WWII was an incredible sink on the world economy. The devastation it caused in Europe, in particular, was horrible. Just talk to anyone that lived through it.
Sure, a handful of people got rich, making weapons and rebuilding afterwards - but this did not increase the economy as a whole, or benefit the general public. The economy as a whole, and the general public, would certainly have been much better off if all that effort could have been pointed towards more worthwhile pursuits than killing people, destroying cities, and then rebuilding the damage. The war set the world economy back by decades.
Once peoples' basic needs have been met, those "other persuits" tend to be rather pointless anyway, like watching movies taking vacations. They don't really contribute that much to the economy, and people won't work all that hard to get them.
I think this reveals the critical departure in your thinking that leads you to the conclusion you have reached. It's not about the economy. It's about your disregard for your fellow man, your disapproval of the way your neighbors choose to spend their time and energy and wealth. You would prefer to see people working harder and receiving less, focusing on simple survival, rather than to see them wealthy and able to pursue their own values - because you don't trust them to pursue the values you think they should.
Welcome to slashdot, Attila.
In particular, the original poster's assertion that hundreds of millions would die in an economic depression caused by taking actions to reduce fossil fuel consumption is patently absurd.
Sure, the relatively wealthy western countries could do it and only set our standard of living back by a few decades, perhaps a century or so, which would result in relatively few deaths. The toll in the developing world would doubtless be quite a bit higher though. I suppose those people don't really count in your worldview, anymore than my right to spend my time pursuing what I value, rather than what you would like me to value, does?
The Kyoto protocol implementation has cost, to date, over 79 TRILLION Dollars. Do you have any clue how many starving people could be fed with that much money? Do you even care?
My hat is off to you, sir, for a top-notch example of how to turn a couple of logical fallacies into a +5 post, without even waiting for anyone to post the opinions you want to attack.
Anyway, yes, the arctic region is getting warmer at the moment. It's still not as warm as it was in '38, however. Funny thing that. Even more odd, the warming trend between 1918 and 1938 was considerably more dramatic than the current trend (which started about '66.)
The fact is, it's arcane, and noticeably so. No one is going to spontaneously coin that phrase to mean 'raises the question' - it's far too awkward, it just doesn't parse, it doesn't make any sense. Because it doesn't parse, it's obviously a fixed phrase. This is an obvious clue that you shouldn't use it unless you're sure what you're saying. Ignoring that clue and charging ahead to use a phrase like that without bothering to understand it first is not behaviour which reflects well on a person, and not behaviour to be emulated. But some idiot back in the 80s did charge ahead with it, and far too many more have been happily emulating him or her since then. This is one little corner of a deeply disturbing phenomenon that deserves to be resisted at every turn.
Like it or not, language matters. Sloppy language both leads to and is a sign of sloppy thinking. No matter how popular a particular bit of sloppiness may be, it's still both possible and worthwhile to resist it.
Logic is not an obscure technical field of some kind, it's an absolutely necessary core function for a free human being. If you don't understand it, you need to improve yourself, not make excuses.
Furthermore, your proposed 'simple English' meaning for the phrase doesn't stand up to the most cursory examination. 'Begs' is never used in English to mean 'demands' although it can be used as an antonym for demands, among other senses. So your 'simple English' parsing makes no sense in English at all.
The fact is, your 'simple English' parsing is simply an incorrect one, and transparently so to any native English speaker of moderate skill and a token amount of thoughtfulness. It doesn't make sense, it never made sense. Using the phrase in that way is nothing more than a way to advertise to everyone in earshot 'look at me, I like to use big words I don't understand.'
That's true. But do remember that, once linux became usable, all the pressure to actually get the HURD up and running went away, freeing the FSF to divert more of their unfortunately miniscule resources to other projects, and freeing the HURD developers to go into exploratory mode without worry of delivering a usable product anytime soon. Linux is here, it's GPL, and it works pretty well, so there's just no urgency to the HURD anymore.
Still hoping to see it go stable one day though. Some really cool ideas, and a real forward-thinking design, from what I can see.
You can actually even call it Cthulhu Linux if you want. LMI won't sue you for that, particularly if you make sure and put in the appropriate "Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds" footnote. The only issue is that you can't register 'Cthulhu Linux' as a trademark yourself without paying LMI. So, in theory, someone could come along later and register that as a trademark, because you didn't.
LMI isn't making money, in fact it's been losing money on it since they got the trademark. They're just trying to get enough income to quit running at a loss every year.
