OS X is not "based on" BSD and even if it was Linux was not around when OS X was under development.
While quite right it isn't just bsd (although a fair majority sans ui is), since it's an unholy hybrid of mach/xnu/nextstep/bsd etc etc. Mac os x public beta didn't even happen until 2000, linux has been around since 1994. It's a hard call to say that os x predates linux.
Sure the original mac os (not x) predates linux, but that's a completely different operating system.
good idea, but just one question, how does sage differ from other numerical (octave) or symbolic (maxima) oss programs? aren't they pretty much complete too?
I'm aware of the Linux kernel, I also think it could be a lot better/safer if a bit of C++ was allowed into it. The only reason it's 100% C is because Linus doesn't really grok C++ (he's demonstrated this quite clearly in his anti-C++ rants).
I'm guessing you are referring to things like this.
I more so have a feeling you might not have understood where he is coming from in regards to that. Obviously his background is programming from a system-level design, and designing things the ground up for their designated purpose.
This tends to lead to not liking abstractions where none are necessary, yes some of the higher level abstractions can be convenient, but also ill suited to the specific task as opposed to writing something yourself, and can cause potential bottlenecks.
In linus' view, it does not matter if something requires more effort or oversight in regards to code so long as architecturally it is better, individual bugs come out over time as they do with any significant project.
Fedora has shipped icedtea6 (100% compliant java implementation) with fedora for quite a few releases now. All the browser java stuff works just fine for me without hassle. Unsure if ubuntu even has that package in it's repos though.
Then I fail to see your initial problem with over the air in such difficult places when your options are expensive laying of cable or expensive retransmitters.
Either way where you've chosen to live has mostly screwed you over.
As long as people keep developing crap software and then blaming it on the user, they will never succeed.
What people define as "crap" varies, I would consider windows crap, and os x passable but needs work, but my needs are likely significantly different than your own.
What you needed was an experienced linux developer to set up your linux distro with you for your needs, the newbies tend to outnumber those with 10+ years of experience about 20 to one but there are still some willing people about.
Of the many people I have managed to switch to linux, none have had any issues because I set it up for them, but I have no doubt if they had tried it themselves they would have likely ran into some tiny problem such as you did. (although most wouldn't write it off over a surround sound issue alone though).
In regards to the comment on the n900, the n900 comes out of the box with everyone most people expect from a phone with the ability to tinker as a bonus.
But in this case I'd put the n900's failure down to lack of advertising and lack of selling them on carriers plans. (here at least you have to purchase one outright from overseas, not cheap)
with what you describe I'm impressed that even the cable companies were willing to deal with areas so sparsely populated and difficult like that
Here if your house is more than say, 2km from any other house, the cable companies will simply say they cannot service you (unless you are willing to pay $10,000+ to have the dig and lay the cabling)
I do not live in the US, and everywhere I've been in a 200km radius of my home has had tv reception, and I have travelled a few thousand kms before, when I arrive at anywhere there is even a small town (less than 1000 total population) it has still had perfect tv reception.(and yes, some of those towns are in mountain areas)
The point is to someone who has had perfect quality tv reception for decades wherever they go the idea of cable is nowhere near as attractive.
If they can reach cable to all those homes, they can get the media to a mini transmitter that can handle settlements of people in difficult terrain.
Likely a matter of locality, where I am cable was never even introduced until the mid 90's because over the air served everyone just fine.
Could go a long way to explain why most people find cable rather useless here in comparison to regular tv since over the air gets the most viewers and most advertising revenue.
Sounds just like just extremely poor planning on the over the air stations behalf.
Then again because of the prevalence of cable I imagine they would have somewhat less viewers and less advertising revenue as opposed to places where cable never had large adoption and the over the air stations are extremely popular.
My TV had 13 buttons on it, I could program them and tune them to 13 radio frequencies. What cable offered was 32 channels, all without snow/noise and I wouldn't have to maintain an aerial on top of my house.
