The BBC is a public service. Think of it like you would the NHS (the UK's National Health Service). You may never get ill, and if you you may go to a private health care provider, but it's always there just in case.
I really hope so. I moved my parent's business PC to Thunderbird from Outlook about 6 months ago, and recently taught them how to use the Junk mail feature. The problem is that 0.5 seems to move a lot of legitimate email to the Junk folder (although it may be that my parents are marking things as junk when they just want to delete them - sigh).
Oh yeah, the new icon looks really nice too, almost as good as FireFoxs.
Sorry, but I can rememeber people using the words crack, cracking and cracker 15 years ago, long before I'd ever heard of ESR. To hack a piece of code is also an old term for coding. Perhaps you should get your facts straight.
I would say that Enlightment is far more Amigery than KDE and GNOME which are very Windows-like in their approaches.
WindowLab on the other hand has obviously been influenced by Intuition, but also does some stuff that I've never seen before. Innovation is a characteristic of the Amiga 'spirit' wouldn't you say.
If you're thinking of 'spirit' like in the demo scene, remember that Linux is not a hardware platform:(
As a UK school kid in the late eighties, I have fond memories of a yoyo called something like the "Duncan FireWheel". It was a wide yoyo made of a heavy wood and was almost like two hemispeheres joined at the centre.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about, and can anyone recommend me a modern replacement?
I'm sure there're slashdotters out there who know more, but I know that IBM and Motorola make (expensive) machines. The latest Apples may be CHRP compliant, but I seem to remember there being problems over their use of specific ROMS (of course it's not in Apple's interests to be CHRP compliant).
Personally I'm all for non-x86 platforms (which I think fundamentally suck), but I'm not sure that PowerPC is the way to go. ColdFire chips are an almost M68k compatible RISC chip (nice for old-school assembley coders), and if you don't care about nice assembley, the ARM series is even better.
It seems to me that if all you want to do is run open source stuff and don't mind compiling from source, you can choose your hardware purely on the merits of that hw platform.
I can't see C++ dieing anytime soon. It remains the best way of creating native executables, and really is a "better C". Unlike Java/C#, it's also independant of any commercial interest.
An aside - if I'm to be convinced that running bytecode/script on a virtual machine/interpreter is really the way forward, I must first be convined that I'm getting some benefit over C/C++ "check at compile-time" behaviour. A bastardised C++ with garbage collection (and what's wrong with smart/auto pointers) is not enough.
Sadly, both the old Amigas hardware and software are woefully out of date (I'm an old Amiga coder, and I know what I'm talking about). The hardware was amazing and the OS was great too (efficient but no memory protection), and hardware and software were very well integrated (Amiga screens for instance). Unfortunately, the Amiga hardware side of things, while brilliant for CLUT based 2D was very poor at 3D stuff (because 8 bit planar graphics require that a pixel be updated 8 times (once per plane) rather than just once on a "chunky" system). The OS was very fast and efficient (fast pre-emptive multitasking on a 7-Mhz A1000 in the mid eighties!) and had some features like datatypes, but prone to crashing becuase without memory protection a badly behaved program could scribble all over memory.
The new "Amiga" stuff is really just the old OS ported (allbeit slightly improved) to (non-CHRP) PPC machines.
That said, most of the hardcore Amiga coders have moved to Linux and their coding mentality lives on in their Linux projects.
Perhaps I should have given more emphasis to the "(at low or no cost)" part.
Personally I'm an old fan of the Motorola 68k chips, but presumably if commodity priced SPARC-compatible chips can be made it's possible that we could have a genuine SPARC based commodity PC industry out there (running Linux).
In my view Intel is Sun's main competitor, not Microsoft. Software is Free remember.
While traditionally Sun are the good guys, we have to accept that the open source movement will make casualties of our friends.
It's a shame. Sun makes nice processors, but these are uncompetitive (on price) with x86. x86 is badly flawed (and HPIA (Itanium) is not designed for low level coding). Sun should licence their processor design (at low or no cost) to create competion to create a SPARC-comaptible marketplace. If they really have been converted to open source they will soon realise that they cannot make money from selling software.
You're right. The point is that because Windows is a bigger target (and I assume most virus writers use Windows), the security holes in Mac OSX are less likely to be found and will spread slower.
Imagine if the Mac had a de facto standard email client that had big security problems like Outlook (Express) does on Windows. An email virus that spread by emailing iteslf would have difficulty spraeding because most people use Windows and the virus would not spread from those machines.
But the votes aren't counted at a national level, they're normally counted at a local level, and then the local tallies are added up to give the national figures.