GNU is a retarted word.[...]Recursive acronyms are not funny, they're not cool, they're grammatically incorrect and retarted
Before you start lecturing other people on how to use the language, you might want to do a little brushing up of your own skills. The word you are looking for is probably 'retarded,' unless you are really trying to imply that the recursive acronyms in general, and GNU in particular, have been 'tarted,' through the addition of tart flavours, twice. That's not a word you're likely to find in any dictionary, but at least it would make some sense (by analogy to 'sweetened.) But retarded doesn't really work here either, it means slowed, hindered, or set back, none of which make much sense in this context.
Most likely I would think you were actually trying to say 'stupid' but 'retarded' is not really a synonym for stupid. In relation to a person, we might say that they are 'mentally retarded' as an explanation for their stupidity, of course, which is probably where you got the idea the two words are synonyms, but if true this is just a further sign of sloppy thinking.
The contention that recursive acronyms are grammatically incorrect is unsupported, incorrect, and generally leads me to suspect (particularly in context, next to the repeated use of 'retarted') that you might be mentally retarded to some degree yourself.
Calling it "GNU/Linux" does not take away the ambiguity of it; it only adds to the confusion. Why do you think it's not "Explorer/WindowsNT",
Perhaps because explorer was never a project to create an operating system, but simply a shell which runs as part of several OSs, on two entirely different types of kernel?
or "Darwin/BSD"?
Perhaps because Darwin doesn't use the BSD kernel? It uses the XNU kernel, and a good deal of BSD userland, so a much better analogy would be calling Darwin the 'BSD/XNU OS.' Unlike what you posted, that would make some sense, and be recognisable as referring to something real, albeit in an unusual way. Of course it's not necessary, because in that case you have no ambiguity, but it would make sense to clarify things if Darwin somehow wound up with no proper name, and people were running around referring to the entire OS as 'XNU.'
before Linux came along, GNU at best was a set of solutions looking for a problem.
No, GNU was a project with the explicit goal of creating a Free Operating System, which had progressed a very long ways already and produced everything required except a functional kernel. People were already running the GNU OS, on top of proprietary unix kernels, but without a Free kernel you still had to buy a proprietary system and then replace the userland to make a GNU system, so it was obviously important to get that last piece made. The GNU toolchain made linux possible, and linux completed the GNU OS in return.
Obviously in addition to the mental/linguistic difficulties noted earlier, your understanding of history is a bit deficient as well.
That's definitely your choice. But, as long as you are a tiny minority of the population, they won't care. And, you'll miss out on the money that can be won by playing against the newbies of the world who donate their money to other players.
I don't know about you, but I really don't have so much time on my hands that I feel like only playing a half-dozen or so good poker sites is a big limitation. Fact is, I only play one, and it has plenty of newbies donating money. Am I 'missing out' on other sites I don't play? In a sense, perhaps, but not in any significant sense. Playing them would be an advantage how? The one I do play is open and well populated 24 hours a day, what more do you want?
I know I've seen several machines totally hosed after clients installed party poker on it. Possibly it's coincidence, but I doubt it.
You're just asking for trouble anytime you download and run unauditable binaries that run with full system privileges anyway. There are several good online poker sites with sandboxed java clients, and I certainly don't trust the intentions of any online poker room that refuses to even offer that option.
I believe that Debian is ported to the PPC. How does Yellow Dog compare to Debian as a distribution? If I could use Yellow Dog on the x86 would I have a reason to use it instead of Debian?
No.
Yellow Dog is based on Redhat. Debian is... Debian. Score one for Debian.
Yellow Dog comes from a single company that will sell you a support contract. Debian is an open standard, if you need a support contract you can choose from several competitors, and if the one you choose initially gives you any problems, you can dump them and move to another without having to change your software. Score two for Debian.
Debian supports nearly as many platforms as NetBSD, meaning that you can run a very heterogenous environment, PPC here, X86 there, ARM over in that corner, SPARC behind that wall there... and have the same tools, use the same methods to administer each one, regardless of platform. Yellow Dog runs on PPC, so if you have anything else in your environment, you'll have to learn to admin Yellow Dog, plus something else. Score three for Debian.
Huh? PPC dying? What planet are you living on? There are more PPCs shipping than ever before.
And btw what kind of crack are the moderators smoking? Parent is about as "insightful" as the guy that says "nice weather, huh?" in the middle of a hurricane.