Every house sold in perhaps the last 30 years (perhaps not in the US?) has had a quality antenna and has required no fiddling or maintenance.
Every tv since at least the late 80's has had the capability to be tuned for usually at least 100 channels of analog.
Modern DVB sets even auto-tune it for you in the space of five minutes after initial setup, I get around 10 channels flawlessly.
I think a big problem for the US is that cable is so prevalent nobody ever bothers with over the air and thusly it's quality suffers. Of those I know with cable easily 90% of the time is spent on free to air channels anyway.
I should note the first part of my prior posting wasn't suggesting fusion as a power source, but as clean nuclear weapons (such as the tsar bomba) in sarcasm.
I'm not sure why you resist people changing habits if they are bad ones.
The problem lies in who decides how much energy consumption is a bad habit? and how do you rate energy consumption for the work that gets done for the consumed energy. If I'm using a constant 3kw of power for my cluster to do scientific research is that ok but if I'm rendering a 3d animated movie it is not? then what of those people who game on their machines, they aren't achieving anything useful to society by doing so but still chewing energy.
Who would you or anyone else for that matter be to decide what is a 'worthy' expenditure of energy.
And what about the waste?
Fast breeder reactors make no high radiation waste, as if it's radioactive enough it gets fed back in to be used as fuel, what isn't radioactive enough to be used as fuel is considered waste.
On a side note I highly recommend you check out just how much radioactive materials gets pumped into the atmosphere by burning coal. I'd rather have a small amount of low hazard material in drums than more radioactive stuff in the air, but that's just me.
I'm not dead-set against it but the design, the amount of waste produced and the sticker (shock!) price.
With waste a non-issue in modern designs, it comes down to designing the things and cost. Designs can be bought or contracted from countries that have kept up with more modern advances such as japan and the biggest problem with cost is more the stigma in most places from greens about having a nuclear power station anywhere in the same state as them.
They pay for themselves over the decades, but few companies will be willing to invest that much in infrastructure unless they can be guaranteed they won't be caught up by something silly as long as they follow legislation.
Nobody wants to be the guy with an $xxx million awesome power station just completed when the government says, no you can't use it because these people don't want nuclear in their back yard.
Or people could.. you know... stop having so many children?
Hell have a nuclear war with nukes that get most of their energy from fusion, nice and clean, should eliminate a fair chunk of the population and thusly their overall effect on the environment (sarcasm)
Those who lack vision, which is most of humanity, fear change.
People do what they need to do to survive, and then to be comfortable. And it is ironic that most of the greens seem to be heavily against any kind of modern nuclear power program... which ironically would create both less carbon dioxide AND less radiation than burning coal.
The greens themselves fear change more than anyone else, hell the whole reason global warming was changed to 'climate change' was because overall the earth was cooling. In the end if they had their way we'd all be living off our own land to minimize our footprint on the earth like we did hundreds of years ago.
I agree that people should do what they can to minimize their impact on things, but the only way to ensure that behaviour from people is to make it the easiest route to do without changing their habits.
I'd rather people use twice the energy when coming from greatly cleaner sources than demanding everyone reduce their energy use by mandate.
Not sure why there are so many haters - I know there are problems with the company and I wish it was more open, but for most people (including Linux users as they do have an official Linux client) it's an incredibly useful service that just works.
There are so many haters because skype doesn't use an open protocol, won't play nice with other voip providers, etc. All proper commercial setups run sip, that they don't segregates professional voip with end user stuff which is very inconvenient.
The problem only exhibits itself when there are 48 cores on a single cpu socket and die.
We are still a while away from that, and the changes to accomodate it aren't that severe so likely the kernel will just deal with things as it has to as new hardware is made and exists.
The point is the article dealing with a simulated theoretical cpu with 48+ cores on a single die with shared l2 cache.
The changes made are incremental and I imagine will be dealt with long before this actually becomes an issue when (or if) we get cpus with that many cores on a single die.
multi socket systems are already immune to this the way it is setup, you could have an 8 socket system with each cpu having 8 cores and it would not show the problems shown in the article.
