I can't wait to get rid of those old 1978, MIT just announced the 1979 should be released soon. Has anyone seen the benchmarks yet?
Who said you should code all your life?
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 1
Companies are often interested in older programmers to manage projects, not to to do plain coding. Though you may like it at 20, you're likely to get fed up only coding (Hey, I'm not even 25 and I don't really like coding anymore). There's no need to worry about that. People working at Mc Donald's are rarely over 25, yet does that mean someone who works there has no future after 25? (the analogy is not perfect, but you get the point)
Let's see, MS tells us they are about to release a cheap (compared to a PC) console with fast hardware. They're even showing screenshots, but they don't tell when it'll be released. They won't release it now, because with the hardware they put in (read GeForce), they just couldn't compete in terms of price. This sounds to me like some way to kill the market for the PS2 and Dreamcast, so that they can wait, and release their stuff when prices drop. Am I just being paranoid... but it looks so much like the usual MS tactics.
Does anyone know whether the this JPEG 2000 standard is covered by any patent? It would be really bad for OSS (and others in general) to have another GIF.
I think you should consider the LOGO language. It was the first language I ever learned. I was 7 years old and we had an Apple IIe at school. What's nice with it is that at first, you can just draw with the "turtle" and then start writing simple functions fo "automate" the drawing,... It is well designed, simple to understand, and can be used interactively.
Pascal is a good language too, but they have to be older. I definitely wouldn't suggest C or C++.
Well, that would be nice... except that you still need to obey the laws of the country you are in. Since you cannot leave your country and go to "The Internet Republic", declaring the Internet independent wouldn't do you any good. There a minor trouble maker that's called "your physical body". It's true that governments are sometimes cluless when it comes to regulating the internet, but there is still some regulation required. Otherwise, it becomes a total jungle.
The most obvious thing to regulate is about crackers. You can't allow anyone to crack into any machine, just because the Internet is "free" (of course, there are already laws for that). Also, if I trust my government's (I know this sounds like an oxymoron) drugs regulation, I don't want a foreign web site to screw it all up because they sell stuff that's not allowed in my country. Of course the Internet needs some freedom, but it shouldn't be free for all...
...Remember "Helms Burton" (spelling?), when the US decided that other countries could not do buisness with Cuba (anybody knows what happened to it?).
Seriously, there is really a problem here. We have the choice between two evils: 1) Any time you pass a law to restrict something (porn, casino, selling drugs online,...), the servers just move to a country that doesn't have that law. 2) You end up with countries (like this case) trying to regulate what's happening in other countries.
I don't think one is better or worse than the other. The only way out is to have uniform laws, which I don't think is likely to happen in the near term.
The UltraSparc cpu can handle a much greater load without sweat than most other cpus.
I think you're confusing the CPU and the OS. A CPU is not designed for higher or lower load. It always runs at 100%, regarless of whether there's load of 10 or nothing but the idle loop to run.
Of course I agree with the main idea. Intel servers have a long way to go to catch the Sun servers, at least on the high end. This is totally different for the low-end servers, where you can get an equivalent Linux box for much cheaper.
All MS needs to do under the DMCA is put a routine in the networking to check for valid serial numbers, then it becomes copy protection and even if we were able to get around UCITA restrictions (by doing it out of the USA) on reverse engineering, a compatible network protocol would break their copy protection and thus be illegal similar to DeCSS. (Or what the MPAA says about DeCSS.)
That would be bad! Fortunatly, I don't think they can do something like that. Assuming they appeal the Antitrust ruling, they'll be fighting the DOJ for years. Using such a serial number would simply be catastrophic for them.
When I said 1/100, I meant absolute numbers, which means 1/10 of the crime rate. While I agree that gun control in Canada could (and should) be much stronger, I think it is still a lot better than in the US. Also, if you think the difference in crime rate is not about gun control. What is it about?
Closer to you, check out Canada... 1/10 of the US populations, 1/100 of the deaths by firearm. Sure, if you suddenly make firearms illegal, crime *may* temporarly increase, since criminals are not instantly disarmed. However, in the long term, it becomes harder for criminals to get guns without being noticed. Also, ever if you don't see a difference in robberies, you still reduce the "he killed his wife because she saw another man" type of crimes.