"I really hate to break it to you -- machines are already used to count votes made with pen and paper,"
Yes but at least you can verify the results by having a human recount the ballot papers. If you replace the physical ballot papers with electronic voting you have to trust the voting system.
The voting process demands openness and accountability, and for these reasons software cannot be used, even if it's open source. Voting must remain dependant on human countable physical ballots (or similar).
One idea I had would be as follows: In an election with 4 candidates there would be 4 transparent tubes, each coated with an opaque wrapper. Voters would insert a coin-shaped plastic token into the cylinder representing their favourite candidate, and when the votes need to be counted the opaque wrapper would be removed to simply show which candidate had won. It's obvious, completely transparent and recounts are unnecessary because the winner should be obvious to all.
I think you meant "Imperial", not "Empirical". "Empirical" means something completely different.
I'm not sure what an "Imperial" passport would be anyway. If there is an empire in this day and age I think you'll find it on the other side of the Atlantic.
The "other one" is called hash - The jargon file says "The pronunciation of '#' as 'pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea... The character is usually pronounced "hash" outside the US."
..."the first Moore's law is endangered, not because the semiconductor industry cannot build new generation of chips, but because we will not be able to provide them with enough power."
Thanks, that's a good answer. Personally I tend to use the applications that come with XFCE with the WindowLab window manager, and this setup runs extremely well on my silent and energy efficient (but slow) PC.
1869 Rutgers and Princeton played a college soccer football game, the first ever, November 6. The game used modified London Football Association rules. During the next seven years, rugby gained favor with the major eastern schools over soccer, and modern football began to develop from rugby.
1876 At the Massasoit convention, the first rules for American football were written. Walter Camp, who would become known as the father of American football, first became involved with the game.
So, American Football (Gridiron) is based on Rugby, which is a sibling of Football (the game where you kick the ball all the time).
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC is a public service. Think of it like you would the NHS (the UK's National Health Service). You may never get ill, and if you you may go to a private health care provider, but it's always there just in case.
I really hope so. I moved my parent's business PC to Thunderbird from Outlook about 6 months ago, and recently taught them how to use the Junk mail feature. The problem is that 0.5 seems to move a lot of legitimate email to the Junk folder (although it may be that my parents are marking things as junk when they just want to delete them - sigh).
Oh yeah, the new icon looks really nice too, almost as good as FireFoxs.
"Who is the idiot that invented "hjlk" cursors? (never thought that the character to move up could be above the one to go down?)"
This is one of my main gripes too - an inverted T shape (like ijkl) would have been much better.
Sorry, but I can rememeber people using the words crack, cracking and cracker 15 years ago, long before I'd ever heard of ESR. To hack a piece of code is also an old term for coding. Perhaps you should get your facts straight.
Just thought I'd point out the obvious - people who attempt to access computer systems without unauthorisation are crackers, not hackers.
It's difficult to define 'spirit'.
:(
I would say that Enlightment is far more Amigery than KDE and GNOME which are very Windows-like in their approaches.
WindowLab on the other hand has obviously been influenced by Intuition, but also does some stuff that I've never seen before. Innovation is a characteristic of the Amiga 'spirit' wouldn't you say.
If you're thinking of 'spirit' like in the demo scene, remember that Linux is not a hardware platform
Enlightenment and WindowLab are two projects that spring to mind. There are many more.
As a UK school kid in the late eighties, I have fond memories of a yoyo called something like the "Duncan FireWheel". It was a wide yoyo made of a heavy wood and was almost like two hemispeheres joined at the centre.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about, and can anyone recommend me a modern replacement?
I'm sure there're slashdotters out there who know more, but I know that IBM and Motorola make (expensive) machines. The latest Apples may be CHRP compliant, but I seem to remember there being problems over their use of specific ROMS (of course it's not in Apple's interests to be CHRP compliant).
Personally I'm all for non-x86 platforms (which I think fundamentally suck), but I'm not sure that PowerPC is the way to go. ColdFire chips are an almost M68k compatible RISC chip (nice for old-school assembley coders), and if you don't care about nice assembley, the ARM series is even better.
It seems to me that if all you want to do is run open source stuff and don't mind compiling from source, you can choose your hardware purely on the merits of that hw platform.
I can't see C++ dieing anytime soon. It remains the best way of creating native executables, and really is a "better C". Unlike Java/C#, it's also independant of any commercial interest.