In other words, business as usual, the kernel gets optimized for hardware that actually exists or will exist in the near future. 48 core single cpus are a few years away, and the changes to accomodate them don't require anything significant so I'm sure it will be dealt with at the time.
By the way, Godel's third great proof shows that God exists - sorry to bother all the Atheist slashdotters with that bit of trivia.
You fail to specify what godels interpretation of 'god' is, spoiler: it's not the anthropomorphic zombie human/spirit that has super powers like what most religions preach.
I would of course assume you are speaking of Godel's ontological proof. Which he himself did not publish until his dying days because he did not want people to mistakenly think he actually believed in god.
The proof starts off arguing that there are infinitely possible worlds, therefore in at least one of those infinitely possible worlds there must be a god etc.
There are numerous arguments against such a proof, not the least of which some of them predate godel himself by a few hundred years. (Immanuel Kant rejected existence as a property some time before this proof was made)
Not to mention the problems of incoherence in regard to god being considered omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent,
Those that have read the many problems with his proof (even theologians) have usually found at least one if not more that satisfy to them that it is flawed.
That you have not is most surprising, there really are that many.
The high level equation or the differential that both our equations are generated from should not be patentable because there is no other interpretations.
My argument is that no maths at all should be patentable, whether it is generic theory or applied to specific problems, since it is all just abstract thinking which should not be patentable.
Likewise with software I can patent the how, but not the what.
It is hard to argue that computer programs are not just mathematics applied to a problem, while the implementation as source/compiled binary receives protection under copyright, the maths behind it should not receive any protection is my argument. I.e. people should be able to reimplement it themselves even if the same math principles wind up being used.
For $300 you can get an iTouch which has apps that are overall on par, or better, than most DS games, are far cheaper, and you get a lot more functionality.
Lots of gamers hate using touch screens exclusively while gaming. Some games touch screens suit, others they do not.
Until the next iThing has a d-pad or an analog joystick and a bunch of buttons, for gaming it's not in the same league.
High level libraries are a nicety not a necessity for homebrew, at least in my opinion, and you have to admit exposing memory mapped registers with a consistent naming scheme in a library once the specs are known (the hard part) is a hell of a lot easier than what PAlib was trying to achieve by making something more typical developer friendly, or other higher level libraries like the wifi library.
Once the hardware is exposed and functions are known, people are able to write their own code for it and experiment/write software even if the high level libraries aren't there to abstract everything away.
It took *years* for the homebrew community to get a decent wifi library for the NDS
Of course since most existing tcp/ip stacks assume some kind of kernel, and writing an embedded one on such limited hardware takes time and skill. However was homebrew functional before the SDL and wifi libraries? yes. Low level access only is still decent enough for homebrew by my standards, ds was the first machine I wrote arm assembly for.
I strongly suspect it'll take a lot more than just "sitting down and writing it" to reverse-engineer how it works.
I already said that that would be the hard and painful part, what I said was once the hardware is properly understood writing the libraries for interaction with the hardware isn't so bad. As with most things the spec is the harder part.
Worst case scenario you're analyzing data logs from a logic analyzer wire wrapped to the board examining what real games do and how it effects things, long and painful but far from impossible.
Nevertheless I wonder how easy will it be to brew for the 3DS, given that some homebrew made for the DS does not work on the DSi/XL. Given the new architecture of the DS, we may need to wait a couple of years until teh-leet-hackers release an amazing library similar to ndslib for the 3DS...
Depends, a lot of ndslib (at least in 2005-6'ish when I last used it) is just memory mapped registers in #defines and light wrappers for them. Hard part is reverse engineering the hardware design and bypassing the security mechanisms, after that the sdk is just a matter of sitting down and writing it.
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Not sure about the UK but in australia I'm getting electricity bills of about $200/month, with only the usual tv/computer/lights on each evening.