I'm ready to say that at least 99.99 % (note: this stat is made up, but realistic) of gun owners know what they do and aren't dangerous. The problem is with the 0.01 % remaining, which represents a several thousands dangerous people. Also, the simple fact that there are 100 millions (or was it 200 millions) firearms in the US makes it really easy to get one without being noticed.
Just as a comparison, I live in Canada. The population is about 1/10 of that in the US. However the deaths due to firearms are 1/100 of that in the US. The reason? Guns control. Hand guns are illegal, except for police and similar. Other guns are strictly (It could be even more strict, I wouldn't mind) controled. For instance, if I want to buy a firearm, the check now includes calling any wife/girlfriend/ex-girlfriend to see if I'm not threatening her.
I know that the biggest argument of pro-firearms people is "we need to defend ourselves agains criminals who have guns anyway (whether legal or not)". There are a couple reasons this doesn't stand. First, many killers aren't in organized crime, but (almost) normal people who suddenly went nuts and happened to have a gun because everybody has one. Second, if guns are illegal (or strictly controled), it becomes harder for criminals to gather a huge arsenal (and it makes gathering firearms look a bit more "suspect"). Thirdly, the gun you buy to defend yourself, may also be the one that kills you - or your child (how many children are accidently killed bu firearms?). At last, if all firearms could be eliminated, you couldn't defend yourself with a gun, but you wouldn't need to defend yourself against guns.
If the were releasing Evolution 1.0, it would be unacceptable to depend on unreleased libraries. However, this is version 0.0 - developer preview. If you can't manage to get these libraries, then you shouldn't download it (I'm not going to download it). By the time Evolution is nead 1.0, these libraries will have become more stable. I see no problem in that. They should depend on the features GTK will have when they release 1.0, not the features GTK has now.
In all seriousness, I had no idea that RMS was so ideologically aligned with the far-left in this country
What's wrong with that. The others parties are at the far-right and nobody's complaining. I guess one thing hasn't changed since the end of cold war: fear of communism and communists. Whenever you want to discredit someone like RMS, you call him a communist.
I don't agree with everything he's saying (especially about the GNU/Linux issue), but there's no reason to say he's wrong because he's communist (regardless of whether this is true of not).
Disclaimer: A am far from being communist, but I am even further from the american Republicans...
That's sort of the effect from the user's point of view, but if I understand vmware, it slides underneath the two OS's and makes them run side-by-side with one appearing in a window in the other. With the user-mode port, it is really Linux inside Linux. If you run it and do a ps, you will see a whole bunch of "linux" processes, plus what they really are inside the virtual machine.
That's simply not true. If you have win98 running in Linux, then VMWare is a Linux process that emulates a virtual machine for win98. There are virtual machines that run below all OS's, but VMWare doesn't work like that. For instance VMWare can crash of freeze solid, without disturbing any other Linux app (or the kernel).
Unless you mean low-latency in the city, forget about it. Lights only travels 300 km/ms and goes down to 200 km/ms in fiber (glass index of refraction ~1.5). Crossing the Atlantic means already 30 ms and the other side of the globe means 100 ms. Sure routers add some latency, but these numbers are the minimun period... unless you run your fiber through a wormhole.
I'm not saying it would solve everything. What I'm saying is that part of this comes from the fear of control from US companies... It doesn't need to be the NSA, just check that MS isn't collectig info about french companies,... It's really a matter of not trusting the control US companies have on software used in France.
I guess european countries are getting scared of the control US companies have on the software they use. Regardless how security-threatening the last MS backdoor was, it frightening for a nation to know that NSA or any other organization can put backdoors in Windows (or other software from any closed-source vendor). The US is not too worry, since a potential NSA backdoor would not benefit other countries, but the europeans are.
OK, a silicon transistor as small as 0.07 um (that's the drain-source distance AFAIK) will work, but that doesn't solve everything. I've seen somewhere between.02 and.03 as being the limit for silicon (a previous Slashdot story talked about a.03 um transistor realized in a lab). The real problems are more practical.
