The question for me is what is 3.1 billion US dollars in Google dollars? Google's stock is way over-priced for the money they pull in, so does that mean that when they buy out seemingly expensive companies they're actually getting a good deal?
Anyone who understands the economy feel free to correct me.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this?
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Agreed; XP is going to be the main OS that software is written for for at least two years (I'm guessing three, but perhaps four), and will be very well supported for at least five years (I'm guessing 7-10). It was only in around 2004-2005 that you started to see consumer software being written exclusively for NT 5 (2k, XP, 2k3) and not 98.
Comparison with Win98 isn't even that valid, because with Win98 there were more reasons to upgrade than there are now. Win98's instability and lack of security made an upgrade to NT 5 much more appealing that an upgrade from WinXP to Vista. (I guess this is why you see far more old Win2k machines around than Win98 in businesses and schools despite only a couple of years between their releases.)
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this?
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you want to see the ubuntu community's (best?) contribution just head over to irc.freenode.net #ubuntu; people are always willing to help with the most common, mundane questions you can think of. I don't know why people are so keen to spoon-feed people FAQ responses, but spoon-feed they do, and I think it's vital for beginners (though for more experienced people it does mean the non-trivial questions are drowned out).
Re:Are we going to be able to see the source code?
on
Palm to go Linux
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· Score: 1
The distinction is more of the freedom that the software itself has. BSD licensed software is free to become non-free. GPL software is not free to become non-free. Which is less free? the software package based on BSD licensed software that has no source available and is only available for $50 for one copy, or the software based on GPL licensed software with source code available (under the GPL license still) and downloadable for free over the internet? I personally find the second one to be more free. Which is more free; FreeBSD downloadable by anyone, or an extensively modified Linux that isn't downloadable by anyone?
Remember that the GPL doesn't say that you have to post all changes to the source that you make, it only says that you must post all changes to the source if you distribute the program.
I am allowed to take Linux, modify it as much as I want, and use it on my own servers, and I don't have to give the source to anyone. (Not just because I wouldn't have to tell anyone, even if Stallman himself knew about it I legally wouldn't have to.)
GPL doesn't strictly mean "you must post all changes you make", so in exactly the same way as BSD it is "free to become non-free".
Re:Are we going to be able to see the source code?
on
Palm to go Linux
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
That is the price Palm pays for using Free software. That's the price they pay for using GPL'd software. OpenBSD runs on the Zaurus, and even though NetBSD is no longer more portable than Linux Palm could certainly go with a BSD instead of Linux if they wanted to keep their IP to themselves.
However they probably decided using Linux would create a buzz, and they may be right; I can't remember the last time I heard Palm mentioned in news.
China isn't going to collapse.. For that to happen you need mass hate of the government, but at the moment China is in an economic boom. Zimbabwe has been under a dictatorship for years now, but only now that citizens are getting poorer are they actually starting to do something about it.
The vast majority of people aren't going to risk their new improving lifestyles for the sake of extra hours gaming for the kids, or even free speech. I just hope a nut-job doesn't find his way into power.
Here in Australia Casio Color calculators are the ones most high school kids get, and which are in most universities. It has 3 colors, with graphs, matrices, recursive functions, lists+statistics, and has a BASIC like program syntax.
I wrote a couple of programs for it (see my website ^) which show the syntax and what it's capable of.
Personally I think they're good, but progress has been comparatively slow. It's still slow and expensive, with a small screen and small memory, when compared with the increasing speed of processors elsewhere.
If an employer decided to profile me based on what I said here, and then decided not to hire me based on what they read, I don't think I'd want to work there anyway.
Exactly right, because all $200 Linux boxes have an HDMI as well as component audio and video ports, come with a remote, run silently, and fit in a shoebox. And please don't reply with a "I don't care about X" post to justify your pricing. That's just retarded. Don't forget the investment that an appleTV is for Apple.
When you buy an appleTV you're essentially guaranteeing that you will, in the future, be buying content for it too. The price of the content you buy for the appleTV makes it cheaper, just like most game consoles.
This is why I expect Apple will do everything they can to fight against people running a flexible system that can run whatever content they want on their artificially cheap hardware. I would be surprised if Apple's lawyers didn't start coming out of the woodworks soon.