OS X is not "based on" BSD and even if it was Linux was not around when OS X was under development.
While quite right it isn't just bsd (although a fair majority sans ui is), since it's an unholy hybrid of mach/xnu/nextstep/bsd etc etc. Mac os x public beta didn't even happen until 2000, linux has been around since 1994. It's a hard call to say that os x predates linux.
Sure the original mac os (not x) predates linux, but that's a completely different operating system.
good idea, but just one question, how does sage differ from other numerical (octave) or symbolic (maxima) oss programs? aren't they pretty much complete too?
I'm aware of the Linux kernel, I also think it could be a lot better/safer if a bit of C++ was allowed into it. The only reason it's 100% C is because Linus doesn't really grok C++ (he's demonstrated this quite clearly in his anti-C++ rants).
I'm guessing you are referring to things like this.
I more so have a feeling you might not have understood where he is coming from in regards to that. Obviously his background is programming from a system-level design, and designing things the ground up for their designated purpose.
This tends to lead to not liking abstractions where none are necessary, yes some of the higher level abstractions can be convenient, but also ill suited to the specific task as opposed to writing something yourself, and can cause potential bottlenecks.
In linus' view, it does not matter if something requires more effort or oversight in regards to code so long as architecturally it is better, individual bugs come out over time as they do with any significant project.
the only truely awesome thing to come from adobe was postscript and pdf.
Fedora has shipped icedtea6 (100% compliant java implementation) with fedora for quite a few releases now. All the browser java stuff works just fine for me without hassle. Unsure if ubuntu even has that package in it's repos though.
Then I fail to see your initial problem with over the air in such difficult places when your options are expensive laying of cable or expensive retransmitters.
Either way where you've chosen to live has mostly screwed you over.
Gauntlet legends required it if you wanted more than one player, it used the extra ram for the extra enemies etc.
As long as people keep developing crap software and then blaming it on the user, they will never succeed.
What people define as "crap" varies, I would consider windows crap, and os x passable but needs work, but my needs are likely significantly different than your own.
What you needed was an experienced linux developer to set up your linux distro with you for your needs, the newbies tend to outnumber those with 10+ years of experience about 20 to one but there are still some willing people about.
Of the many people I have managed to switch to linux, none have had any issues because I set it up for them, but I have no doubt if they had tried it themselves they would have likely ran into some tiny problem such as you did. (although most wouldn't write it off over a surround sound issue alone though).
In regards to the comment on the n900, the n900 comes out of the box with everyone most people expect from a phone with the ability to tinker as a bonus.
But in this case I'd put the n900's failure down to lack of advertising and lack of selling them on carriers plans. (here at least you have to purchase one outright from overseas, not cheap)
with what you describe I'm impressed that even the cable companies were willing to deal with areas so sparsely populated and difficult like that
Here if your house is more than say, 2km from any other house, the cable companies will simply say they cannot service you (unless you are willing to pay $10,000+ to have the dig and lay the cabling)
I do not live in the US, and everywhere I've been in a 200km radius of my home has had tv reception, and I have travelled a few thousand kms before, when I arrive at anywhere there is even a small town (less than 1000 total population) it has still had perfect tv reception.(and yes, some of those towns are in mountain areas)
The point is to someone who has had perfect quality tv reception for decades wherever they go the idea of cable is nowhere near as attractive.
If they can reach cable to all those homes, they can get the media to a mini transmitter that can handle settlements of people in difficult terrain.
Likely a matter of locality, where I am cable was never even introduced until the mid 90's because over the air served everyone just fine.
Could go a long way to explain why most people find cable rather useless here in comparison to regular tv since over the air gets the most viewers and most advertising revenue.
Sounds just like just extremely poor planning on the over the air stations behalf.
Then again because of the prevalence of cable I imagine they would have somewhat less viewers and less advertising revenue as opposed to places where cable never had large adoption and the over the air stations are extremely popular.