First, how do you build a CPU with a.07 process? You cannot modify the current lithography process to do that. It would require far UV, for which no transparent materials are known. The alternatives go from X-Ray (IBM) to electron beam (Lucent), but none of these alternative is close to being production ready.
The second practical problem: cooling! A.07 um CPU the size of a PIII would contain ~200,000,000 transistors. Since it would probably run a coupe GHz, The heat will likely be close to a kilowatt - impossible to cool with just a fan. Plus it would also cost ~$30/month just to leave your computer running 7/24. Breaking the Linux uptime record wound thus cost about $1000 in electricity.
Here's my reason for writing opensource software: I am my own boss. I can work on the project I like, dump it if I don't like it anymore and improve the parts I like.
I'm pretty sure many write open source software to do what they can't do in their regular job. I think this goes beyond the "it's fun" reason given in the article.
Geosynchronous orbit is about 30 000 km, so 100 ms delay at speed of light. Up and down means 200 ms latency. Now how bad is this?
I tried a couple ping (note, I'm in eastern Canada): www.slashdot.org 35 ms www.linux.com 110 ms www.inria.fr 130 ms www.csu.edu.au 400 ms
The ping is round-trip, so you need to divide by 2. Basically, the latency introduced by a satellite isn't that bad compared to what we've got now. Of course, it will depend a lot on the routers (I've already seen 5000 ms to go 5 km).
I think for most applications (web, ftp,...) it'll be OK, I'd just forget about remote X applications though. Voice over IP might have problems too.
I see two ways to fight this (there may be more thought):
1) Fight fire with fire. Start complaining about every site. For instance, the gay magazine that was taken down could have asked that the other magazine (they are the ones who complained, right?) be taken down because they also think it would publish something diffamatory next year!
2) Start threatening to sue the ISPs for violation of contract, censorship of something similar when they take down a site for no reason. If IPSs become more afraid to take down a site than to leave it there, then they'll think twice before taking down any site. Of course, teh off-side is that these ISPs risk being caught in the middle of fights.
Slashdot Mirror
That gives a whole new sense to wearable PC's. The PC that can save your life when being shot.
I can't wait to get rid of those old 1978, MIT just announced the 1979 should be released soon. Has anyone seen the benchmarks yet?
Companies are often interested in older programmers to manage projects, not to to do plain coding. Though you may like it at 20, you're likely to get fed up only coding (Hey, I'm not even 25 and I don't really like coding anymore). There's no need to worry about that. People working at Mc Donald's are rarely over 25, yet does that mean someone who works there has no future after 25? (the analogy is not perfect, but you get the point)
Let's see, MS tells us they are about to release a cheap (compared to a PC) console with fast hardware. They're even showing screenshots, but they don't tell when it'll be released. They won't release it now, because with the hardware they put in (read GeForce), they just couldn't compete in terms of price. This sounds to me like some way to kill the market for the PS2 and Dreamcast, so that they can wait, and release their stuff when prices drop. Am I just being paranoid... but it looks so much like the usual MS tactics.
Does anyone know whether the this JPEG 2000 standard is covered by any patent? It would be really bad for OSS (and others in general) to have another GIF.
I think you should consider the LOGO language. It was the first language I ever learned. I was 7 years old and we had an Apple IIe at school. What's nice with it is that at first, you can just draw with the "turtle" and then start writing simple functions fo "automate" the drawing, ... It is well designed, simple to understand, and can be used interactively.
Pascal is a good language too, but they have to be older. I definitely wouldn't suggest C or C++.
Much simpler, you just run your sshd on the standard telnet port... or on port 80. Nothing trichy necessary, just
sshd -p 80
Well, that would be nice... except that you still need to obey the laws of the country you are in. Since you cannot leave your country and go to "The Internet Republic", declaring the Internet independent wouldn't do you any good. There a minor trouble maker that's called "your physical body". It's true that governments are sometimes cluless when it comes to regulating the internet, but there is still some regulation required. Otherwise, it becomes a total jungle.
The most obvious thing to regulate is about crackers. You can't allow anyone to crack into any machine, just because the Internet is "free" (of course, there are already laws for that). Also, if I trust my government's (I know this sounds like an oxymoron) drugs regulation, I don't want a foreign web site to screw it all up because they sell stuff that's not allowed in my country. Of course the Internet needs some freedom, but it shouldn't be free for all...