I honestly think they can and should do this, with some caveats.
Everyone talks about how their hardware profit margins are high. This is true, but on the other side the marginal cost of more copies of the OS are pretty near null. The worry that people would have bought a mac otherwise could be assuaged in several ways, however. If it can be done in a way that leaves people that would have bought mac hardware, still buying mac hardware, but other people that would not have done this running Mac OS on non-apple hardware, this would be a big win for Apple (with a few caveats.) Those extra sales of the OS are nearly 100% profit, after all, and that profit can be turned around and used to keep Apples own computers on the cutting edge. More people running the OS, regardless of the hardware they use, also means more people developing for it. And once you get a developer to give ObjC and Cocoa a try, he's not likely to want to go back to win32. So that would be a big win too. But you have to find a way to do it without killing Apples hardware sales (unless they decided to take the dive and become a software company, something I don't see happening.)
Now the other big objection is limiting the hardware they have to program for. It's a lot easier for Apple to make things work when they control the hardware, and can limit the number of devices and machine configurations they have to deal with enormously. If they released OSX on the Wintel PC market, there is a serious and reasonable worry that they would quickly be swamped with a support nightmare that would kill them, or at the least kill their reputation.
Now, with all this said, what I would probably do in their shoes would be to *NOT* use any DRM tie-ins and make it quite easy for people to run OSX on non-Apple boxes, but also *NOT* officially support this practice in any way. I'd throw up a warning screen on boot if the OS is running on non-Apple hardware, with a big flashing warning that something is wrong with the hardware and the user should NOT continue, but instead take their machine to the store, blah blah. But go ahead and leave a button for the user to continue anyway. This way they're not on the hook for support, they don't have to write a bunch of new drivers, etc. BUT people that would never have bought an Apple otherwise will still find it relatively easy to put it on their existing machine and give it a try. I predict most will like it, and buy proper Apple hardware the next time they have money to spend on a computer.
I'd have to say that's symptomatic of the problems with the US. "Lie detectors" are technological snake-oil, they most definately do NOT detect lies. We won't admit them as evidence in a court room, but law enforcement and national security agencies rely on them nonetheless.
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Because of context. It could have said 'that xoids the fragnit' instead, and we would have been able to figure out what the writer was trying to say.
The total cost will undoubtedly wind up in the trillons, however, so the point stands. Apologies for the typo.
WWII was an incredible sink on the world economy. The devastation it caused in Europe, in particular, was horrible. Just talk to anyone that lived through it.
Sure, a handful of people got rich, making weapons and rebuilding afterwards - but this did not increase the economy as a whole, or benefit the general public. The economy as a whole, and the general public, would certainly have been much better off if all that effort could have been pointed towards more worthwhile pursuits than killing people, destroying cities, and then rebuilding the damage. The war set the world economy back by decades.
I think this reveals the critical departure in your thinking that leads you to the conclusion you have reached. It's not about the economy. It's about your disregard for your fellow man, your disapproval of the way your neighbors choose to spend their time and energy and wealth. You would prefer to see people working harder and receiving less, focusing on simple survival, rather than to see them wealthy and able to pursue their own values - because you don't trust them to pursue the values you think they should.
Welcome to slashdot, Attila.
Sure, the relatively wealthy western countries could do it and only set our standard of living back by a few decades, perhaps a century or so, which would result in relatively few deaths. The toll in the developing world would doubtless be quite a bit higher though. I suppose those people don't really count in your worldview, anymore than my right to spend my time pursuing what I value, rather than what you would like me to value, does?
The Kyoto protocol implementation has cost, to date, over 79 TRILLION Dollars. Do you have any clue how many starving people could be fed with that much money? Do you even care?
Totally fallacious.
What you're overlooking is that the time and money spent to replace that window, had it not been broken, would have been available for other pursuits.
By that logic every broken window is an economic boost, since someone has to be hired to go fix it.
Simplistic, and fallacious.
Not just ad-hominen, but pre-emptive ad-hominen!
My hat is off to you, sir, for a top-notch example of how to turn a couple of logical fallacies into a +5 post, without even waiting for anyone to post the opinions you want to attack.
Anyway, yes, the arctic region is getting warmer at the moment. It's still not as warm as it was in '38, however. Funny thing that. Even more odd, the warming trend between 1918 and 1938 was considerably more dramatic than the current trend (which started about '66.)