My TV had 13 buttons on it, I could program them and tune them to 13 radio frequencies. What cable offered was 32 channels, all without snow/noise and I wouldn't have to maintain an aerial on top of my house.
Every house sold in perhaps the last 30 years (perhaps not in the US?) has had a quality antenna and has required no fiddling or maintenance.
Every tv since at least the late 80's has had the capability to be tuned for usually at least 100 channels of analog.
Modern DVB sets even auto-tune it for you in the space of five minutes after initial setup, I get around 10 channels flawlessly.
I think a big problem for the US is that cable is so prevalent nobody ever bothers with over the air and thusly it's quality suffers. Of those I know with cable easily 90% of the time is spent on free to air channels anyway.
I should note the first part of my prior posting wasn't suggesting fusion as a power source, but as clean nuclear weapons (such as the tsar bomba) in sarcasm.
I'm not sure why you resist people changing habits if they are bad ones.
The problem lies in who decides how much energy consumption is a bad habit? and how do you rate energy consumption for the work that gets done for the consumed energy. If I'm using a constant 3kw of power for my cluster to do scientific research is that ok but if I'm rendering a 3d animated movie it is not? then what of those people who game on their machines, they aren't achieving anything useful to society by doing so but still chewing energy.
Who would you or anyone else for that matter be to decide what is a 'worthy' expenditure of energy.
And what about the waste?
Fast breeder reactors make no high radiation waste, as if it's radioactive enough it gets fed back in to be used as fuel, what isn't radioactive enough to be used as fuel is considered waste.
On a side note I highly recommend you check out just how much radioactive materials gets pumped into the atmosphere by burning coal. I'd rather have a small amount of low hazard material in drums than more radioactive stuff in the air, but that's just me.
I'm not dead-set against it but the design, the amount of waste produced and the sticker (shock!) price.
With waste a non-issue in modern designs, it comes down to designing the things and cost. Designs can be bought or contracted from countries that have kept up with more modern advances such as japan and the biggest problem with cost is more the stigma in most places from greens about having a nuclear power station anywhere in the same state as them.
They pay for themselves over the decades, but few companies will be willing to invest that much in infrastructure unless they can be guaranteed they won't be caught up by something silly as long as they follow legislation.
Nobody wants to be the guy with an $xxx million awesome power station just completed when the government says, no you can't use it because these people don't want nuclear in their back yard.
Or people could.. you know... stop having so many children?
Hell have a nuclear war with nukes that get most of their energy from fusion, nice and clean, should eliminate a fair chunk of the population and thusly their overall effect on the environment (sarcasm)
Those who lack vision, which is most of humanity, fear change.
People do what they need to do to survive, and then to be comfortable. And it is ironic that most of the greens seem to be heavily against any kind of modern nuclear power program... which ironically would create both less carbon dioxide AND less radiation than burning coal.
The greens themselves fear change more than anyone else, hell the whole reason global warming was changed to 'climate change' was because overall the earth was cooling. In the end if they had their way we'd all be living off our own land to minimize our footprint on the earth like we did hundreds of years ago.
I agree that people should do what they can to minimize their impact on things, but the only way to ensure that behaviour from people is to make it the easiest route to do without changing their habits.
I'd rather people use twice the energy when coming from greatly cleaner sources than demanding everyone reduce their energy use by mandate.
Not sure why there are so many haters - I know there are problems with the company and I wish it was more open, but for most people (including Linux users as they do have an official Linux client) it's an incredibly useful service that just works.
There are so many haters because skype doesn't use an open protocol, won't play nice with other voip providers, etc. All proper commercial setups run sip, that they don't segregates professional voip with end user stuff which is very inconvenient.
The problem only exhibits itself when there are 48 cores on a single cpu socket and die.
We are still a while away from that, and the changes to accomodate it aren't that severe so likely the kernel will just deal with things as it has to as new hardware is made and exists.
The point is the article dealing with a simulated theoretical cpu with 48+ cores on a single die with shared l2 cache.