...Remember "Helms Burton" (spelling?), when the US decided that other countries could not do buisness with Cuba (anybody knows what happened to it?).
...), the servers just move to a country that doesn't have that law.
Seriously, there is really a problem here. We have the choice between two evils:
1) Any time you pass a law to restrict something (porn, casino, selling drugs online,
2) You end up with countries (like this case) trying to regulate what's happening in other countries.
I don't think one is better or worse than the other. The only way out is to have uniform laws, which I don't think is likely to happen in the near term.
The UltraSparc cpu can handle a much greater load without sweat than most other cpus.
I think you're confusing the CPU and the OS. A CPU is not designed for higher or lower load. It always runs at 100%, regarless of whether there's load of 10 or nothing but the idle loop to run.
Of course I agree with the main idea. Intel servers have a long way to go to catch the Sun servers, at least on the high end. This is totally different for the low-end servers, where you can get an equivalent Linux box for much cheaper.
All MS needs to do under the DMCA is put a routine in the networking to check for valid serial numbers, then it becomes copy protection and even if we were able to get around UCITA restrictions (by doing it out of the USA) on reverse engineering, a compatible network protocol would break their copy protection and thus be illegal similar to DeCSS. (Or what the MPAA says about DeCSS.)
That would be bad! Fortunatly, I don't think they can do something like that. Assuming they appeal the Antitrust ruling, they'll be fighting the DOJ for years. Using such a serial number would simply be catastrophic for them.
When I said 1/100, I meant absolute numbers, which means 1/10 of the crime rate. While I agree that gun control in Canada could (and should) be much stronger, I think it is still a lot better than in the US. Also, if you think the difference in crime rate is not about gun control. What is it about?
Closer to you, check out Canada... 1/10 of the US populations, 1/100 of the deaths by firearm. Sure, if you suddenly make firearms illegal, crime *may* temporarly increase, since criminals are not instantly disarmed. However, in the long term, it becomes harder for criminals to get guns without being noticed. Also, ever if you don't see a difference in robberies, you still reduce the "he killed his wife because she saw another man" type of crimes.
I'm ready to say that at least 99.99 % (note: this stat is made up, but realistic) of gun owners know what they do and aren't dangerous. The problem is with the 0.01 % remaining, which represents a several thousands dangerous people. Also, the simple fact that there are 100 millions (or was it 200 millions) firearms in the US makes it really easy to get one without being noticed.
Just as a comparison, I live in Canada. The population is about 1/10 of that in the US. However the deaths due to firearms are 1/100 of that in the US. The reason? Guns control. Hand guns are illegal, except for police and similar. Other guns are strictly (It could be even more strict, I wouldn't mind) controled. For instance, if I want to buy a firearm, the check now includes calling any wife/girlfriend/ex-girlfriend to see if I'm not threatening her.
I know that the biggest argument of pro-firearms people is "we need to defend ourselves agains criminals who have guns anyway (whether legal or not)". There are a couple reasons this doesn't stand. First, many killers aren't in organized crime, but (almost) normal people who suddenly went nuts and happened to have a gun because everybody has one. Second, if guns are illegal (or strictly controled), it becomes harder for criminals to gather a huge arsenal (and it makes gathering firearms look a bit more "suspect"). Thirdly, the gun you buy to defend yourself, may also be the one that kills you - or your child (how many children are accidently killed bu firearms?). At last, if all firearms could be eliminated, you couldn't defend yourself with a gun, but you wouldn't need to defend yourself against guns.
OK, now I guess I have the NRA after me!
If the were releasing Evolution 1.0, it would be unacceptable to depend on unreleased libraries. However, this is version 0.0 - developer preview. If you can't manage to get these libraries, then you shouldn't download it (I'm not going to download it). By the time Evolution is nead 1.0, these libraries will have become more stable. I see no problem in that. They should depend on the features GTK will have when they release 1.0, not the features GTK has now.
In all seriousness, I had no idea that RMS was so ideologically aligned with the far-left in this country
What's wrong with that. The others parties are at the far-right and nobody's complaining. I guess one thing hasn't changed since the end of cold war: fear of communism and communists. Whenever you want to discredit someone like RMS, you call him a communist.
