. Okay, choose System Info. Do you see the box that it popped up? Okay, read that out for me ... you can skip the title bar..."
etc., etc., etc., until you start crying blood
versus
"Type 'lspci -vvv'"
(really more like)
"Type 'lspci -vvv', followed by enter, ... yes, all lower case ... yeah, put a space after the 'i' ... and read (or email) me what it says."
Which is shorter? Right, the CLI way.
I usually don't even bother trying to help people do GUI stuff over the phone or email now. We set up VNC -- or, theoretically, Remote Desktop, except that all the people I support are on Linux now -- or they wait until I can physically get to them. It's just too painfully slow to work any other way.
And then your talk about the registry just cracks me up. You only have to have these regfile fixes because Windows sucks so much it will randomly corrupt its centralized, labyrinthian configuration data! Text config files are so much easier to understand and if there's an actual problem you have to diagnose (versus Windows just shitting itself in a predictable way), it's much easier to ask someone to read out a text config file -- or even edit it -- than it is to ask them to open regedit and futz around. I'll admit that both of them suck -- tech support works best on-site, and passably with remote access of some sort, but phone and email-based methods royally suck ass.
It sounds like you sell Windows support, so it doesn't surprise me you'd be fearful of a better system taking away your business, and I guess you've made up a nice little fairy tale about why the other system isn't really better. I've already established Linux has GUI config tools anyway. The ones in Ubuntu even suck a little less than the Windows ones, though that's kind of like a spitting contest between dehydrated people. CLI is just better for system configuration, as it's better for so many other things. It's a shame you don't get that; it would make your life easier.
Oh, and lol @ the 2% thing. Linux is probably already above 2%, though it's hard to measure. 3 months ago, the anti-Linux ranters would be talking about how "Linux will NEVER EVER BREAK 1% MARKET SHARE until it !". Now, even the totally skewed HitsLink stats have Linux over 1%, so you've all started bumping your SMALL_NUMBER to 2%. Awesome :)
Please see [http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=28374]. No CLI necessary.
How some people convince themselves they need 4+ buttons on a mouse or 2+ monitors is always amusing to me.
I can't tell if you're trolling ... are you actually holding up the Windows Registry as a paragon of UI design?
I want to help someone out. I need to know about their hardware.
Linux: "Open up a terminal and type 'lspci -vvv', then post the output here." ... post a screenshot after clicking all this crap?"
Windows: "Open up Device Manager and, uh
Which is easier for you to describe? Which is more likely to result in you getting the information you need? Hell, which is easier for /the user to do/?
Again, it's not that Linux GUI system config tools suck; it's that they all suck, because it's fundamentally the wrong way to solve the problem.
That's a good point, but I consider the ability to easily communicate shell-based directions to be a legitimate shell advantage. After all, what you're basically doing when you say that is giving the user a script -- even if it's a script written with the human as a preprocessor since you didn't have enough info to actually write it out yourself :)
"Remove Bash. That's right, no Bash, no Korn, no Bourne, no shells of ANY kind. Do that with a fresh install and see if it will run six months, with allowing updates, without any access to CLI."
That's an absurd thing to say and betrays your ignorance here. The shell is an integral part of a Unix system. If you remove /bin/sh, the system will not even boot. Any Unix system will be this way, including OS X, because this specific interpreted language is part of what makes Unix Unix.
As far as not using the shell for day-to-day tasks, you can do that with Linux now. Ubuntu has all those point-and-click controls you love, and you're free to use them instead of the shell if you like. You'll get things done more slowly, because GUI configs suck, but that's your choice.
What may make you believe it's impossible to go without using a shell in Linux is the fact that Linux people tend to suggest typing shell commands when people ask how to fix problems on a forum. This is because the shell is the best, fastest way to fix problems in Linux, even when other options are available, and we won't suggest an inferior solution unless pressed for it.
You can shout that as much as you want, but, until someone gets sued and loses, you're wrong.