The changes made are incremental and I imagine will be dealt with long before this actually becomes an issue when (or if) we get cpus with that many cores on a single die.
multi socket systems are already immune to this the way it is setup, you could have an 8 socket system with each cpu having 8 cores and it would not show the problems shown in the article.
In other words, business as usual, the kernel gets optimized for hardware that actually exists or will exist in the near future. 48 core single cpus are a few years away, and the changes to accomodate them don't require anything significant so I'm sure it will be dealt with at the time.
By the way, Godel's third great proof shows that God exists - sorry to bother all the Atheist slashdotters with that bit of trivia.
You fail to specify what godels interpretation of 'god' is, spoiler: it's not the anthropomorphic zombie human/spirit that has super powers like what most religions preach.
I would of course assume you are speaking of Godel's ontological proof. Which he himself did not publish until his dying days because he did not want people to mistakenly think he actually believed in god.
The proof starts off arguing that there are infinitely possible worlds, therefore in at least one of those infinitely possible worlds there must be a god etc.
There are numerous arguments against such a proof, not the least of which some of them predate godel himself by a few hundred years. (Immanuel Kant rejected existence as a property some time before this proof was made)
Not to mention the problems of incoherence in regard to god being considered omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent,
Those that have read the many problems with his proof (even theologians) have usually found at least one if not more that satisfy to them that it is flawed.
That you have not is most surprising, there really are that many.
The high level equation or the differential that both our equations are generated from should not be patentable because there is no other interpretations.
My argument is that no maths at all should be patentable, whether it is generic theory or applied to specific problems, since it is all just abstract thinking which should not be patentable.
Likewise with software I can patent the how, but not the what.
It is hard to argue that computer programs are not just mathematics applied to a problem, while the implementation as source/compiled binary receives protection under copyright, the maths behind it should not receive any protection is my argument. I.e. people should be able to reimplement it themselves even if the same math principles wind up being used.
For $300 you can get an iTouch which has apps that are overall on par, or better, than most DS games, are far cheaper, and you get a lot more functionality.
Lots of gamers hate using touch screens exclusively while gaming. Some games touch screens suit, others they do not.
Until the next iThing has a d-pad or an analog joystick and a bunch of buttons, for gaming it's not in the same league.
High level libraries are a nicety not a necessity for homebrew, at least in my opinion, and you have to admit exposing memory mapped registers with a consistent naming scheme in a library once the specs are known (the hard part) is a hell of a lot easier than what PAlib was trying to achieve by making something more typical developer friendly, or other higher level libraries like the wifi library.
Once the hardware is exposed and functions are known, people are able to write their own code for it and experiment/write software even if the high level libraries aren't there to abstract everything away.
It took *years* for the homebrew community to get a decent wifi library for the NDS
Of course since most existing tcp/ip stacks assume some kind of kernel, and writing an embedded one on such limited hardware takes time and skill. However was homebrew functional before the SDL and wifi libraries? yes. Low level access only is still decent enough for homebrew by my standards, ds was the first machine I wrote arm assembly for.
I strongly suspect it'll take a lot more than just "sitting down and writing it" to reverse-engineer how it works.
I already said that that would be the hard and painful part, what I said was once the hardware is properly understood writing the libraries for interaction with the hardware isn't so bad. As with most things the spec is the harder part.
Worst case scenario you're analyzing data logs from a logic analyzer wire wrapped to the board examining what real games do and how it effects things, long and painful but far from impossible.
Nevertheless I wonder how easy will it be to brew for the 3DS, given that some homebrew made for the DS does not work on the DSi /XL. Given the new architecture of the DS, we may need to wait a couple of years until teh-leet-hackers release an amazing library similar to ndslib for the 3DS...
Depends, a lot of ndslib (at least in 2005-6'ish when I last used it) is just memory mapped registers in #defines and light wrappers for them. Hard part is reverse engineering the hardware design and bypassing the security mechanisms, after that the sdk is just a matter of sitting down and writing it.