I don't agree with everything he's saying (especially about the GNU/Linux issue), but there's no reason to say he's wrong because he's communist (regardless of whether this is true of not).
Disclaimer: A am far from being communist, but I am even further from the american Republicans...
That's sort of the effect from the user's point of view, but if I understand vmware, it slides underneath the two OS's and makes them run side-by-side with one appearing in a window in the other. With the user-mode port, it is really Linux inside Linux. If you run it and do a ps, you will see a whole bunch of "linux" processes, plus what they really are inside the virtual machine.
That's simply not true. If you have win98 running in Linux, then VMWare is a Linux process that emulates a virtual machine for win98. There are virtual machines that run below all OS's, but VMWare doesn't work like that. For instance VMWare can crash of freeze solid, without disturbing any other Linux app (or the kernel).
Unless you mean low-latency in the city, forget about it. Lights only travels 300 km/ms and goes down to 200 km/ms in fiber (glass index of refraction ~1.5). Crossing the Atlantic means already 30 ms and the other side of the globe means 100 ms. Sure routers add some latency, but these numbers are the minimun period... unless you run your fiber through a wormhole.
I'm not saying it would solve everything. What I'm saying is that part of this comes from the fear of control from US companies... It doesn't need to be the NSA, just check that MS isn't collectig info about french companies, ... It's really a matter of not trusting the control US companies have on software used in France.
I guess european countries are getting scared of the control US companies have on the software they use. Regardless how security-threatening the last MS backdoor was, it frightening for a nation to know that NSA or any other organization can put backdoors in Windows (or other software from any closed-source vendor). The US is not too worry, since a potential NSA backdoor would not benefit other countries, but the europeans are.
a moral person can be either a real person or an incorporated company.
OK, a silicon transistor as small as 0.07 um (that's the drain-source distance AFAIK) will work, but that doesn't solve everything. I've seen somewhere between .02 and .03 as being the limit for silicon (a previous Slashdot story talked about a .03 um transistor realized in a lab). The real problems are more practical.
.07 process? You cannot modify the current lithography process to do that. It would require far UV, for which no transparent materials are known. The alternatives go from X-Ray (IBM) to electron beam (Lucent), but none of these alternative is close to being production ready.
.07 um CPU the size of a PIII would contain ~200,000,000 transistors. Since it would probably run a coupe GHz, The heat will likely be close to a kilowatt - impossible to cool with just a fan. Plus it would also cost ~$30/month just to leave your computer running 7/24. Breaking the Linux uptime record wound thus cost about $1000 in electricity.
First, how do you build a CPU with a
The second practical problem: cooling! A
Here's my reason for writing opensource software: I am my own boss. I can work on the project I like, dump it if I don't like it anymore and improve the parts I like.
I'm pretty sure many write open source software to do what they can't do in their regular job. I think this goes beyond the "it's fun" reason given in the article.
Geosynchronous orbit is about 30 000 km, so 100 ms delay at speed of light. Up and down means 200 ms latency. Now how bad is this?
...) it'll be OK, I'd just forget about remote X applications though. Voice over IP might have problems too.
I tried a couple ping (note, I'm in eastern Canada):
www.slashdot.org 35 ms
www.linux.com 110 ms
www.inria.fr 130 ms
www.csu.edu.au 400 ms
The ping is round-trip, so you need to divide by 2. Basically, the latency introduced by a satellite isn't that bad compared to what we've got now. Of course, it will depend a lot on the routers (I've already seen 5000 ms to go 5 km).
I think for most applications (web, ftp,
I see two ways to fight this (there may be more thought):
1) Fight fire with fire. Start complaining about every site. For instance, the gay magazine that was taken down could have asked that the other magazine (they are the ones who complained, right?) be taken down because they also think it would publish something diffamatory next year!
2) Start threatening to sue the ISPs for violation of contract, censorship of something similar when they take down a site for no reason. If IPSs become more afraid to take down a site than to leave it there, then they'll think twice before taking down any site. Of course, teh off-side is that these ISPs risk being caught in the middle of fights.