The fact is, it's arcane, and noticeably so. No one is going to spontaneously coin that phrase to mean 'raises the question' - it's far too awkward, it just doesn't parse, it doesn't make any sense. Because it doesn't parse, it's obviously a fixed phrase. This is an obvious clue that you shouldn't use it unless you're sure what you're saying. Ignoring that clue and charging ahead to use a phrase like that without bothering to understand it first is not behaviour which reflects well on a person, and not behaviour to be emulated. But some idiot back in the 80s did charge ahead with it, and far too many more have been happily emulating him or her since then. This is one little corner of a deeply disturbing phenomenon that deserves to be resisted at every turn.
Like it or not, language matters. Sloppy language both leads to and is a sign of sloppy thinking. No matter how popular a particular bit of sloppiness may be, it's still both possible and worthwhile to resist it.
Logic is not an obscure technical field of some kind, it's an absolutely necessary core function for a free human being. If you don't understand it, you need to improve yourself, not make excuses.
Furthermore, your proposed 'simple English' meaning for the phrase doesn't stand up to the most cursory examination. 'Begs' is never used in English to mean 'demands' although it can be used as an antonym for demands, among other senses. So your 'simple English' parsing makes no sense in English at all.
The fact is, your 'simple English' parsing is simply an incorrect one, and transparently so to any native English speaker of moderate skill and a token amount of thoughtfulness. It doesn't make sense, it never made sense. Using the phrase in that way is nothing more than a way to advertise to everyone in earshot 'look at me, I like to use big words I don't understand.'
That's true. But do remember that, once linux became usable, all the pressure to actually get the HURD up and running went away, freeing the FSF to divert more of their unfortunately miniscule resources to other projects, and freeing the HURD developers to go into exploratory mode without worry of delivering a usable product anytime soon. Linux is here, it's GPL, and it works pretty well, so there's just no urgency to the HURD anymore.
Still hoping to see it go stable one day though. Some really cool ideas, and a real forward-thinking design, from what I can see.
At the point where a usable system was achieved. X is nice, but not essential. A kernel, shell, binutils, editor, and compiler are.
Come now, that's a bit harsh.
No one is so irredeemably sinful as to deserve to use MS Windows.
You can actually even call it Cthulhu Linux if you want. LMI won't sue you for that, particularly if you make sure and put in the appropriate "Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds" footnote. The only issue is that you can't register 'Cthulhu Linux' as a trademark yourself without paying LMI. So, in theory, someone could come along later and register that as a trademark, because you didn't.
LMI isn't making money, in fact it's been losing money on it since they got the trademark. They're just trying to get enough income to quit running at a loss every year.
Before you start lecturing other people on how to use the language, you might want to do a little brushing up of your own skills. The word you are looking for is probably 'retarded,' unless you are really trying to imply that the recursive acronyms in general, and GNU in particular, have been 'tarted,' through the addition of tart flavours, twice. That's not a word you're likely to find in any dictionary, but at least it would make some sense (by analogy to 'sweetened.) But retarded doesn't really work here either, it means slowed, hindered, or set back, none of which make much sense in this context.
Most likely I would think you were actually trying to say 'stupid' but 'retarded' is not really a synonym for stupid. In relation to a person, we might say that they are 'mentally retarded' as an explanation for their stupidity, of course, which is probably where you got the idea the two words are synonyms, but if true this is just a further sign of sloppy thinking.
The contention that recursive acronyms are grammatically incorrect is unsupported, incorrect, and generally leads me to suspect (particularly in context, next to the repeated use of 'retarted') that you might be mentally retarded to some degree yourself.
Perhaps because explorer was never a project to create an operating system, but simply a shell which runs as part of several OSs, on two entirely different types of kernel?
Perhaps because Darwin doesn't use the BSD kernel? It uses the XNU kernel, and a good deal of BSD userland, so a much better analogy would be calling Darwin the 'BSD/XNU OS.' Unlike what you posted, that would make some sense, and be recognisable as referring to something real, albeit in an unusual way. Of course it's not necessary, because in that case you have no ambiguity, but it would make sense to clarify things if Darwin somehow wound up with no proper name, and people were running around referring to the entire OS as 'XNU.'
No, GNU was a project with the explicit goal of creating a Free Operating System, which had progressed a very long ways already and produced everything required except a functional kernel. People were already running the GNU OS, on top of proprietary unix kernels, but without a Free kernel you still had to buy a proprietary system and then replace the userland to make a GNU system, so it was obviously important to get that last piece made. The GNU toolchain made linux possible, and linux completed the GNU OS in return.