It's pretty hard to get a comment that the vast majority of scientists, and all the evidence, disagree with modded up.
Looking back up through the discussion the majority of posts have been from skeptics, and none of them have given particular reasons why the IPCC's report is wrong. We have
"I don't buy it",
"It's solar influencing, not CO2, I know way more than those climatologists",
"Maybe warming won't be so bad! It'll be good for Siberia!",
"Why should I believe the scientific consensus of people who spent all their lives studying the climate?",
"The makers of south park say that it's not true, and I don't like Al Gore who says it is true, so it can't be true."
I've never heard of a massive conspiracy between the loosely knit scientific community before, but this is basically what skeptics are saying. Our kids might look back at discussions like this and wonder what the hell skeptics were thinking and why they couldn't accept that they had to make small lifestyle changes.
If I want a game console/PDA/iPod/camera I won't buy a phone!
Maybe some time in the future portable devices will have modular upgradeable hardware and portable software, and we'll start to see true convergence, but that time hasn't come yet.
Improving a crappy gaming device by adding a PDA is like improving a crappy car by adding a fridge (damn I just used a car analogy).
I wouldn't trust a screen maker to tell me whether or not screens are more productive (and if it's Apple they'll probably tell me it's Now 2.3x more productive! MS has less to gain, so I'm more inclined to believe them.
I disagree, it seems to have been completely written from the perspective of the code he writes.
Don't tell me that POSIX is a more valuable (speaking in terms of money) thing for a programmer to know than the latest thing out of Microsoft. If you call things that change a "trap" then POSIX is one of the very few things which hasn't been a trap (including Java, which Allison praises).
He talks about machine code still being very relevant, and that you can't write code for thousands of machines working in a cluster without it. Well, most people don't write code for thousands of machines working in a cluster.
I agree machine code is good to know, but not for the reasons he gives.
It's interesting to hear his take, but I think Allison is a bit removed from the average developer in terms of the sorts of things that he has developed.
Remember that Google likes to use commodity 2nd hand hardware which fails a lot. It's not like a datacenter with lots of brand new expensive systems that have guarantees.
These days the kind of environmentally friendly things Apple do are to sell LCD screens, which use less power than CRTs.
They have a whole paragraph on "Say hello to the stunning Apple Screen, which uses 1.7x less power than a CRT screen. Using the Apple Screen you can save your business and your marriage, and now you can save the planet too!"
Slashdot Mirror
MVPs are not employees, they're people who help out with supporting people on the official forums and so on.
The question for me is what is 3.1 billion US dollars in Google dollars? Google's stock is way over-priced for the money they pull in, so does that mean that when they buy out seemingly expensive companies they're actually getting a good deal?
Anyone who understands the economy feel free to correct me.
Agreed; XP is going to be the main OS that software is written for for at least two years (I'm guessing three, but perhaps four), and will be very well supported for at least five years (I'm guessing 7-10). It was only in around 2004-2005 that you started to see consumer software being written exclusively for NT 5 (2k, XP, 2k3) and not 98.
Comparison with Win98 isn't even that valid, because with Win98 there were more reasons to upgrade than there are now. Win98's instability and lack of security made an upgrade to NT 5 much more appealing that an upgrade from WinXP to Vista. (I guess this is why you see far more old Win2k machines around than Win98 in businesses and schools despite only a couple of years between their releases.)
If you want to see the ubuntu community's (best?) contribution just head over to irc.freenode.net #ubuntu; people are always willing to help with the most common, mundane questions you can think of. I don't know why people are so keen to spoon-feed people FAQ responses, but spoon-feed they do, and I think it's vital for beginners (though for more experienced people it does mean the non-trivial questions are drowned out).
Remember that the GPL doesn't say that you have to post all changes to the source that you make, it only says that you must post all changes to the source if you distribute the program.
I am allowed to take Linux, modify it as much as I want, and use it on my own servers, and I don't have to give the source to anyone. (Not just because I wouldn't have to tell anyone, even if Stallman himself knew about it I legally wouldn't have to.)
GPL doesn't strictly mean "you must post all changes you make", so in exactly the same way as BSD it is "free to become non-free".