An aside - if I'm to be convinced that running bytecode/script on a virtual machine/interpreter is really the way forward, I must first be convined that I'm getting some benefit over C/C++ "check at compile-time" behaviour. A bastardised C++ with garbage collection (and what's wrong with smart/auto pointers) is not enough.
Sadly, both the old Amigas hardware and software are woefully out of date (I'm an old Amiga coder, and I know what I'm talking about). The hardware was amazing and the OS was great too (efficient but no memory protection), and hardware and software were very well integrated (Amiga screens for instance). Unfortunately, the Amiga hardware side of things, while brilliant for CLUT based 2D was very poor at 3D stuff (because 8 bit planar graphics require that a pixel be updated 8 times (once per plane) rather than just once on a "chunky" system). The OS was very fast and efficient (fast pre-emptive multitasking on a 7-Mhz A1000 in the mid eighties!) and had some features like datatypes, but prone to crashing becuase without memory protection a badly behaved program could scribble all over memory.
The new "Amiga" stuff is really just the old OS ported (allbeit slightly improved) to (non-CHRP) PPC machines.
That said, most of the hardcore Amiga coders have moved to Linux and their coding mentality lives on in their Linux projects.
Perhaps I should have given more emphasis to the "(at low or no cost)" part.
Personally I'm an old fan of the Motorola 68k chips, but presumably if commodity priced SPARC-compatible chips can be made it's possible that we could have a genuine SPARC based commodity PC industry out there (running Linux).
In my view Intel is Sun's main competitor, not Microsoft. Software is Free remember.
While traditionally Sun are the good guys, we have to accept that the open source movement will make casualties of our friends.
It's a shame. Sun makes nice processors, but these are uncompetitive (on price) with x86. x86 is badly flawed (and HPIA (Itanium) is not designed for low level coding). Sun should licence their processor design (at low or no cost) to create competion to create a SPARC-comaptible marketplace. If they really have been converted to open source they will soon realise that they cannot make money from selling software.
Moderators - I'm not sure I agree with it, but that's not a Troll is it.
It's easier to add 1000 regional tallies together (if you trust the calculator ;) than it is to physically count the votes in each region 1000 times.
You're right. The point is that because Windows is a bigger target (and I assume most virus writers use Windows), the security holes in Mac OSX are less likely to be found and will spread slower.
Imagine if the Mac had a de facto standard email client that had big security problems like Outlook (Express) does on Windows. An email virus that spread by emailing iteslf would have difficulty spraeding because most people use Windows and the virus would not spread from those machines.
But the votes aren't counted at a national level, they're normally counted at a local level, and then the local tallies are added up to give the national figures.
"I really hate to break it to you -- machines are already used to count votes made with pen and paper,"
Yes but at least you can verify the results by having a human recount the ballot papers. If you replace the physical ballot papers with electronic voting you have to trust the voting system.
The voting process demands openness and accountability, and for these reasons software cannot be used, even if it's open source. Voting must remain dependant on human countable physical ballots (or similar).
One idea I had would be as follows:
In an election with 4 candidates there would be 4 transparent tubes, each coated with an opaque wrapper. Voters would insert a coin-shaped plastic token into the cylinder representing their favourite candidate, and when the votes need to be counted the opaque wrapper would be removed to simply show which candidate had won. It's obvious, completely transparent and recounts are unnecessary because the winner should be obvious to all.
PS. Am I the only one who ever noticed that the # symbol looks like two "++" strings, one above the other? "C#" can be seen as
I think you meant "Imperial", not "Empirical". "Empirical" means something completely different.
I'm not sure what an "Imperial" passport would be anyway. If there is an empire in this day and age I think you'll find it on the other side of the Atlantic.
The "other one" is called hash - The jargon file says "The pronunciation of '#' as 'pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea ... The character is usually pronounced "hash" outside the US."
..."the first Moore's law is endangered, not because the semiconductor industry cannot build new generation of chips, but because we will not be able to provide them with enough power."
Hell, the way we're burning through oil, powering computers should be the last of our problems.
Thanks, that's a good answer. Personally I tend to use the applications that come with XFCE with the WindowLab window manager, and this setup runs extremely well on my silent and energy efficient (but slow) PC.
which says:
1869
Rutgers and Princeton played a college soccer football game, the first ever, November 6. The game used modified London Football Association rules. During the next seven years, rugby gained favor with the major eastern schools over soccer, and modern football began to develop from rugby.
1876
At the Massasoit convention, the first rules for American football were written. Walter Camp, who would become known as the father of American football, first became involved with the game.
So, American Football (Gridiron) is based on Rugby, which is a sibling of Football (the game where you kick the ball all the time).