Obviously in addition to the mental/linguistic difficulties noted earlier, your understanding of history is a bit deficient as well.
Au contraire, any binary component running at kernel level means giving up control over your system, completely and utterly.
Indeed. He did a great job on B5, in a much more serious role.
I don't know about you, but I really don't have so much time on my hands that I feel like only playing a half-dozen or so good poker sites is a big limitation. Fact is, I only play one, and it has plenty of newbies donating money. Am I 'missing out' on other sites I don't play? In a sense, perhaps, but not in any significant sense. Playing them would be an advantage how? The one I do play is open and well populated 24 hours a day, what more do you want?
I know I've seen several machines totally hosed after clients installed party poker on it. Possibly it's coincidence, but I doubt it.
You're just asking for trouble anytime you download and run unauditable binaries that run with full system privileges anyway. There are several good online poker sites with sandboxed java clients, and I certainly don't trust the intentions of any online poker room that refuses to even offer that option.
Specialisation is for insects.
Look here
No.
Yellow Dog is based on Redhat. Debian is... Debian. Score one for Debian.
Yellow Dog comes from a single company that will sell you a support contract. Debian is an open standard, if you need a support contract you can choose from several competitors, and if the one you choose initially gives you any problems, you can dump them and move to another without having to change your software. Score two for Debian.
Debian supports nearly as many platforms as NetBSD, meaning that you can run a very heterogenous environment, PPC here, X86 there, ARM over in that corner, SPARC behind that wall there... and have the same tools, use the same methods to administer each one, regardless of platform. Yellow Dog runs on PPC, so if you have anything else in your environment, you'll have to learn to admin Yellow Dog, plus something else. Score three for Debian.
Huh? PPC dying? What planet are you living on? There are more PPCs shipping than ever before.
And btw what kind of crack are the moderators smoking? Parent is about as "insightful" as the guy that says "nice weather, huh?" in the middle of a hurricane.
They went extinct. That's a fact. Whether or not that happening was, in fact, caused by human activities is a very open question, however.
Really?
Read that license again. It doesn't seem like it could remain functional after the demise of SUN.
I honestly think they can and should do this, with some caveats.
Everyone talks about how their hardware profit margins are high. This is true, but on the other side the marginal cost of more copies of the OS are pretty near null. The worry that people would have bought a mac otherwise could be assuaged in several ways, however. If it can be done in a way that leaves people that would have bought mac hardware, still buying mac hardware, but other people that would not have done this running Mac OS on non-apple hardware, this would be a big win for Apple (with a few caveats.) Those extra sales of the OS are nearly 100% profit, after all, and that profit can be turned around and used to keep Apples own computers on the cutting edge. More people running the OS, regardless of the hardware they use, also means more people developing for it. And once you get a developer to give ObjC and Cocoa a try, he's not likely to want to go back to win32. So that would be a big win too. But you have to find a way to do it without killing Apples hardware sales (unless they decided to take the dive and become a software company, something I don't see happening.)
Now the other big objection is limiting the hardware they have to program for. It's a lot easier for Apple to make things work when they control the hardware, and can limit the number of devices and machine configurations they have to deal with enormously. If they released OSX on the Wintel PC market, there is a serious and reasonable worry that they would quickly be swamped with a support nightmare that would kill them, or at the least kill their reputation.
Now, with all this said, what I would probably do in their shoes would be to *NOT* use any DRM tie-ins and make it quite easy for people to run OSX on non-Apple boxes, but also *NOT* officially support this practice in any way. I'd throw up a warning screen on boot if the OS is running on non-Apple hardware, with a big flashing warning that something is wrong with the hardware and the user should NOT continue, but instead take their machine to the store, blah blah. But go ahead and leave a button for the user to continue anyway. This way they're not on the hook for support, they don't have to write a bunch of new drivers, etc. BUT people that would never have bought an Apple otherwise will still find it relatively easy to put it on their existing machine and give it a try. I predict most will like it, and buy proper Apple hardware the next time they have money to spend on a computer.
I'd have to say that's symptomatic of the problems with the US. "Lie detectors" are technological snake-oil, they most definately do NOT detect lies. We won't admit them as evidence in a court room, but law enforcement and national security agencies rely on them nonetheless.