However they probably decided using Linux would create a buzz, and they may be right; I can't remember the last time I heard Palm mentioned in news.
I didn't understand it.. Mod it up!
China isn't going to collapse.. For that to happen you need mass hate of the government, but at the moment China is in an economic boom. Zimbabwe has been under a dictatorship for years now, but only now that citizens are getting poorer are they actually starting to do something about it.
The vast majority of people aren't going to risk their new improving lifestyles for the sake of extra hours gaming for the kids, or even free speech. I just hope a nut-job doesn't find his way into power.
Here in Australia Casio Color calculators are the ones most high school kids get, and which are in most universities. It has 3 colors, with graphs, matrices, recursive functions, lists+statistics, and has a BASIC like program syntax.
I wrote a couple of programs for it (see my website ^) which show the syntax and what it's capable of.
Personally I think they're good, but progress has been comparatively slow. It's still slow and expensive, with a small screen and small memory, when compared with the increasing speed of processors elsewhere.
Employers don't want humans after all..
If an employer decided to profile me based on what I said here, and then decided not to hire me based on what they read, I don't think I'd want to work there anyway.
The pigeon/pidgin mistake is one that is going to be made repeatedly from now on.
When you buy an appleTV you're essentially guaranteeing that you will, in the future, be buying content for it too. The price of the content you buy for the appleTV makes it cheaper, just like most game consoles.
This is why I expect Apple will do everything they can to fight against people running a flexible system that can run whatever content they want on their artificially cheap hardware. I would be surprised if Apple's lawyers didn't start coming out of the woodworks soon.
What does him being a blogger have to do with his crime? Why isn't it "car driver jailed"?
Looking back up through the discussion the majority of posts have been from skeptics, and none of them have given particular reasons why the IPCC's report is wrong. We have
I've never heard of a massive conspiracy between the loosely knit scientific community before, but this is basically what skeptics are saying. Our kids might look back at discussions like this and wonder what the hell skeptics were thinking and why they couldn't accept that they had to make small lifestyle changes.
If I want a game console/PDA/iPod/camera I won't buy a phone!
Maybe some time in the future portable devices will have modular upgradeable hardware and portable software, and we'll start to see true convergence, but that time hasn't come yet.
Improving a crappy gaming device by adding a PDA is like improving a crappy car by adding a fridge (damn I just used a car analogy).
I wouldn't trust a screen maker to tell me whether or not screens are more productive (and if it's Apple they'll probably tell me it's Now 2.3x more productive! MS has less to gain, so I'm more inclined to believe them.
I disagree, it seems to have been completely written from the perspective of the code he writes.
Don't tell me that POSIX is a more valuable (speaking in terms of money) thing for a programmer to know than the latest thing out of Microsoft. If you call things that change a "trap" then POSIX is one of the very few things which hasn't been a trap (including Java, which Allison praises).
He talks about machine code still being very relevant, and that you can't write code for thousands of machines working in a cluster without it. Well, most people don't write code for thousands of machines working in a cluster.
I agree machine code is good to know, but not for the reasons he gives.
It's interesting to hear his take, but I think Allison is a bit removed from the average developer in terms of the sorts of things that he has developed.
Remember that Google likes to use commodity 2nd hand hardware which fails a lot. It's not like a datacenter with lots of brand new expensive systems that have guarantees.
Common sense? Have you seen the size of Google's datacenter warehouses, the amount of electricity and heat dissipation they need?
These days the kind of environmentally friendly things Apple do are to sell LCD screens, which use less power than CRTs.
They have a whole paragraph on "Say hello to the stunning Apple Screen, which uses 1.7x less power than a CRT screen. Using the Apple Screen you can save your business and your marriage, and now you can save the planet too!"
Yeah, imagine the lines..
Damn mooching chimps, next they'll want to be able to sit up in the front of our buses and use our public toilets.
Rights come with responsibilities. If we give chimps human rights will they pay their taxes and obey the law?
Treating them humanely doesn't have to mean giving them human rights.
Back in England, and here in Australia, high school starts at 9:00am.. Didn't seem too impractical to me.
Thanks, that's just what I had in mind